ON PETER MARKUS
Brian Evenson
One way of teasing out what Peter Markus is doing in his two slim volumes Good, Brother and The Singing Fish books that seem to be versions of one another or at very least part of a larger and hidden ur-text involving boys, mud, fish, and the nailing of hands to telephone poles—is to think about the frequency with which he uses words.
Take for instance the three-page long story “The Moon is a Fish” in Good, Brother. Only 587 words in all, including the title, this short piece tells the story of the two brothers that appear throughout Markus’s work as they catch a fish, prepare to cut its head off, and then deciding it’s too beautiful to kill. Instead, they put it into a bathtub, bring it muddy water (which the fish seems to be asking for), hug it to their chests, and then carry it back to the river.
Word frequency can often tell us something about what is important to the 175 writer of a particular piece. What is remarkable about this story—and about the collection as a whole—is Markus’s structure of repetition. 33 of the 587 words of the story, or 5.6% of the total, are the word “fish.” In fact, “fish” is the most frequently used word in the story, outstripping the usual first place, “the,” by three words. Both the British National Corpus (which computes word frequency based on about one hundred million words assembled from a wide variety of sources) and the Brown Corpus (an earlier study which computes word frequency based on about a million words) have as their most frequent words “the,” “of”, and “and,” (6.9%, 3.6%, and 2.8% of total word usage respectively) with “fish” checking in, in the Brown Corpus, as the 3098th most used word, used 0.0034% of the time.
Obviously, word usage varies from text to text, but to give a sense of comparison, consider the start of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” which is often praised (or criticized) for its repetitive and provocative description of trout in a stream. Of the first 587 words of Hemingway’s story, seven (1.2%) are the word “trout.” It appears more than any other noun (except the proper name “Nick” which appears eight times), but still only a fraction as many times as Markus’s “fish”. “Stream” appears six times, “bridge” and “current” and “pool” five times. But Hemingway’s most frequent words are, like the Brown Corpus or the British National Corpus, respectively “the” (13.9%), “of” (4.2%), and “and” (2.5%).
Is there anything to make of the fact that Hemingway uses double the number of “the”s average to English-language writing? Probably it says something about the nature of his descriptions, about the flatness or impersonality or precision or objectivity of them. Can anything be said about the fact that Markus uses the word “fish” 33 times but never names a specific fish? At the very least it shows he has a commitment to a certain level of abstraction or generality that Hemingway does not have: Hemingway has trout and no fish; Markus has fish and no trout.
Consider the words that Hemingway and Markus use 10 times or more. For 176 Hemingway there are only 6; for Markus 16, suggesting a greater commitment to repetition as an aesthetic strategy:
Hemingway
The - 82
Of - 25
And - 15
He - 14
His - 12
A - 11
Markus
Fish - 33
The - 30
This - 28
We - 22
Us - 19
And - 17
Brothers -15
Our -13
It - 12
To - 12
Up - 12
With - 11
At - 10
Muddy - 10
Of - 10
In other words, 41% of Markus’s story consists of the same ten words used again and again. If you add in the use of “Brother” (5 times) to “Brothers”, and the use of “Mud” (8 times) to “Muddy,” very quickly you have the sense of an artist working with a limited set of words but employing them with great care to create a simplified and beautifully restricted world. In the words Markus uses most we not only see some of the objects he’s most interested in through the collection (fish, mud, brothers), but we also see an emphasis on the togetherness of the brothers (we, brothers, us, our). As significant in terms of the narration are the words that are omitted: “he” never appears, and “I” appears just once, as if the brothers can hardly exist separate from each other.
If it’s not clear by now, Markus’s use of English is quite unique. In a way it’s not really English at all, or not the English we’ve learned to be comfortable with. It is instead a sort of ritual speech, an almost religious invocation in which words themselves, through repetition, acquire a magic or power that in this case revives the simpler, blunter world of childhood. In that sense, things are less depicted or mimetically represented than they are invoked.
In theoretical terms, this is what Gilles Deleuze calls minor literature, a major language put to a minor usage. With all the possibilities of standard English open to him, Markus opts instead for something slightly uncanny, and does so by refusal. By limiting his palette, by beating the drum of the same words over and over again, and by a deliberate paucity he transforms ordinary language into extraordinary ritual.