Using the Reader Hierarchy of Needs: A Reading of Eric LeMay's "Hole"

I first read Eric LeMay’s short essay “Hole” (which you can read here) while searching for texts I could assign to an introductory creative writing class. My first priority, because I know students are students and because I know school often insists on being too much all of the time, was to find short readings, texts that could illustrate useful principles without taking up students’ whole lives. On that front, “Hole” did the job: you can read the whole thing without scrolling. More than that, though, “Hole” moved me in a way that most texts don’t. From the first reading and in the years since, it has been personally significant to me, an example of nonfiction doing what nonfiction is uniquely good at doing.

Recently on the show, I talked about a framework I developed for making sure that writing meets its readers where they are and builds reliable foundations of significance as it leads readers to the meaningfulness the writer has in mind. If you haven’t (somehow) seen that video, you can, of course, find a more thorough explanation of the framework there. For now, though, I want to show how that framework can guide a reading of a text and give us insight into how writers do what they do—obviously, so that we can replicate it in our own work.

Linguistic Significance

The foundation of foundations, linguistic significance is the product of intelligible language use. But this essay is interesting for just how simple its language is. Of the essay’s 234 words, 193 are monosyllables, 37 have two syllables, and only four (pandemic, exhausted, another, and eventually) have more. They’re all common, everyday words that work to convey the simple, human activity of digging a hole in the dirt.

For the most part, the syntax is also straightforward and simple. Here and there, a sentence picks up a layer or two of modification, mostly simple participial phrases adding a little adverbial color.

Twice, though, the essay gives us something a little more complex, repeating and recasting itself midsentence:

“This time my son watched me, watched as I did it, smiling as the quarter struck the dirt.”

As if to say, don’t miss it, don’t misunderstand—the charade of the whole event was obvious to us all: the quarter showing up in the dirt was no more surprising to my son than it was to me.

“...keeping our game—if it was a game—alive.”

We could read this in multiple ways, I’m sure, but there are two main routes. The first, less likely (or less interesting) reading is that this inane act doesn’t count as a game because it’s too simple and pointless to be one. The second, more interesting reading is that the act is far too serious and meaningful to be dismissed as only a game.

Anyway, we’re deviating into layers of meaning beyond the linguistic. The short version is that the language appears to be calculatedly simple and straightforward. For a reader who understands English, it’s hard to imagine a piece that sets up fewer linguistic barriers to access. As we carry on into the higher-order layers of significance, then, this essay’s approach to language is a clear example that skillful writers can still do incredibly meaningful things with mostly monosyllabic words arranged in simple sentences.

Literal Significance

Okay, so we’ve got easy words, but what’s actually going on? Well, lucky for you and me, the first sentence of this essay tells us everything we need to know: “A year into the pandemic, as thousands of people were dying each day and March hung its low gray skies over us, my five-year-old son and I went out into the rain and dug a hole.”

Check it out—we have the time of year, the weather, the social and epidemiological backdrop, a father, a son, a hole-to-be. The rest of the short first paragraph also gives us their motive: there was nothing else left to do, so why not dig. As soon as it begins, the essay grounds us in an unmistakable understanding of what’s going on and why: after a year of being stuck inside and isolated during a pandemic, a father and son set out to dig a hole in the yard. We don’t have to guess where they are, who’s involved, or anything else—and the essay doesn’t make us wait to discover things gradually. From sentence one, it does what Dinty Moore describes when he writes: “An essay needs a lighted sign right up front telling the reader where they are going. Otherwise, the reader will be distracted and nervous at each stop along the way, unsure of the destination, not at all able to enjoy the ride.”

The literal clarity—the ease with which we place ourselves in the essay, watching this father and son play their game of digging a hole and dropping coins in it—is a natural outgrowth of the linguistic clarity. We don’t have to guess at what the words are saying, and, because of that, we don’t have to guess at what’s happening either. Just as the language couldn’t be simpler, the literal context of the essay couldn’t be more straightforward. To read it is to know, without complication, what happened in a literal sense.