From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler Page B

inextricably for a time.
    I want to give you an example of dissolve from my own work—a novel hardly ever read by anybody, called Wabash. I need to give you some background first. Deborah and Jeremy Cole live in the fictional steel mill town of Wabash, Illinois. It's 1932. They're both struggling with private demons of one sort or another. He's getting involved in radical politics at the steel mill where he works; she's trying to reconcile a family of women who rip each other to pieces as a matter of daily course. But Jeremy and Deborah carry a shared grief that has been a barrier in their marriage for some time—the death of their little girl, Lizzy, who died from pneumonia a couple of years before. They have not made love since Lizzy died. They do not touch. There's no intimacy between them at all. In this scene they go off for a picnic on an ancient Indian burial mound, a gesture toward reconciliation, trying to find moments when they can reconnect. But as the scene progresses, they lapse into separate memories about their daughter, memories that are lovely but painful.
    The scene partly represents a technical problem—not, I need hardly stress anymore, that I was conscious of finding a technical solution to an analytically perceived problem. This is analysis after the fact. But the problem was that I wrote the book in the third-person limited omniscient, with two point-of-view characters, Deborah and Jeremy. In the sections that begin in Jeremy's sensibility, the narrator has no access to Deborah. And in the sections that begin with Deborah, the narrator has no access to Jeremy. This is so for the first eighty-some pages of the book. But in this scene of the picnic, just as they aspire to come together—so does the narrator get into both sensibilities at the same time. The narrator moves between these two isolated reveries, hoping to bring them together somehow.
    A couple of things you need to know: the memory that Deborah has is of seeing Lizzy outside the house one day crouching near the grass, swaying in front of a poisonous copperhead snake, singing a variation of the old nursery rhyme "Hush little snaky, don't you cry." The copperhead is swaying and coiling as well; Lizzy has literally charmed the snake.
    Jeremy's memory involves Lizzy and his work at the steel mill. He has Lizzy on his shoulders. It's nighttime. He's stopped near the slag pile and has an unobstructed view of the blast furnace. He's watching its beauty: the flames of the ovens and the billows of smoke, the constellation of lights on the equipment, and a single prominent smokestack that is flaring off a flame from the excess gasses.
    Here is the passage that uses the technique of the dissolve:
    Deborah waited motionless as Lizzy sang to the snake and finally Deborah whispered, Come away now, and her daughter rose slowly and left the copperhead where it lay charmed on the grass and when Lizzy was near, Deborah grasped her hand and Jeremy reached up to grasp his daughter's hand and she said, What's that jelly fire? and he looked and he knew at once what she meant—the flame coming from the tall, thin stack. It's a bleeder valve, he said, and he felt her chin touch the top of his head; he could imagine her resting her head on his so that she could study this beautiful flame and when Lizzy looked up at her mother she smiled a smile that seemed full of some special knowledge and Lizzy's thoughtful study of the flame and her smile at the charming of the snake brought both Jeremy and Deborah to the same tremor of grief. They each felt it in the other's body and to feel the other's grief was too much to add to their own and they pulled gently apart. Jeremy rose and walked to the western edge of the mound and he looked off to the mill and Deborah lay flat and closed her eyes against the sky and she thought she heard a gliding nearby in the grass but she did not care and did not move.
    Did you hear the dissolve? It's set up with Lizzy's question, "What's