Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Pilcrow
A passage from Adam Mars-Jones' Pilcrow:
(If you think this passage is a little too fraught with detail, remember that John, the narrator, is a four-year-old child with a disability that all-day confines him to a cradle. Also understand that John the at-least-eighteen-year-old is the actual narrator here, and speaks for his younger self.)
The passage to me represents a microcosm of all that is good about the stylistic novel. The qualification in the third sentence, for example ("but it brought laughter to mind") places within the sentence a recognizably infantile innocence, lending it a pleasant layer of feeling without which the sentence cannot -- devoid as it is of factual or character-related information -- stand. Reminded of John's humanity, we read the rest of the passage primed for any detail that might bring us closer to him; when he obliges us with the textural delights of the second paragraph (I don't know about you, but I actually went through each of the actions described there, discovering among other things that my tongue cannot in fact be persuaded to meet my nose) we are more than just satisfied; we discover a sympathy for our narrator's disability that is not directly engendered by any single idea in the passage. The latter is central to the magic of great prose, prose that consciously avoids the garish pitfalls of sentimentality while still achieving that rare combination of feeling and meaning through the selection and framing of character-specific detail.
(Specificity is of course the most intangible of qualities of the written word, and perhaps the most overlooked. As children, we find ourselves frustrated by the specific, by what is as opposed to what should be. A ten-year-old me cannot indulge my mud-eating propensities, because such a thing is generally unacceptable; never mind that I may have enjoyed the taste and texture of the peculiar red-clay endemic to my backyard in the wintertime. We internalize these rules (and accept them, if grudgingly) by our teens, and the most precocious of us are -- by the time we are fifteen or so -- already swathing the things we see around us in easy webs of generality. We begin to speak of "the world", of "life", and of "society"; surely, we say, these broad strokes we paint are in fact the only ones that our canvases can support. A state of mind that accepts such generalities can rarely set out to write anything that resembles literature. For example, an absolute that I have always cherished vis-a-vis the urban RSS supporter -- namely that he is a filthy specimen of humanity -- ensures that any attempt to include such a person as a character in my novel will be abortive at best. The adroit novelist understands that he would be best served by proceeding in the direction of the specific, understands that such a path -- however weighed down as it might be with the ambiguous, the finally inscrutable -- is the only one that may lead to meaning. (Of course, this paragraph is itself an extremely generic observation, and may itself be quite meaningless.)
At the other end of the spectrum is criticism, specifically novelistic criticism as seen in the context of the social. Any piece of criticism written for society cannot be held culpable for either its corpus of unspecific observations or its willingness to draw conclusions. What is the bigger picture? is the question that we ask, and the critic obliges by providing us, that is to say society, with his version of the bigger picture. The latter he achieves by cleverly producing specific examples that support his generic observations.
The insidious -- and to me rather disheartening -- truth about such criticism is that it cannot survive, and is indeed fundamentally meaningless without widespread social acceptance. A piece like Harold Bloom's rant on Harry Potter, for example, would have been completely ignored (and rightly so) if not for the fact that it was a socially approved critic writing about a commercially (and by proxy, socially) successful writer. As things stand the piece is regarded as snobbery by the bourgeois and `great' criticism by the elite. The question I would pose to Harold Bloom is this -- tell us why you didn't like Harry Potter (and no, piddling examples of repetitive phrases in the novel won't do) rather than compare it with James Thurber or Thomas Pynchon. Tell us what you felt. Of course, if the critic really told us what he felt, he wouldn't stop until he had written enough to populate a full-sized novel. And then we'd have others' criticism of his critique. The process seems never to end. :)
)
PS: Brought Pilcrow down on a rather alarming specimen of cockroach yesterday; the novel's tome-like heaviness lent to my swing the clumsiness that attends the most satisfying of such occasions.
My tongue was a rich source of games. I would tickle the roof of my mouth with its tip. It didn't quite make me burst out laughing, but it brought laughter to mind. Anybody who says that tickling yourself is impossible, and that the sensation depends on someone else doing it, hasn't tried tickling of this type. It's not perfect but it works, and that made it a precious game for me then.
Then I stuck my tongue out and started rotating it very slowly at full extension, feeling the wet trail I left on my chin or my cheeks or the groove above my lips as it slowly evaporated. I learned to touch my nose with my tongue, gradually improving its flexibility. I discovered for myself that the tongue is a muscle, by straining it. Then it was back to eye work for a while. When the speaking muscle had recovered, I would combine the eye-rollings and the tongue sweep, sometimes synchronising the movements, sometimes making them contrary, even contrapuntal. When Mum came into the room and surprised me while I was engrossed in my little theatre of grimaces, she was shocked. She thought I was having a seizure. A fit, on top of all her troubles. Even then I understood that they were her troubles.
(If you think this passage is a little too fraught with detail, remember that John, the narrator, is a four-year-old child with a disability that all-day confines him to a cradle. Also understand that John the at-least-eighteen-year-old is the actual narrator here, and speaks for his younger self.)
The passage to me represents a microcosm of all that is good about the stylistic novel. The qualification in the third sentence, for example ("but it brought laughter to mind") places within the sentence a recognizably infantile innocence, lending it a pleasant layer of feeling without which the sentence cannot -- devoid as it is of factual or character-related information -- stand. Reminded of John's humanity, we read the rest of the passage primed for any detail that might bring us closer to him; when he obliges us with the textural delights of the second paragraph (I don't know about you, but I actually went through each of the actions described there, discovering among other things that my tongue cannot in fact be persuaded to meet my nose) we are more than just satisfied; we discover a sympathy for our narrator's disability that is not directly engendered by any single idea in the passage. The latter is central to the magic of great prose, prose that consciously avoids the garish pitfalls of sentimentality while still achieving that rare combination of feeling and meaning through the selection and framing of character-specific detail.
(Specificity is of course the most intangible of qualities of the written word, and perhaps the most overlooked. As children, we find ourselves frustrated by the specific, by what is as opposed to what should be. A ten-year-old me cannot indulge my mud-eating propensities, because such a thing is generally unacceptable; never mind that I may have enjoyed the taste and texture of the peculiar red-clay endemic to my backyard in the wintertime. We internalize these rules (and accept them, if grudgingly) by our teens, and the most precocious of us are -- by the time we are fifteen or so -- already swathing the things we see around us in easy webs of generality. We begin to speak of "the world", of "life", and of "society"; surely, we say, these broad strokes we paint are in fact the only ones that our canvases can support. A state of mind that accepts such generalities can rarely set out to write anything that resembles literature. For example, an absolute that I have always cherished vis-a-vis the urban RSS supporter -- namely that he is a filthy specimen of humanity -- ensures that any attempt to include such a person as a character in my novel will be abortive at best. The adroit novelist understands that he would be best served by proceeding in the direction of the specific, understands that such a path -- however weighed down as it might be with the ambiguous, the finally inscrutable -- is the only one that may lead to meaning. (Of course, this paragraph is itself an extremely generic observation, and may itself be quite meaningless.)
At the other end of the spectrum is criticism, specifically novelistic criticism as seen in the context of the social. Any piece of criticism written for society cannot be held culpable for either its corpus of unspecific observations or its willingness to draw conclusions. What is the bigger picture? is the question that we ask, and the critic obliges by providing us, that is to say society, with his version of the bigger picture. The latter he achieves by cleverly producing specific examples that support his generic observations.
The insidious -- and to me rather disheartening -- truth about such criticism is that it cannot survive, and is indeed fundamentally meaningless without widespread social acceptance. A piece like Harold Bloom's rant on Harry Potter, for example, would have been completely ignored (and rightly so) if not for the fact that it was a socially approved critic writing about a commercially (and by proxy, socially) successful writer. As things stand the piece is regarded as snobbery by the bourgeois and `great' criticism by the elite. The question I would pose to Harold Bloom is this -- tell us why you didn't like Harry Potter (and no, piddling examples of repetitive phrases in the novel won't do) rather than compare it with James Thurber or Thomas Pynchon. Tell us what you felt. Of course, if the critic really told us what he felt, he wouldn't stop until he had written enough to populate a full-sized novel. And then we'd have others' criticism of his critique. The process seems never to end. :)
)
PS: Brought Pilcrow down on a rather alarming specimen of cockroach yesterday; the novel's tome-like heaviness lent to my swing the clumsiness that attends the most satisfying of such occasions.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Monday, October 6, 2008
Notes on Atmospheric Disturbances
Almost through Ms. Galchen's book. A few thoughts --
1) Leo, the protagonist, as the novel begins, thinks of his wife Rema as a `simulacrum', someone other than his `true' wife. What begins as an apparent mystery quickly resolves into the irresolution of Leo's thoughts; we learn not to trust him or the events that occur around him (as he reports them). The `truth' as seen through the filter of Leo's mind is fractured, and we as readers are not afforded the simple refuge of the `actual' truth. What is implicit is that Leo's narration is in fact the truth because it is his truth -- this is the world he sees, and we as readers can only see `the' world through the stained window of his perception. This seems to me a concept rich with possibility, in the sense that it provides the writer with the stylistic freedom necessary to populate the character's quiddities. Consider a passage from early in the novel. Leo is about to lie to his patient, Harvey (Leo is a psychotherapist) so that he can cure Harvey of his itinerant ways (Harvey wanders about the country convinced he works for the atmospheric branch of a multidimensional entity known as the 49 Quantum Fathers):
The lack of commas in the last sentence is of course intentional, but in this case authorial intent translates into narratorial peculiarity and the establishment of a voice. We are more convinced of the narrator's sincerity because he does not seem to be writing for us - indeed is completely unaware of the act of writing -- because the way he speaks seems 'natural'. Leo's unconsciousness allows us as readers to unquestioningly sink deeper into his scarred reality, and in so doing inherit his conceptions of it. The same sentence, however, if written in third person, would have come across as being somewhat self-consciously literary and would have been less effective at communicating the somewhat tempestuous intent beneath its writer's thoughts; our readerly attention would then turn to the prose instead of its subject, and whereas some of us would perhaps think of the sentence as being a `great' piece of writing, the more experienced would indict the writer for displaying a brand of gauche self-indulgence that is (for good reason) considered a hallmark of a novice.
2) The book is full of synonyms of the word 'imitation'. In particular, the word 'simulacrum' is repeated several times, to the extent that its presence in any given paragraph becomes almost implicit, almost prepositional.
3) A literary register that nevertheless possesses its share of incongruities. In particular, the narrator seems not to know how to string long sentences together without stuttering into commas, and streams of consciousness seem almost list-like, almost like rote recitation. The semi-colon is shunned.
4) The narrator hears things. Consider a beautiful example midway through the book. Leo is in Buenos Aires visiting Rema's mother Magda. Leo dials a number, and here is the first thing he hears:
We can qualify Leo's imaginings with our own staid experiences of the everyday; it seems unlikely that a stranger who one is speaking to for the first time will so accurately echo the state of one's personal life. But what does it mean to say that `no one would ever say that'? Did the phone call even occur? It did in Leo's head, that's all should matter to us.
5) At the same time, it is clear -- from say the hyphenations, the satisfactory ends to chapters, the happy novelistic structure -- that it has been written. Not only that, but from the tense of the verbs we are aware that what has happened is past, and that the narrator is presenting his past to us. If he did so, then would he not be conscious of the act of writing itself, so much so that he would become doubly unreliable, that is to say, unreliable about his unreliability? Would he not be anxious to frame himself in at least a not-unfavorable light? Would he not question his unreliabilities? If on the other hand the work is not written, then why does it possess the degree of structure that it displays to us? Why is it not content to degenerate into a Joycean flouting of all that is literally literary? What appears at first almost vulgarly postmodern (and fatally self-conscious) is in fact the beginning of the end of all affirmations of social bondage and the joyful liberation that is inevitably the ultimate of all forms of expression.
6) A more general thought: it is only in a voyeuristic third-person world that there is a consensus viewpoint on character. The first-person, being unaware of who he is, is most likely to be comical in defiance of his own self, is most likely to be internally stochastic. People may not think of me today as being a person that frequents nightclubs, but tomorrow I may visit ten such in a row and claim that I actually enjoyed myself. A character's tastes to me seem by this token fundamentally meaningless (which is to say they don't reflect anything worth speaking about), because they are either intangible (of the "I hate eggplant" category) or social, that is, brought about by persons and situations that are extraneous to the individual. There is of course a third category of tastes that perhaps reflect the individual, but these remain wedged within the specific to a degree that no suitable metaphor can extract. It is then up to the author to become as specific as he can about the specific, in the hope that the reader sees his own individuality reflected within the work that he is reading. The latter seems an impossible task.
1) Leo, the protagonist, as the novel begins, thinks of his wife Rema as a `simulacrum', someone other than his `true' wife. What begins as an apparent mystery quickly resolves into the irresolution of Leo's thoughts; we learn not to trust him or the events that occur around him (as he reports them). The `truth' as seen through the filter of Leo's mind is fractured, and we as readers are not afforded the simple refuge of the `actual' truth. What is implicit is that Leo's narration is in fact the truth because it is his truth -- this is the world he sees, and we as readers can only see `the' world through the stained window of his perception. This seems to me a concept rich with possibility, in the sense that it provides the writer with the stylistic freedom necessary to populate the character's quiddities. Consider a passage from early in the novel. Leo is about to lie to his patient, Harvey (Leo is a psychotherapist) so that he can cure Harvey of his itinerant ways (Harvey wanders about the country convinced he works for the atmospheric branch of a multidimensional entity known as the 49 Quantum Fathers):
You really look closely at a person before lying, or confessing love, or doing anything momentous. It is above all Harvey's outfit from that day I remember well: navy blue suspenders hooked onto gray trousers (lightly pilling), a thin-striped button-up shirt (cuffs unbuttoned) with a dark ink stain like Argentina at the left floating rib and with sleeves too short and a collar strangely starched and flipped and seeming poised for flight.
The lack of commas in the last sentence is of course intentional, but in this case authorial intent translates into narratorial peculiarity and the establishment of a voice. We are more convinced of the narrator's sincerity because he does not seem to be writing for us - indeed is completely unaware of the act of writing -- because the way he speaks seems 'natural'. Leo's unconsciousness allows us as readers to unquestioningly sink deeper into his scarred reality, and in so doing inherit his conceptions of it. The same sentence, however, if written in third person, would have come across as being somewhat self-consciously literary and would have been less effective at communicating the somewhat tempestuous intent beneath its writer's thoughts; our readerly attention would then turn to the prose instead of its subject, and whereas some of us would perhaps think of the sentence as being a `great' piece of writing, the more experienced would indict the writer for displaying a brand of gauche self-indulgence that is (for good reason) considered a hallmark of a novice.
2) The book is full of synonyms of the word 'imitation'. In particular, the word 'simulacrum' is repeated several times, to the extent that its presence in any given paragraph becomes almost implicit, almost prepositional.
3) A literary register that nevertheless possesses its share of incongruities. In particular, the narrator seems not to know how to string long sentences together without stuttering into commas, and streams of consciousness seem almost list-like, almost like rote recitation. The semi-colon is shunned.
4) The narrator hears things. Consider a beautiful example midway through the book. Leo is in Buenos Aires visiting Rema's mother Magda. Leo dials a number, and here is the first thing he hears:
[Person on the other end of the line]: Are you calling about the marital tension?
We can qualify Leo's imaginings with our own staid experiences of the everyday; it seems unlikely that a stranger who one is speaking to for the first time will so accurately echo the state of one's personal life. But what does it mean to say that `no one would ever say that'? Did the phone call even occur? It did in Leo's head, that's all should matter to us.
5) At the same time, it is clear -- from say the hyphenations, the satisfactory ends to chapters, the happy novelistic structure -- that it has been written. Not only that, but from the tense of the verbs we are aware that what has happened is past, and that the narrator is presenting his past to us. If he did so, then would he not be conscious of the act of writing itself, so much so that he would become doubly unreliable, that is to say, unreliable about his unreliability? Would he not be anxious to frame himself in at least a not-unfavorable light? Would he not question his unreliabilities? If on the other hand the work is not written, then why does it possess the degree of structure that it displays to us? Why is it not content to degenerate into a Joycean flouting of all that is literally literary? What appears at first almost vulgarly postmodern (and fatally self-conscious) is in fact the beginning of the end of all affirmations of social bondage and the joyful liberation that is inevitably the ultimate of all forms of expression.
6) A more general thought: it is only in a voyeuristic third-person world that there is a consensus viewpoint on character. The first-person, being unaware of who he is, is most likely to be comical in defiance of his own self, is most likely to be internally stochastic. People may not think of me today as being a person that frequents nightclubs, but tomorrow I may visit ten such in a row and claim that I actually enjoyed myself. A character's tastes to me seem by this token fundamentally meaningless (which is to say they don't reflect anything worth speaking about), because they are either intangible (of the "I hate eggplant" category) or social, that is, brought about by persons and situations that are extraneous to the individual. There is of course a third category of tastes that perhaps reflect the individual, but these remain wedged within the specific to a degree that no suitable metaphor can extract. It is then up to the author to become as specific as he can about the specific, in the hope that the reader sees his own individuality reflected within the work that he is reading. The latter seems an impossible task.
Wood on Smith
And if Smith is offering up her own novel as an example of the very corruption afflicting her characters, one would have to say that to poison a whole novel is a very lengthy way of making a point about a single modern germ. Besides, confession is not absolution. The identification of a problem is not necessarily a form of resistance to it, and may be only an easy complicity: this was exactly the moral structure of Rushdie’s trivia-tattooed novel, Fury, which posed as excoriation but was really a love letter to the society of spectacle.
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