Re: He shall Purify the sons of Eli...
AntiUtopia (AntiUtopia@aol.com)
Mon, 09 Mar 1998 07:22:05 -0500 (EST)
In a message dated 98-03-09 06:49:09 EST, you write:
<< > piece of writing. Gimmicks are always gimmicks, but it is a writer's
> job to find the Best way to tell a story. The reader will know if it's
> a gimmick or not. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut didn't *need* to
> write certain things in his own handwriting to conceal the ineptness of
> his writing, but he did because it helped create the atmosphere of a
> WWII prisoner camp outhouse where all the Americans puked like pigs
> while the Brits and Germans looked on, disgusted.
Vonnegut + Slaughterhouse-Five = inept writing? I'm sure I must have
missed something in this logical train of thought, because this is perhaps
Vonnegut's most emotionallly wrenching novel. There's not a day that
passes when I don't see an echo of his story in my daily life (getting
crushed into a subway train, feeling that I'm occasionally the victim of
random circumstances, even imagining how to talk to a Tralfamadorian!).
--tim
>>
I think the intent of the original paragraph was that if Vonnegut were a
better writer, he wouldn't have to resort to the gimmick of writing in his own
handwriting to acheive an effect. The gimmick was a crutch he used to be
effective, because he couldn't be effective any other way.
There's some substance to this. Prose and poetry writers who resort to
italics or Capitals in unusual places do so to put emphasis on specific words,
but if the sentence is written correctly a competent reader will know what's
being emphasized without the use of a visual device such as italics or
capitals.
In a sense this is an Aristotelian approach to literature. Aristotle's
Poetics set out as a criteria for good tragedy the dictum that the mere
telling of the story should produce the effect of the tragedy, apart from
spectacle or any of the trappings associated with a live performance. In
literature, then, I imagine the words themselves would produce the desired
effect, apart from their visual appearance...
But on the other hand the person who wrote the quoted post (first quoted
above) does seems to hold to a very narrow view of what literature is and how
it should work. All text was, at one time, handwritten. Typeset text is a
fairly recent invention in the history of writing, even though it is hundreds
of years old. Vonnegut's device recognizes and exploits this change in
convention, bringing in an older convention as a counterpoint to a newer one.
Conventions in language and literature are not laws set in stone, but are
created by writers like Vonnegut. Two hundred years from now handwritten text
in novels could become a standard means of communicating a specific effect.
Pioneering writers would violate that convention, and readers such as the one
Tim quoted above would complain about it...
Jim