You are all Invited to my Joint Funeral with Benjamin Becker by Daniela Silva is a story from Periphery 55. It can be found in our archives as well as under the story of the week tab. The Periphery Blog is a blog about writing, narrative, art, and everything in between.
You are all Invited to my Joint Funeral with Benjamin Becker is a story that I have been wanting to talk about for a long time. Silva captures a feeling of listlessness in very clever ways, while still being incredibly funny and poignant. Silva’s story falls into an archetype of stories we get from time to time at Periphery about funerals. They come in all shapes and sizes: happy and sad, serious and funny, melancholy and profound. What I have noticed throughout many of them, including Joint Funeral, is a push back against the severity of the occasion. Often stories will work to undercut the importance of funerals, or how seriously society takes them, even if they are conveying genuine grief. This week I want to look at how Silva undercuts the severity and importance of funerals using grammar, conjunctions, and syntax.
Joint Funeral has a meticulously crafted careless feel to it. When transcribing the story for this post, I carefully added capitals to the beginnings of sentences and quotations, names and other proper nouns, before realizing how much work they do when breaking the rules. The story feels irreverent about the future and funerals, and that ideology carries all the way down to the rules of grammar. Lines like, “and ben goes “dude!!!! totally!!!” work really hard to showcase how far Silva pushes beyond foundational rules of grammar. Careless uncapitalized ‘I’s litter the story, like the protagonist was writing it on the back of a napkin while sitting in their 1996 gold Nissan Altima. The same ideology the point of view character and Ben have about funerals extends to how the story is written. Grammatically the story is as irreverent as it is thematically.
No less than 33 conjunctions are used in Silva’s story. That means that almost 5% of the 672 word story is conjunctions; that’s one of every twenty words. Silva’s heavy reliance on conjunctions works to make the story sound colloquial, like it was an actual conversation. Anyone that has ever transcribed an interview or conversation can attest that people don’t speak like they write. Fragments, and run on sentences dominate all but the most formal speech. Silva uses conjunctions to push against syntactic structure with sentences like this one:
we’ve been friends for nearly five years now,
and i don’t remember how i met ben exactly,
he wasn’t there and then he just was,
asking me about whether he should patent
an invention called the slitten
(which are literally just sleeve-length mittens)
or whether we should have a shuffleboard table at our funeral
and laughing at my jokes even when they don’t deserve it
One can feel the memories flashing before the protagonist’s eyes as they run through six different thoughts at mach 1. Conversations do that. They are peppered with disjoined thoughts all connected with ands and buts and ors even though grammar and syntax demand that writing doesn’t. By breaking the basic rules of grammar and sentence structure Silva showcases how little either character seems to care about the seemingly severe topic of a funeral. Through syntax the irreverent tone is underscored.
The adage ‘you must know the rules to break the rules’ holds especially true in writing. Syntax and grammar should be tools of communication rather than chains that hold an author back. These socially understood rules of written communication help authors convey meaning effectively to a wide audience. Breaking rules inherently calls attention to itself. A fragment, or run on sentence can stand out of a piece of writing. Breaking that understanding of communication conveys its own message, but it takes a specific piece and a specific voice to use it. It can be really tempting for authors to break rules for the sole reason of breaking rules. All too often those choices shift focus away from the writing itself to the errors and the effect of them. Joint Funeral embraces that idea, making the focus on errors work for the story. Joint Funeral works incredibly hard to look like it doesn’t care. Every uncapitalized name and ‘I’ work to convey a specific tone. The piece is built around a disregard for societal understandings of importance, and therefore carries that same ideology to rules of grammar. Silva has a reason to break the rules, and the effect works with the piece instead of against it.
Why then do so many pieces about funerals push back against severity with which society views them? Next week the blog will showcase Funeral Weather by Caitlin Allen from Periphery 53 and look at just that question.
Periphery Journal 