"A Sunday repose prevailed the whole moribund town, peaceful, profound. A certain pleasing numbness, a sense of grateful enervation exhaled from the scorching plaster. There was no movement, no sound of human business. The faint hum of the insect, the intermittent murmur of the guitar, the mellow complainings of the pigeons, the prolonged purr of the white cat, the contented clucking of the hens--all these noises mingled together to form a faint, drowsy bourdon, prolonged, stupefying, suggestive of an infinite quiet, of a calm, complacent life, centuries old, lapsing gradually to its end under the gorgeous loneliness of a cloudless, pale blue sky and the steady fire of an interminable sun."
- Frank Norris, The Octopus
That's a nice bit of stage setting.
I especially like the word "bourdon," for a low-pitched tone, a word that seems to have dropped out of use since Norris' day. I also love the unexpected modifiers, "grateful enervation," "mellow complainings," "infinite quiet." The generation of writers after Norris became very reflectively anti-adjective, but here one sees there is nothing disreputable about that form of speech.
Showing posts with label literary criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary criticism. Show all posts
16 July 2011
05 February 2011
What Was So Great About It?
On January 29, I quoted what I called a "great sentence from Dylan Thomas." I will wait now while you look it over again.
What, you might ask, was so great about it?
It clocks in at 100 words, by my counts. That by itself doesn't make for a great sentence, but it can certainly be an attention-getting way to start a story or essay.
Length, though, won't do the job if one simply writes a run on. This sentence is not a run-on. It is a perfectly self-contained, well-constructed, unit of thought. There are numerous places where Thomas could have put a period -- where a lesser writer would have put a period -- buit in each case we can see the logic of continuing.
"I was born in a large Welsh industrial town at the beginning of the Great War." That would be almost journalism. Start your story, they say, with a sentence that answers the four Ws: who, what, where, when.
Yet Thomas isn't writing for a newspaper, and he follows that simple statement with a colon and a striking paradox about the "ugly, lovely town." What he means by those apparently contradictory adjectives is what is to become clear as the sentence unfolds.
What are we to make of an adjective like "jerry-villa'd"? Jerry-built is the more common compound. Or jerry-rigged. We recognize that at first read, and we may even think that "jerry-villa'd" is a misprint. But, no ... that is how Thomas wanted it. Andit has an obvious connection with the "ugly, lovely" conjunction.
Not only is this sentence a great work of art in itself, it is endlessly fascinating in its parts.
What, you might ask, was so great about it?
It clocks in at 100 words, by my counts. That by itself doesn't make for a great sentence, but it can certainly be an attention-getting way to start a story or essay.
Length, though, won't do the job if one simply writes a run on. This sentence is not a run-on. It is a perfectly self-contained, well-constructed, unit of thought. There are numerous places where Thomas could have put a period -- where a lesser writer would have put a period -- buit in each case we can see the logic of continuing.
"I was born in a large Welsh industrial town at the beginning of the Great War." That would be almost journalism. Start your story, they say, with a sentence that answers the four Ws: who, what, where, when.
Yet Thomas isn't writing for a newspaper, and he follows that simple statement with a colon and a striking paradox about the "ugly, lovely town." What he means by those apparently contradictory adjectives is what is to become clear as the sentence unfolds.
What are we to make of an adjective like "jerry-villa'd"? Jerry-built is the more common compound. Or jerry-rigged. We recognize that at first read, and we may even think that "jerry-villa'd" is a misprint. But, no ... that is how Thomas wanted it. Andit has an obvious connection with the "ugly, lovely" conjunction.
Not only is this sentence a great work of art in itself, it is endlessly fascinating in its parts.
28 October 2010
The Broom of the System, concluded
A final few words, if I may, about Wallace's first novel, as I described it last week.
I'm attracted to the sensibility behind it, as regular readers of this blog will probably suspect. The rapid moves from high-brow to low, from Wittgensteinian philosophy to Gilligan references, make for a hybrid of challenge and comfort.
Another strength is dialogue. He has a fine ear for the way people really talk to each other. I'm reminded of the Woody Allen move "Bullets over Broadway," because that is the criticism that the artistically gifted mob soldier directs at the not-so-gifted playwrite, "Nobody in real life talks like your characters. You gotta real problem wid dat."
Anyway, people in real life do talk like Wallace's characters. Or, at least, the stylization of necessity in fictional dialog never draws attention to itself. Here is one character, whose job entails reading a lot of manuscripts submitted to a journal, talking to his lover.
"Do you know where all the really sad stories I'm getting are coming from? They're coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I'm starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America."
That's the way people old enough to worry about "kids in college" do talk -- and the sentiment advances the story, while introducing one of the book's stories-within-the-story, because of course this editor proceeds to describe an example of one of these sad submissions.
I was a little disappointed in the ending. I won't describe it, out of deference to any of you who may wish to read it yourself. But a plot this intricate needs a neat tie-up at the end, or the intricacy can feel like a cheat. As, alas, it does.
Still: there was a lot to admire, and finally reading Wallace allows me retrospectively to mourn his passing.
Have I mentioned my recent discovery that Wallace was the target of satire by The Onion?
I'm attracted to the sensibility behind it, as regular readers of this blog will probably suspect. The rapid moves from high-brow to low, from Wittgensteinian philosophy to Gilligan references, make for a hybrid of challenge and comfort.
Another strength is dialogue. He has a fine ear for the way people really talk to each other. I'm reminded of the Woody Allen move "Bullets over Broadway," because that is the criticism that the artistically gifted mob soldier directs at the not-so-gifted playwrite, "Nobody in real life talks like your characters. You gotta real problem wid dat."
Anyway, people in real life do talk like Wallace's characters. Or, at least, the stylization of necessity in fictional dialog never draws attention to itself. Here is one character, whose job entails reading a lot of manuscripts submitted to a journal, talking to his lover.
"Do you know where all the really sad stories I'm getting are coming from? They're coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I'm starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America."
That's the way people old enough to worry about "kids in college" do talk -- and the sentiment advances the story, while introducing one of the book's stories-within-the-story, because of course this editor proceeds to describe an example of one of these sad submissions.
I was a little disappointed in the ending. I won't describe it, out of deference to any of you who may wish to read it yourself. But a plot this intricate needs a neat tie-up at the end, or the intricacy can feel like a cheat. As, alas, it does.
Still: there was a lot to admire, and finally reading Wallace allows me retrospectively to mourn his passing.
Have I mentioned my recent discovery that Wallace was the target of satire by The Onion?
24 October 2010
The Broom of the System
I've lately been reading the 1987 novel "The Broom of the System," by the late David Foster Wallace. Broom was his first novel, though he later became famous with "Infinite Jest" (1996).
The title reference to a "broom" alludes to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is a theme of the novel. LW wrote: "For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." That line is often shortened to just three words: meaning is use.
One character in this novel explains this to another using the example of a broom. What is the more essential part of a broom, the straw bristles or the wooden handle? Most people if pressed, will say the bristles, because the bristles do the actual cleaning. But one says this because one is thinking of the use of a broom -- its use is to clean. If one thought of the same object as a baseball bat, or as a burglar's tool for breaking windows, the handle would be vastly more valuable. The change in use would change the meaning.
The protagonist of the novel is a young woman named Lenore, a 24-year-old telephone switchboard operator for a publishing company that does hardly any publishing (since it is in reality somebody's tax dodge). The catalyzing crisis of the plot is Lenore's discovery that her Wittgensteinian great-grandmother, the one who uses the broom example to explain language -- this woman, also named Lenore, had studied in England in her youth and had known LW personally -- is no longer in the nursing home where she is supposed to be -- that she and several other residents have disappeared.
One intriguing character in the novel is the manager of that nursing home, David Bloemker. Bloemker repeatedly expresses himself in an overly elaborate manner, only to have to reduce his own locutions to a much simpler form. For example, he tells Lenore that if they find her great-grandmother they will likely also find the other missing residents of the facility. Why? Because, she "enjoyed a status here -- with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents that leads one to believe that, were the mislocation a result of anything other than outright coercion ... it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties."
The younger Lenore says that she doesn't understand all of that.
Bloemker tries again, "Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here."
That sort of trick -- the comic reduction of ornate speech to plain speech -- is commonly attempted, yet it is rather hard to pull off, and I think Wallace handles it well when he uses it.
Better than, say, the screenwriters for the old television show "Gilligan's Island." In one episode of that show, the castaways discover helium escaping from the ground, and attempt to leave from the island in a balloon. When Gilligan shows the professor the source of helium, the prof says, "why, it's obviously an invisible and odorless gas." Gilligan replies, "not only that, you can't see it or smell it."
The Gilligan version of the joke is lame, Wallace's version shows how it can be done properly.
The conjunction of the two isn't unfair to Wallace, because he actually introduces Gilligan's Island into this novel. There is a restaurant in this novel's fictional version of Cleveland Ohio that is decorated like the set of that TV show.
"Once an hour the bartender would be required to do something cloddish and stupid -- a standard favorite had the bartender slipping on a bit of spilled banana daiquiri and falling and acting as if he had driven his thumb into his eye -- and the patrons would, if they were hip and in the know, say with one voice, 'Aww, Gilligan,' and laugh, and clap."
Wallace's use of the baroque-speech-turned-plain meme is not just a gag to pull out, and pull off, when Bloemker happens to be in a scene -- it is a contribution, after all, to the novelistic meditation upon language -- a contributor to the Wittgensteinian theme of the whole.
One character suggests (this is young Lenore's father, the older Lenore's grandson) that the elder Lenore has left the home because she no longer believes that she has any use. In her worldview, use is meaning. And without use, as a broom incapable anymore of sweeping, she has no further meaning. So she is willing to involve herself in a biochemical experiment in order to again have a use.
I will leave this open-ended.
The title reference to a "broom" alludes to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is a theme of the novel. LW wrote: "For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." That line is often shortened to just three words: meaning is use.
One character in this novel explains this to another using the example of a broom. What is the more essential part of a broom, the straw bristles or the wooden handle? Most people if pressed, will say the bristles, because the bristles do the actual cleaning. But one says this because one is thinking of the use of a broom -- its use is to clean. If one thought of the same object as a baseball bat, or as a burglar's tool for breaking windows, the handle would be vastly more valuable. The change in use would change the meaning.
The protagonist of the novel is a young woman named Lenore, a 24-year-old telephone switchboard operator for a publishing company that does hardly any publishing (since it is in reality somebody's tax dodge). The catalyzing crisis of the plot is Lenore's discovery that her Wittgensteinian great-grandmother, the one who uses the broom example to explain language -- this woman, also named Lenore, had studied in England in her youth and had known LW personally -- is no longer in the nursing home where she is supposed to be -- that she and several other residents have disappeared.
One intriguing character in the novel is the manager of that nursing home, David Bloemker. Bloemker repeatedly expresses himself in an overly elaborate manner, only to have to reduce his own locutions to a much simpler form. For example, he tells Lenore that if they find her great-grandmother they will likely also find the other missing residents of the facility. Why? Because, she "enjoyed a status here -- with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents that leads one to believe that, were the mislocation a result of anything other than outright coercion ... it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties."
The younger Lenore says that she doesn't understand all of that.
Bloemker tries again, "Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here."
That sort of trick -- the comic reduction of ornate speech to plain speech -- is commonly attempted, yet it is rather hard to pull off, and I think Wallace handles it well when he uses it.
Better than, say, the screenwriters for the old television show "Gilligan's Island." In one episode of that show, the castaways discover helium escaping from the ground, and attempt to leave from the island in a balloon. When Gilligan shows the professor the source of helium, the prof says, "why, it's obviously an invisible and odorless gas." Gilligan replies, "not only that, you can't see it or smell it."
The Gilligan version of the joke is lame, Wallace's version shows how it can be done properly.
The conjunction of the two isn't unfair to Wallace, because he actually introduces Gilligan's Island into this novel. There is a restaurant in this novel's fictional version of Cleveland Ohio that is decorated like the set of that TV show.
"Once an hour the bartender would be required to do something cloddish and stupid -- a standard favorite had the bartender slipping on a bit of spilled banana daiquiri and falling and acting as if he had driven his thumb into his eye -- and the patrons would, if they were hip and in the know, say with one voice, 'Aww, Gilligan,' and laugh, and clap."
Wallace's use of the baroque-speech-turned-plain meme is not just a gag to pull out, and pull off, when Bloemker happens to be in a scene -- it is a contribution, after all, to the novelistic meditation upon language -- a contributor to the Wittgensteinian theme of the whole.
One character suggests (this is young Lenore's father, the older Lenore's grandson) that the elder Lenore has left the home because she no longer believes that she has any use. In her worldview, use is meaning. And without use, as a broom incapable anymore of sweeping, she has no further meaning. So she is willing to involve herself in a biochemical experiment in order to again have a use.
I will leave this open-ended.
29 November 2008
Critics and their art
How much does it matter to us that a critic is an artist him/herself?
If I commend a statue, or on the other hand if I compare it invidiously to another, does it matter that I have never taken chisel to marble in my life?
Does the taint of the dilletante disappear if I have tried my hand at it, failed, and then have used my appreciation of and study in the art to assess the contributions of others? Or is that worse from the point of view of my trustworthiness than if I had never tried at all?
"Those who can do, those who can't carp," is a common enough complaint by those on the receiving end of such criticism.
So we turn, at least in some moods, with some relief to critics who have "done it themselves," and done it successfully.
Still, they have their own set of vulnerabilities. If an active and successful sculptor criticizes the work of one of his competitors in that line, is he not an interested party? Isn't it a bit like Goodyear offering an appraisal of tires one might consider buying from Firestone?
So what kind of critic is ideal?
I don't know, but those thoughts came to mind recently when I encountered, through circumstances I won't bother to relate, a scholarly paper written in 1938 on the critical writings of Walt Whitman.
The author, Maurice O. Johnson, concludes in a manner that reminds me a bit of Goodyear and Firestone. Whitman's critique of other poets was always in the service of the idea that "the poet who was to combine all the prescribed virtues was Whitman himself."
If I commend a statue, or on the other hand if I compare it invidiously to another, does it matter that I have never taken chisel to marble in my life?
Does the taint of the dilletante disappear if I have tried my hand at it, failed, and then have used my appreciation of and study in the art to assess the contributions of others? Or is that worse from the point of view of my trustworthiness than if I had never tried at all?
"Those who can do, those who can't carp," is a common enough complaint by those on the receiving end of such criticism.
So we turn, at least in some moods, with some relief to critics who have "done it themselves," and done it successfully.
Still, they have their own set of vulnerabilities. If an active and successful sculptor criticizes the work of one of his competitors in that line, is he not an interested party? Isn't it a bit like Goodyear offering an appraisal of tires one might consider buying from Firestone?
So what kind of critic is ideal?
I don't know, but those thoughts came to mind recently when I encountered, through circumstances I won't bother to relate, a scholarly paper written in 1938 on the critical writings of Walt Whitman.
The author, Maurice O. Johnson, concludes in a manner that reminds me a bit of Goodyear and Firestone. Whitman's critique of other poets was always in the service of the idea that "the poet who was to combine all the prescribed virtues was Whitman himself."
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