Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer personifies the hell out of things. The pines whisper, white folks’ mouths talk instead of people talking, like Humbert Humbert’s fingers, eyes leave sockets, fear goes and closes a mind, a street is a bastard, not a street, and it breathes air and has skin and bone. It made me wonder where all the people were.

Even when they were there, they weren’t. In the first sentence of “Becky”, a distinction is made between the skin color of the mother and of the sons, which forces the reader to wonder how that came about, voiced by the repeated question of “Who gave it to her?” Becky is barely a human. She is only defined physically. We know she has white skin, has the stomach of a pregnant woman and sunken, scraggly features. But then once she goes to the cabin, where “No one ever saw her”, we are left with nothing of her. Since she has only been given to us physically, she ceases to exist as a human once that is taken away and she is unseen.

At the end of the excerpt, the de-personification is completed when we hear of “the Becky cabin”. Even her name is divorced from personhood and assigned to a building. Her death/life is disconnected from the actual breath and beating heart and soul of a person. Her existence hinges on smoke and bricks. Every thing has been given life and authority and every person has been robbed of it.

The type of metaphors used also take the place of some straightforward human element. The metaphors consist of the action of objects- a girl’s words are falling pink petals. We are not told the emotion or content that they hold, but instead what they would do if they were flowers, as we are told they in fact are. Paul, in this story, is not described as “floating”, “being on cloud 9”, “superior” even, or simply “happy”, any other word that would describe his state. Instead, we read that, “Above them, worlds of shadow-planes and solids, silently moving. As if on one of these, Paul looks down on Bona.” (Which I also found interesting due to the first sentence’s verblessness and the second’s use of the present tense, which holds up throughout the excerpt.) So Paul is moving silently on a plane or solid, whatever that means. Looking down at the girl. The narration of this story is omniscient, but from the viewpoint of an alien, or a material object that is telling a story of humans.

I wondered about Toomer’s use of ellipses. Were they to signify someone speaking? The pauses they could create seem pointed, since they were usually followed by quick exclamation or repeated phrase such as “they too joined hands to cast her out. . . The pines whispered to Jesus. .” and “Wedges rust in soggy wood. . . Split it! In two! Again! Shred it! . . the sun”. These short, scattered sentences clearly add to the ‘impressionism’- they are impressionistic, quick glances at the world. But is that the only reason and application? Is impressionism like pointillism, consisting of the sum of its tiny, disparate parts? Could a different approach to structure still be impressionistic, or are these short yet forthcoming phrases, definitely not furtive or reticent, the only way to allow room to turn around?

The Uncanny

Freud at first does not identify himself as the psychoanalyst, but uses the character of one to present his views of aesthetics. He makes them seem burdensome, unimportant nuisances to psychoanalysts who have “little to do” with something “subdued” and “remote”.

He provides his qualifications- or lack of them- by explaining his relationship with the word and phenomenon ‘uncanny’. He gives a background history of the previous study of this by Jentsch. He then lists two courses of action- like a thesis, a scientific method. Clearly thorough and scientific in his methods, Freud still reads rather easily and entertainingly. He rations his sentences, breaking them up to keep the reader from getting bogged down in them. Sentences that could have been clauses in longer, joined sentences, instead are separate ones that begin with “Or”, “And”, “Still”, or “So”. This also makes it easier to connect to the writer, because it seems like he is thinking of things as he goes along. Another instance of this is when he poses a problem that he does not immediately admit to having the answer to, as when he says “Let us bear this discovery in mind, though we cannot yet rightly understand it…If we go on to examine individual instances of uncanniness, these hints will become intelligible to us.” He also makes his essay accessible by telling us stories, though to show us really what he means by uncanny he could have taken a little more care with the storytelling, in order to give us that feeling.

One thing I like about Freud is that you can’t say he doesn’t define his terms. Even when going into extensive German Heimlichs and Unheimlichs, he makes sure to use them in usually very simple sentences such as “‘Animals which are neither wild nor heimlich’”. He uses multiple examples and metaphors to demonstrate his point, “the ‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea.” He uses a mix of middle and high level words. They are sometimes technical but other times very straight-forward.

Nanny Dearest

Woody Allen’s piece from Mere Anarchy references the smoky voiced narration of noir detective films and stories, notably of Sam Spade. The sarcasm is apparent from the opening lines that quote the radio program “The Shadow”. This was a program that little boys listened to and emulated in Cold War imaginations. He follows this with the language of the obsessively educated and excessively insecure. This language, which speaks of “crepuscular winter light of my progenitor’s gloomy digs” and is also a noir reference, not just a characterization of snobby Park Avenue types. By mixing words like “digs” with words that made me roll my eyes and keep a dictionary handy, Allen calls up the images of people stuck in seedy underbellies of society while mixing with the upper classes- gangsters, bored wayward women who get themselves in trouble, and people who run the back room politics of high society. “The woman’s usually steady timbre jiggled like quantum particles, and I could tell that she had gone back on smokes” shows that these people know about physics enough to toss it around in witticisms, but still have not cleansed themselves from the infamous smoke-filled rooms. He barely avoids calling his wife a broad or a dame when he mentions that he got a call from “the better half”- at one dehumanizing and ostensibly praising her, later, she takes it further and calls him ‘sugar’ and ‘lover boy’. (Which induces a shiver in some readers if their mental image is still of Woody Allen himself.) The juxtaposition of low dialogue, the silliness of nannies named after cheese products and French maids doing just what we think French maids do, and the distance-producing narrative filled with obscure references of the expository history of what came before, all add to the high-drama style of a detective story, and even ends with a murder gone awry. Yet Allen really does no detective work here, no back alleys are patrolled and no one turns out to be a dirty double crosser. Here, the style tells the story more than the story is able to, and indeed tells a different one, perhaps making up for the lack of substance in the actual events themselves.

The Secret Sharer

In Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, many parallels and opposite concepts are presented through parallel language. The most thematic of these may be the “strangeness” of the captain, a stranger in what is essentially his own home among his own people, and the familiarity he finds in a true stranger, his double. But I would rather look at the language of one of the first of these distinctions, the one between the stillness of the sea as described in the first few pages, and the storm as related by the fugitive. The captain describes the atmosphere as “very still in an immense stillness”, the ship floating in a vast expanse, and uses “solid, so still and stable” and “smoothly” to create the hiss of the silence. “There was not a sound in [the ship]”, and the hissing silence is “breathless” and in it “nothing lived”. This is a lifeless, lonely, static sea, as is the captain who observes it.

The words used in regard to the storm described by the fugitive are not so smooth and similar, they are instead jagged and violent, “furious”, “anxious”, “fierce”, and use verbs of direct action to emphasize the heightened situation, “rushed”, “gripped”, “running”, “yelling”, “shaking”. The language is conversational, “You understand the sort of weather”, “Terrific weather… terrific, I tell you”. The speaker exclaims repeated phrases in his distress, and speaks incomplete, abrupt sentences. In contrast to the eternally quiet breathless sea in the captain’s eyes, the storm of the fugitive can scream Murder and is alive so much that it, and the fugitive’s victim, can be killed. Life is only appreciated once death has become an option.

Discussions of Islam

Alright, so I succeeded in reading about half of the article by Mark Steyn until he started talking about “Injuns” and then I had enough. Complete with everything from racial and sexist stereotypes of Italians, Greeks, Native Americans, Germans and Muslims, to pandering faux-scientific formulas of age and youth, and every clichéd little trick in between, Steyn’s piece served to annoy the hell out of me and not really convince me of anything. He meanders from nation to nation, spinning half-fleshed out theories and wandering far from his core point: that, presumably, “The Future Belongs to Islam”.

The first paragraph did bode well for him in my opinion. He took a phrase indoctrinated into the mythos of September 11, 2001, “The day everything changed”, and in fact close-read it. The end of this passage sparked my annoyance, when he personified the metaphor of an iceberg, and had used that inhuman abstraction to “topple the Twin Towers.” Oh that’s cute, some alliteration as well. Toppled, like a children’s tower of blocks. Why doesn’t he write about Hitler’s Horrible Holocaust as well? The dead metaphors reviled by Orville appear, such as “dead as the dinosaurs”. Perhaps Steyn uses these for their comic, sarcastic effect; however, this detracts from his efforts to appear scientific in his methods and arguments.

Stephen Holmes’ review of “Infidel” By Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and “Murder in Amsterdam”, by Ian Buruma, is targeted towards an audience familiar with high style as well as political complexities. At least a portion of this audience is also able to buy and read two books on the same subject- a niche demographic who are interested in these specific events and debates, or the immaculately educated. Hirsi Ali, though presented as complex and questionable, is nevertheless compelling, and Holmes gives us her background in a narrative as dramatic as the plots of the books that Ali credits with inspiring her decision to run away.

Holmes basically presents three viewpoints here: Hirsi Ali’s, Buruma’s, and his own. In sentences such as, “Indeed, he worries, not unreasonably, that her version of the Enlightenment has been brazenly converted into a weapon of the racist right, which opportunistically paints its xenophobia with a veneer of universalism”, he represents all three, with his own snuck skillfully into the two words of “not unreasonably”. As a good critic, he stands out of the direct spotlight, but in closely examining his subjects the light must reflect onto him.

Montaigne

Montaigne does not avoid putting himself into his essay, yet in the first few sentences he keeps it more impersonal, talking about “a man” and “his soul”. Almost sounds like a straightforward philosophical piece. But then he gives up the act and throws all the “I”’s that he wants at you. Many teachers tell you to leave out the “I”’s and to at least disguise expression of what is your own opinion and not fact. In the first paragraph he tells us a good deal about himself and his present state, and we wonder where he is going. Does this lead to something, or is he like an old man on the bus who decides to tell you his life story out of loneliness or senility? But yet we still hang on, waiting for a reason.

Next he starts speaking in Latin. The crazy old man on the bus has just started singing some song from his youth that OF COURSE I don’t know, and it’s a little weird that he just started singing. His sentences are long, rambling, and running, leading us around and affording no chance for interruption, and definitely no opportunity for distraction or inattentiveness, lest we completely lose his train of thought. If you start counting his commas out of amazement at his shameless use of them, you will realize with a jolt that you have no idea why he’s talking about cob-nuts or whip tops, and before you know it he’s in Latin again.

Attentiveness pays off when his observations stick with us, “I had rather be a less while old than be old before I am really so.” Chiasmus strikes us in the head out of the rambling.

His long and explorative sentences show us that he can, indeed, talk forever, and is wise and well-lived enough to be able to sustain this, pulling knowledge and references from every corner. But it remains a batty sort of wisdom that is confident enough in itself as to not care about structures that would make it easier for a reader to follow.

Montaigne has proven that he’s worth hanging on and deciphering. I wish I could stay on for the whole bus ride, but unfortunately, my stop comes. The crazy old man doesn’t even mind, but just keep talking. In Latin.