Irony

Whitman, as an American, has a point of view of war. In his time period there was a lot of conflicts going on and Whitman was, as the rest of the Americans, involved in it. His works have this effect reflected.

There is this part from poem 18 that I really liked:

“ Vivas to those who have fail’d!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements! and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes, equal to the greatest heroes known. ”

First, I notice that the four ending lines start with “And”, as I said in my previous blog, this makes an emphasis to what he is saying. But as if the repetition wasn’t enough, Whitman adds an exclamation mark at the end of the four starting lines. It is a strong verse, a lot of feeling. He is making a celebration to war, almost as if critizing it. Celebrating the deaths of so many, like the politicians and generals do. The last line I love. “numberless unknown heroes, equal to the greatest heroes known.” He uses two well chosen adjectives, numberless and unknown, and then three adjectives that are quite the opposite, equal (as an specific number) greatest and known. The line is sad. The entire verse is sad. But he celebrates it, ironically.

I Failed

Walt Whitman, I researched, is American, and “the father of free verse”. His style is unique, bla, bla, bla. I read indeed the poems from his book Leaves of Grass (by the way, grass doesn’t have leaves). I wanted to get the style all by myself, without the help from Mr. Tangen. Usually I miss all the stylistic things and the real meaning behind the word choice, or sentence structure, I don’t catch the greatness of the author, writer, poet, artists, painter, etc. I just miss it, no matter how hard I read it, or how focused I am. But the times I do get it, it feels good. In Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert, I was getting the hang of it, I had started to feel Flaubert and his sentences and description, and just when I feel I pro, I have to read somebody else. But that’s good. I have to practice comparing styles (I guess). So I compared Whitman with Flaubert.

Whitman writes in first person, he is describing what he sees, what he feels, “Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.” (line 98). Flaubert writes in third person, and he describes the third person’s feeling, actions, emotions, “She found it hard, however, to think of the latter as a person, for was it not a bird, a flame, and sometimes only a breath?”

Flaubert seldom repeats a word, he is even famous because of that. Whitman, on the other hand, uses repetition as a style, he starts a series of lines in his verses with the same first, second and third word, for example,
“It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men;
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps;” (lines 104-107)

I also noted that he compares everything with nature, plants specially. He is also very, not the pejorative self centered, but the selfcenterness that is good. I accept it, I feel I failed to get Whitman, I need the class discussions.

And Again

We learned that the parrot is of great importance to Felicite. Flaubert gives importance to Loulou the way he writes about him. Almost half of Simple Soul is about the parrot, even the last sentence of the story is about the parrot. When Felicite is getting sick, deaf, blind and weak, Flaubert writes, “Only one noise penetrated her ears; the parrot’s voice.” The second part of the sentence is independent, separated by the semi colon, clearly giving much more emphasis to the parrot himself, as if the reader is to read it alone, pausing before. Noise rhymes with voice, a pretty sentence, it's nicely put together, because of its importance, not to mention that it is the last sentence of a paragraph.

Loulou the parrot’s death, is painful for Felicite, Flaubert makes the significance, giving two sentences, one after the other, a single paragraph each,

“She wept so sorely that her mistress said: ‘Why don’t you have him stuffed?’

She asked the advice of the chemist, who had always been kind to the bird.”

If, the two sentences are together and joined to the previous paragraph, it would not be as meaningful. For the second sentence, a person (the chemist) would be expected to “always been kind to” Felicite, and not the bird, but because the bird is more important than Felicite (going back to the meaningless life that she had) he has “always been kind to the bird”, and not Felicite. In the first sentence, it is surprising that the mistress cared about Felicite, through out the story, she hasn’t given a damn about her, now she does, because of the bird, again.

I like Flaubert, I’m getting every time better at understanding his style, I’m probably not an expert; But I’m not lost, which is good.

(Noticed my style?)

Tasty Writing

Free indirect style is the way you make a character as yourself and writing about it while narrating the story. Flaubert does that. There is a bit of irony and hyperbole in the story, obviously adding more to the tastiness of it. I get to see Felicite’s soul and thoughts without noticing that it is her feelings and thoughts that are being described. For example, “She hung her head. He then asked her whether she had ever thought of marrying. She replied, smilingly, that it was wrong for him to make fun of her.” (Simple Soul) So far there has been almost no quotation for Felicite, not when she is talking or thinking something. Felicite “hung her head” is describing a feeling, an action hat comes with a feeling without saying the specific emotion. Or for example, “He always came at dinner-time and brought an ugly poodle with him, whose paws soiled their furniture.” The adjective “ugly” for the dog is only because he made the furniture dirty, and Felicite doesn’t like that. This sentence could be written like this, “He always came a dinner-time and brought the ugly poodle that Felicite hated because he soiled their furniture.” But there is no need for the “Felicite hated because”, it is induced with the negative adjective and the second part of the sentence.

There is this paragraph which stood out to me, goes like this:

“When Virginia’s turn came, Felicite leaned forward to watch her, and through that imagination which springs from true affection, she at once became the child, whose face and dress became hers, whose heart beat in her bosom, and when Virginia opened her mouth and closed her lids, she did likewise and came very near fainting.”

It’s a sentence with 7 commas. Makes it as a race, like the heart beat, and the excitement mixed with anxiety. If read out loud it is tiring, as if “near fainting”. The description is perfect, the emotion, one can perfectly picture the little Felicite at the edge of the bench, and yet Flaubert doesn’t talk about the thoughts or feelings much, he simply narrates what is happening, as if it were himself.

My Attempt

I have often found myself wondering around on off topic thoughts while reading a book, and before I am aware of it I am already about two pages ahead and I have no idea what I have read. Un willingly I have to back, and while I do so I realize that absolutely every sentence in the book is key, every sentence has a purpose and if I skip it I lose the essence that the author wanted to cause on me. It is interesting, every sentence of books of 150 pages to 500 pages or more, has, obviously, a reason why they were placed there. What that agnorisis of mine has to do with Gary Lutz, The Sentence Is A Lonely Place is that he made me see another reason for not only the sentence but the words that every writer chooses for their sentences.

I never found myself on wondering off thoughts while reading this essay in the first place. I really, thoroughly enjoyed, indeed, every sentence of it. My respects to Lutz. This essay is by far, the most pleasant to read. As I read, he made me change the way I was reading. From the opening sentence the words caught my unconditional attention. All the way till the end I asked to myself repeatedly what was it that made this writing so good, why was I enjoying this much more than the Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow? I guess that the content of what was being written could be applied, or is forced to be applied while one is reading.

“I came to language only late and only peculiarly.” In this nine-word opening sentence there are about six things that I could talk about. I read it the first time and I was driven to highlight it and reread it again four times. He talks about language as if it were a person, or a place. He does this all along the essay, “-this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and palpable.” He uses the word only twice, and for two very different adjectives: he uses late first, when I should, or could be better placed last, and peculiarly last. To describe how he came into language and maybe to explain why he used late first and not last curiously (this is my attempt to analyze his words choices). Why only late? Why only peculiarly? Why not late and peculiarly? The word only definitely adds style to the sentence, without it, it would be an ordinary sentence.

The Sentence Is A Lonely Place is an exemplary analytic essay. For next assigned essay I will use this as a rubric. Lutz’s structure goes like this:

The introduction is an anecdote of his early life, obviously using hyperbole and figurative language, “…the release of words were the least significant of the mouth’s activities-…” I don’t know how true is the description of how language came into his life but it is interesting.

Lutz then talks about language itself, the feeling of it, his point of view of words and how much they mean to him, the way other authors use it and the way he himself uses them. He says, “…the aim of the literary artist, I believe, is to initiate the process by which the words in a sentence no longer remain strangers to each other but begin to acknowledge one another’s existence…” He talks about his relationship with words and words relationship with another words as if he were talking about a couple that were dating! Even though he is talking about a potentially boring topic he manages to make it as thrilling as an action movie.

The body of the essay is his close reading on sentences from authors like, Christine Shutt, Gordon Lish, Diane Williams, Sam Lipsyte, among others. He does very deep analysis. I knew that the letters in the words that made up a sentence could have an effect on its meaning. But I was not aware that the sound and shape and even symbolic meaning of the letters had such an impact. Lutz’s analysis could be applied to his writing, “A book was, for me, an acquisitive thing, absorbing, accepting, taking invitation to practice hygiene over it- ….” Lutz uses the vowel a to start the three adjectives that he chose to describe what a book was for him. I believe that is called alliteration, but I’m not so good at analyzing so profoundly. Lutz does this from pages 6 to 12 of the 13-page-essay. And again, I am going to use it as a guide for my own close reading.

And finally he concludes with a sentence that wraps almost the whole essay, “Psychiatrists use the term weak central coherence to pinpoint the difficulty of certain autistic persons to get the big central picture, to see the forest instead of the trees.” He is calling himself a person that indeed, has a weak central coherence, because he sees the words, (even the letters) instead of the story.

"What Is It About?"

During my weekend I was asked about the book that I was reading, and this was my dialogue:

Silvia (a friend of mine) looked at my book and asked, “What are you reading?”
I stopped reading and I told her, “It is an assignment for my english class, The Crying Of Lot 49”
She was as confused as before, so she asked me, “What is it about?”
I looked at the book, and I realized that is was 15 pages away from finishing it and I still didn’t really know what was it about… I was blank. I said, “I’m not sure, it is a bunch of inside jokes making fun of things”
Silvia looked puzzled and kept on asking me, “But… what is the author making fun of?” And I was blank again! I felt so stupid, I had been reading a book for about two weeks and I really didn’t know what it was about. So I told her, “Things like, the society, the commercialists, the ordinary things that are daily but stupid.” Still not clear she asked me, “But… why is it called The Crying of Lot 47? What does that mean?” That, I actually had no clue, “I don’t have a clue” I think she surrendered asking me about the book, so she simply kept on reading her magazine about fashion.

I kept on thinking, The Crying Of Lot 49 is just a book that describes, it doesn’t explain anything. There is no way to answer what the book is about. The novel, if it can really be called a novel, is about nothing! I think that the story of Oedipa and the death of Pierce is just an excuse to write about nonsense, just make fun of life. The none significance of life.

“But like the thought that someday she would have to die, Oedipa had been steadfastly refusing to look at that possibility directly, or in any but the most accidental of lights. “No,” she said, “that’s ridiculous.’” (pg.138) This quote, kind of says it all. If she was going to die someday then, why bother to care about ANYTHING that she had been bothering about?!

In a hypothetical case that Silvia asked me again, “What is the book about?” I would answer, “Nothing”

So Yeah... Whatever

I was able to connect the book with what has been out Topic all week: Signifying Nothing.

It is very weird the themes that this book has, if it is read ad a real novel, taking it seriously it will never make any sense, and even if it is read as metaphorically and understanding the message that Pynchon is trying to get trough his lines, it still doesn’t make any sense. Pynchon said that for his books, “Stories much more focused on a single theme usually; novels full of many themes.” (link)
That is exactly what this story is:

The cheating on Mucho with Metzger, the play Courier’s Tragedy, The Trystero, the horns, the sign that looks a little like a key, the Thurns and Taxis, Hilarious (a shrink gone mad), LSD, Pierce’s death, Oedipa’s confusion, The Paranoids, “… etc.” (pg.27)

But, it all actually means nothing. It is fictional, of curse, it is not historical, it is not scientific, it is simply, nothing.

And like in Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5,
“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Pynchon says,
“the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever theirs lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned.” (pg. 104)

So, it doesn’t matter if I what I write about is write or wrong, or if Oedipa finally deciphers the million mysteries, because as Macbeth did, Oedipa and I are going to die.