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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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« CONVERSATION IN THE MOUNTAINS - A brief Q&A with John Banville | Main | NOTA BENE: PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT »

July 03, 2008

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

NPR (which has actually bucked the trend and expanded book coverage) is the latest outlet to fall hard for the glorious Netherland ... (Speaking of Netherland, there will be no giveaway this week - we're going dark for the holiday - but you will definitely want to be paying attention to this space next Friday.) ... James Wood is profiled in PW, and gives a quote which sums up (for us) all that is wrong with the academy: "An academic said, 'it's embarrassing that he gets so worked up.' ” ... TEV Guest Reviewer Jim Ruland classes up the LA Times Book Review ... The new issue of Open Letters is online ... Widely noted already is agent Barbara Bauer's lawsuit against those sullying her reputation ... Dara Horn on the new translation of Der Nister's The Family Mashber ... A much-too-brief report from Tuesday's Manchester panel with Martin Amis and James Wood ... Cigar Aficionado looks at the Cuban tradition of reading aloud to workers in cigar factories: "The workers were read novels such as Les Miserables by Victor Hugo; works by Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville; and many other important Spanish, Cuban and Latin American writers. There was also the indispensable reading of newspapers. And famous cigar brands such as Romeo y Julieta and Montecristo were created because of the reading of William Shakespeare and Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo." ... The male mid-life crisis, from Shakespeare to today's BMW motorbikes ... The San Francisco Bay Guardian notes Horacio Castellanos Moya's marvelous Senselessness (coming soon to a Recommended sidebar near you) and Moya is profiled in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ... Fay Weldon finds Attachment "gratifyingly readable" ...  Bangladeshi novelist-in-hiding Taslima Nasreen joined international writers gathered at a literary conference in Stockholm Tuesday to deplore how censorship and persecution affect their work ... The Washington Post does a feature on "Bit o' Lit," a great D.C. area book excerpt freebie (which was kind enough to excerpt Harry, Revised for our aborted D.C. visit) ... Africa News reports on the growing success of Kwani Litfest ... The great Hungarian novelist George Konrad is interviewed at Hungarian Literature Online (via) ... Joyce Carol Oates?  Slacker!  Philip Roth?  Layabout!  Consider Rajesh Kumar with 1,250 novels and 2,000 short stories to his name ... Prague writer Lenka Reinerová has died at 92 ... A groovy Colm Toibin picture ... Looks like John Keats would have been very much at home in some sections of Brooklyn today ... Michael Ondaatje in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel ... Jonathan Karp's much-linked-to thoughts on "The Disposable Book" ... Nam Le in conversation with the L.A. Times (via Newsday) ... Despite all promises to the contrary, the obligatory James Bond post ...  A secret cache of love letters reveals how John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, re-enacted his epic story of forbidden passion with a young student ... And, finally, we're not usually big into videos of writers talking about their work, but there's something undeniably charming about Rowan Somerville's no-frills production discussing the genesis of his novel The End of Sleep.  Happy holidays, y'all - see you back here on Monday.

Posted by TEV at 12:01 AM in Marginalia |

Comments

I think I need a bit more on the Woods quote. I even read the context, and I can't say I really understand how that sentence sums up (for you) "all that is wrong with the academy." Does that mean academics tend to be cold . . . and that's ALL that's wrong with the academy? Or was this just hyperbole?

Posted by: Benjamin D Hagen | July 03, 2008 at 01:42 PM

Well, hyperbole is the house speciality ...

Sorry for the lack of clarity - your first read, the sums up interpretation, is what I meant. But I don't think my stance is that unusual or even uncommon. I frequently find those who feel that it's with statements like that - one mustn't like! one mustn't enthuse! one mustn't use the word "good"! - that the world of literary studies renders itself essentially irrelevant to all but other academics.

Mind you, this is all coming from a non-academic perspective, and some of my best friends are academics ...

Posted by: TEV | July 03, 2008 at 02:34 PM

Well, I was at the Amis/Wood meeting and a fun time was had by all.

Amis was the more quotable of the two and I thought JW looked a little nervous. The whole thing was only let down by some poor questions at the end.

Posted by: Dick Madeley | July 04, 2008 at 08:10 AM

Re: the Wood/Amis meeting, it is reported:

"To [Wood], the striking parallel between religion and fiction was that both had to do with belief. The difference was that the novel couldn't command belief with religion's authority, because it was already too aware of its own status - what Wood, citing Thomas Mann, called the 'game of not-quite'."

Here's a humbug-free translation: fiction is defined as the opposite of fact, whereas the tenets of the religion in question were presented, for tens of centuries, as fact.

It is also reported:

"Wood said he had the sneaking suspicion that the collapse of doctrinal religion was somehow bound up with the rise of the novel in the mid 19th century. It was a half-baked theory, he was quick to add, that 'needed work and time'..." (One has a "sneaking suspicion" that the concept of the *Industrial Revolution* will hobble, cruelly, this "theory").

The difference in quality and intensity of "belief" as it applies to fiction, versus how it works in religion, is the difference between seduction and brainwashing; it's not a case of Mann's "game of the not-quite", and if it seems to be, it's because "belief" is so broad a term that its usage here is deceiving.

Misunderstanding the profound difference between the mutual pleasures of seduction and the unilateral tenacity of brainwashing, Wood once wrote, as though any *genuine* believer in a religion came to this belief via intellectual choice (rather than congenital brainwashing):

****''Fiction, being the game of not quite, is the place of not-quite-belief. Precisely what is a danger in religion is the very fabric of fiction. In religion, a belief that is only 'as if' is either the prelude to a loss of faith, or an instance of bad faith (in both senses of the word). If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one's choice is marked under the category of refusal, and is thus never really free: it is the duress of a recoil. Once religion has revealed itself to you, you are never free.

''In fiction, by contrast, one is always free to choose not to believe, and this very freedom, this shadow of doubt, is what helps to constitute fiction's reality. Furthermore, even when one is believing fiction, one is 'not quite' believing, one is believing 'as if.' (One can always close the book, go outside and kick a stone.) Fiction asks us to judge its reality; religion asserts its reality. And this is all a way of saying that fiction is a special realm of freedom.''****

A fiction is only a "special realm of freedom" to the extent that one hasn't been browbeaten, from birth, into believing it true.

That folks were raised into a centuries-old tradition of believing that Christ is the son of God will go a long way towards explaining why they'd grant the men in the funny costumes in the big stone buildings more "authority" (yeah, yeah, I know: the ambiguity of the word seems ripe for the plucking) than they accorded, say, Jane Austen. They knew (or suspected without needing it confirmed) that Jane Austen was a female earthling who'd sat down to a desk with a quill pen and made it all up, hoping to be paid for the effort.

And even if Jane Austen *hadn't* been making it all up, they knew (or suspected) she wasn't capable of hurling thunderbolts in order to enforce her dietary proscriptions and sundry commandments. The power to hurl thunderbolts is a pretty good basis for "commanding authority", the pleasure (and sheer flimflam value) of quoting Thomas Mann notwithstanding.

Sporting that not-quite tonsure of his, it's easy to see Wood fancies himself a priest of some sort; easy, also, to see how his *at-heart-trite* fiction/religion metaphor flatters that self-image. "Easy", I mean, if one isn't one of Wood's, ahem, Believers.

Posted by: Steven Augustine | July 05, 2008 at 06:16 AM

just wanted to say that i really enjoyed surfing your blog. a real effort of love for literature. i am sort of new to the blogworld and slowly getting used to its multi-dimensionality.

- moazzam

Posted by: Moazzam Sheikh | July 06, 2008 at 12:05 AM

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