Pynchon's sentence structure

Tue Mar 22 06:43:33 CDT 2016

That’s true, too. Some narrations are irreducible to their prior influences if they’re compressed tightly enough.

From: Mark Kohut [mailto:mark.kohut at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2016 7:40 AM
To: Jeffrey Calzaloia
Cc: ish mailian; Pynchon-l
Subject: Re: Pynchon's sentence structure

I think we also have to keep in mind P's own words about his stylistic breakthru with such as On The Road, that is

it led him to get what we would call "actual speech" (beyond stream of consciousness or Proust's stylized surround sound of consciousness)  into his writing.  

His narrator talks directly to us at times and the narrator tries to write as if he were transposing unfiltered speech at times. 

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

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160322/c426edef/attachment.html>