"1984" and "Gravity's Rainbow"

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 30, 2009, at 3:01 AM, Campbel Morgan wrote:

[Not that Campbel Morgan wrote 1984—give credit where credit is due]

> Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in  
> the protection of the muslin curtain. . . .

> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Robin
> Landseadel<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>> "A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.”
>>
>> Sir Thomas Beecham
>>
>>
>> On Jul 29, 2009, at 4:35 PM, Campbel Morgan wrote:
>>
>>> the young Hamlet giving acting lessons to
>>> professional actors, for example.

The young Hamlet giving acting lessons to professional actors Is  
verbal music of the highest order, and what Eric Arthur Blair was  
talking about was anti-music.

To produce Hamlet as an example of a "bad play" [a straw man propped  
up to demonstrate that Against the Day is "cobbled together"] is very  
silly and very pretentious. There's hardly any writing as musical as:

	Hamlet: Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you,	 
trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of your
	players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do
	not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently;
	for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of
	your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that
	may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a
	robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very
	rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part 	
	are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise.
	it out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.
	
	First Player: I warrant your honour.

	Hamlet: Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be
	your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,
	with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty
	of nature. For anything so o'erdone is from the purpose of
	playing, whose end both at the first and now, was and is, to hold
	as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own
	feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the
	time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy
	off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the
	judicious grieve, the censure of the which one must in your
	allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. Oh, there be
	players that I have seen play, and heard others praise and that
	highly, not to speak it profanely, that neither having the accent
	of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so
	strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's 	
	journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they
	imitated humanity so abominably.

	First Player: I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us,
	sir.

	Hamlet: Oh reform it altogether. And let those that play your
	clowns speak no more than is set down for them, for there be of
	them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of
	barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some
	necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's
	villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that
	uses it. Go make you ready.
	—Hamlet, (3.2.1-36)

A play within a play is the very point of Hamlet and what better  
opportunity for Shakespeare to give stage directions than the words he  
so elegantly placed in Hamlet's mouth?

I won't argue that Against the Day is some neatly plotted unified  
field theory of a book—Pynchon unspooling a thread concerning  
quaternions seems to point to some virtue in rambling—but to then  
point to Hamlet as an example of how not to write a play, when  
Hamlet's soliloquies and speeches are among Shakespeare's best  
music . . .

The play's the thing, Campbel, not the plot.