Toomer & Roth

It's curious that we're reading Toomer now, towards the end of the semester, after we've spent so much time analyzing prose, prose, and more prose. Toomer's prose feels nothing like prose, mostly because it reads as though it was more to do with oral tradition, poetry, and jazz. It takes on the "Signifying Monkey" tone of Ellison's more poetic passages in Invisible Man that, indeed, read like excerpts and not like driving components of the plot. The tone is characterized by an obvious performative quality, and a higher regard for the sonic effects of words and phrases as they're delivered, quite rhythmically, before an audience. Words and phrases repeat, as they do in poetry and song, subjects and proper nouns are omitted from sentences, and there's an underlying feeling that his audience understands his writing, despite the occasional missing pieces, because they've heard it all before in the oral tradition, in jazz, or in anything. The jazzy moments are sometimes at odds with the more "written" moments because of a conflict of language and style. In "Becky," he consciously addresses his audience in presuming that certain questions have been asked (not unlike Nabokov) about Becky's one Negro son, but adopts the precise language and dialog of those who would likely gossip about it, i.e. "Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger, said the white folks mouths." He doesn't attribute the insult to the white folks themselves, but instead has a go at their "mouths," as though their mouths aren't attached to the rest of them. Same goes for, "Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the blak folk's muths." Unless this was a typo, the white impersonations he does get increasingly lazy, disinterested, angry, and so on. It could just be a typo, though, because there are a few in this paragraph already. "Muths" would be a funny slang for "mouth," or at least a funny way to articulate the sound of oral indolence.

Not all of his excerpts feel quite so talky. This excerpt, from Bona and Paul, has a much denser narrative quality:

"A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly he knew that people saw not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference. Their stares, giving him to himself, filled something long empty within him, and were like green blades sprouting in his consciousness. There was a fullness, and strength and peace about it all. He saw himself, cloudy, but real. He saw the faces of the people at the tables round him. White lights, or as now, the pink lights of the Crimson Gardens gave a glow and immediacy to white faces. The pleasure of it equal to that of love or dream, of seeing this."

The sentences are fairly straightforward as they explain Paul's epiphany, and are fairly unconcerned with feeling spoken rather than written. The simple diction makes the passage especially poignant, as in the case of "He saw himself, cloudy, but real." It's a loaded statement of self-perception, and yet its terms are seemingly simple. He saw this, he saw that. The final sentence similarly speaks plainly, but qualifies itself at the end in being specific about what the pleasure of it really is.

The interesting thing about Harlem Renaissance writers, or so I've noticed, is the distinction between what is written and what is spoken in their prose. There are moments that clearly pulled from actual conversation or performances, and there are those that have been written out for a reader's sake. These moments are characteristically more profound, in Toomer's case, and feel much differently in the scattered scheme of his story telling.

* * *

Roth's writing feels like good writing to me, though it's not especially easy to decide what good writing even feels like. I suppose he is clear and thorough in the same way that Bellow is (perhaps in the grand tradition of Jewish-American writers). Roth's appeal, I think, is in his well-crafted long sentences, or his drawn-out questions that are answered over a paragraph or so.

"And how did this affect him-the glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love?"

The suspensive questions begs for a dramatic reading of pretty basic athletic maneuvers like a hook shot or a pass. Thus, he glorifies what is so standard by elevating the style, elongating his method of describing the Swede's moves to make it seem like more than they really are--because in fact, the Swede is probably less than he is made out to be. The later questions reveal the narrator's blunt skepticism of his revered subject, quite thoroughly diagnosing the entire community's psychological misconceptions about the Swede, and his direct effect on all of them. It takes on a passive, hands-off voice (i.e. "that an entire community was ladling with love") during a moment in which there is unabashed judgment fixed into the narrative. This seems to be the fun of Roth. His observations of particular moments and characters are astute and beautifully written without ever being deceptive or unaccessible.

Uncanny

What struck me most about Freud is how remarkably considerate he is of his unknowing audience. That is to say, he holds firm beliefs about his topic, but is also deeply attuned to a reader who is facing it for the first time, or to a reader who generally is skeptical of psychoanalysis, and of him. He only spends a brief amount of time lingering on semantics before he has moved on to imaginative literature as a medium through which anybody can access the uncanny, and comprehend difficult distinctions between the uncanny and the ordinarily frightening. Freud sustains his arguments by reiterating points and making them accessible to those unfamiliar with the intricacies of psychoanalysis, and does so by making these discoveries, or the process of understanding them, a collective, group effort. Hence, Freud will seldom use "I" and instead opts for "we," as if he is--quite affectionately--holding our hands while he walks us through his expansive theory. Stylistically, Freud's tone is authorial and sophisticated without ever really being alienating.

Curiously, Freud also holds a certain skepticism towards his theories--one that we can't be certain is genuine or contrived--in his transitional or broader topic sentences:

"Now, however, it is time to turn from these aspects of the matter, which are in any case difficult to judge, and look for some undeniable instances of the uncanny, in the hope that an analysis of them will decide whether our hypothesis is a valid one."

This sentence doesn't quite feel suspensive, but is certainly divided in such a way in which we can see how cautious Freud needs to be in relaying his information. With that, his sentences are often loaded with qualifications and details that are, perhaps, meant to console the reader or have them understand that this topic is reasonably farfetched beyond the boundaries of psychoanalysis. It is also peculiar that Freud uses "in hope," as though his theory's success rides on belief, coincidence, fate, or some other abstraction.

It appears as though Freud's semi-humble tone is put-on in some places to ensure that reader that he is not necessarily pompous or haughty, but in other places, he is less concerned with seeming cautious.

"It may be true that the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. But the selection of material on this basis does not enable us to solve the problem of the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition — not everything that recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of the individual and of the race — is on that account uncanny."

As he oscillates between what specifically is and is not uncanny, we can see how the style of argument takes a very conventional form, or one that we often see in persuasive writing. Again, he qualifies a separate truth of the uncanny that might ultimately obstruct his argument, but only to immediately counter it by stating how one notion is capable of disabling him, or "us" from solving "the problem of the uncanny." His voice then hardens up with a passive, suspensive statement that again ensures what isn't uncanny.

I found his arguments in part III to be the most exciting and fathomable.

"We have clearly not exhausted the possibilities of poetic licence and the privileges enjoyed by story-writers in evoking or in excluding an uncanny feeling. In the main we adopt an unvarying passive attitude towards real experience and are subject to the influence of our physical environment. But the story-teller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material."

It's no easy feat to explain what happens to us as readers when we read fiction, and yet Freud accomplishes this pretty well. Freud begins his point by stating what it is that we don't do, as if to appease a reader in opposition, and then moves on to quite generally state what it is that we actually do: adopt a passive attitude towards reality. The final, most convincing statement adopts the uncharacteristically metaphorical language of a flowing river. The phrases themselves don't hit us hard because of how gradually they are delivered, but the slow, elaborative quality of the cumulative sentence is actually very powerful in piling on evidence that substantiates his insights.

Woody Allen.

I found it amazing how many times I had to stop and look up words while reading Woody Allen (at least three times). Allen tends to use lofty, scientific diction while talking about mundane annoyances of his privileged life. Quite like he does in his films, in "Nanny Dearest" he has made it so that everybody speaks in the same voice (which is, essentially, his own), despite the characters' obvious socioeconomic differences. That is, unless it is a coincidence that his "pleasant drone" of a nanny would think to call someone a "motormouthed little proton." Is it possible for a pleasant drone to be so writerly? I guess that's the joke.

I don't find Woody Allen as funny in his writing as I do in his films. His prose is often verbose and hard to access, especially when it is loaded with weird jargon and pop culture references. He goes out of his way to distinguish his wife as his "better half" or "the Immortal Beloved," expressing his ironic contempt for marriage cliches and consciously distancing himself from normalcy by saying things that are all too normal. Since he is famously neurotic, it seems he's using the language of doctors:

"A twitching in my cheek began its arrhythmic calisthenics, and drops of perspiration began emerging on my brow with audible snaps."

For whatever reason, the twitching and the perspiration drops have agency here. Woody Allen refuses to tell us that his cheek twitched and he was sweaty, and instead offers us the passive voice mixed with the voice of the directions/information on a prescription drug labels. It's as if he doesn't really want us to know what he's talking about, or, by using elevated language, he is differentiating his sweating and twitching from the kinds that regular people experience, because he has been formally diagnosed, and therefore uses drawn-out, medical terms.

He also makes uses of suspensive sentences as means for his jokes. It's his own very special way of delivering a punch line.

"Her successor, a nineteen-year-old French au pair named Veronique, who was all wiggles and cooing, with blond hair, the pout of a porn star, long tapered legs, and a rack that almost required scaffolding, was a far less truculent type. "

From the beginning of the sentence, we are awaiting his formal diagnosis of the bad nanny's successor, and gradually come to realize that the au pair was absurdly desirable based on his descriptions, yet she is diagnosed as "a far less truculent type," or someone who is less combative or difficult than the previous nannys, even though she was equally problematic. As he goes through his list of old nannies, we anticipate that each anecdote will be more awful and absurd than the next. Allen, then, is forced to squeeze his jokes into a single sentence, for pacing's sake.

Mark Steyn's Big Fat Canadian Essay + Holmes' Book Review

The structure of Mark Steyn's essay feels like catchy, culturally-specific examples (many of which feel like digressions) supporting his argument that the youth of Islam will prevail, and all of which are annoyingly dispersed throughout the long, dragging essay. Despite this piece not really qualifying as a rant, it has rant-like tendencies. The rant quality is brought about by his conversational techniques which employ the second person, along with images that are pretty fresh in our minds and experiences (baseball teams, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", Sony, and so on). A lot of his examples that he uses to depict birth and population rates are distinctly As-Seen-On-TV. They're well chosen examples, all effective in getting his point across, and yet, regardless of their accessibility, they seem kind of dumbed-down and fleeting. By the time the essay closes, he has beat the point to death.

Some of the essays more outwardly intelligent moments are undermined by his borderline funny (or perhaps "punny") moments:

"And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what's easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a licence to become the Cloney Corporation?"

Well, it is without a doubt that Steyn believes in the unyielding power of consecutive rhetorical questions, so much so that he spends half of a large paragraph asking them to his reader. There's something within his questioning here, as they are the kinds of questions that he already has answers to, that seems enormously phony (ha, more like the Phony Corporation). In the last sentence of the above excerpt, he adopts the language of maternal childcare and offers the ambiguously vulgar image of a population feeding off of the figurative breast of "the good life," and then tosses it up with the name-brand pun of the century! The power of these questions as well as the weird cuteness inside of them ultimately feels very strange in his stylistic scheme. This is the sort of essay, written for publication, that doesn't feel very stylish. It's written to captivate an audience and to argue a point, but the former incentive proves more valuable, as is clear in the writing. With that, he is writing for a widespread, middle-class audience that isn't concerned with deep historical research and explanations supporting claims about the rise of Islam in Europe, but instead is concerned with the social and cultural implications of his argument, or the ideas that will resonate with the readers whose attention spans are, presumably, ever-shrinking. His diction is low and colloquial, and he uses contractions like "you'd" instead of "you would" to pick up the pace, make it sound more spoken.

Holmes' book review is devoid of any distinctive style, and his incentives don't pour out until he's well into his essay. Perhaps this is because book reviews are not conventional mediums in which reviewers express their political beliefs--though this kind of review might be more symptomatic of The American Prospect. When he takes the time to lay out his ideas independently of his direct discussion of the books, his tone stays pretty much the same. This style of writing feels loftier that Steyn's, perhaps written in a middle style. Something about it feels fair, balanced, diplomatic, and neutral (just as plenty of non-fiction/journalism strives to appear, despite ulterior motives), and yet he is expressing his ideas fairly straightforwardly:

"One might even argue that, in today's Europe, the Enlightenment ideal of universal citizenship is already dead. Europeans are becoming increasingly habituated to living in dual states, where "real" citizens live side by side with poorly assimilated immigrants who (in the minds of the majority) will never become full-fledged members of the community. This may not be a clash of civilizations destined to evolve into violent confrontation, but it is a profoundly disquieting moral crisis, which these two original and stimulating books invite us to ponder."

It's so odd reading this kind of polite essay writing after Steyn's punchy piece where he addressed me, the reader, as "you." Now I am referred to as "one," and there's no saying that I am even sure to argue that, in today's Europe, the Enlightenment ideal of universal citizen ship is already dead. I might argue it. It's especially peculiar because this is essay writing of college students; it's reasonable and argues a point without being the least bit presumptuous.

Henry James Takes his Sweet Time

For me, the greatest challenge of reading Henry James is keeping alert--staying with him--the whole time. He, of course, makes this very difficult with his exhausting suspensive sentences that meander a whole lot and eventually settle on what feels like a thankless detail. In the scheme of James, however, I can see how his sentence endings have deeper resonance in relation to the whole story. As we discussed in class a few weeks ago, James is representing a sort of hands-off stream of consciousness, portraying thoughts as they come and go from his characters' minds, typically at a leisurely pace. In the confines of this short story, he tends to go back and forth between longer sentences explaining thoughts or feelings, and every now and then he slips into a mode that feels like regular fiction prose that just lays out the plot for you (through dialogue, a comparatively short sentence, and so on). If it weren't for these seemingly "faster" moments in the writing, I don't think we could get through it in one sitting.

The suspension bears a blatant rhythmic quality that, for whatever odd reason, when read, reminds me of the way we recite the Pledge of Allegiance:

"They met her eyes for the first time, but in a moment, before touching them, she knew them as things of the theater, as very much too fine to have been, with any verisimilitude, things of the vicarage. They were too dreadfully good to be true, for her aunt had had no jewels to speak of, and these were cornets and girdles, diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Flagrant tinsel and glass, they looked strangely vulgar, but if, after the first queer shock of them, she found herself taking them up, it was for the very proof, never yet so distinct to her, of a far-off faded story." (85).

James takes the time to explain to us the precise moment in which Charlotte understands the jewelry's sentiment. This particular realization of jewels being of the theater and of a marriage, after all, fuels the whole story. The beginning and ending sentences are structured similarly, both with seemingly anti-climactic yet sentimental points waiting at the end of all the qualifications and crucial details.

His nearly-one-paragraph-long sentence also has many of the same symptoms:

"Charlotte was conscious of a mind divided and a vision vaguely troubled, at once more she took up two or three of the subjects of this revelation; a big bracelet in the form of a gilt serpent with many twists and beady eyes, a brazen belt studded with emeralds and rubies, a chain, of flamboyant architecture, to which, at the Theatre Royal, Little Peddlington, Hamlet's mother, had probably been careful to attach the portrait of the successor to Hamlet's father." (86).

It's remarkable that James thought it was to his advantage to keep these varied thoughts as a single sentence in this scene, and yet his ideas come across pretty clearly, despite the amount of time it takes for them to be fully realized. It's as if his sentences, loaded with both mundane details and big ideas, are often times meant to capture the entirety of a thought, starting at the psychological connections that the character makes, then heading to the physical sensations of the moment, and ending up with something relating to social rank or status. With that, James gives us the fullness of an experience by stretching it out over the length of a suspended sentence that is motivated to express something meaningful.

Persuasion!

Reading through the first section of the Communist Manifesto, I was reminded of the kind of writing we have always been taught is "good" writing. For instance, the way that each paragraph begins with a "new" idea that takes up the rest of the paragraph is a true mark of the organization that teachers want students to have when writing a persuasive essay, or something like it. What happens is, I think, the completion of one single thought before heading on to the next makes it read more like a text book, which devotes a certain amount of space to the entirety of a concept or event, and then moves on to what is chronologically next. Text books, often times, are historical, well-documented, and irrefutable. In having an manifesto feel as thorough and accurate as a text book, Marx makes it easier for readers to understand that his arguments are crucial, honest, and incontestable.

As far as persuasion is concerned, the language--in addition to the organization--is easily digested, though not colloquial or even the language of the bourgeoisie. It's actually written in a high, technical style. Robin mentioned two separate times in class that those writing in a high style are often untrustworthy, and perhaps manipulative. It's a curious issue, because as far as communism is concerned, there is always a severe imbalance/gaping black hole between dictators and the rest of society, so it's very telling that the philosopher who is writing on behalf of the proletariat isn't writing like the proletariat. Instead, it would seem he's writing for highly ranked intellectuals.

However, some of his diction, while accessible on the whole, has a universal appeal. He writes:

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

In this moment, Marx makes use of the ever-effective listing method. Most notably, in the pairings of "religious fervor, chivalrous enthusiasm, philistine sentimentalism," it's as if he's creating compound words out of these virtuous cliches. His topic sentence is mildly suspensive, and takes the time to break up the thought with a qualifying phrase ("wherever it has got the upper hand") that actually does use the language of the people. He also uses scientific, clinical diction that could perhaps be used to describe natural or technological disasters, i.e. "the icy water of egotistical calculation," "It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies," "substituted naked," and so forth. The final line is kind of a gut wrenching, with his piling on the adjectives, "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." It's moments like these in the manifesto when it's most clear how he gets across to his readers. They're perfectly apt, punchy words that accurately get at the notion of exploitation in their society.

Looking at the excerpt from David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," we can see how DFW expresses the futility of words and language, nowadays, in portraying a romantic connection. He doesn't quite lay out the courting process like Jane Austen would, but instead seems to say, "You've heard this before, haven't you? I'll spare you." He's saving us a lot of time on the matter, using images like, "with the very same twist on their faces" to perhaps tell (not show) us that they had some kind of familiar facial glow or contrived facade that we've seen before (maybe in the movies?) and don't need to see again. For DFW, a face with a "twist" is more readily recognized (or subjectively interpreted) by the reader. His final sentence, frustratingly, amounts the whole paragraph to a kind of slaughtering of regular language. It's incredibly perceptive to human experience because we've all had moments in which words sound weird because we've said or thought about them so much. It's like saying your name over and over again until it feels foreign, ugly, and uncomfortable. Again, he's getting at the futility of words, both in experiencing a familiar story, and in writing it down.

Grostesques

Anderson's peculiarly insightful third person narrator explains grotesques by means of a grotesque who dreams of other grotesques. His style is meandering and hypotactic, explaining things in a story-telling quality. I couldn't help but to think of O'Connor the entire time I read this, not necessarily because of the similarities, but because of how his explanation of grotesques seems to work well with how things play out in her highly interpretable short stories. Some of his own tactics are similar to O'Connor's--for instance, the deliberate naming of certain characters over others is typical of O'Connor (in "Paper Pills" the old man is named Doctor Reefy and the girl remains the girl). Of course, Anderson's narrative is told with all of the vital information in the beginning, so we know of everything that will happen, and the excitement is in the details. O'Connor's stories, contrarily, have climactic and often frightening endings. His narrator seems to pass mild judgment on his characters and their situations, but very vaguely, as in the case of: "The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story." He then goes on to supply us with a curious tale of twisted apples that, in their improbable sweetness, are certainly meant to be emblematic of Doctor Reefy himself (or at least his weird knuckles).

Anderson depicts his characters as vague silhouettes with big, pop-out features, like "a white beard and a huge nose and hands," or simply "with a white mustache." Facial hair seems to be of some unknown relevance, as it is one of the few physical attributes we're offered. He has deliberately given his character limited depth in the first paragraph, only to zoom in on more specific details. Perhaps this means to bring our attentions to the sentiments, the curious moments, and the profound details that create a grotesque character, rather than the mere plot of his life.