Pynchon's sentence structure

[Smoke Teff]

Sentences are as fertile for flux, distortion, innovation as anything else
(thus can hold the novelist's worldview in microcosm), and can consciously
use/exploit the forces timing, convention, expectation to produce
disorientation and surprise to achieve a new and sometimes higher effect,
just as narratives do, just as jokes do.


On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 9:51 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Cool!
>
> And in looking the term up in one of trust crusty old Handbooks I found
> also
> Hypotyposis  the vivid description, especially when used for
> rhetorical or dramatic effect.
>
> Used by poets, the example given is of WB Yeats.
>
> The passage John called our attention to employs what a poetic
> analysis would recognize as an extended metaphor or conceit as well.
>
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 9:50 AM, Jeffrey Calzaloia <jcalz216 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Longtime lurker here, first-time replier. But this is a subject that's
> dear to my heart, and I have to mention Roger Shattuck's "Proust's Way: A
> Filed Guide to 'In Search of Lost Time'" as having the best riff on
> sentence structure that I've yet read. Here's the paragraph in question,
> transcribed in its entirety:
> >
> > "The pendulum-like motion between solitude and sociability also strikes
> the reader in the rhythm of Proust's style. He is famous for the dimensions
> of his sentences. Their coilings and uncoilings encompass the extended
> landscape of the protagonist's mind. Readers as less likely to notice the
> short, one-line sentences even against the ground of lengthier
> constructions. On the one hand, Proust is constantly tempted to fit his
> endlessly expanding, introspective universe into one, proliferating and
> carefully built sentence whose syntax will articulate an order of
> subordination and temporality and causation holding all its parts in place.
> In discussing Flaubert and Nerval, Proust insists many times on the beauty
> of syntax as an organizing principle. On the other hand, Proust knew the
> advantages of terseness. 'It's you.' 'Here's why.' 'He dared not move.' He
> can be as laconic as Hemingway and the Gospels. His opening sentence does
> not fill out a line. The bulk of the novel is made up of what grammarians
> call hypotactic style, where syntax records a wide range of connections and
> relations among the elements of experience. Proust also relies, but
> fleetingly, on paratactic style--setting simple sentences side by side
> without transition and connectives, a style associated with primitive
> writing and ultramodern writing, as in Gertrude Stein and some passages of
> James Joyce. Hypotaxis tends to hold the world together in a comprehensive
> order. Parataxis tends to fragment the world into small parts among which
> we can move swiftly and freely."
> >
> > Gee, who else does this sound like?
> >
> > Jeff C.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of ish mailian
> > Sent: Monday, March 21, 2016 6:48 AM
> > To: Pynchon-l
> > Subject: Re: Pynchon's sentence structure
> >
> > If anything, and only after very close examination, what I find a bit
> awkward is the fact that the shift from the narrator who starts the passage
> to the free indirect style that takes on Frenesi's language and thoughts,
> and thus, her tone as well, is almost to subtle. It happens right at the
> junction where the apparent grammar error is said to occur. A James
> enthusiast like James Wood will complain that this awkwardness is easily
> avoided through indirect style. In fact, he argues that free indirect
> narrative evolved to avoid such awkward narrative. He criticizes Updike for
> getting narration wrong and he lashes out at Pynchon too. The grammar
> question seems less important than this one: does Pynchon want to have his
> own words? Wood (29) argues that the author must have his own words.
> Pynchon's VL seems to argue that this is a stodgy convention that he will
> break with long sentences and abrupt language and tone shifts. Personally,
> I prefer that Pynchon majors because of the language and tone, but it's
> just a preference not a critique of P's style in the lesser works.
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 6:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> Even one long non-sentence mistake, is that enough to label P as well
> >> as a pretty great reader, "pretenders"?
> >> My gawd, they are still fighting over Shakespeare's punctuation (but
> >> he is spared being called a pretender because we don't have what he
> >> actually wrote down for sure.
> >> ---could it have been a copyediting error?
> >> Would it work with a semi-colon? ...and, to me, the way loooong
> >> sentences like this "work' with a comma are that they bring us one
> >> thing after another purely....
> >>
> >> But, when I read Proust, I did feel that my narrow
> >> business-declarative sentence world was so small, so narrow and the
> >> enveloping let's-call-them-connections were so differently and more
> >> deeply real.
> >>
> >> When I first read James in my later high school and college years, I
> >> was told my writing became circuitous and ridiculous, taffy-pulled to
> >> absurdity (my pretentious metaphor just borrowed from TRP and his
> >> taffy-stretched sky late in GR)
> >>
> >> With P, it is a kind of narrator's tone and, yes, his connections with
> >> long elaborate metaphoric connections.
> >>
> >> On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 6:15 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I've been reading a recent essay by one of Australia's pre-eminent
> >>> novelists, Gerald Murnane, an extremely private man (the more common
> >>> description is 'reclusive') only two years younger than Thomas
> >>> Pynchon and whose work is characterised by obscenely long sentences
> >>> that are nonetheless grammatically correct. His great obsession is
> >>> Proust and most would say he is the Antipodean answer to Proust. The
> >>> essay is on the long sentence's profound potential to produce meaning
> >>> - which he associates with 'connections' - that short, descriptive,
> >>> declarative sentences can't access. But as an obsessive grammarian,
> >>> he begins the work decrying Kermode's review of Vineland, in which is
> >>> quoted the following loooong sentence. Murnane says it isn't a
> >>> sentence, but a 66 word sentence followed by a bunch of unconnected
> >>> clauses. He goes on to call Pynchon and Kermode 'pretenders' as a
> >>> result (did I mention Murnane is a serious grammar freak?) but
> >>> eventually produces quite an interesting essay.
> >>>
> >>> My question is: I can see how he can't parse the following as a
> >>> classically correct sentence past "another motel room" but I can also
> >>> see how it does work. I don't know how to argue for it, however. A
> >>> puzzle fit for a P-list.
> >>>
> >>> The 'after a while her visits to Sasha' clause is where things get
> hairy.
> >>>
> >>> "By the time she began to see that she might, nonetheless, have gone
> >>> through with it, Brock Vond had reentered the picture, at the head of
> >>> a small motorcade of unmarked Buicks, forcing her over near Pico and
> >>> Fairfax, ordering her up against her car, kicking apart her legs and
> >>> frisking her himself, and before she knew it there they were in
> >>> another motel room, after a while her visits to Sasha dropped off and
> >>> when she made them she came in reeking with Vond sweat, Vond semen —
> >>> couldn't Sasha smell what was going on? — and his erect penis had
> >>> become the joystick with which, hurtling into the future, she would
> >>> keep trying to steer among the hazards and obstacles, the swooping
> >>> monsters and alien projectiles of each game she would come, year by
> >>> year, to stand before, once again out long after curfew, calls home
> >>> forgotten, supply of coins dwindling, leaning over the bright display
> >>> among the back aisles of a forbidden arcade, rows of other players
> >>> silent, unnoticed, closing time never announced, playing for nothing
> >>> but the score itself, the row of numbers, a chance of entering her
> >>> initials among those of other strangers for a brief time, no longer
> >>> the time the world observed but game time, underground time, time
> >>> that could take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely
> >>> deathless perimeter."
> >>> -
> >>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> >>
> >>
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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