Burgers, Pancakes and Juxtaposers

Juxtaposition is a fun word to say, plus it speaks to something fundamental to writing: Setting objects next to one another. Words next to words. Sentences next to sentences. Images next to images. Scenes next to scenes. And so on.

It’s also how we think—by comparing and contrasting. With each word, we as writers create meaning cumulatively, each word and set of words changing one another’s meanings, like they themselves are communicating with one another.

If you think too much about it, especially while you’re writing, it can be hard to touch your fingers to the keys at all.

We all juxtapose, all the time, in other activities. When we make a dish of food, we sometimes choose foods of certain colors to set next to each other to make the overall effect more beautiful. People in sports companies may find certain athletes to juxtapose next to their products in commercials, to create a meaning through their association.

One of my favorite juxtapositions is at Dick’s Drive-In in Wallingford. Every time I visit there, I am struck by the huge mural of a cow on the back wall, a stylistic relic from the 1950’s, when folks were presumably less detached to the means by which the two patties on their Dick’s Deluxe came into existence. They saw a cow, and thought “yum.” These days, most restaurants seem to try their best to veil any part of the production that might point to the fact that the meat on one's plate was once part of a living creature. I eat meat, and I love Dick’s burgers, but I’m sure I’m not the only one sitting there at one a.m. on the hood of my car, trying my best to ignore the reality that what I am sinking my teeth into looked like the mural on the back wall, and smelled far worse.

I’ve been reading “The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake,” over the last week, which is a brief—but brilliant—collection from a West Virginia writer who had a brief life.  Pancake tragically cut it short, before his first book was published, in 1979. The stories have very strong sense of history, stretching back through time. That historical echo, present throughout his stories, gives them a constant subtextual layer of sadness, loss and decay. In “Trilobites,” Colly, the main character, searches the hills of his native West Virginia for fossils (Trilobites). He has an ongoing bet with an old-timer, that he can find a fossil that can't be identified. Colly finds the old-timer, Jim, in the usual diner. "I pull this globby rock from my pocket and slap it on the counter in front of Jim. He turns it with his drawn hand, examines it. ‘Gastropod,’ he says. ‘Probably Permian. You buy again.’ I can’t win with them, he knows them all.” (22)

What would be a fairly mundane interaction is charged with meaning, thanks to a few wonderfully juxtaposed details from the preceding paragraph. Colly describes the cups lining the wall, with the names of the regulars sketched on them, as: “...covered with grease and dust.” (22) What’s more, he describes Jim as someone who’s “joints are cemented with arthritis. I think of how long it’ll be before I croak, but Jim is old, and it gives me the creeps to see his cup hanging up there.” (22) Colly is fixated on his mortality. He sees that the cups, Jim, even himself, are all the fossils of the future.

How have you seen writers use juxtaposition to create meaning? How have you seen it around Seattle, used to comic effect?

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