6 posts tagged “bad writing”

This cheered me up— from the Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd Edition, in "Dante and the lyric past" by Teodolinda Barolini (p. 27):

The Rime contains the traces of Dante's stylistic and ideological experimentation.  The tenzone of scurrilous sonnets exchanged between Dante and his friend Forese Donati, for instance, was long denied a place among Dante's works because of its base content, considered inappropriate for the refined poet of the Vita nuova; and yet, without it, we would be hard put to trace the passage from the tightly circumscribed world of the Vita nuova to the all-inclusive cosmos of the Commedia.  Nor does the tenzone's lowly content obscure the archetypal signs of Dante's poetic mastery, evidenced by the compact vigor and concise force of his diction, and the effortless energy with which one insult springs from another.  Whereas Forese requires a full sonnet to accuse Dante of being a bounder who lives off the charity of others, Dante characteristically packs an insult into each verse of the opening quatrain of "Bicci novel," which tells Forese that (1) he is a bastard, (2) his mother is dishonored, (3) he is a glutton, and (4) to support his gluttony he is a thief:

Bicci novel, figliuol di non so cui
(s'i' non ne domandasse monna Tessa),
giù per la gola tanta roba hai messa
ch'a forza ti convien tòrre l'altrui.

(Young Bicci, son of I don't know who [short of asking my lady Tessa], you've stuffed so much down your gorge that you're driven to take from others.) (Foster and Boyde, Dante's Lyric Poetry, 1, p. 153)

Also good was David Wallace's "Dante in English," from which I kept reading aloud to P, z.B.:

In [1782], however, William Hayley translated three cantos of the Inferno as a footnote to his Essay on Epic Poetry, and William Rogers published a blank verse translation of the entire Inferno.  Rogers' work is neither accurate nor poetically accomplished; the quality and tenor of Hayley's work may be gauged from an earlier rendition of the famous Hell-gate inscription in his The Triumphs of Temper (1781): "Thro' me ye pass to Spleen's terrific dome" (DEL 1, p. 361). [...]  It was not until 1814... that H.F. Cary, an Anglican clergyman, brought the English-speaking world face to face with a powerful, accurate, and poetically moving translation of Dante.  (289-90)

That was the one Keats hauled around the Lake District and Blake illustrated.  On Wallace's account, with only a few exceptions (Chaucer, Milton, Shelley) the height of Dante's reception in English was the 20th century, although he doesn't speculate on the implications.  I leave this exercise to you readers!  Why would Dante have gone over so well in the age of modernism-and-after, at least in English?  Is it just too upsetting in a less secular world, perhaps?

The TLS reviews the newly-released original manuscript of On the Road, a book I have never read and expect never to read — but I must now say that if I had to read it, I'd much rather have the "original scroll."  Is this kind of thing really still happening? — I mean, can you really still suppress the unbowdlerized version of a widely-read novel for 50 years?

The most striking feature is that the scroll uses the real names of characters who were lightly disguised in On the Road.  The real-life Neal Cassady returns to usurp the legendary Dean Moriarty, as if by right.  Where On the Road begins, "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.  I had just gotten over a serious illness . . .", the scroll opens, "I first met met [sic] Neal not long after my father died . . . I had just gotten over a serious illness". On the Road's Carlo Marx is the scroll's Allen Ginsberg; Dean's three wives, Marylou, Camille and Inez, feature in the scroll under their real names, Carolyn Robinson, Luanne Henderson and Diane Hansen, whom Neal married in New York while still husband to Carolyn (the legality of his marriage to Luanne is likewise questionable, since she was underage at the time). . . . On the Road is a non-fiction novel, predating In Cold Blood by nine years. [. . .]  [Malcolm] Cowley had worked hard to persuade an increasingly disorganized Kerouac that Viking could not publish a "novel" in which living people were depicted stealing, committing adultery and indulging in illegal sexual acts.

So the buggery is excised, names are changed, fig leaves are applied where needed and, as the reviewer puts it: "It might have been paternal feeling towards his young author that led Cowley to excise many mentions of women as 'whores'.  Now they are back, and the rampant misogyny of the early Beat Generation is as plain as can be."  What sense would a book, "improvised" over three weeks, that contains all these elements make without them?  What strange confusion it must have sown in the minds of young readers.  Nothing can make your skin crawl like a shoddy cover-up.  But on the other hand, it's easy to underestimate the strength of taboos, or their auras, even when they're utterly absurd: the absurdity is the last thing you encounter when you break them, like hope creeping out of Pandora's box.

Still: sounds like a marvelously ugly, hateful all-American text.  Tasty, like Rocky Mountain oysters dipped in ketchup.  I never made it past Kesey and Ferlinghetti as a teenager: I don't think Kerouac or Cassady ever seemed much like kindred spirits; they seemed more antsy than zany.  On the road with a bunch of semi-closeted misogynists?  Sounds pretty boring to me.  I think I'll read popular science books and Camus instead.

Am I the last person to learn of the Walter Benjamin monument in Spain, near the graveyard in which he was buried?  I can't find adequate pictures, but my sense is that I would be very affected by it— although traveling there with the purpose of seeing it seems all wrong, unless the bus were to leave me stranded overnight.

Health update: I'm walking again with an air cast; I seem to have caught a cold.  So far everything else is in order.

P.S.: The Lusíads.  Camões was The Great Portuguese Poet until Pessoa, who carried on an agon with him, because of The Lusíads, which are the Age of Exploration version of the great classical epics.  By "version" I mean "hilariously ham-handed imitation:" the Roman gods all show up to take sides over Vasco da Gama's voyage to India— Venus, of course, is on Vasco's side, while scheming Bacchus wants to keep India for himself.  Camões assures us that it's better than that hackwork Aeneid; it's certainly funnier, and so far has caused me to shriek more often.  Lordy.

But it was Bacchus who dissented
Most from Jupiter's edict, well aware
His own powers in India would cease
If such men came there as the Portuguese.

He knew it was fated there would come
From Iberia, over the high seas,
An invincible people to subjugate
All his India's foaming coastline,
And with fresh victories would dwarf
Legends, whether his own or others.
[. . .]

Against him spoke the lovely Venus,
Favouring the people of Portugal
For her love of the Roman virtue
She saw resurrected in them;
In their stout hearts, in the star
Which shone bright above Ceuta,
In the language which an inventive mind
Could mistake for Latin, passably declined.

This stirred the Cytherean, and more
Deeply since fate clearly had in mind
That wherever these warrior people
Roamed, her rites would be respected.

Eeek!  Eeek!  Stop!  Nooooo....

Kein Ort. Nirgends is Wolf's novella about an imagined meeting between Kleist and Günderrode.  I turn out to have a copy of the English translation in my library; after some resistance to the mere idea I decided to sample it.

Wolf is certainly an artful stylist, although the full effect doesn't always come across in translation.

Hmm.

Okay, I seem to be unable to write a balanced review: I couldn't keep reading it.  I kept putting it down and remarking on its failures to Paul, picking it up again, getting more frustrated and discussing those failures more intricately; I'll leave it up to anyone else to tell me if it gets better.

Example:

He can easily imagine, down to every individual turn of phrase, what tattle the members of Frankfurt society are telling behind his back.  To stall his fiancée, and then to jilt her.  Why does it matter to him what they say?  Why this horror at standing up to their judgment?  Why, when putting this distance between himself and them has failed to bring any relief, does he still feel the temptation: it is better to die than face that.

Ah: because their reproach confirms his own self-reproaches.  Immorality!  They do not know the meaning of the word.  But he knows.  To fail to pay life the debt it demands, and the living what they are compelled to demand; to feel truly alive only when one is writing . . .  These ghastly six months in Wedekind's home.  In some secret sense they had been for him an indescribable holiday: his condition forbade him even so much as to think about writing.  In the nearness to death this compulsion to write falls away.  One lives simply in order to live.  Now, how could that idea be expressed?

One really ought to think about something else.

This is an irritatingly psychologically-minded critical essay with delusions of being fiction.  There are footnotes.  Who is Wedekind?  What was Der Prinz von Homburg?  To which of Kleist's letters does this passage make reference?  But you don't care, because no one talks, thinks or lives like this, not in 1979, not in 1804, no writer ever, no place on earth.  What competent novelist doesn't know that?  Writers don't have writerly thoughts: they shit, they go to the grocery store, they wake up late and groggy and off their game.  Sehnsucht is notoriously unstable as a state of mind.

I thought Wolf's Kassandra had its moments, but I couldn't get into it in the end: it seemed to be trying so hard, so disingenuously, to determine the reader's reaction to the thoughts and ideas and words of every character— in fiction this is, I think, fatal.  Fiction is what you write when you don't have an agenda.  You can write perfectly good, perfectly beautiful, persuasive essays, without requiring your readers to buy into the contingency and opacity of imaginary people with imaginary thoughts to get your point.  The only decent piece of author-biographical fiction I can think of is Büchner's Lenz, which is a masterpiece, written out of obvious and unfathomable sympathy with its subject.  Do any of you know any others?

Two new engineers collared me, or corraled me.  "So you're a reader," said one.  "Who do you think is the best contemporary American novelist?"

I figured that whatever argument ensued would not leave me crying on the floor, and said Pynchon.  He was overjoyed.  He'd read all of Pynchon's books!  ... Did I like David Foster Wallace?  I said, truthfully, that I thought his best asset was his sense of humor and I preferred it to his attempts at profundity, which other people do better.  That might have been more than he wanted to know.  Slowly, slowly, though, I think I am learning to make small talk with people.

It's a nice distraction from the increasingly maddening efforts to write a Personal Statement.  They all come out like Ezra's, only more negative, to the point at which I wonder if I'd better just write "what I really think" and then negate every sentence, one by one.  Here is the problem: the personal statement is neither a cover letter nor an essay, but a peculiar hybrid of the two.  It may end up being sterile.  I can write an essay; I can write a cover letter; I can't imagine how to combine them.

Dear Admissions Committee:

I am interested in your position as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Literature.  I am currently completing a master's degree in this field at Thinly Veiled University, specializing in German and Spanish prose fiction of the 20th century.  I am also interested in poetry, philosophy, the relationship between literature and history/ historiography, and narrative theory, and I have some familiarity with deconstruction, the Frankfurt School, and the work of Bakhtin.  In terms of languages, I have studied Spanish since I was 11 and took a literature course in Berlin this past summer, where I received a grade of * for work done entirely in German; I can read French and Italian and intend to learn Latin soon.

Your department seems like a good match for my interests for several reasons.  Several of your full professors' research combines philosophy with literary study in compelling and novel ways, for instance Professor X (not his real name)'s book on Parcel Mroust or Professor Y's recent study of Plato.*  These works have directly helped me in my own literary investigations**, but they evince a flexibility and clarity of thought which would surely be an asset to students in the program as well.  From my perspective, then, your department has much to offer.  As a student in your firm program, I would hope to reciprocate by lending my exacting skills with language, fidelity to argumentative logic, creative problem-solving and patience as a teacher and mentor to the varied tasks of a graduate student.

My references, writing sample, transcripts, GRE scores and application fee are included with this letter. If you have any other questions or require other documentation, please contact me at your convenience.  I am grateful for the opportunity to apply and look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
the author

* Come on, that could be anyone.
** Blue stockings, brown nose

You know?  That's so much easier than knocking their socks off with fluent, lofty prose.  Which way did the socks go on first?  What if I just kick their feet out from under them instead?  Raaaah.

Writing in the Hungarian Quarterly, Miklós Györffy pins down exactly why Péter Nádas sucks:

The most specific and personal feature of the narrative tone is the almost monomaniacal and monotonous superimposition of sensual experience and abstract analysis.  However much the narrator's omniscience extends to actual facts, to the description of the period and to scenes and information from other sources, it is primarily evident in an incessant, reflexive analysis of bodily existence, sensual impressions, desires, the subconscious, instincts and sexuality.  The narrator in Parallel Stories [the 1500-page, 3-vol novel under review] peoples the world with characters in whom individuality is upstaged by what is common to all humans, by a determination of primary, sexual existence that is valid for all.  "It makes no difference at what point I begin, for I shall always come back again to this" is the epigraph Nádas borrows from Parmenides for his novel.  [...]  Much has been written already about this (scandalous?) aspect, about the (liberating?) radicalism of the language of sexuality, which I shall not touch upon here.  Suffice it to quote József Keresztesi's comment in the journal Magyar Narancs: "There is no situation in which one's knowledge of one's cock or cunt would not function" -- what the writer, throughout the novel, consistently calls the genitalia that play such a prominent part in it.  One correction at most might be made -- that Nádas primarily elaborates situations relevant to "one's knowledge of one's cock."  Knowledge of the sexus of the other gender lies merely in the mention of attractions and relationships, mostly lesbian...  Because of this one sidedness, one cannot really make much of another suggestion emanating from Nádas' concept of man, namely that we all have in us masculine and feminine features in equal measure; therefore, all human sexual orientation and the object of sexual desire are quite uncertain.  [...]  A greater problem is that in the long, self-generatingly extensive and proliferating passages in which the sensual minutiae of the characters are discussed, distinct characters become stereotyped, whether by design or not.  If by design, it is because the narrator seeks to accentuate what is common to all of us, what is within and beyond the individual.  If unintentionally, it is because the analytical method Nádas employs is the same throughout....  [T]he reader eventually has the impression that everyone lives through more or less the same experience: bodily, sensual existence is of primary importance and can be perceived and articulated by everyone at a high level of intellectual and conceptual sophistication.

Amazingly, the review is quite positive in its conclusion -- but this is such a perfectly damning diagnosis of exactly what makes the man's novels unreadable that I'll always remember it fondly as a hatchet job.  I don't know whether I find it more depressing that Nádas himself, despite his technical talents, can't break out of this rut, or that so many people love and praise his books because of it.  Well, that's 1500 pages of Literature I won't be reading.