So, first, Hemingway, who, if there is going to be SOUND DYNAMICS in fiction, has got to be among the quietest. He is the verses on Gigantic. His style is muted to the point that it gets made fun of for it. I guess that if books are quiet, Hemingway represents the bookiest books. There seems to be a studiousness about his work that is essential to it; try shouting a line from one of his stories at someone -- it will not work as well as it would with Mark Leyner, I guarantee it. Even a line that seems shoutable, like "Will you please please please please please please please stop talking" from "Hills Like White Elephants" sounds, relative to the world, wrapped in muslin.
Here are some guys whom I think might have some loudth, yanked from my bookshelves after a quick scan: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Barth, Norman Mailer. Let's see how they do.
Ok, here's Chaucer: "And whan I saugh he wolde nevere fyne/To reden on this cursed book al nyght/Al sodeynly thre leves have I plyght/Out of his book, right as he radde, and eke/I with my fest so took hym on the cheke/That in oure fyr he fil bakward adoun./And he up stirte as dooth a wood leoun,/And with his fest he smoot me on the heed/That in the floor I lay as I were deed." That's from the Wife of Bath's Prologue, and it maybe this seems louder to me than it might've because it is in verse, and thus more like music; and music, like the music I was talking about before, is for performance and thus can obviously be loud. Maybe the Wife of Bath is the thirteenth century Lita Ford. That bit about the fight between her fifth husband (wilcome the sixt, whenever he shal) can have some loudth because Chaucer is so good at rising, both in tempo and dynamically (both sentences start with "and"), and with his repitition (I think it is loudly, raucously hilarious that she says that both she and Symkyn hit each other with a fist). So Chaucer can get up there, mixing it up with some loudth and being funny. Anyone else?
Barth, I think, is not really loud like Black Sabbath, but loud like this guy. He's not raucous; he's fast and showy. You don't get measured as quiet anywhere by stopping your story over and over to throw in an assessment of Freytag's triangle. If Chaucer drummed up some literate loudth by honing in on a musical description of a raucous event, Barth gets his by making noise. I think that is how a lot of postmodern writers, and Joyce work; Joyce is way loud, where most of his contemporaries are Hemingway-soft. In The Sot-Weed Factor he has a list of women calling one another whores in English and in French, and that's a lot of loud noise.
I think that one of the reasons that I love literature is that I am usually confident that when I like books, it is because they are good. When it comes to music, something that I am often enchanted by but probably do not love, I have no such confidence, because I can never tell if I like the song I like because it is good or dumb or both. The big clue for music is that the songs that I like that I tend to think are dumb, I only like when they're loud. So I think it's fitting, I guess, that the loudest author I can think of is Norman Mailer, one of the only writers whom I can't figure out as good, or dumb. Norman Mailer (at least the Norman Mailer of The Armies of the Night, which is the only of his books I know well) is the Ozzy Osbourne of American writing, except he's the Sharon Osbourne too because he does his own spin right along with his antics. Here he is, talking about the character of himself, insulted by Robert Lowell: "Mailer, looking back, thought bitter words he would not say: 'You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary?...What do you know about getting fat against your will and turning into a clown of an arriviste baron when you would rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat from these damned democratic states." Next to this, in my copy, I wrote, "Seriously?" And looking back, I mean...seriously? This guy is a goofball. But he is a brilliant and glorious dumb goofball, and so he's the loudest man in American writing. As usual, I'm sure that there's something important about this, and unsure what. Something about this bombastic guy being loud and yet clearly wanting to be Hemingway, and being so full of noise but reminding me of music. Maybe if I expand my Mailer knowledge, I'll do myself a favor. I will check back with you guys when I see if I figure out the secret of music and literature and loudth in The Naked and the Dead.
2 comments:
this theory has legs.
how bout that thing where you have a sforzando immediately followed by piano (sfp? in notation). i feel like that's the dynamic of a lot of the best hunter s. thompson sentences—launching a rude shock to the eardrum and slipping right back into that wounded quiet.
Chaucer, I would say, is more colorful than he is loud. That is to say, he wields color better than he does loudth. Take, for instance, the first two of the Canterbury Tales: the Knight's Tale and the Miller's. He moves brilliantly from the marble-whiteness of the Knight's story of the ancients to the Miller's gaudy, provincial world in a moment best echoed in film by Dorothy's awakening/blooming into a technicolor Oz from a rather drab, sepia Kansas. This is not a boom so much as a flourish and is, I think, more characteristic of Chaucer.
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