Saturday, August 02, 2003
FAIR WARNING: This is going to be one of those long, talky updates about old books. If that type of thing bores you to tears, there will be other stuff later in the weekend.
THE CASE FOR THE ARTIST: "By an 'artist' I mean Shakespeare and Me and Bach and Myself and Velasquez and Phidias, and even You if you have ever written four lines on the sunset in somebody's album, or modelled a Noah's Ark for your little boy in plasticine. Perhaps we have not quite reached the heights where Shakespeare stands, but we are on his track. Shakespeare can be representative of all of us, or Velasquez if you prefer him. One of them shall be President of our United Artists' Federation. Let us, then, consider what place in the scheme of things our federation can claim." This is the start of one of those great hidden gems in the Project Gutenberg collection of out-of-copyright (or freely released) texts, from a guy you've probably heard of (A.A. Milne) in a book you probably haven't heard of (If I May). It's not setup-punchline type of writing (God curse the day that all humorists start writing like stand-up comedians), but a thoughtful kind of humor; also, in the lead-off piece I quoted above, Milne does make a case for the arts, a uniquely human endeavor. It's definitely worth a look, and since these are all magazine essays a few pages long each, you can pick through them at your leisure. Anyway, it's free, so all you're paying with is your time.
AND SPEAKING OF READING: If you haven't been completely ignoring my sidebar stats lately, you might've noticed that I've been reading a book called Tristram Shandy for an godawful amount of time. I still haven't finished (the curse of not being a Constant Reader, and the curse of choosing another extra-long one), but I'm finally within shouting distance of the end, so it's good enough time for a status report. The short version: HOLY SCHLAMOLEY.
And now, for those of you who are thick enough to ask for the long version: Like Don Quixote, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy was written at the dawn of noveldom, so the rules about what could or couldn't--or rather SHOULD or SHOULDN'T--be done in long-form fiction hadn't been hardened yet. Lawrence Sterne, a vicar who wasn't above an occasional ribald joke or two, decided to have a bit of fun with the form, just like Tarantino decided to toy with movie storytelling conventions in the 1990s. Although Sterne didn't have people dropping F-bombs of language and unleashing bloodbaths of violence on the world, he did share the idea with Quentin that a writer didn't have to tell a story in a straight line. Therefore, you get a book which isn't afraid to double back several decades at the drop of its three-cornered hat. He jumps the tracks frequently to tip in things that may or may not be related to the main stream of the story, which is nominally about the title character, his family (landed middle class, unless I missed something important), and the people that surrounded them. At one point, a sentence is cut off for a digression and not picked back up until the next volume. While it's not stream-of-consciousness by any means, you could say all this jumping and shuffling was an attempt to reflect the way the mind tends to work (a major influence was Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, so this might be pretty close to truth).
Sterne was obviously in love with the process of writing and the mechanics of the novel, and toys with the format in other ways. At one point, he writes a glowing, flowery old-school dedication (in the middle of one of the volumes, mind you), then turns around and offers to sell it to the highest bidder in phraseology best suited to used-car dealers. After thinking about the eventual death of a character, a page all in black pops up. He writes chapters, writes about his plans to write about chapters, and writes about why he never wrote some of them. Other "chapters" are nothing more than blank pages with headings. He talks directly to the reader, and occasionally puts words in their (our?) mouths. Then there's the ten "missing" pages that were "torn out" for delicacy's sake; in the original printing it was actually nine, so the odd and even numbered pages were on the "wrong" side for the rest of that volume. People have called this book an ancestor of the postmodern approach; another way of putting it is that metahumor runs amok throughout.
Oh yes, that phrase "nominally about"...I could really get myself into trouble if I told you the story was about anything in particular, especially about the title character. As odd as it might sound, Tristram Shandy, the guy whose name is in the title, is so minor a character in his own story that he hardly appears in it at all, except for narrating the whole thing. He doesn't even manage to get born until the fourth volume.
In spite of all the shenanigans, we do still get some vivid human types: Walter Shandy, Tristram's dad, who could best be termed as a terminal OVERthinker with a "whim of iron"; Uncle Toby, the original man who wouldn't hurt a fly, whose mania over military tactics led him to tear up his yard to build a scale model of a battle; Parson Yorick, a jester like his Hamlet namesake, and who found no end of trouble as a result; and various other servants and family members who dash in and out of the story. Since this is a book that refuses to attack anything head on, we pick up the details as we would our own relatives, through anecdotes, sideways glances at incidents, and the like. Even at a distance of 250 years, we're given many instantly recognizeable moments of human nature; the bedroom "debate" between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy about whether it's time to put Tristram in pants, Yorick's misadventure with a piping hot chestnut and an open button fly, and Uncle Toby's courtship of Widow Wadman are among the highlights.
To boil it down, this can be mega-dense in places, the actual layout (and this time I'm talking about things like quotation marks and paragraph breaks) might take some getting used to, and if you're the type of person who wonders when somebody's going to get to the point already, you'll have no end of frustration here; like the man says, remove the digressions, and you might as well remove the whole book. In other words, by no means a summer beach book; more like a summer project. However, there's some gorgeous language to fill your head with, and an overall unique reading experience. Oh yeah, and a lot of 18th-century sex humor, too (clue: when Sterne says "nose," that's not always what he means).
If you go for it, I recommend the Penguin Classics version; it has the most thorough footnotes (100+ pages) to help you through the more obscure spots and point out a few "appropriations" (not to mention some of the multilingual dirty jokes). There's also a great introductory essay.
THE CASE FOR THE ARTIST: "By an 'artist' I mean Shakespeare and Me and Bach and Myself and Velasquez and Phidias, and even You if you have ever written four lines on the sunset in somebody's album, or modelled a Noah's Ark for your little boy in plasticine. Perhaps we have not quite reached the heights where Shakespeare stands, but we are on his track. Shakespeare can be representative of all of us, or Velasquez if you prefer him. One of them shall be President of our United Artists' Federation. Let us, then, consider what place in the scheme of things our federation can claim." This is the start of one of those great hidden gems in the Project Gutenberg collection of out-of-copyright (or freely released) texts, from a guy you've probably heard of (A.A. Milne) in a book you probably haven't heard of (If I May). It's not setup-punchline type of writing (God curse the day that all humorists start writing like stand-up comedians), but a thoughtful kind of humor; also, in the lead-off piece I quoted above, Milne does make a case for the arts, a uniquely human endeavor. It's definitely worth a look, and since these are all magazine essays a few pages long each, you can pick through them at your leisure. Anyway, it's free, so all you're paying with is your time.
AND SPEAKING OF READING: If you haven't been completely ignoring my sidebar stats lately, you might've noticed that I've been reading a book called Tristram Shandy for an godawful amount of time. I still haven't finished (the curse of not being a Constant Reader, and the curse of choosing another extra-long one), but I'm finally within shouting distance of the end, so it's good enough time for a status report. The short version: HOLY SCHLAMOLEY.
And now, for those of you who are thick enough to ask for the long version: Like Don Quixote, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy was written at the dawn of noveldom, so the rules about what could or couldn't--or rather SHOULD or SHOULDN'T--be done in long-form fiction hadn't been hardened yet. Lawrence Sterne, a vicar who wasn't above an occasional ribald joke or two, decided to have a bit of fun with the form, just like Tarantino decided to toy with movie storytelling conventions in the 1990s. Although Sterne didn't have people dropping F-bombs of language and unleashing bloodbaths of violence on the world, he did share the idea with Quentin that a writer didn't have to tell a story in a straight line. Therefore, you get a book which isn't afraid to double back several decades at the drop of its three-cornered hat. He jumps the tracks frequently to tip in things that may or may not be related to the main stream of the story, which is nominally about the title character, his family (landed middle class, unless I missed something important), and the people that surrounded them. At one point, a sentence is cut off for a digression and not picked back up until the next volume. While it's not stream-of-consciousness by any means, you could say all this jumping and shuffling was an attempt to reflect the way the mind tends to work (a major influence was Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, so this might be pretty close to truth).
Sterne was obviously in love with the process of writing and the mechanics of the novel, and toys with the format in other ways. At one point, he writes a glowing, flowery old-school dedication (in the middle of one of the volumes, mind you), then turns around and offers to sell it to the highest bidder in phraseology best suited to used-car dealers. After thinking about the eventual death of a character, a page all in black pops up. He writes chapters, writes about his plans to write about chapters, and writes about why he never wrote some of them. Other "chapters" are nothing more than blank pages with headings. He talks directly to the reader, and occasionally puts words in their (our?) mouths. Then there's the ten "missing" pages that were "torn out" for delicacy's sake; in the original printing it was actually nine, so the odd and even numbered pages were on the "wrong" side for the rest of that volume. People have called this book an ancestor of the postmodern approach; another way of putting it is that metahumor runs amok throughout.
Oh yes, that phrase "nominally about"...I could really get myself into trouble if I told you the story was about anything in particular, especially about the title character. As odd as it might sound, Tristram Shandy, the guy whose name is in the title, is so minor a character in his own story that he hardly appears in it at all, except for narrating the whole thing. He doesn't even manage to get born until the fourth volume.
In spite of all the shenanigans, we do still get some vivid human types: Walter Shandy, Tristram's dad, who could best be termed as a terminal OVERthinker with a "whim of iron"; Uncle Toby, the original man who wouldn't hurt a fly, whose mania over military tactics led him to tear up his yard to build a scale model of a battle; Parson Yorick, a jester like his Hamlet namesake, and who found no end of trouble as a result; and various other servants and family members who dash in and out of the story. Since this is a book that refuses to attack anything head on, we pick up the details as we would our own relatives, through anecdotes, sideways glances at incidents, and the like. Even at a distance of 250 years, we're given many instantly recognizeable moments of human nature; the bedroom "debate" between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy about whether it's time to put Tristram in pants, Yorick's misadventure with a piping hot chestnut and an open button fly, and Uncle Toby's courtship of Widow Wadman are among the highlights.
To boil it down, this can be mega-dense in places, the actual layout (and this time I'm talking about things like quotation marks and paragraph breaks) might take some getting used to, and if you're the type of person who wonders when somebody's going to get to the point already, you'll have no end of frustration here; like the man says, remove the digressions, and you might as well remove the whole book. In other words, by no means a summer beach book; more like a summer project. However, there's some gorgeous language to fill your head with, and an overall unique reading experience. Oh yeah, and a lot of 18th-century sex humor, too (clue: when Sterne says "nose," that's not always what he means).
If you go for it, I recommend the Penguin Classics version; it has the most thorough footnotes (100+ pages) to help you through the more obscure spots and point out a few "appropriations" (not to mention some of the multilingual dirty jokes). There's also a great introductory essay.
|| Eric 1:08 AM#
