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The Iterative
The iterative is a verb aspect in which the described actions have been performed over and over again. The iterative is frequently used to introduce pieces of both fiction and nonfiction—“The family would go to the beach every summer and always stayed in a rented cottage”—and it is true that often a story then moves to a particular instance that was somehow different—“One summer my dad decided that maybe we should actually buy our own place.” (This is the plot of a recent piece by David Sedaris in The New Yorker, for example.)
However, the iterative is also commonly used in a more extended way to indicate actions, behaviors, and states of being that are permanent, saturating, defining, and/or universal. Here is a rather light, humorous example, “Once More with Stuffing,” by Meg Huber.
Every year we say, “Let’s really have a gathering for Thanksgiving,” and every year our second thought is, “Here comes trouble.” But we love Thanksgiving dinners so each year I cook three of them. The first is a small private dinner with just our children. One child is disabled and needs to have his dinner served to him midday. The second Thanksgiving dinner is held the night of the official day and is served to reward a brother’s kin for spending eleven hours on the road while we were eating meal one. Why I serve the third dinner, I cannot say, but while smarter women are getting a jump on Christmas shopping, our tradition is to invite people from other countries to dinner. Perhaps all that pumpkin pie and stuffing on Thursday unleashes unexpected energy because one never knows what will happen on Thanksgiving Friday.
Enter the guests. One holds us in uneasy thrall explaining the logic of government-sponsored single-child families in China. We look around the room. Only one among us is a first child. Next a guest from the Ukraine brings the conversation to an uneasy pause by suggesting that one way to deal with Third World nations is to let them all starve. On this note, I call folks to the table. As we sit down, Grandma, who is visiting from Florida, mistakes a nine-year-old girl in overalls for a boy. Next, Grandma loudly requests that someone please remove the stuffed cabbages from her end of the table. Fortunately, the Russian cabbage cook is so close to drowning in the sea of English that she just smiles and isn’t offended.
Just then an air inversion pulls heavy smoke from the fireplace over to our table. Windows and doors, stripped of their screens the previous week, fly open, and indoor cat sees his moment to escape. The cook flies to the fireplace to monkey with the damper, succeeding in closing it completely. By now the smoke is oppressive, and one guest, having driven eleven hours, is sure he is getting a headache so it is on with the attic fan. One young woman quietly retrieves her red wool coat from the closet and pulls it over Grandma’s legs to keep her warm. A few moments of artificial wind through the house clears the smoke. We close the windows, put on coffee, and check out Grandma, resplendent in her coat blanket, smiling at the lot of us. It seems the best Thanksgiving ever, we agree. Maybe it is all that stuffing and pumpkin pie.
This is doubtless a composite of Thanksgivings and is written in the iterative to give it that sense of timelessness. Note, however, that it is also very specific in terms of details, as, I think, my own article is.
If someone says, “My family always celebrated the Fourth of July with special desserts,” the statement remains somewhat generic. However, if someone says, “My family always had lemon icebox pie on the Fourth of July, and I will never forget the way it enlivened my tongue with its sweet-tart flavor and its cold smoothness, as if in sassy answer to the stultifying question of the humid summer weather,” then the statement is both iterative and very specific.
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