It's a rainy day here again and seems like a good time to talk about books I'm reading. I feel like it's been a while anyway. Currently I'm reading A Ship of the Line, the second Horatio Hornblower novel by C.S. Forester, and I've also been rereading Moby Dick. It's a pretty instructive contrast for ways to approach stories of seafaring. The Hornblower novel is like an extraordinarily good sandwich while Moby Dick is like a terrific feast prepared by a master chef over the course of a month utilising ultra-rare ingredients. But the stylistic difference could be described in other ways besides quality. A Ship of the Line is plot driven, compulsively readable. Forester does paint a picture but it's so much more about what happens next. Melville, with Moby Dick, is so much more about establishing mood and sensation.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?
That's the kind of writing that couldn't be taught in a million years. Only instinct could show a writer how to so effectively move from simple descriptive prose to presumptions of instant mental associations, from traditionally composed renderings to colloquial, conversational injections. It has the peculiar sensation of a narrated film in which the pictures and sound are somehow embedded in the words.
Oh, I'm also still reading Tristram Shandy. I guess I've been slowly working my way through it for over a year. That's the real polar opposite of A Ship of the Line. Where the Forester novel is all momentum, Tristram Shandy is a deliberate project against momentum. And I do sort of admire that. Every time I pick the book up I laugh at something but, strangely, however funny it is, it never makes me want to pick it back up. I guess this is the surest sign it is postmodern before postmodernism was codified. When I set out to read what were formerly considered the four great, essential novels of the 18th century--Pamela, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and Tristram Shandy--I'd never have imagined the last would be the one that would slow me down the most, possible because, of all four, Tristram Shandy was the only one for which I've actually spoken to or heard of currently living admirers.
I have been kind of getting more into it lately. I'm just over halfway through and the protagonist has finally emerged from his mother's womb. An argument has ensued about the accident of him being baptised "Tristram"--his father wanted "Trismegistus" but the housemaid who was supposed to communicate this to the priest forgot the full name by the time she reached Mrs. Shandy's bedchamber. There's also some hints that the boy's nose may have been crushed by experimental forceps. My pace at reading has picked up a little bit lately now that I've started to suspect the author, Laurence Sterne, basically decided to role play as a man who has no penis. The fundamental joke of the novel is that it presents the symptoms, preoccupations, and desires of an intelligent author writing in such a condition. He never explicitly invites the reader to contemplate the possibility that he has no penis, but he does talk a lot about his Uncle Toby whose genitals were crushed by shrapnel from cannonfire and who, for the rest of his life, has a "hobbyhorisical" fixation on diverting all conversations to the subject of battlefield artillery or fortifications. Shandy, the fictional author, meanwhile, devotes whole chapters to button holes and an embarrassing accident with a chestnut and then separate chapters justifying the others. I feel like I get the joke and the intricacy of its execution is fascinating but, even so, I feel like I could zip through a dozen Hornblower novels before I finally finish Tristram Shandy.
No comments:
Post a Comment