"The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Once upon a time there was a story called The Rocking Horse Winner. In it was a boy, who was sweet and earnest and gifted, and his mother, who was beautiful and did not love her children. It is stated that “she married for love and love turned to dust.” D.H. Lawrence tells us this. He tells us the house whispered for more money. He tells us that the boy and his uncle and the gardener win at the horse races, which the boy predicts.

Even though this story holds incredible potential for psychological analysis (possibly including madness and hallucination, gambling addiction, greed, psychic insight and premonition, loneliness, post-partum depression, the struggle between the worlds of adult and child), these are all viewed and conveyed through an observing, not analyzing, lens. We are told that the house whispers, not that someone thinks or imagines that it does. We are told and see that Paul has some sort of gift, and we, along with Bassett and Uncle Oscar, accept this with minimal questioning. We are told that the mother, “when her children were present…always felt the centre of her heart go hard”, and although we are told that this troubled her and was because she felt that they were thrust upon her.

Although the narrator knows this, and is clearly inside his character’s minds, he does not make the connections for us to perhaps explain the cause of these feelings or the workings of these minds. He gives us all the clues we need to come to many different conclusions about backstory, motive, and meaning, but these conclusions would change upon repeated reading. Lawrence juxtaposes transparency with “secrets within secrets”. We know that Paul has sought and found luck through riding his rocking-horse. Yet the mother, who seemed destined to be the central character in the opening paragraphs, remains unnamed till the second to last sentence. This simultaneous closeness and distance helps create the story’s chilling atmosphere. You are still scared if someone unknown stands in your room or close behind you, even if you know that they are there, even if you can see exactly what they are doing. This is the same feeling. Plainly told that the house whispers and moans, we want to know WHY! and HOW! and REALLY?

This paratactic, only VERY occasionally hypotactic style, may help the story to be seen through Paul's eyes, as a child who understands more than he should, which is true for many children but even more for him. And yet he remains a child and what is told to him is understood as truth and fact, less cause and effect and more simple occurrences, no matter how strange.

Orwell

Orwell writes aggressively and confrontationally in "Politics and the English Language". He stresses the importance of clarity and attacks vagueness and abstractness as bullshit. He names the “swindles and perversions” (707) of modern writing. Through clear examples and a list of grievances and demands, he successfully convinced me of the sloppiness and laziness of this kind of uncareful writing.

Well, I don’t want to be a sloppy and imprecise writer. Anyone taking a class about close reading would probably make every effort to consciously form their language and meaning, or at least appear to do so. The very appeal of the class is in understanding the grammatical and stylistic scaffolding that structures prose. So Orwell puts us on the defensive, and even though we may agree with him, be fully persuaded by him, he has forced us to be hyper-aware of bullshit writing, and we seek it out in the very text we are reading, trying to be even more aware and knowledgeable than he is.

But Orwell knew we would do this. He criticizes the use of “dead metaphors”, and so we notice every time he uses any metaphor. He deliberately creates new ones that force us to question and visualize the comparison. Disguised aims are “cuttlefish squirting out ink” (710). When he writes that Latin words “fall… like soft snow” (710), he justifies it by explaining that they blur outlines and cover up details.

Near the end of the essay he throws in some “strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else” (708), such as “swallow such absurdities”, “on the other hand”, “above all”, “concrete object”. Yet once again he parries, challenging us to look back through his essay to find the very examples of which he writes, and admitting that “I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against” (711). To use a dead metaphor, Orwell has covered his ass and all the bases, which allows for occasional sloppiness since it is acknowledged and self-aware, and we are left noticing every unconscious word we speak, embarrassed to be pointed out as swindlers and perverts.

Grace

Sentence Styles

Pattern 2: “His collar was unfastened and his necktie undone.” (p 255) (‘was’ is left out of the 2^ndclause.) This is this pattern only a second comma is omitted.

Pattern 14: “Two nights after, his friends came to see him.” (p 260) Even though the preposition does not begin the introductory phrase, I believe this is still an example of pattern 14, since it could have read “His friends came to see him two nights after/after two nights,” but Joyce stresses the time which has passes after the event.

Pattern 16: “The scheme might do good and, at least, it could do no harm.” (p 261)

Pattern 9: “Mr. M’Coy had tried unsuccessfully to find a place in the bench with the others, and, when the party had settled down in the form of a quincunx he had tried unsuccessfully to make comic remarks.”(p 272)

“More than he resented the fact that he had been victimized, he resented such low playing of the game.” (263)

“Father Purdon knelt down, turned towards the red speck of light and, covering his face with his hands, prayed. After an interval, he uncovered his face and rose. The congregation rose also and settled again on its benches. Mr. Kernan restored his hat to its original position on his knee and presented an attentive face to the preacher. The preacher turned back each wide sleeve of his surplice with an elaborate gesture and slowly surveyed the array of faces.” (273)

Not only is this passage heavy on the verb style, but it showcases some other common traits throughout this story. The subject is usually in the immediate beginning in a simple subject-verb formation, “Father Purdon knelt,” “The congregation rose,” “Mr. Kernan restored”. The exceptions are the prepositional introductions, such as “After an interval”. Joyce mixes simple monosyllable words with colloquialisms and ornate vocabulary words of those striving for a higher class. The use of the verb style sets up a distant narration, a clear record of events, but lacking in emotion or explanation- that is left up to the reader as a viewer. One of the very few times the narration reaches inside a character’s mind is when Mr. Powers is playing with the children and is “surprised at their manner and at their accents, and his brow grew thoughtful” (258). Even here, as soon as we are let in to know the he actually feels surprised, we are shut out again and only shown that he is thoughtful. “At their manner and at their accents” is another example of Pattern #9. This repetition breaks up the forward-driven rhythm of the verb style.

Lolita

Our unpaid governess and housekeeper was my mother’s eldest sister Sybil, who had been married and neglected by a cousin of my father’s, who she had been in love with, and he had had taken advantage of the fact one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared, so she tried to make me a better widower than he had been, giving me very rigid rules, but despite them I was extremely fond of her, with her pink-rimmed azure eyes and waxen complexion and poetry and poetic superstitions, which turned out to be true when she predicted that she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, which is when she indeed did die.