Over the weekend, I finished Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own, where Woolf concludes that for a woman to be an artist (or, really, if a woman's to pursue her own dreams and ambitions) she needs to have money and a room of her own. Basically, women need the same kinds of resources and respect that have traditionally been given to men. Only then can they have the opportunities to write, create, invent, etc. that the feminist movement has sought to instill.
But what struck me the most about A Room of One's Own was that it was an essay that was actually fun to read. Woolf ties in personal anecdotes, and she uses these with a dash of wit, humor, and research to flesh out her argument. And in writing the essay, she builds several small stories into her larger argument. She recalls when women received the vote, a time at which she just inherited from an aunt a large sum on money; she recalls at the time being more excited about the money than the vote, because it was money that would enable her to pursue her artistic ventures.
And then there's Woolf's hypothetical situation--what if Shakespeare had a sister, Judith, who was as talented as Shakespeare? Woolf tells us the story about Judith's life, about how she gets disparaged for reading books and never receives the education that her brother did, about how her attempts to follow in his footsteps get her ridiculed.
So yeah, A Room of One's Own reads like a piece of modernist prose, but it's engaging. Part of the problem that we find with essays is this thing that gets drilled into our brains in middle and high school, and it really screws our ability to write well: the five paragraph essay, "In this essay I will...." But Woolf tells us stories, she tells us jokes, and peppers anecdotes throughout to spice up her language and make the entire argument personal.
A good essay should do these things; a good essay should be engaging and fun and informative. In reading it, we should get an idea of exactly why this means so much to the author and why, therefore, it's important that we hear about it. Having personality isn't just for the personal essay.
And seriously, read A Room of One's Own.
(Star Trek review on Friday! Poetry on Wednesday!)
Showing posts with label Literary Styles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literary Styles. Show all posts
Monday, April 5, 2010
Friday, December 11, 2009
Reality of the Imagination
BBC News - Rare words 'author's fingerprints'
French surrealist painter, poet, and critic Max Jacob observed, “What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.” Media circuses in the past few years have given us plenty of reason to doubt the veracity of appearances; I think of the Kobe Bryant scandal a few years back and the recent Tiger Woods imbroglio—multiple women scrambling from the woodwork to have their say—as examples of how clean images and massive media campaigns can crumble in seconds. Or—since I’m sticking with athletes this morning, apparently—consider Andre Agassi’s recent revelation that he abused crystal meth and lied about his drug use during his competitive days.
So what endows a work or a human life with that sincerity, that strength, as opposed to merely plating it with glass? Language is involved, obviously: multi-million dollar campaigns, advertising contracts, public appearances, and prize money contribute to putting these superstars in the limelight. But these appearances are mirrors; these clean images reflect back at us exactly what we want to see, and the smallest things—a crash into a fire hydrant outside your home, for instance—can split that fragile surface, send cracks rippling across the whole infrastructure.
I, for one, believe that what imbues a narrative with strength is precisely the perception that it is real, that although it is something imagined (it’s a story, made out of words strung into phrases linked together into sentences blocked together in paragraphs, constructed from the letter level on up) it nonetheless has the full essence of something lived, something real. Propaganda and cover-ups are just ruses. Feints. Distractions from the actual narrative, something layered under photo-ops and press conferences and advertising your recent breach of the White House on your StalkerBook page.
I originally intended to write about something else today—film adaptations of stories, actually—but I decided to bring up this idea—what makes the reality of a story—after reading a BBC article that claimed that authors have stylistic fingerprints. Sebastian Bernhardsson, the leader of the research, claims that we all possess a “meta-book,” the theoretical text that contains all of our uses of particular words. He said to the BBC’s writer that “That story you’re writing right now is a piece of that big book and that is what you’re pulling out.” They catalogued the words in the works of Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, and D.H. Lawrence.
I can’t help but feel that this diminishes what a work of art is. It’s more than simply the words—there’s the obvious manner of arranging them. Perhaps there is a “meta-book” on some theoretical level, some way for us to catalogue an author’s use of language. But it stops at this brand of textual fingerprinting. This reduces narrative to being just a matter of words—and then we ignore the poetry of language. Hardy, Melville, and Lawrence aren’t remembered because of the words they used but because of how their words were used. And literature is adaptable, alterable even across the career of a single writer. I would love to see them do this sort of fingerprinting based off the career of modernist experimental writers—a Woolf or a Joyce or a Faulkner—and then compare it to contemporary modern novelists—a McEwan or a Byatt, perhaps—whose styles have evolved and finessed over their careers.
In short, what I wanted to get across this time around is that there’s more to a story than simply language and the choice of words. Philip Roth said in an interview in The New Yorker about his novel Exit Ghost a few years back that the novel is “language in service of a surmise,” and that’s what this fingerprinting overlooks: the way the words accrue significance upon the page, induce in our imaginations something realer than the sight of ink on an off-white page.
French surrealist painter, poet, and critic Max Jacob observed, “What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.” Media circuses in the past few years have given us plenty of reason to doubt the veracity of appearances; I think of the Kobe Bryant scandal a few years back and the recent Tiger Woods imbroglio—multiple women scrambling from the woodwork to have their say—as examples of how clean images and massive media campaigns can crumble in seconds. Or—since I’m sticking with athletes this morning, apparently—consider Andre Agassi’s recent revelation that he abused crystal meth and lied about his drug use during his competitive days.
So what endows a work or a human life with that sincerity, that strength, as opposed to merely plating it with glass? Language is involved, obviously: multi-million dollar campaigns, advertising contracts, public appearances, and prize money contribute to putting these superstars in the limelight. But these appearances are mirrors; these clean images reflect back at us exactly what we want to see, and the smallest things—a crash into a fire hydrant outside your home, for instance—can split that fragile surface, send cracks rippling across the whole infrastructure.
I, for one, believe that what imbues a narrative with strength is precisely the perception that it is real, that although it is something imagined (it’s a story, made out of words strung into phrases linked together into sentences blocked together in paragraphs, constructed from the letter level on up) it nonetheless has the full essence of something lived, something real. Propaganda and cover-ups are just ruses. Feints. Distractions from the actual narrative, something layered under photo-ops and press conferences and advertising your recent breach of the White House on your StalkerBook page.
I originally intended to write about something else today—film adaptations of stories, actually—but I decided to bring up this idea—what makes the reality of a story—after reading a BBC article that claimed that authors have stylistic fingerprints. Sebastian Bernhardsson, the leader of the research, claims that we all possess a “meta-book,” the theoretical text that contains all of our uses of particular words. He said to the BBC’s writer that “That story you’re writing right now is a piece of that big book and that is what you’re pulling out.” They catalogued the words in the works of Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, and D.H. Lawrence.
I can’t help but feel that this diminishes what a work of art is. It’s more than simply the words—there’s the obvious manner of arranging them. Perhaps there is a “meta-book” on some theoretical level, some way for us to catalogue an author’s use of language. But it stops at this brand of textual fingerprinting. This reduces narrative to being just a matter of words—and then we ignore the poetry of language. Hardy, Melville, and Lawrence aren’t remembered because of the words they used but because of how their words were used. And literature is adaptable, alterable even across the career of a single writer. I would love to see them do this sort of fingerprinting based off the career of modernist experimental writers—a Woolf or a Joyce or a Faulkner—and then compare it to contemporary modern novelists—a McEwan or a Byatt, perhaps—whose styles have evolved and finessed over their careers.
In short, what I wanted to get across this time around is that there’s more to a story than simply language and the choice of words. Philip Roth said in an interview in The New Yorker about his novel Exit Ghost a few years back that the novel is “language in service of a surmise,” and that’s what this fingerprinting overlooks: the way the words accrue significance upon the page, induce in our imaginations something realer than the sight of ink on an off-white page.
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