Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 35

A Multiplicity of Suggestions

Lytton Strachey makes an interesting point, here, about the tools needed to convey a sense of strangeness and remoteness in writing, but I think he might have overlooked something:

There is, of course, no doubt that [Thomas] Browne's vocabulary is extraordinarily classical. Why is this? The reason is not far to seek. In his most characteristic moments he was almost entirely occupied with thoughts and emotions which can, owing to their very nature, only be expressed in Latinistic language. The state of mind which he wished to produce in his readers was nearly always a complicated one: they were to be impressed and elevated by a multiplicity of suggestions and a sense of mystery and awe. "Let thy thoughts," he says himself, "be of things which have not entered into the hearts of beasts: think of things long past, and long to come: acquaint thyself with the choragium of the stars, and consider the vast expanse beyond them. Let intellectual tubes give thee a glance of things which visive organs reach not. Have a glimpse of incomprehensibles; and thoughts of things, which thoughts but tenderly touch." Browne had, in fact, as Dr. Johnson puts it, "uncommon sentiments"; and how was he to express them unless by a language of pomp, of allusion, and of elaborate rhythm? Not only is the Saxon form of speech devoid of splendour and suggestiveness; its simplicity is still further emphasised by a spondaic rhythm which seems to produce (by some mysterious rhythmic law) an atmosphere of ordinary life, where, though the pathetic may be present, there is no place for the complex or the remote. To understand how unsuitable such conditions would be for the highly subtle and rarefied art of Sir Thomas Browne, it is only necessary to compare one of his periods with a typical passage of Saxon prose.

"Then they brought a faggot, kindled with fire, and laid the same down at Doctor Ridley's feet. To whom Master Latimer spake in this manner: 'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.'"

Nothing could be better adapted to the meaning and sentiment of this passage than the limpid, even flow of its rhythm. But who could conceive of such a rhythm being ever applicable to the meaning and sentiment of these sentences from the Hydriotaphia?

"To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We, whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and, being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment."

Here the long, rolling, almost turgid clauses, with their enormous Latin substantives, seem to carry the reader forward through an immense succession of ages, until at last, with a sudden change of the rhythm, the whole of recorded time crumbles and vanishes before his eyes. The entire effect depends upon the employment of a rhythmical complexity and subtlety which is utterly alien to Saxon prose. It would be foolish to claim a superiority for either of the two styles; it would be still more foolish to suppose that the effects of one might be produced by means of the other.

-- From Books and Characters French & English, by Lytton Strachey. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1922.

But is it foolish? I think a similar effect can be achieved through metaphor, through imagery, through the unexpected juxtaposition of everyday things. Some of the passages I want to quote are more "latinate" than others, but they all rely on definite, ordinary details to suggest something beyond the ordinary:

Before getting into bed I drew my curtains wide and opened all the windows to the warm tide of the sea air that flowed softly in. Looking out into the garden I could see in the moonlight the roof of the shelter, in which for three years I had lived, gleaming with dew. That, as much as anything, brought back the old days to which I had now returned, and they seemed of one piece with the present, as if no gap of more than twenty years sundered them. The two flowed into one like globules of mercury uniting into a softly shining globe, of mysterious lights and reflections.

-- E. F. Benson, "Negotium Perambulans."

His brain pounded with hate for the sea. The blue sea! The devouring shapeless sea with its evil swell, its monstrous depth, its wintry breakage of wooden boats, its cruel rocks, its drawing of bodies in such cold and nerveless draught, its vertiginous flatness sparkling and deceiving, its roots of oil and the furred and shelled beasts that preyed slowly on its bed, all of its wrack and wreck and rotting cold embrace and the tides that day after day, age after age, crawled up the beaches and then left them, desiring all but never needing, breaking uselessly and ceaselessly at the earth and at man.

-- William Sansom, "The Cliff."

Leonora Chanel stepped from the limousine and strolled into the desert. Her white-haired figure in its cobra-skin coat wandered among the dunes. Sand-rays lifted around her, disturbed by the random movements of this sauntering phantasm of the burnt afternoon. Ignoring their open stings around her legs, she was gazing up at the aerial bestiary dissolving in the sky, and at the white skull a mile away over Lagoon West that had smeared itself across the sky.

-- J. G. Ballard, "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D."

It was a singularly sharp night, and clear as the heart of a diamond.  Clear nights have a trick of being keen.  In darkness you may be cold and not know it; when you see, you suffer.  This night was bright enough to bite like a serpent.  The moon was moving mysteriously along behind the giant pines crowning the South Mountain, striking a cold sparkle from the crusted snow, and bringing out against the black west the ghostly outlines of the Coast Range, beyond which lay the invisible Pacific.  The snow had piled itself, in the open spaces along the bottom of the gulch, into long ridges that seemed to heave, and into hills that appeared to toss and scatter spray.  The spray was sunlight, twice reflected: dashed once from the moon, once from the snow.

-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Night-Doings at 'Deadman's'".

Then he straightened himself up, and walked over to the fireplace, and stood there, looking at the burning logs with their frost-like ashes and their throbbing cores of flame. [...] The wind had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a monstrous peacock's tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes. He looked down, and saw the policeman going his rounds and flashing the long beam of his lantern on the doors of the silent houses. The crimson spot of a prowling hansom gleamed at the corner, and then vanished. A woman in a fluttering shawl was creeping slowly by the railings, staggering as she went. Now and then she stopped, and peered back. Once, she began to sing in a hoarse voice. The policeman strolled over and said something to her. She stumbled away, laughing. A bitter blast swept across the Square. The gas-lamps flickered, and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their black iron branches to and fro.

-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray.

The Smiler With the Knife

Jorge Luis Borges: "From Allegories to Novels." 

Nominalism, once the novelty of a few, today encompasses everyone; its victory is so vast and fundamental that its name is useless. No one declares himself a nominalist because no one is anything else. Let us try to understand, nevertheless, that for the men of the Middle Ages the fundamental thing was not men but humanity, not individuals but the species, not the species but the genus, not the genera but God. From such concepts... allegorical literature, as I understand it, derived. Allegory is a fable of abstractions, as the novel is a fable of individuals....
 

The passage from allegory to novel, from species to individual, from realism to nominalism, required several centuries, but I shall have the temerity to suggest an ideal date: the day in 1382 when Geoffrey Chaucer, who may not have believed himself to be a nominalist, set out to translate into English a line by Boccaccio -- "E con gli occulti Jerri i Tradimenti" (And Betrayal with hidden weapons) -- and repeated it as "The smyler with the knyf under the cloke."

-- From Other Inquisitions. Washington Square Press, New York, 1966.

At First, You Hear The Silence

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Cover designed by Tragelaphus.

Engage My Interest

Francine Prose:

Not long ago, a young writer told me a story about being taken to dinner by his successful, high-powered agent. The agent asked him what he wanted to write about, what subjects engaged his interest. To which the young writer replied that, to tell the truth, subject matter wasn't all that important to him. What he really cared about, what he wanted most of all was to write... really great sentences.

The agent sighed. His eyelids fluttered. After a moment he said, "Promise me that you will never, ever in your life say that to an American publisher."

-- From Reading Like A Writer. HarperCollins, 2006.

Running Out Of Time

Late in her life, almost overnight, my mother became a piano student. She made rapid progress with classical conservatory lessons, and just before she died, she had moved up to a third teacher and a new level of skill; but despite her achievements and steady resolve, she never felt confident in what she could play.

I think she felt this way because we do not celebrate practice in our society. We see concerts, but not the lifetimes of training that make the music seem effortless. We see Olympic events, but not the decades of work to create an athlete. We see books, but not the woodstoves that were fed for years and years and years with lousy attempts to find the words.

Yet even though we never celebrate practice, people have long accepted its necessity. But what happens when a culture hits a point where it might not survive long enough to make practice worthwhile? After 1945, we had to face the constant fear of nuclear war; nowadays, we have to face climate change, neoliberal austerity, political collapse, and the real possibility that our civilization might be killed off not by disaster, but by business as usual.

When a lifetime is no longer likely, why should young people commit themselves to decades of practice? How can we show them the value of craftsmanship, when they might not have the necessary years needed to develop their craft?

This question matters to me, because I would love to celebrate the arts of today; but more and more often, I find myself going back to enjoy the achievements of yesterday, because yesterday valued craftsmanship, and yesterday offered lifetimes for practice.

Mon esprit autant que mon regard récusait ce ciel impossible

My attempted translation of one passage from a story by Michel de Ghelderode:

The living were scarce, but the town existed as always: a mass very much like coal, with bumps and passageways, streaming and drifting without a beacon like a wreck in the ashen air. I found it insane that no one had fought against the invasive obscurity, that not one lantern had been lit, that not one pane of glass gave off any light, anywhere. Fortunately, the air was breathable and not cold, even though Autumn was on the way; it even carried the old warmth exhaled by the soil. My body had been set free, and I went without hesitation to find the cause of that oppression in my soul.

Emerging onto the esplanade that encircles the Church of Saint Nicholas, where a hundred lanes and dead-ends hurl themselves as if into a vat, I caught the secret of that prostration, of that deadly torpor into which the town had plunged, and which remained exactly like the one that I had borne: the sky appeared before me, as the sea appears at the top of a slope, unexpectedly; a bizarre sky, hollowed out, a prehistoric fantasy, formed by the accumulation of gaseous caverns. And the light: a cold and dripping light with a knife's edge, foaming from the cloudy sacks, a light with a venomous tint, a slow ejaculation.

It all seemed to me like the invention of some painter mad or possessed. The discovery of that catastrophic sky awoke my mood of oppression and, at the same time, my sense of an imminent threat that menaced the Earth and the species teeming on its crust. I could not resolve myself to see nothing more than a dusk at its critical moment, its orgasm of light. No; my spirit as well as my stare challenged this impossible sky, because it reflected in reverse the bowels, the abominable internal fluctuations, of the globe; and even more, if I dare say it, because this atmospheric phenomenon seemed to me like a monstrous mistake of nature. And I concealed my aching eyes.

The original text:

Les vivants, on n’en voyait guère; la ville, elle existait toujours, masse charbonneuse tout en aspérités et galeries, encore ruisselante et, sans un fanal, dérivant comme une épave dans l’atmosphère cendrée. Je trouvais insensé qu’on ne fît rien pour lutter contre l’obscurité envahissante, que pas une lanterne n’eût été allumée, que pas une vitre ne s’éclairât quelque part… Par bonheur, l’air était respirable et non glacé, bien que l’automne avançât; il charriait même de vieilles chaleurs expulsées du sol. J’étais physiquement délivré et je ne tardai pas à trouver la cause de mon oppression d’âme. Débouchant sur l’esplanade qui encercle l’église Saint-Nicolas, où cent couloirs et impasses viennent se jeter comme dans une cuve, je surpris le secret de cette mortelle torpeur, de cette prostration dans quoi restait plongée la ville, et en tout semblable à celle que j’avais subie: le ciel venait de m’apparaître inopinément, comme au sommet d’une rampe se découvre la mer; un ciel bizarre, en creux, d’une fantaisie préhistorique, et fait d’une accumulation de grottes gazeuses. Et la lumière, une froide et baveuse lumière à couper au couteau, bouillonnait de ces poches nuageuses; une lumière de teinte vénéneuse lentement éjaculée… Cela me parut l’invention d’un peintre fou ou possédé. La découverte de ce ciel catastrophique réveilla mon oppression en même temps que le sentiment de l’imminent malheur qui menaçait la Terre et l’espèce pullulant sur ses croûtes. Je ne pouvais me résoudre à y voir un crépuscule à son instant critique, un orgasme lumineux. Mon esprit autant que mon regard récusait ce ciel impossible, parce qu’il réverbérait par inversion les entrailles du globe et ses abominables flux, et encore, si j’ose écrire, parce que ce phénomène météorique m’apparaissait comme une monstrueuse erreur de la nature… Et je cachai mes yeux irrités.

-- From "Un crépuscule," by Michel de Ghelderode. Sortilèges, 1941.

Lawless Agency

Charles Lamb:

We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion -- of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd -- could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony? -- That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire -- that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed -- that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest -- or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring -- were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld -- has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood à priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolised by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he should come sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor. -- That the intercourse was opened at all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake -- but that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised.

-- From "Witches, and Other Night-Fears."
In The Essays of Elia. J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, 1906.

You Have to Do it Yourself

I first read this little book in April, 1986, and I still do whatever I can to follow its principles. It might be the single most useful book on writing fiction that I've been able to find.

The craft of writing serves the art of writing and sharpens it.

Craftsmanship is the use of tools and materials in order to make something in a seemly and economical fashion. For instance, it is not craftsmanship to decide to build a table and buy half the lumberyard and have, when the table is finished, approximately eighty or ninety oddly shaped pieces of wood lying around on the floor and hundreds of bent nails and screws and great piles of sawdust. Craftsmanship does indeed carry with it this element of economy of materials. And when it is appropriate to the object being constructed, it acts to enhance.

Craftsmanship is not an 'in-group' word right now. Little attention of a public sort is paid to a writer simply on the grounds of his mastery of materials. Of course that mastery starts with words. And I have been unable to detect on the part of our critics any great differentiation between somebody whose knowledge of words is obviously imprecise and to whom words are frozen like stones to the hand regardless of their shape, color, and so on, and someone who has an obvious richness of knowledge of words -- the playfulness within the word. Craftsmanship is also not particularly admired today for another reason. It is supposed to betoken an absence of creativity to a certain extent. A well-constructed piece of fiction is assumed, if it seems very neat and tight, to have lost something, to have been diminished by the writer, to have been placed on a bed of Procrustes in order to come out even with its own material, and this in itself is considered old-fashioned and probably hostile to the creative spirit.

Furthermore, our age does not care very much about craftsmanship. Most of us don't have to make very many things with our hands anymore. This is not a criticism of the way in which we live in twentieth century America, but people are conditioned by what they do with their bodies. Even though many people have returned to the land and to 'natural' things, the majority of us no longer practice craftsmanship in our lives. Our food is largely prefabricated. Our clothing is almost wholly prefabricated. Our shelter is prefabricated. Our entertainment is almost all prefabricated. Most of our experience in sport is a vicarious and spectator experience. The permissive nature of our sexual morality requires very much less proficiency on our part in the whole broad spectrum of the sexual experience than in ages when things were a little tougher to get away with than they are now, and we have a crowd of helpers to raise our children.... In any event, almost everything has been removed one step away.

When it comes to craft and writing, however, you have to do it yourself. If you blow in sweet and it comes out sour, the best editor in the world cannot help you to anything more than either silence or an inoffensive mumble. So while it may not be possible to teach people much about writing, it is possible for some people to learn something about how to write.

 
-- William Sloane, The Craft of Writing.
W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1979.

Unimpaired and Undiminished

 F. L. Lucas:

It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us, and to be forgotten, when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its ‘stars’.
 

Part of our heritage -- you are now coming into it -- is the English tongue. You may not be among the few in whose hands it becomes an Excalibur; but you can do your part to pass it on, clean, unrusted, undefiled.

-- From
Style , by F. L. Lucas.
Cassell, London, 1955.
Harriman House Ltd, 2012.

Trapped in the Reboot Phase

We seem to be trapped in a "reboot" phase of our culture.

Although I can understand that people enjoy this repetition, it troubles me by suggesting a reluctance to confront the world on personal terms, a refusal to dig for metaphors, imagery, stories, that present our own thoughts, our own impressions. We value replicas more than we value individual perspectives, and to me, this feels like defeat.