BR Myers is Hello Kitty

Both white, big in Asia

Frankly, your pal the Rake feels a little bad about wasting time on BR Myers yet again.  The man is a bomb-thrower, plain and simple, and I shouldn't have been drawn into an emotional response in the first place.  (Not that I don't, in principle, stand behind every curse that I wrote.)  I'm never going to agree with a lick of what he writes, as to me it's all an extension of his flawed first principle (i.e., that many acclaimed authors are acclaimed solely due to a conspiracy of philistinism and silence).  That Myers now chooses to assign the blame for corruption and incoherence in government to the literati is just the tasteless, oily icing on his fallen cake.

Why he chooses to write from a such an position of extreme aggression and intolerance is beyond me. Certainly no one is demanding that he appreciate Auster, DeLillo, et al.  And a dissenting opinion is typically welcome.  However, he's accomplishing nothing more than rhetorical bullying in arguing as he does, brooking no difference of opinion and reaching past the author and text to accuse any who might read differently than he does of being a dupe or a degenerate liar.

This "I don't-know-what's-wrong-with-these-kids-today" tone plays well to the curmudgeons in the balcony, but the argument it conveys is nothing more than aesthetic bigotry.

Further, I think the debate brewing in the comments to the previous post provide a good example of why narrowly focused, pedantic sentence dissection as a means to judging a novel is a dead-end.  Take this passage:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Are we going to enjoy the music here, or are we going to vivisect the text?

Is snow, which we later establish is "faintly falling," going to hit a old, lead glass windowpane hard enough to make a tapping sound, even a "light" one?  Are the snowflakes silver or are they dark?  How can a snowflake be dark?  How can snow fall obliquely against lamplight?  Does he mean obliquely through the lamplight?  Can a soul swoon--that is, be "overwhelmed with ecstatic joy"--slowly?  Isn't it absurd to assert that the snow's falling not just through the sky but indeed the universe?

And so on.

Not all prose is created equally, and not everyone is Joyce, but I think the point still stands that if you're hellbent on denying all artistic license and poring over sentences like a Talmudic scholar, you will find something to quibble about in the greatest passages from our finest prose stylists.

Who has the time or the stomach?  Not I, friends.  Not I.

Now, onward, I hope, to better things.

Comments

[Mike B.]

I love B.R. Myers. I love him the way fat kids love cake. Having said this -- I "bwahed!" loudly at "Both white, big in Asia."

"Is snow, which we later establish is 'faintly falling,' going to hit a old, lead glass windowpane hard enough to make a tapping sound, even a "light" one?"

Yes. Snow does that. At least, snow in Oregon does that, which is where the bulk of my sense of snow comes from.

"How can snow fall obliquely against lamplight? Does he mean obliquely through the lamplight?"

No -- I think Joyce is correct in saying "obliquely against." "Obliquely" because it's falling at an oblique angle; "against" because one sees this against the light. The light provides the background against which the falling snow is seen. This also explains how the snow can be silver and dark.

"Can a soul swoon--that is, be "overwhelmed with ecstatic joy"--slowly?"

That's not what he means by "swoon" I don't think. I think he means a faint. But "his soul swooned" is especially lovely because of the aliteration.

I love "The Dead" -- and don't think much of Joyce as a writer. Or, at least, I don't think there's anything of value in "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake." But that's not this argument. And I think that's a passage full of breathtakingly wonderful sentences.

Joyce has seen snow. Joyce understands snow very well. This passage is stunning because of its poetry; it's also stunning because it's true. (Well, we can quibble good-naturedly about souls, I guess, which I don't believe exist at all. Or we can not quibble about souls, which would be preferable.)

What makes the passage not work for your purposes (as far as I'm concerned) is that each element bears vivisection. It's holographic, in that each piece shows the entirety of the whole. Johnson's writing isn't doing that at all.

But yeah: Hello Kitty? Brilliant.

[Rake]

I think this is, in the main, proving my point.

Because I can argue with the snow tapping. I have never heard snow (having been in it in CO, NM, MT, MA, ID, WY) tap against a window. Brush, yes. Kiss, perhaps. Slap, when heavy and wet, absolutely. Tap, no, I wouldn't say that, as that implies to me two quite solid objects coming briefly into contact at a certain velocity.

And I would say souls themselves do not faint; the physical body faints, and we know that to be true, medically. We can test it and proven it via experiment.

But this kind of reading is tortuous and unkind; we're not getting anywhere. It's better to me to squelch any minor misgivings about, say, tapping snow and just let the sound of the word rush over me along with the rest of the music in these sentences.

I see we're going to disagree, but, differences in quality aside, I don't see any reason to treat Johnson's prose with any less respect.

But, hey, at least you liked Hello Kitty.

[jh]

“We do not always think of eternity while serving potatoes; sometimes we just think of serving potatoes. Virginia Woolf’s characters never do”
-David Lodge

One of my favorite quotes. I think Joyce, in some sense, is the opposite. And if the first 200 and last 100 pages of Ulysses aren't some of the most incredible literature you've ever read, I don't know what to tell you.

[Rake]

Amen, jh.

[Elizabeth]

>>I don't think there's anything of value in "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake."

I don't know which is worse, the punctilious vivisection or the blanket dismissal.

[Rake]

(As subtlety seems to be lost as easily as a tube sock in a dryer around here lately, let me just note that any punctilious vivisection on my part is purposefully awful and meant in jest, for demonstration purposes only.)

Oh, and:

ULYSSES RULZ!!!11!

[Josh]

Dunno about the Johnson sentence on bees that started it all, but the rhetoric in the Joyce passage (as we learn from Hugh Kenner) does a great job at limning the pov character: Gabriel's shabby-genteel romanticism and the emotional needs of the moment are what's behind the paradoxical impressions (snow that can tap, when it's more likely the wind, flaks that can be "silver and dark," fainting and falling, the social leveling that the snowfall offers) he perceives.

[nnyhav]

Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque.

http://www.conversationalreading.com/2005/05/death_watch.html#comments

(quote-tale:
http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0107&L=nabokv-l&P=5628
)

[BRMYERSNO1FAN]

"Certainly no one is demanding that he appreciate Auster, DeLillo, et al."

No one put a gun to anyone's head, no, but these authors (Joyce, too) were thrust upon me in school in the same manner and frequency as, say, Paris Hilton or Britney Spears.

(I rank Auster only marginally ahead of Britney -- I defy you to contradict this ranking!)