What is This I Don't Even

[Shockley]

Indeed, Steerpike, it's Finnegans Wake.

It's meant, of course, to be read out loud.

 

[Steerpike]

It's meant, of course, to be read out loud.

Is it? I didn't know that. Does sounding it out make a difference? I know I used that approach when I had to read Chaucer in middle english, but I never thought to try it with Joyce.

 

[Shockley]

Indeed. Joyce was blind by that time, so he had Samuel Beckett (the Samuel Beckett, even) sit down and write what he said - since Joyce couldn't read what Beckett wrote, he couldn't correct spellings or individual words so it's best understood out loud.

Edit: We know, for instance, that Joyce preferred the spelling 'kwork' to 'quark' but didn't bother correcting Beckett.

 

[Ankari]

"The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living."

I'm not sure how this can be considered purple prose. The living lament the dead. Lament means to deeply mourn. Some examples would be crying or wailing. So the crying and wailing of the living serves as songs of the dead. A lengthy way of saying the living who lament with cries and wails are creating a requiem for the dead.

I think I'm on board with Steerpike here. This attack on descriptive narratives reminds me of the bully complex I recall through my youth. If you don't understand something, or if you are envious of something, you attack it. Don't attack art, understand it.

There was a time when writing was entirely considered an art form. Remember the phrase "paint the scene with words?" That is exactly what I think these examples do. Do you have to think about the phrase a bit? Why not?

I liken this to the expanding selection of garbage rap. It's all entertainment and requires very little, if any, thought to consume it. Then there are those artists that are wordsmiths. They make you think about the lyrics. They require you to become an active party in the sharing of ideas. I'll never buy the piles of garbage rap (and other music) but I can't wait to buy the artists.

 

[Steerpike]

Indeed. Joyce was blind by that time, so he had Samuel Beckett (the Samuel Beckett, even) sit down and write what he said - since Joyce couldn't read what Beckett wrote, he couldn't correct spellings or individual words so it's best understood out loud.

Edit: We know, for instance, that Joyce preferred the spelling 'kwork' to 'quark' but didn't bother correcting Beckett.

Thank you, Shockley. I didn't know any of this. I don't know much about Joyce's life, I just know some of his works. As I said, I thought Dubliners was very good, and Ulysses was intellectually interesting. Maybe I'll give Finnegan's Wake another look and try this approach, just to see how it sounds to me.

 

[Mindfire]

I'm not sure how this can be considered purple prose. The living lament the dead. Lament means to deeply mourn. Some examples would be crying or wailing. So the crying and wailing of the living serves as songs of the dead. A lengthy way of saying the living who lament with cries and wails are creating a requiem for the dead.

I think I'm on board with Steerpike here. This attack on descriptive narratives reminds me of the bully complex I recall through my youth. If you don't understand something, or if you are envious of something, you attack it. Don't attack art, understand it.

There was a time when writing was entirely considered an art form. Remember the phrase "paint the scene with words?" That is exactly what I think these examples do. Do you have to think about the phrase a bit? Why not?

I liken this to the expanding selection of garbage rap. It's all entertainment and requires very little, if any, thought to consume it. Then there are those artists that are wordsmiths. They make you think about the lyrics. They require you to become an active party in the sharing of ideas. I'll never buy the piles of garbage rap (and other music) but I can't wait to buy the artists.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. The sentence you quoted doesn't make me think. It does not cause me to ponder this thing we call life, or anything else of note. It only makes me roll my eyes.

 

[Mindfire]

Indeed. Joyce was blind by that time, so he had Samuel Beckett (the Samuel Beckett, even) sit down and write what he said - since Joyce couldn't read what Beckett wrote, he couldn't correct spellings or individual words so it's best understood out loud.

Edit: We know, for instance, that Joyce preferred the spelling 'kwork' to 'quark' but didn't bother correcting Beckett.

That does shed some light on the situation. But then, why hasn't the book been reprinted with corrected spellings?

 

[Shockley]

Two reasons:

1. That was the edition Joyce approved of, and Joyce was making up words anyway. What's the correct spelling of a nonsense word?

2. Who has the stuff to correct Samuel goddamn Beckett?

 

[Steerpike]

I think I'm on board with Steerpike here. This attack on descriptive narratives reminds me of the bully complex I recall through my youth. If you don't understand something, or if you are envious of something, you attack it. Don't attack art, understand it.

There was a time when writing was entirely considered an art form. Remember the phrase "paint the scene with words?" That is exactly what I think these examples do. Do you have to think about the phrase a bit? Why not?

I think you're right. The potential pitfall with dense, descriptive writing is that it is hard to do well. Peake was a genius at it. Nabokov didn't write in that highly descriptive style, but was a genius with words. People who try to write in that manner but can't pull it off end up with a disaster on their hands. You get enough of those disasters and you have people thinking that any kind of highly descriptive writing is 'purple prose' and should be avoided. It's nonsense, of course. Then you have another group of people who confuse their subjective taste with objective standards of writing. A more dense style of prose can be done extremely well - look at Peake in fantasy, Conrad outside of fantasy, for some great writing. Discounting it out of hand tells you something about the reader and almost nothing about the work they are discounting.

 

[Shockley]

Thank you, Shockley. I didn't know any of this. I don't know much about Joyce's life, I just know some of his works. As I said, I thought Dubliners was very good, and Ulysses was intellectually interesting. Maybe I'll give Finnegan's Wake another look and try this approach, just to see how it sounds to me.

Missed this.

Dubliners is wonderful. If you like that, you might want to grab A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It's about halfway between Dubliners and Ulysses stylistically.

 

[Steerpike]

Dubliners is wonderful. If you like that, you might want to grab A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It's about halfway between Dubliners and Ulysses stylistically.

I actually have a copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in my to-read stack of books, but on thinking of it I don't think I've really looked at it. I'll have to try to fit it in. My stack of books grows faster than I can possibly read them.

 

[Shockley]

Anyway, I posted the Joyce to try and illustrate a point, but now I want to spell it out with words.

- Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald have dominated American literature since the 1920s, and they both preferred a sparse, empty writing style. It's a beautiful style and one of my favorites, but it's *their* style. It's something they created and most of us accept it as a matter of convenience. Had we been born in 1900, we'd have no problem endorsing what Paolini did in that book and just focused on the terrible narrative (and been confused by what we were reading, since fantasy was still in its early stages).

- The idea that there's one correct style of writing is ridiculous. Even though Hemingway was the sparse writer, he loved Joyce and Joyce loved Hemingway. They were able to appreciate writers with different styles and (especially in Joyce's case) experiment in other styles.

- I'm thinking of painting at this moment - some people paint like Titian and some people paint like Matisse. You'll have your preferences, granted, but you should at least accept them both as artists and maybe, just maybe, be willing to enjoy both.

 

[Chilari]

Pourquoi? The argument against circular logic involves circular logic - 'circular logic is bad because circular logic is bad because circular logis is bad because circular logic' and so on and so forth.

No, circular logic is bad because it requires the premise to be the answer in order for the answer to be the one you want. It fails to logically lead from premise to argument to conclusion, because assumptions are made about the conclusion in order to conceive the premise.

 

[tlbodine]

No, circular logic is bad because it requires the premise to be the answer in order for the answer to be the one you want. It fails to logically lead from premise to argument to conclusion, because assumptions are made about the conclusion in order to conceive the premise.

Yes, precisely. Which is, of course, what we mean when we say the sentence is meaningless. It fails to give any information. "The songs of the dead are lamentations of the living" delivers no more meaning than the similarly tautological sentence "The red couch was a reddish color."

 

[Ankari]

Yes, precisely. Which is, of course, what we mean when we say the sentence is meaningless. It fails to give any information. "The songs of the dead are lamentations of the living" delivers no more meaning than the similarly tautological sentence "The red couch was a reddish color."

Except that lament doesn't mean song (for the dead). The whole point of the sentence is to show how the audible manifestations of the mournful living are songs of the dead.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Writing is not art? I think it is. Sure there may be a purpose behind its creation, i.e. to get meaning across, but surely it goes beyond that.

I mean think of something like the instructions to put together a piece of furniture. You know the stuff - slot part A into the hole in part B. This is writing of a sort. But it's not art, and I don't think many people would want to read a novel written in this style. They want to read something that captures their imagination and their hearts.

So does time pass quickly? Or does it fly by? (Even though it doesn't have wings and can't actually take to the sky.) Does blood curdle like milk? (This might actually be possible if you acidified someones blood, though of course they'd die.) Or do people just feel afraid? Does death prowl the streets looking for new victims? (Anthropomorphisising death.) Or are people just dying?

Writing is an art though it comes with a purpose. The purpose is to communicate the message, something done in any set of assembly instructions. But the art comes in making that message real to the reader. Making them feel. I mean read some of my old micro textbooks. You'll discover quite quickly just how dry and boring a message can be. And how much more enjoyable and engrossing a novel about bacteria can be.

So to the OP. The question is do you understand the message being given by the selections? And does it make you feel something more than just, 'war's coming', 'something's fluttering', and 'deaths sad'? If you understand the message, the writing has succeeded. And if you don't feel something from reading it then the art is either not to your taste or else has failed.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Devor]

Mindfire, while I don't really like the lines, I think you're over reacting. The bird-across-moon imagery is just fine when he's looking at some movement inside a dragon egg, and the gray-eyed destiny line - while pretentious - just means that the events which just happened are going to start a war.

"The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living."

What if I wrote it this way?

The weeping of their widows was the only song the Red Fire Soldiers had left sing.

Okay, it's still a little much, unless they were connected to music somehow, but the words do have meaning.

What I mean to say is, it's more that the prose is more ambitious than the author's skill levels to execute, rather than that they have no meaning.

But there are more than enough people on the web who harp on Paolini. Just so long as we can keep the conversation in some ways useful.

 

[Mindfire]

Mindfire, while I don't really like the lines, I think you're over reacting. The bird-across-moon imagery is just fine when he's looking at some movement inside a dragon egg, and the gray-eyed destiny line - while pretentious - just means that the events which just happened are going to start a war.

"The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living."

What if I wrote it this way?

The weeping of their widows was the only song the Red Fire Soldiers had left sing.

Okay, it's still a little much, unless they were connected to music somehow, but the words do have meaning.

What I mean to say is, it's more that the prose is more ambitious than the author's skill levels to execute, rather than that they have no meaning.

But there are more than enough people on the web who harp on Paolini. Just so long as we can keep the conversation in some ways useful.

I think that sentence is missing a word or so...

The weeping of their widows was the only song the Red Fire Soldiers had left to sing.

And this thread was intended to be about the trope in general, not just Paolini's (ab)use of it.

 

[Shockley]

Yes, precisely. Which is, of course, what we mean when we say the sentence is meaningless. It fails to give any information. "The songs of the dead are lamentations of the living" delivers no more meaning than the similarly tautological sentence "The red couch was a reddish color."

The sentence, as nearly everyone on 'my' side of this argument has indicated, has more meaning than that - at least to us.

The important thing for everyone to remember here is that just because you yourself can not comprehend a meaning to something does not mean that there is no meaning - it just means that you yourself can not find it. We're weak mentally, on some level, and all in different ways; this is a difference we should expect.

 

[Mindfire]

The sentence, as nearly everyone on 'my' side of this argument has indicated, has more meaning than that - at least to us.

The important thing for everyone to remember here is that just because you yourself can not comprehend a meaning to something does not mean that there is no meaning - it just means that you yourself can not find it. We're weak mentally, on some level, and all in different ways; this is a difference we should expect.

That doesn't mean the sentence itself has any meaning. It could mean that you're reading into the sentence. Reading into a sentence on the scale you did to squeeze some meaning out of it (though I'm not convinced you succeeded) shouldn't be necessary, especially in a modern fantasy novel.