The Elegant Variation: Banville's marginalia (vs. my own)

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May 19, 2013

Banville's marginalia (vs. my own)

I am forever urging my students to mark up their books, to scribble, deface and decode. It's only by interacting with the books we admire at the sentence level that writers can begin to unlock the secrets of how one's heroes have accomplished their magic. (I should add this need came painfully to me, as I do have the collector's gene, courtesy of my father, and am always aware of the value of objects. But in the end, I forced myself to pick up a pen, and I've never looked back.)

So I'm especially interested today, for a number of reasons, to see this item from The Guardian, in which John Banville has annotated a copy of The Sea. One of the nine screencaps is below:

The annotations are called out on the website, and I found this one most interesting and amusing:

p.88 [on 'succubus'] 'Really should get hold of a dictionary. I'll be interested to see if he/she got to the end of the book before selling it to the second-hand shop. Could have exchanged it for a Chambers or a Shorter Oxford.'

The notion of Banville with a dictionary should resonate for anyone who has read him. I was also struck by this one:

p.244 'Never noticed before the pre-echo of p.264. K[afka] is right, one works in deepest darkness.'

It always fascinates me when writers detect their influences after the fact. In contrast, I suppose I should confess that my second novel is heavily indebted to Banville's own The Book of Evidence - nothing after the fact there. I recently worked my way through the book, taking it apart, trying to figure out how he could break so many rules and still have the book succeed marvelously. Here's a sample of my own, far messier, marginalia:

I cannot figure out why this keeps posting on its side, but you get the general idea. I will leave it to future readers to determine how well I've internalized the lessons of this novel but I remain devoted to my idea that if you are a writer and there is a book you adore, there is no better exercise than stripping the thing down to its foundations to see what it's made of.

Posted at 11:32 AM in Inside the Classroom, Obsessions, On Writing | Permalink

Comments

Surely the first comment means: the reader - previous owner of this copy - who underlined 'succubus' in blue can't have much of a vocabulary if he/she doesn't know that word. If he/she had trouble with that, the chances are he/she may well not have completed the book (being stumped by too many other 'hard words'). Perhaps consciousness of a limited vocabulary sent him/her to the bookshop to exchange it for a dictionary (or it would have been a good thing for his/her education if he/she had). It has nothing to do with Banville having or not having, needing or not needing, a dictionary himself.

Posted by: Tom Traddles | May 20, 2013 at 07:36 AM

Tom, please refer to the headline of the original Guardian item. The annotations are Banville's.

Posted by: TEV | May 20, 2013 at 09:56 AM

How do you strip it down to its foundations?

Posted by: Shelley | May 21, 2013 at 07:54 AM

Hmmm. Though these days, when every other television program is about a vampire or a werewolf, the idea of John Banville looking up the meaning of the world 'succubus' seems absurd, seeing that annotation was, for me, charming and humanizing.

Anyway, always great seeing your process in action, you don't know how inspiring it is!

Posted by: Tony Chavira | May 30, 2013 at 05:59 PM

I really enjoyed this book because I really enjoy despair and self-pity. Especially if it’s couched in a good story by an Irish writer with a fabulous vocabulary. Banville is the saint of sumptuous sentences.

Posted by: Dana Shepard | June 02, 2013 at 02:58 AM

TEV, Surely Tom knows the annotations are Banville's, but is suggesting that he (Banville) was talking about the previous owner of the book in his annotation. Which is how I read it too. Otherwise the remainder of his annotation (including the ref. to "he/she") makes no sense at all.

Posted by: Richard | June 09, 2013 at 08:07 AM

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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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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

May 19, 2013

Banville's marginalia (vs. my own)

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

May 19, 2013

Banville's marginalia (vs. my own)

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism