Proust, Jenga, and a baleful smear.

[wwidsith]

So have a look at this catchy sentence, which Proust uses to open the second volume of his novel sequence.

My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of

Comments

and part 2

[weofodthignen]

But the unclarity of James, it seems to me, is at the paragraph level and above. It just doesn't hang together. It seems designed to be incoherent. I never heard this from my father about Proust, and that sentence you quote seems to be going somewhere, albeit under a heavy load - which is Proust's evident purpose.

Now the Pynchon I find completely clear, if impressionistic. It seems to me that the objections will be of 2 kinds. One is stylistic, to the use of almost shockingly weird words (the sun as a device, the sun as baleful, the sun as almost shapeless) - I tend that way myself and have frequently been told it's a silly thing to do, over-dramatic and over-intellectual. Only a subset of readers like that kind of heated style. The other is to his point, about being weirded out by the sun. And to evaluate that I'd have to have read the guy :-) But both Proust and James are doing it about people, which tends to attract different readers from writers who do it about landscapes or events.

Your point about the importance of clarity in non-fiction is worth unpacking, I think. It's taken as a truism, but I think it must of necessity be far more of a truism in film (think of how people have reacted to the demands on comprehension from Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland and other stuff with split-screen and embedded narratives, and I can't follow Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes - identically dressed people grunting against a background of washed out green. Seems to be a replay of that Conrad book with less exposition. In non-fiction books, I don't think I agree. My housemate and I have both happened to read books about class recently. We were both disgusted by the thin amount of actual information stretched out with acres of jargon. I, however, was interested in the details and in second-guessing the writer I read by envisaging alternate interpretations and saying "yes but", and as usual found the pictures invaluable and the captions at times amazingly naive. (Also as usual, I counted all the copyediting flaws, including mistranslations, against the writer.) She was just exasperated not to get more of an education from the 2 or 3 books she read in the same time. I know we also have whole classes of mixed documentary and analysis books - novelizations of fact in some sense or the other - that emerged in the 20th century but presumably hark back to when fiction and fact were not rigidly separated. I'm thinking of Theodor Dreiser and then Truman Capote as bookends, but I'm ill-informed on this stuff. John Betjeman's discurses on architecture would be an example I've actually read where the style of writing is important and the stuff is fun to read as well as informative. I suspect we learn better from that than from dry textbook writing. (I have an ongoing project of translating Jan de Vries' Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte and everyone agrees the resulting prose is boring. It's also the most erudite summary available.)

End of lengthy, somewhat callow, and opinionated response.

M