Voice and Style in Sandra Cisnero’s "One Holy Night" and John Updike’s "The Other"

After reading Cisnero’s One Holy Night, I had a difficult time accessing Updike’s The Other. To lift a term from David Michael Kaplan’s “Revising Your Prose for Power and Punch”, One Holy Night has punch. Cisnero’s sentences swing between essential communications like “He bought a mango on a stick the first time”(117) without devolving into simplicity because they’re paired with series of connected and interdependent realizations that, with each turn, create lyricism and develop our understanding of the character. “My mother took the crooked walk too, I’m told, and I’m sure my Abuelita has her own story, but it’s not my place to ask” (116), or “What I like to hear him say is how he is Chaq, Chaq of the people of the sun, Chaq of the temples, and what he says sounds sometimes like broken clay, and other times like hollow sticks, or like the swish of old feathers crumbling into dust” (117). The repetition of Chaq in the latter sentence might be discouraged by Kaplan for its repetitiveness, but gives the impression that [Ixchel] is praying to Chaq, thereby inflating his mystique.

There’s a sense of mystery to this particular type of sentence construction; it’s straightforward but lyrical nature tends to show and not tell, forcing us to make assumptions about events not described in detail, and allowing Cisnero to focus less on exposition and more on style and structure. When the narrator remembers her first time with Chaq, there is no explicit mention of the event, only “[t]hen something inside bit me, and I gave out a cry as if the other, the one I wouldn’t be any more, leapt out” (118). What’s more important than exposition here is the narrator’s separation of virgin and non-virgin into two states of being. Cisnero’s abstraction only gives us a clearer impression of the moment, where a more generic turn of phrase would become too abstract and boring.

When I turned to Updike’s The Other, I was immediately struck by the stylistic opposition between that text and Cisnero’s. Not to say that one is better than the other, but that Updike wanted and succeeded in shaping a tone that reflected the subtle and ritual-driven arc of his characters’ lives, something that Cisnero also achieved (tone reflecting plot and character), but since her narrator was younger, and her story in the first person, she was able to use the voice I’ve already described. Updike, on the other hand, adopts a somewhat confusing structure that begins at the ending and ends at the beginning of a thought: “How blissfully little did seem to matter in the fifties!” (493). He’s already begun to situate his tone in a nostalgic vernacular native to the scene he sets; a romance built by fascination with the absent (Priscilla’s twin, Susan). Updike, like Cisnero, never states explicitly what his tone implies, at least not until the short’s close, and when he does, he lets the revelation occur not from the narrator’s point of view, but straight from the character’s mouth, “I’ve always liked you. Loved, should I say? Or would that be too much?” (506). Here’s a nugget of Sylvia Watanabe’s advice in “A Mystified Notion: Some Notes on Voice” in action; let your characters make judgments, not your narrator. It smacks of authenticity, if not necessarily truth.

Updike and Cisnero impress me. He does a great job of writing that “other” into his tone, and she does with repetition and delicious detail what I’d like to do with my own text. One Holy Night is driven by setting and character development, without relying on exposition (my problem). All her exposition is built into the action. When she says “[w]hen I woke up, the cucumber pushcart was dust and Abuelita was sprinkling holy water on my head” she’s simultaneously pushing the plot forward and building Abuelita’s character. This multitasking also pushes me as a reader to attach importance to characterization, since Abuelita’s character is so intertwined with her actions. Hopefully, remembering and creating this interdependence between exposition and action will allow me to introduce some badly needed context into my manuscript, instead of avoiding exposition all together, which is what I’ve been doing recently.