MDDM Ch. 72 Dixon and the slave driver (Italics)

[Terrance]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> >>>Likewise, even if all of Dixon's italics indicate that he is shaking the
> whip or even lashing,  there is nothing in the text to suggest that Dixon is
> not simply shaking the whip in the air, failing to inflict injury on the
> Driver.<<<
> 
> There is nothing in the text to definitively state. If you put together
> Dixon's words, the reactions of the onlookers, the broken tooth, the bodily
> position of the slavedriver, there is much to suggest the possibility of a
> whipped slavedriver.

So maybe it is poorly written. Or has P decided to experiment with this
sort of italics use in **this chapter only? At this scene only. That
would be something to look into. Certainly if these are the only
examples where italics are used to indicate action, we have a right to
fault the author. Don't we? Maybe not. 

Maybe it's only P posting modernism again. 


Faulkner hits us with his italics at the opening of The Sound and the
Fury. Messed me up the first time I read that opening scene I had no
idea what the hell was going on. OH! A tale told by an idiot! I get it!
Hitting, oh, golf and what is he remembering? A smell? 
With Joyce we know what that we are inside thinking and that thought is
jumping about inside and out, Stephen crushing the sea shells with his
feet as he walks, his mind racing about from Adam and Eve to his mother,
to Hamlet and so on. 


Woolf is an interesting experiment, the cubist painting, but it is the
middle part of the novel where we get the italics. Right? Someone that
has read it or read it recently? 

Time accellerates and we get the creation in seven days run backward,
not unlike what happens to SLothrop on the ship when hs pukes over the
rail and goes flowing through his Puritan heritage. Anyway, Woolf's
chapter, there are three chapters I think and the middle one is where we
get the italics, it's stream of consciousness similar to Joyce's Ulysses
or Faulkner, but the chapter subverts all sorts of narrative convention.
It's the shortest chapter but it coves the longest period in the novels
chronology. It also cover all time, from the biblical abyss to the war.
The war wipes out characters we have come to know and their deaths, not
unlike what happens to Slothrop when he discovers that his good friend
Tnativy has been killed, are simply announced like newspaper headings.
blah blah blah

but the point is, if P has decided to use this unconventional italics at
this scene only, this must be significant. maybe not.    
> 
> >>>But, if we can find other examples where P uses italics in this way<<<
> 
> The way in which they are used includes multiple repetitions of the same
> word or variant thereof, and parallel structure of usage by two characters
> in response to one another.


Yes, and I like think Bandwraith is really onto it with the master/slave
stuff.