Language Archives - A Geography of Reading

Opening up Language with Aureole by Carole Maso

September 29, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I started reading Aureole by Carole Maso because Goodreads told me that Gwendolyn Jerris wanted to read it and I needed the kind of book that Gwen loves—lyrical literature like Inner China that falls somewhere between poetry and prose. It’s a type of writing that echoes that of our shared advisor, Micheline Marcom, and one I think we both aspire to in our own way. I started reading this book because I needed to get lost in language—to see again what some of its outer limits are.

What I didn’t realize until I opened the book and started reading the introduction was how very perfect this book would be for stretching my language and my thinking. To start with, it turns out that Maso is, like I, a prose writer writing poetry. Longtime readers of this blog will have seen me fall in love with all kinds of writers who dance along that line (most notably Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje). But when Maso started describing her process for writing this book—for the way she was deliberately reinventing her language—I was hooked. She writes “If I felt I was doing something I already knew how to do well, the rule was to start again.”

Part of my struggle is that I’ve been doing a lot of blogging lately. And I don’t mean for this blog. At work, I’m writing about content marketing and other forms of digital marketing where the very best thing I can do for the audience is write simply and clearly as I try to demystify aspects of the topic. What that’s left for this writer, though, is a large hole in my creativity where I want to be mysterious. I want to be oblique. I want to stretch pull tease and twist language until it does my bidding and my readers can learn about how to reinvent their worlds along with their words rather than following expected paths to get measurable results.

Finding Sense in Nonsense

“When they are French, which they often are, especially in bed they say dérangement. When they are French, and this is Paris, which it often is—so beautiful, so light-dappled, such light—the window opening up onto everything, everything: the tree-lined boulevard, the stars, the Tour Eiffel, she says, it’s like a cliché, only beautiful: croissant, vin rouge, fromage, French poodles, polka dots. When they are French.” – Carole Maso

Actually, the passage above is hardly nonsense, at least not in a Steinian sort of way (though I know Maso was reading Stein when she wrote this). But there is a certain amount of arbitrariness and randomness to the connection of the thoughts. When they are French? Usually Frenchness is more of a permanent state than that. This allowance that it’s an identity the two characters can put on or take off is playful and perhaps something they put on when they are in France. As this story evolves, “When they are French” also starts to mean when they are lovers or in bed. I absolutely adore the openness of this and the fact that some of the meaning I’ve just imparted comes from my head and that if you read this story, you might have an entirely different (and equally valid) meaning.

That openness of meaning is so much what I crave reading and also writing. A work that only achieves its full meaning through interaction with a reader just seems like magic to me. And although I bring my own feelings and experiences into a reading of Madame Bovary, you and I are much less likely to be able to build castles of our own interpretations of it because the narrative and language are much more conventional.

Sound

“A dream of sucking, akimbo.” – Maso

Now would probably be a good time to mention that this book is mostly comprised of erotic adventures both hetero- and homosexual. In case erotica isn’t your thing. In many places Maso exploits the softer vowel sounds so well as the crescendo of each act builds that I didn’t even see what she was doing until she interposed a different, harder sound. At some point I’d really like to re-read this book aloud just to feel her mastery of sound.

Rhythm of Language

“And she opens her hand, her life to him: a blur of wings.

And desperately.

And desperately then.” – Maso

Another thing that really makes me want to read this book aloud is the way that Maso uses the rhythm of the words. Imagine after reading an entire chapter of foreplay and play and allusions to the act of sex, reaching this peak…

You Can’t Push All the Time

All of this fabulous word play and invention of syntax and crazy sensuous juxtaposition so pushed my thinking of what words can do that when I reached a line that read “threshold of all possibility,” the mundanity of those words only highlighted how wonderful the rest of the book is. What this means for me and my writing is that if I’m going to push the limits, I’m going to have to really go for it, because the moments that I flinch or get lazy will be obvious to the careful reader. And worse, they will disappoint me if I catch myself doing it.

The Next Journey

A completely unexpected moment in this book is when Maso references India. I’m actually leaving for India in just over a week and suddenly it’s everywhere, including in A Mapmaker’s Dream, another book I read this weekend.

That sounds like a complete and total non sequitur, but I had to find some way to drop in the fact that my blogging might be a bit sporadic in October. I’ve bought all of these books:

(Two of which I’ve since read) and I plan to pack as many of them in my luggage as I can and to write when I can. Maso described a character’s “ink-stained hands (the measure of her day)” and I plan to get some of that in as well. Maybe I can find my own language in the interstices of poetry and prose. I’m sure as hell going to try.

If you want to open up the boundaries of the way you use language, pick up a copy of Aureole from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reinventing Language with The God of Small Things

January 20, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - Cover

Of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, John Updike wrote, “A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.” This quote alone is neither complimentary nor derogatory, but after reading this gorgeous book, I am awestruck at how Roy’s small tweaks to spelling, capitalization, and compound words captured both my attention and the essence of the characters and setting. The language she invents for this book is only the beginning of her ambition and every word on every page is worth the read.

Discovering the True Grammar of a Story

Roy shows from the very beginning of this book that she is doing something different with her language and that to get the most out of the story, the reader will have to trust her. Her wordplay begins subtly as she joins adjectives and nouns into unfamiliar compound words like “dustgreen” and “mossgreen.” It’s a hint of what’s to come, but it’s so gentle that it’s not at all off-putting.

Then Roy begins to emphasize words with unexpected capitalization, as when she writes, “[W]hen life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever.” Because much of the story centers around children, these capitalized words bear the weight of a mother’s emphasis—they become words and lessons even when we don’t yet have the context for them. These capital letters also show us how characters see each other. For example, Sophie Mol is often described as “Sophie Mol, hatted bell-bottomed and Loved from the Beginning” in contrast to Rahel whose birth forever marred her mother’s life.

Roy also creates weight around words by intentionally misspelling them. For example, Estha is given “pocket money” at a movie theater to fetch a soda. The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, who will go on to molest Estha in a few moments, calls this “porketmunny” instead, which denotes both that he comes from a lower caste than Estha and also that he is teasing him. The scene that ensues between them is an important one and this linguistic variation (denoted through the varied spellings) adds a nuance to the moment that could have easily been overwritten if the differences between the two characters had to be described instead.

I’m glad I surrendered my copy editor’s eye to the way Roy was using language. I’m certain this book was a nightmare during the galley correction stage, but the end product is wonderful.

Piecing Together a Fractured Narrative

Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. – Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

True to the above quote, Roy reveals early that the young Sophie Mol will die and that her death changes everything for the family. The author shifts easily backward and forward in time as she describes the aftermath of Sophie’s death (spanning decades) and the events leading up to it. Clues are nestled throughout the novel, and yet when we come to the actual death it is both satisfying to finally know and unsatisfying that one event could have such a devastating effect for generations of a family. In this way, the art of the story imitates the justifications we seek in life for terrible events that occur, even though the answers offer no solace.

Some Books Deserve a Quiet Weekend Alone

A book this carefully constructed demands your full attention. I recommend holing up somewhere without distractions so you can fully surrender to Roy’s language and follow the emotional logic of her narrative.

Are there other books you’ve encountered that use subtle wordplay as artfully as The God of Small Things? Please tell me about them in the comments below.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The God of Small Things from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Epistrophe in Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato

October 13, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 5 Comments

“It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker. Billy Boy had died of fright, scared to death on the field of battle, and Frenchie Tucker had been shot through the nose. Bernie Lynn and Lieutenant Sidney Martin had died in tunnels. Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Buff was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead.”

So begins Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien. In six sentences he repeats the words “was dead” five times and “death” or “died” three times. With this repetition, he sets a horrible scene—a battlefield in Vietnam where the men expect to die—and it becomes easy to sympathize with Cacciato as he sets off on foot for Paris. France.

What is O’Brien Doing with this Repetition?

What O’Brien is doing, repeating a phrase at the end of clauses, is called epistrophe. This rhetorical device is meant to bring emphasis. But like its sibling, anaphora (same thing but placed at the beginning of clauses), epistrophe adds more than emphasis—it creates an incantatory effect. It creates magic.

Writers are often taught that repetition is a bad thing, but if we look at the world around us, we can see how entrancing this effect is. Think about the verses of the popular song that are stuck in your head right now—nearly any song will do. Even if the phrases do not repeat within the verse, the verse itself is a repetition and the words become nearly impossible to forget.

Epistrophe as Framing Device

Because O’Brien sinks the phrase “was dead” so deep in our psyche as we read this passage, we feel the inevitability of death as much as the soldiers do. It becomes accepted. This may sound callous, but it isn’t. O’Brien is setting the reader in the same psychic landscape as the soldiers. He is also allowing himself a lot of freedom.

What do I mean by that?

By building a grand expectation of death and dying in these first sentences, O’Brien doesn’t have to mention death at all for a very long time. He is free to explore his characters and the odd situation with Cacciato for pages at a time without returning to the topic of death. That’s because the epistrophe has sunk in and the reader is repeating (knowingly or not) “was dead.” There is a limit and if O’Brien never brings the topic up again, the opening would be wrong for this book. But the next time he does bring up death, it builds on and affirms this rich incantation that he’s already created for us.

In fact, O’Brien waits a full page before bringing up death again (I think he could have waited even longer). In another book, that might seem like a short time, but the intervening passage is filled with rot and missing soldiers and lost limbs (things that also contribute to the general atmosphere of the book) in a staccato, Hemingway-esque style that is also uniquely O’Brien.

I am only a few pages into this novel and I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen, but I am excited to see how O’Brien builds on his epistrophe.

I started using anaphora in my own work in an unconscious way. It wasn’t until an advisor pointed it out that I was able to play with the power of this device. And there is power in it. Until picking up Going After Cacciato, I had thought it was a device better suited to meditations and magical stories. O’Brien is showing me how limited my imagination was, and I can’t wait to play with epistrophe next.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Going After Cacciato from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Dubravka Ugrešić: The Language of a Refugee in The Ministry of Pain

June 8, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

We’re coming back from Croatia today, so here, at long last, is a post on Ugrešić.

In an interview with James Marcus, Dubravka Ugrešić said The Ministry of Pain “is all about language.” Ugrešić uses language as a metonym for culture to express the complexity of Tanja Lucić’s identity in terms of her relationship with her homeland, Yugoslavia, and her language, Serbo-Croatian, “a subject that officially no longer existed.”

Tanja is a well-educated and hyper-articulate professor of Serbo-Croatian living in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam. She has difficulty processing who she is in the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, and because she is a professor of language and literature, she is able to articulate her experience best in the context of her language. Tanja experiences a kind of “linguistic schizophrenia” where “[t]here were times I felt like a student of Croatian as a foreign language” and she experiences her “native language as alien.” She is trapped in a no-man’s land between her native language, Serbo-Croatian, and the newly defined Croatian, unable to express herself fully in either. Language, which is the comfort of any writer or student of literature, has become her torment, and because this is a first person narrative, the reader is painfully aware of Tanja’s inability to define herself.

Tanja has lived in Berlin and Amsterdam and her husband is in Japan, but all of these places are temporary. She knows that because she cannot return permanently to Zagreb, she has no home anymore. Her identity belongs to a country, and a language, that has been divided like a schizophrenic mind. This foreignness of Tanja’s own language mimics the feelings she is having as a displaced person—a refugee. Because she comes from a country that no longer exists, she is unmoored and must create a new cultural identity for herself. “I sometimes feel that here, surrounded by Dutch and communicating in English, I am learning my native language from scratch.” She must also create her identity from scratch away from a home that was irrevocably changed.

Even in her dreams Tanja is best expressing her feelings through the metonym of language. She dreams of “a native language that had turned into three languages like a dragon with a forked tongue.” The dragon is a menacing figure and the image is of dividing something that was once one whole into parts that can whip and lash and hurt. The image evokes language emerging along with a dragon’s fiery breath. In another passage she recounts a dream where “I speak an unchecked, uncontrollable language, a language with a false bottom, whose words leap out like a jack-in-the-box and thumb their nose at me.” This captures her tenuousness as she finally begins to learn Dutch and integrate herself with her host country at the end of the book. Language can drop out from under her at any time. Words, formerly her intimate friends, can now jump out and mock her. Tanja is completely exposed in the area she was once most comfortable—language.

Language fails Tanja as returns to what remains of her native country for a short visit. The street names have changed in Zagreb and she can no longer navigate what used to be home. Of getting lost in familiar streets, she writes: “[t]he refugee trauma, the equivalent of the sudden disappearance of the mother from a child’s field of vision, had surfaced where I’d least expected: ‘at home.’” Tanja is stripped of all that is familiar to her. She has left behind her home and her language, but when she returns home—to the place that should bring the comfort of a mother’s arms—she finds it changed and is slapped in the face with how unmoored she truly is. When she discusses it with a man on the plane back to Amsterdam, the experience really comes alive:

“You had every reason to get lost….So many street names have changed”

“But the streets are the same.”

“Not if they have new names”

The renaming of the streets makes the change real. It is the act of naming, the words, that define the new Zagreb. The old names are being erased and covered up with new names just as Tanja’s history is being erased.

Language is explicitly political in The Ministry of Pain: “[a] language is a dialect backed by an army.” Tanja tries to broker a peace between the Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian in her classroom by focusing on the similarities of the Yugoslav peoples in the same way she has “no interest in dividing [Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian] up by the fifty or so words that distinguished them.” Though Tanja perceives the differences in her students, the “Zagreb way of talking,” she unites them with reminiscences about their childhoods in Yugoslavia and reminds her students of their commonalities. Tanja is returning her students in memory to the “happier” times when their ethnic factions had a common enemy. Though she cannot return to Yugoslavia, she can create a proxy in her classroom.

Tanja projects her own torment over language onto her students. Some of the students are integrating with their host country as their language is “being taken over by a half-baked English and, more recently, half-baked Dutch.” Nevena is “‘more comfortable in Dutch,’” “as if Dutch were a sleeping bag.” Shell-shocked out of their mother tongues, “[l]anguage was our common trauma” “my students had an easier time saying what they had to say in languages not their own.” This connotes Tanja’s concern that her students have lost their cultural identity, and the cultural identity she would like to ascribe to them and have them identify with along with her is Yugoslav.

Initially, Tanja asks her students to write in English because “using ‘our language’ would lead them to adopt a confessional mode.” She is afraid that if she allowed her students to use Serbo-Croatian, they would relinquish control of their emotions. What she finds is that “writing in a foreign language had provided an excuse for being dry and brief.” The students use the opportunity of writing in English to separate themselves further from their experiences and efface the vehemence of emotion associated with their linguistic differences. Later, Igor tells her that the students were trying to please her and that she never fully grasped what they needed. They were acting out her denial.

Tanja presents herself as a Yugoslav in exile, but her compatriots are acknowledging the division and therefore destruction of Yugoslavia and are finding new identities and new languages. Tanja laments the students’ loss of their culture. Even when implying that the survivors of the Balkan Wars will move forward, she forecasts a hollowness in their futures: “[t]hey will be linguistically gifted, speaking several languages and creating a Eurospeak of their own, peppering it with personal coinages.” Eurospeak is at once all languages and none. It has no homeland associated with it and what Tanja longs for most is a homeland. Ironically, Serbo-Croatian was itself a melding of languages, but Eurospeak belongs to the identity “European,” and in her heart, Tanja is Yugoslavian.

Violence is inherent in the imagery of Serbo-Croatian: “‘in other languages children sleep the sleep of the just and in mine they sleep the sleep of the butchered.’” Boban reminds the class of the inherent danger of speaking his mother tongue as he tells of his dream of being lost in Zagreb “‘afraid to ask for directions, because people would hear that he was from Belgrade.’” The reader wonders if in acknowledging this, the students feel the violence in themselves and between their cultures is inevitable. At the end of the book, Tanja muses: “I keep wondering whether a language thus maimed, a language that has never learned to depict reality, complex as the inner experience of that reality may be, is capable of doing anything at all, telling stories, for instance.” How does one rebuild a life in the ashes of a pogrom?

This violence manifests in the end, when Igor, a former student, ties Tanja up and holds her captive. He lectures her on the part language plays in culture and forces her to confront the alienation she is experiencing:

“[y]our course was about a culture that totally compromised itself, and you neglected to mention that fact….when you lectured on Andrić, you neglected to mention that the current cohort of culture butchers have chopped him in three….when you lectured on literary history, you neglected to mention that the Sarajevo University Library was bombed out of existence.”

Igor has forced Tanja back into seeing how her beloved language and literature are inseparable parts of the culture for which she has been pining. After he leaves her, she reminds herself that “there is only humiliation and the pain of endless memory.” She can no longer hide within her metonym, and she now has to live through the entirety of her loss. From the ashes of her cultural identity, she finally begins to build anew.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Ministry of Pain from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Henry Miller: Origins and Originality in Tropic of Cancer

May 26, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, I felt like I was returning to the source. There were so many things I recognized in it from other books and other writers that I wondered if Miller was their originator or if he too got them from someone else. From the “crazy little gesture” of the Polish-Irish-English con artist that smacks of Milan Kundera’s obsession with Agnes in Immortality to the phrase “apropos of nothing at all,” Miller left me wanting to consult some grand, comprehensive encyclopedia of intertextuality to see where these ideas were coming from and who else he had influenced and who had influenced him or how much of it had come out of the atmosphere of collective inspiration.

Miller’s stripped-down language and raw reportage made me feel like I was inside the story and experiencing it with him. After leaving Serge’s flophouse, the narrator describes being at a concert: “It’s as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards.” The narrator goes on like that for almost a page with everyday words twisted into this extraordinary description. As a reader I felt like I was an alien encountering my first concert and I loved it. It was strange but wholly evocative. Miller wasn’t writing about what happened at the concert but rather what it felt like to be at the concert. I wish I could do that.

Earlier in the novel Miller describes a dinner party at Tania’s and the effect is the same although his method is different. The paragraph contains no quotation marks but Miller is clearly capturing snippets of conversation: “Halitosis. Gaudy socks. And croutons in the pea soup, if you please. We always have pea soup Friday nights. Won’t you try a little red wine?” The paragraph goes on and on and continues with, “My next play will involve a pluralistic conception of the universe. Revolving drums with calcium lights.” Miller ties together all these short crisp sentences that are at once related to the scene but unrelated to one another so as a reader I felt like I was trapped inside a cocktail party where all the conversation was distilled and thrown at simultaneously. It is manic and dizzying and I loved it.

Miller also has a way of sketching a character with only a few short images. In reference to Olga he writes, “She weighs almost as much as a camel-backed locomotive; she drips with perspiration, has halitosis, and still wears her Circassian wig that looks like excelsior.” It’s incredible. He could have just said she was fat and had bad breath and an afro, but the way he wrote it engages the reader. The oddness of the Circassian reference threw me off balance a little and made me want to draw more of a mental image of this woman. I felt like I would recognize her anywhere.

Miller’s wild descriptions also mirror the wild bohemian lifestyle he was writing about. Even if he hadn’t written about drinking, I felt intoxicated reading these passages. There is a freedom and wildness in these descriptions that I envy. Miller manages to convey both the sense of what is going on and also the feeling of it all happening.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Tropic of Cancer from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.