Jess Reviews: Scrimshaw by Eley Williams
For the last half a year, I’ve been thinking a lot about writing. Since March, the task of maintaining our friendships has fallen even more so than usual to typed communication and all its imperfections. Frequently I would find myself sitting up late, talking-typing to friends, reading their mannerisms and their emotions into snippets of text, noting a full stop as you might a furrowed brow, thinking and overthinking, struggling to get the words on the screen to say exactly what I mean. Read in parallel to this, it’s not surprising that ‘Scrimshaw’, a short story by Eley Williams shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award 2020, resonated with me the way it did. Over the course of its 4 a.m. text conversation, ‘Scrimshaw’ charts the frustrations of trying to communicate by text when you’re not sure how to get across what you mean - or if you even want to.
As is a trademark of Williams’ writing, this story delights in language - not merely in its sound but in its shape too, and all its other less frequently considered attributes which are nonetheless a part of how we perceive it. A word’s signification is not limited to its mere definition; they are instead pulled apart into their building blocks, their multiple meanings dragged out, the subtle differences in signification between synonyms highlighted, pressing at the weak points where language fails to communicate exactly - or where it accidentally communicates too much. Most important in ‘Scrimshaw’ are the things that remain unsaid, that go implied or assumed or which are deliberately withheld. Each pause is a gesture, the three dots for ‘typing’ a punctuation mark, something written to read meaning into. ‘Scrimshaw’ points to the places in which these failures or lapses in communication reveal us.
It brought to mind a book I read last year: Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet, which surveys and documents the linguistics of our online communication. Far from the grammatical wilderness the more traditional of us might assume, McCulloch records the underlying codes which shape our ever-evolving digital self-expression. Particularly, she writes how many of these are built from a deep desire to be understood by those we are communicating with. It is part of an emotional connection, a love, which as McCulloch writes "doesn’t come from a list of rules - it emerges from the spaces between us, when we pay attention to each other and care about the effect that we have on each other. When we learn to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of the rules, we learn to see writing not as a way of asserting our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to each other better."
Williams’ writing captures something of this shared meaning-making, of connection between people despite their solitariness, which rings especially true at the moment as we search for closeness at a distance. ‘Scrimshaw’ is a wonderful, funny love letter to digital intimacy, even in the places it fails.