...but I digress...

My interest (sometime healthy, sometimes unhealthy) in English-language style and usage got another little jolt from the new Louis Menand piece in The New Yorker, which starts out with a smackdown of Eats, Shoots & Leaves reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's gentle encounter with the pedantic moviegoer in Annie Hall. That bit is entertaining enough, but here's where the real shooting starts: "Truss has got things mixed up because she has confused two aspects of writing: the technological and the aesthetic. [....] What most punctuation does not do is add color, texture, or flavor to the writing. Those are all things that belong to the aesthetics, and literary aesthetics are weirdly intangible."

That bit of business behind, the piece unfolds into a wonderful discussion of the writer's "voice" and the appreciative reader:

“I do not care for movies very much and I rarely see them,” W. H. Auden wrote to the editors of The Nation in 1944. “Further, I am suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, to find myself not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else in The Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to reading him again.” A lot of the movies that James Agee reviewed between 1942 and 1948, when he was The Nation’s film critic, were negligible then and are forgotten now. But you can still read his columns with pleasure. They continue to pass the ultimate test of good writing: it is more painful to stop reading them than it is to keep going. When you get to the end of Agee’s sentences, you wish, like Auden, that there were more sentences.

I was thrilled by this (probably overly thrilled: I just about channeled the googly-eyed, slobbering Back to School/Rodney Dangerfield/Thornton Melon "Yes...yes...yes" when I got to the end of the piece), because the topics of grammar, style and voice in writing have been percolating with me these days while reading Arthur Quinn's Figures of Speech. I've owned this book since graduate school (*cough*first-term Reagan administration*cough*), but did no more than give it a superficial read for the purpose of strip-mining it for some paper, I'm sure, way back then. I am so glad that this volume somehow survived the sloughing off of hundreds (nay, thousands) of books in my library amid moves and "decluttering" and purging over the years, allowing me to pick it up about a month ago and finally read it the way it ought to be read.

In this book, Quinn presents more than sixty rhetorical devices with very fancy and unpronounceable (at least by me) names, such as: antioptosis; brachylogia; hysteron-proteron; praeteritio; and tmesis. He uses examples from powerful writing (Shakespeare, and the Bible [—King James Version, thank you very much!]) to illustrate each rhetorical device. The "figures" and their examples are fascinating, but it's his attitude that's admirable:

Writing is not like chemical engineering. We shouldn't learn the figures of speech the way we learn the periodic table of elements. We shouldn't because we are learning not about hypothetical structures in things, but about real potentialities within our language, within ourselves [....] Therefore, in what follows, the quotations from Shakespeare, the Bible, and other sources are not presented to exemplify the definitions; the definitions are presented to lead to the quotations. And the quotations are there to show us how to do with language what we have not done before. They are there—must I confess?—for imitation.

and

The danger in a classification system such as this is that, like the robot which turns upon and begins to dictate to its maker, it can become an end in itself. The system will have served its purpose not when it is "complete" (whatever that means), but when it can be dispensed with. Its function is partial and temporary. We are not going to follow in the footsteps of the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Things get even more interesting once you stop thinking of writing style strictures as "rules" and start thinking of them as "fashion":

The most influential work written in early modern Europe on the figures of speech was De Copia by Erasmus. As the title suggests, Erasmus was primarily interested in teaching how to write more copiously. His readers would learn how to use many words where the common herd used only a few. At one point he developed more than a hundred variations on the sentence "Your letter has delighted me very much." "With what joy do you suppose I am filled when I recognize your soul in your letter! When the letter carrier handed me your letter, my spirit at once began to thrill with an ineffable joy. How shall I tell you what joy titillated the spirit of your Erasmus when he received your letter?" Hemingway would not approve.

The baroque identification of eloquence with copiousness is so far from official twentieth century taste that scarcely a guidebook on writing does not contain an admonition such as the following: "Be brief. Do not repeat yourself. Say what you have to say in as few words as possible. To belabor your point is to risk boring your reader—or even insulting his intelligence."

Erasmus would not lack words for a reply. He would point out that the author of this advice had thought it so important that he was not brief, did repeat himself, used as many words as he dared, and had insulted the intelligence of his reader by contradicting himself in the process. "How shall I tell what joy titillated the spirit of your Erasmus when he read your foolish passage?"

And all y'all who were making fun of Shepard Smith for skipping verbs? He's just using "scesis onamaton[, which] has become a conventional way to indicate either the apprehension of immediate particulars or the flow of consciousness."

Don't get me wrong—I'll continue to glower fiercely at folks whose job it is to uphold the standards of standard English and who fall down on the job. But I hope to squelch my inner grammar prig if its fixation on letter-perfection threatens to obscure what actually matters—the spirit of the thing.

In the meantime, I've sought out more of Quinn's wryly perceptive observations, rendered in elegant prose, in his historical narrative A New World: An Epic of Colonial America from the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec, which I'm finding (happy sigh) "more painful to stop reading...than to keep going". Next? I'm saving my pennies for Quinn's The Confidence of British Philosophers (Studies in the History of Christian Thought, No. XVII).

The dead-tree issue of The New Yorker in which the Menand piece appears showed up in my mailbox today, but the hat tip for its sneak-preview online incarnation goes to Language Log. OGIC also links to the piece, and adds an intriguing recommendation for style guides written by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. I stopped collecting books on language usage around the time I started drafting legal documents for a living, so Karen Elizabeth Gordon hadn't been on my radar screen...but then I realized that I have her cookbook, The Garden of Eternal Swallows, picked up during my brief vegetarian phase (swiftly ended once I could afford red meat), then kept through the years as one of a group of cookbooks that I don't really cook from much, but which I keep around because I enjoy reading them (along with: Jane and Michael Stern's American Gourmet, Ida Guillory's Cookin' with Queen Ida, and, especially in retrospect of her death too young, the heartbreakingly beautiful Home Cooking and More Home Cooking from Laurie Colwin). Although this post digresses far from the garden-related, I'll end with this strangely apt quote from The Garden of Eternal Swallows' afterword:

Because the recipes accumulated during metamorphoses I no longer care to recount, taciturnity being one of the later stages—I'll say that much—we have here a cornucopia of disparities in which the questions and answers of sound nutrition still play at blind man's bluff. In harmonizing what felt like contradictions within myself, I have squeezed the rules out of the sense, and only the garden remains.

Arthur Quinn, Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase. Gibbs M. Smith Inc., 1982. ISBN 0-87905-121-3.

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Garden of Eternal Swallows. Shambala, 1980. ISBN 0-394-73948-5.

Comments

[C. S. Froning]

Jane Austen is a good example of an author who used punctuation in service to style: she made more and better use of the semi-colon and especially the em-dash than any other author I can think of.

From Mr. Darcy's letter:

Two offences of a very different nature, and by no means of equal magnitude, you last night laid to my charge. The first mentioned was, that, regardless of the sentiments of either, I had detached Mr. Bingley from your sister; -- and the other, that I had, in defiance of various claims, in defiance of honour and humanity, ruined the immediate prosperity, and blasted the prospects of Mr. Wickham. -- Wilfully and wantonly to have thrown off the companion of my youth, the acknowledged favourite of my father, a young man who had scarcely any other dependence than on our patronage, and who had been brought up to expect its exertion, would be a depravity to which the separation of two young persons, whose affection could be the growth of only a few weeks, could bear no comparison. -- But from the severity of that blame which was last night so liberally bestowed, respecting each circumstance, I shall hope to be in future secured, when the following account of my actions and their motives has been read. -- If, in the explanation of them which is due to myself, I am under the necessity of relating feelings which may be offensive to your's, I can only say that I am sorry. -- The necessity must be obeyed -- and farther apology would be absurd. --

[Chan S.]

Wonderful comment--thank you!

[Chan S.]

Excerpt being from Pride and Prejudice, of course. (D'oh!)

[cloularogue]

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