On The Pleasures and Solitudes of Quiet Books

Essays Lists
August 27, 2013 | 8 books mentioned 25 4 min read

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1.
Some years ago, before my first novel found its eventual home, several editors in a row said the book was “too quiet.” I was told at the time that this was just a euphemism for “no obvious marketing angle,” but I found it interesting to consider the idea that some novels are quiet, whereas others are loud.

2.
coverIn her exquisite memoir, The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes movingly of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Shelley gave birth to four children, but only the fourth survived. “In the years she gave birth to all those too-mortal children,” Solnit writes:

…she also created a work of art that yet lives, a monster of sorts in its depth of horror, and a beauty in the strength of its vision and its acuity in describing the modern world that in 1816 was just emerging. This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.

But before the meeting comes the solitude, the book as a private space that a reader steps into, and nowhere is this clearer to me than on the subway. On any given morning, a majority of my fellow passengers are reading. It’s a way to pass the time, of course, but it seems to me that escaping into a book in these moments is also a bid for some measure of seclusion.

In the places where everyone drives, the roads fill with single-occupancy vehicles in the mornings and the late afternoons, thousands or millions of drivers in their solitudes. On a subway commute, packed in with strangers in an underground train, solitude is more elusive. We resort to small tricks to find some space for ourselves: the noise-blocking headphones, the iPad, the book. I wear earbuds on my commute, but unless I’m too tired to read or the person next to me is loud, the iPod in my pocket is dark. I just want things to be a little quieter, so that I can disappear into my book more fully. In those moments I just want to be a little more alone.

coverIt probably goes without saying that you’ll crave different solitudes at different moments in your life, both in books and in physical places. I have an immense love for loud books. Novels like, say, Nick Harkaway’s, about which I’ve rhapsodized at length, books that come galloping into your life with their doomsday machines and schoolgirl spies and ninjas and leave you daydreaming for days afterward about clouds of mechanized bees. But on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the immense pleasure of novels like Teju Cole’s Open City, which I finally got around to reading a few weeks back. Very little happens in Open City, plotwise. It’s a very intelligent meditation on memory, dislocation, family, music, national identity, and other interesting topics, but the action is mostly a man wandering the streets of New York. I found it mesmerizing.

Lately, possibly because it’s been a long summer of continuous hard work on a new novel and I don’t want to think about plot just now, or perhaps because my annual allotment of vacation days at my day job resets every September 1st, I’ve been out of vacation time since February, and reading quiet books is the closest I can get to a vacation at the moment, I’ve discovered a new appreciation for books that fall on the quieter end of the spectrum.

3.
Any definition of what constitutes a quiet book will naturally be subjective, but I think the important point here is that quiet isn’t the same thing as inert. I’m not talking about the tediously self-conscious novels written by authors who use “literary fiction” as a sort of alibi, as in “my book doesn’t have a plot, because it’s literary fiction.” I rarely get more than fifty pages into these books before they join the books-that-need-to-get-out-of-my-apartment-immediately pile by the front door. Nor is quiet necessarily the same thing as minimalist. Raymond Chandler’s prose is minimalistic, but his stories aren’t quiet.

The books I think of as being quiet, the ones I’ve been enjoying lately, have a distilled quality about them, an unshowy thoughtfulness and a sense of grace, of having been boiled down to the bare essentials. If the solitude you crave at the moment is a quiet one, here’s a short reading list of quiet books that I’ve recently read and admired:

cover1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
The book takes the form of a letter written by an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames, to his young son. I found the language extraordinary.

2. Open City by Teju Cole
A young psychiatrist, Nigerian-born, walks the streets of New York City. The walks open the city to him and serve as a respite from the stress of his working life.

3. Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon
A North Korean man defects and immigrates to a coastal town in Brazil following the Korean War, where he becomes a tailor’s apprentice. An elegant account of a quiet and solitary life.

4. The Number of Missing by Adam Berlin
A deeply moving chronicle of drinking, friendship, and grief. Paul was among the scores of Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died in the World Trade Center. In the months following the 9/11 attacks, his best friend, David, moves like a ghost between the bars of Manhattan, sometimes with and sometimes without Paul’s widow, Mel. Both are falling, but David is waiting for Mel to fall first, so that he can catch her.

cover5. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Sophia, age six, and her grandmother, who’s nearing the end of her life, while away the days of a summer on a remote island in the Bay of Finland. Jansson’s depiction of both characters and of their relationship is delightful.

6. The Harp in the South by Ruth Park
A classic in Australia. A couple raise their children in the slums of 1940s Sydney, “in an unlucky house which the landlord had renumbered from Thirteen to Twelve-and-a-Half.”

Image via Michael Veltman/Flickr

is a staff writer for The Millions. Her most recent novel, Station Eleven, was a 2014 National Book Awards finalist. She is married and lives in Brooklyn. www.emilymandel.com.

Essays

Henry James and the Joys of Binge Reading

Essays
March 17, 2011 | 8 books mentioned 19 8 min read

1.
During a recent semester spent studying abroad in the UK, I had the opportunity to take an undergraduate course on Henry James. I seized the chance, having never taken a class devoted to a single author before. Previously, Henry James had existed in my mind as a hazy legend in Anglo-American letters who wrote hefty novels and dense stories in an ominously opaque prose. The only thing I had ever read of his was “The Middle Years”, a short story about an aging writer resting in Bournemouth, who befriends a doctor who also happens to be a fervent admirer of his work. It sounds awfully boring but I was impressed by the story, which reveals a great deal about reader-writer relations, although of course I found the writing itself a little impenetrable at times (the number of commas in the first sentence alone would send a good number of readers packing). It’s easy to lose your way in a James story if you’re not careful. Your eyes keep scanning the words, but your thoughts tend to wander off. Often what’s literally happening is buried beneath endless looping sentences, words that lap like waves, eddies of thoughts and counter-thoughts. It all sounds beautiful, but the reader is left wondering: what does it actually mean?

It’s obvious that Henry James is ill suited for a text-heavy undergraduate course, which requires extensive reading in a very short time. It’s not so bad when you’re studying earlier James, which tends to be more straightforward (although with the novels the length can sometimes get to you) — but things get an awful lot worse with later James. The prose becomes denser, the metaphors extend into page-long emotional parables, the grammar is impossibly convoluted, and numerous adverbs cling to and clutter the sentences.

James’ prose is notorious for becoming more elusive and complex and he grew older (it may be in part due to the fact that he started dictating to a typist in 1897, just before the advent of his “late phase”). In a letter to the Duchess of Sutherland, dated 1903, James gave his correspondent a few tips on how to read one of his novels:

Take, meanwhile, pray The Ambassadors very easily & gently: read five pages a day — be even as deliberate as that — but don’t break the thread. The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. Keep along with it step by step — & the full charm will come out.

It may have been that the Duchess was a particularly obtuse reader, but I do think it’s true that James is much better appreciated with lots of time to take him in slowly, a few pages at a time, to let his magic quietly come through. But James’ own recommendations, of course, are impossible to follow when you have to rifle through a whole novel in a few days for a seminar.

2.

The reading list for the class in question included:

A selection of tales: “Daisy Miller”, “The Aspern Papers”, “The Pupil”, “The Real Thing”, “The Figure in the Carpet”, and “The Lesson of the Master”
Roderick Hudson
The Europeans
What Maisie Knew
The Portrait of a Lady
The Princess Casamassima
The Ambassadors
The Golden Bowl
The Wings of the Dove

I ended up quite liking most of the tales, especially “The Lesson of the Master”, about the relationship between a young, promising writer and an older one whose art is in decline. It has a certain ironic bite, which I found enjoyable — the “lesson” in question being that novelists shouldn’t marry, in order to concentrate on their art (James remained a bachelor all his life). It is apparent that there are quite a few gems in the tales of Henry James, which are often in the vein of the French nouvelles (Maupassant often comes to mind). Although writing many of these short stories was bread-and-butter work for James, they offer much insight into art and human expression.

Among the novels, I never finished The Wings of the Dove, What Maisie Knew, or The Princess Casamassima, one of James’ forays into more traditional social realism (with The Bostonians), which I found read like a bad imitation of Dickens. The Portrait of a Lady was by far the most readable and engaging of his novels, and Isabel Archer remains one of his most sympathetic characters — despite the famously unsatisfactory ending. The two later novels I read, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl — especially the latter, where so little happens for so long — initially put me off. They are demanding books, but in the end they proved more interesting to think and write about. The Ambassadors, for instance, through some intricate literary trick, manages to charm the reader into embracing the middle-aged protagonist’s point of view. Strether’s fascination for Paris, for Chad (whom he comes to Paris to save) and for Madame de Vionnet (with whom Chad is having an affair) becomes the fascination of the reader, while James masterfully pulls the strings behind the scenes. It’s a rewarding, beautiful reading experience; and there really is a kind of taut, charming thread running through it.

3.
A certain reputation precedes Henry James, I think — and it’s not a very good one. Another preconception I had about him was that he was rather passé, in both style and content. He already seemed outdated in his own time (at the turn of the century, who else was writing novels about adultery among the rich and beautiful in such wordy prose?), so how could he possibly be relevant today?

I was wrong, of course. Although James was never read by the masses, he still generates a fair deal of critical attention and admiration. Many authors today use James’ life and work to inspire their own fiction: Colm Tóibín’s Booker short-listed The Master is a fictionalized account of a part of James’ life (more on that later), while David Lodge’s Author, Author (published six months after Tóibín’s novel) does something similar. Joyce Carol Oates’ recent collection of stories Wild Nights! includes a moving story about James visiting a wounded soldier in a London hospital during World War I, and Cynthia Ozick’s 2010 novel Foreign Bodies is a retelling of The Ambassadors. In the last decade, Penguin Classics has reedited most of James’ novels and stories in a new series under the general editorship of one of the most prominent Jamesian critics, Philip Horne. NYRB Classics has also included many of James’ little known titles in their series, while Cambridge University Press is planning a new, multi-volume critical edition of James’ works, to be published by 2016 for the centenary of his death.

It is clear that James is not passé, and never was. He is, in fact, perhaps more relevant than ever; but his works lie in a strange place outside of time, and they were written that way. James was and remains a demanding author because he found something intensely true about the complexity of human nature and felt compelled to communicate this truth in the stories that took hold of his imagination. He was a careful writer, true to his art and craft, and a meticulous revisionist. His works are deep, long, airless dives into the complexities and multiplicities of the self. It’s not an easy subject to write about. His stories, lacking in plot, are simple accounts: mere turning points in the lives of characters or revelations of social organizations. Yet in their self-consciousness and ambiguities, and even in the circumlocutions of James’ language — which in truth is closer to the fragmented consciousness of modernism than to Victorian verbosity — they reveal something irresistibly true about life.

4.
It’s easy, of course, to call binge reading Henry James a joy when the term is over and the essay is handed in and corrected. For most of the duration of the course, I would’ve probably called the process “Henry James and the Woes of Binge Reading”. Often times it felt like I was out of breath as I jumped from one work to the next, trying to catch up on my reading just before class, and then having to move on to the next book down the list without having finished the previous one.

But, as anyone who has taken a class like this (or anyone who has ever binge read from a single author in a short period of time) will know, this type of reading can also be highly rewarding. One passes from one book to the next almost seamlessly, without having to adapt to a new style, witnessing (if the works are read more or less chronologically) the progression of the writer’s art over time, the evolution of his concerns, and the development of his authorial voice.

James’ themes become richer and more multi-faceted when looked at across his entire oeuvre: things like the so-called international theme, problematic endings, his obsession with art and reality (or realism v. romance), and the self-consciousness of his fiction. For instance, I noticed that in nearly all of his novels, whenever fate intervenes in a way that seems exaggerated, a character usually declares something along the lines of: “I feel like we’re in a novel!”

The binge reader also starts to notice stock characters as they crop up from story to story. One of the most common, in James, is the young, empowered American heiress: for example the eponymous heroine of “Daisy Miller”, James’ first successful story; Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, who struggles between her freedom and her duty; and Maggie Verver (aka The Princess) in The Golden Bowl, who starts off as a meek wife and manages to get rid of her husband’s lover (also married to her father) by the end of the novel through the most skillful, subtle social maneuvering.

Theater is another recurring (although not always explicit) theme in Jamesian fiction. James uses a great deal of theatrical metaphor throughout his stories to describe the shifting nature of his characters and the multiplicity of their personalities, which they project out into the world like carefully constructed roles. Thus the adulterous women in his novels — another stock character — like Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors or Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady, are often described as actresses. They put on masks, makeup, and costumes and bury their identities beneath layers of constructed characteristics to manipulate their audiences.

Perhaps the great number of theatrical metaphors relates to James’ involvement with the theatre, which more or less ended with the failure of his play Guy Domville in 1895 (again, shortly before his “late phase” began). It was a deeply traumatic experience for James (both Tóibín and Lodge make it a central element in their novels). He described the humiliating premier in a letter to Henrietta Rendell as “the most horrible hours of my life.” Thus James was forced to return to the less lucrative — albeit probably more comfortable — business of writing for print only (“thank heaven there is another art”), but it is clear that his failure in the theater left its mark.

5.
It seems I didn’t want to get away from Henry James after the course was over because I continued to peruse his Life in Letters, brilliantly edited by Philip Horne, which has some really beautiful bits of writing in it. I also read The Master by Colm Tóibín, and I would like to end with a few words on this book. It walks the fine line between biography and novel, a tricky genre that Tóibín pulls off majestically. It proves an insightful way of writing and thinking about James, whose life and work are a complicated balance of fiction and reality.

Tóibín’s novel is a gripping, major work of literature, which I binge read with relish not because I had to, but because it offers a fascinating exploration of James as a character whose consciousness is revealed to be as complex and deeply moving as those of the characters he, in turn, created. Tóibín’s novel offers a prism through which many of James’ works are refracted, illuminating them with new meaning and a more directly human resonance. He also treats James’ probable homosexuality with subtlety and respect — no easy feat. The Master is a good read intrinsically, as well; intelligent, endearing, moving, and even funny at times (in a quiet, quaint, all too Jamesian way).

If you read nothing by Henry James or nothing else related to him, I urge you, at least, to read The Master. It seems almost disrespectful to the “master” in question to say so, but I am confident that if you do read Tóibín’s novel, you’ll be tempted to pick up one of James’ books afterward. I’m quite certain you won’t be disappointed by either.

Essays
| 8 books mentioned 19 8 min read
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Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life

Essays Notable Articles
March 16, 2010 | 8 books mentioned 46 5 min read

In the same way that it would be hard to meet Scarlett Johansson and not be distracted by her beauty, it is difficult to read War and Peace and not be preoccupied with its reputation as the greatest novel ever written.  As lay readers, the specific qualities that make War and Peace so great can be hard to assess.  But just as it takes specialized knowledge to understand exactly why a magnet attracts metal, yet any five-year-old can identify a magnet when he sees one, it is one thing to apprehend the formal properties of a great work of art, but another, much more accessible question, to assess its effects.  And so, having recently finished reading War and Peace, what I want to think about is just what it is that great art does.

One way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace?  The answers, I think, tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading.

The social consequences first.  It’s a fair bet that without War and Peace I would not know that my father-in-law read the book himself in two feverish weeks 35 years ago while on sabbatical in West Berlin.  People, as I discovered, tend to remember where they were when they read War and Peace, and when they saw me with the book they told me those stories.  I learned that my friend Paul read War and Peace as a 25-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia in the late-sixties.  He told me that the experience was revelatory in that it showed him that “a classic that came with the gravity of adult recommendations could be more engaging than life and easy to read, too.”

War and Peace lends itself to sharing with others more than most books.  I wouldn’t say that shareability is an essential element of great literature, but where present, it helps.  As I read, I frequently retold episodes from the book.  I remember taking a long walk with my wife in early February and telling her the story of how Pierre, who was kind-hearted but lacked will, became engaged unwittingly to Helene who was beautiful.  With my father-in-law, as part of a conversation about how to plan for the future, I brought up the tragic tale of young Petya Rostov, who joined the Russian army in a fit of patriotic fervor, but whose romantic visions of war blinded him to its dangers right up until the moment he was shot through the head.  And on a happier note, I shared with my friend Eric a retelling of the scene of Natasha at the opera, a scene charged through with the erotic energy of a young woman suddenly becoming aware of her beauty and the power it holds over men.

This is not something I usually do, tell stories from books I read, but the spectrum of experience depicted in War and Peace, combined with the precision with which it’s captured, creates an infinite number of roads into the book and an infinite number back out.  The fact that the scenes in War and Peace are easy to retell is also in keeping with a claim my friend Paul likes to make that Tolstoy’s writing is so irreducible that the translation doesn’t matter. (For my part, I began reading the Maude translation and switched halfway through to the new Pevear and Volokhonsky; I found that while my mind was stimulated all the same, my heart raced twice as fast with the newer version.)

After the social experience of the book there is the intellectual one.  I have read other novels where the controlling idea of the story came to serve as a lens through which I viewed my days, but never has this happened quite as thoroughly as it did with War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s intellectual agenda in the book was to expose the meagerness of historical accounts of the War of 1812 that tried to reduce the world-remaking conflict to a finite and knowable set of causes.  Instead, Tolstoy wanted to depict the war in all its complexity and contingency, to show that the outcome rested at least as much on the decision of an individual soldier to charge or not as it did on Napoleon’s machinations, and that both the soldiers and the Emperor were controlled equally by forces larger than themselves.

It’s an expansive idea and one that finds ready application in almost any facet of one’s life.  I thought of Tolstoy when reading about climate change (he probably would have been a skeptic) and when assessing President Obama’s leadership on health care (I think, based on his favorable depiction of General Kutuzov, who abandoned Moscow to the French in order to preserve the Russian army, that Tolstoy would have endorsed Obama’s decision to forego the public option).

I applied War and Peace to my life in smaller ways, too.  A passage about the forced idleness of regimental life clarified vague thoughts I’d had about how having a baby makes it easier to nap guilt-free.  And at one point—I may have been walking through a park when this happened—I stopped short after reading a passage on Prince Andrei’s decision to withdraw from life into the work of his estates that seemed, minus the part about the estates, like a mimeograph of my own mind.  (One somewhat disquieting effect of reading War and Peace is that the more your own thoughts show up in its pages, the less original your life begins to feel.)

In the end, though, the reason I read novels is not because I can talk about them with other people, or because I’m looking for ideas to explain the world.  I read them for the pure aesthetic moment that comes from seeing life perfectly distilled into words.  In this respect, I don’t think there is a more able book than War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s singular genius is to be able to take the torrent of conscious experience and master it.  There are countless moments in the book where this happens, but the one that left me reeling was Tolstoy’s long, exquisite depiction of the Battle of Borodino, which was the deciding battle in the war and one of the bloodiest in history.

The night I finished reading about Borodino, it was plainly obvious that I had just read something great.  Yet here I was sitting in a corner of my couch, just the same as I had been an hour before.  I thought about the question with which I opened—what is it that greatness does?  An encounter with greatness, I would say, is like a bright light fixed in time, a marker that defines memory and makes it clearer than it otherwise might have been, that we were here.

Previously: Scenes of Retreat in War and Peace and Atonement, Selections from a Winter Reading War and Peace

Bonus Link: The Millions Interview: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

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| 8 books mentioned 46 5 min read
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Essays

Creativity and Madness: On Writing Through the Drugs

Essays
February 27, 2014 | 8 books mentioned 25 8 min read

I had rarely felt so alive, so close to the spitting pulse of energy and awakened life. I moved from the Berkshires to New York City for graduate school, to pursue an MFA in writing. My first year was an exhilarating blur of freedom and power. Each morning when I stepped out of my apartment, I felt like I owned the world. I felt beautiful and talented and young. I knew famous people, I was creatively inspired, I was meeting regularly with editors and publishers who were interested in my writing. My only responsibilities were to read, study with some of my literary heroes, write, and teach part-time. But by the end of my third year in the city, an anxiety disorder that had plagued me since the beginning of my life, and would flare up and calm down on a strange circadian rhythm of misery, had gotten so bad it reduced me to a quivering non-functioning bundle of raw nerves. I barely squeaked by in my last semester of my program, writing, reading, and teaching between emergency room visits, therapy appointments, panic attacks, and crippling phobias.

There were so many low points during my last year in New York, but a few stand out in sharp relief. I remember the terror of leaving my bed, and how humiliated and desperate I felt calling a friend in the middle of the night to ask her if she would come over to bring me a glass of water from my kitchen. I remember being too afraid to leave my bed for therapy, and calling my therapist on the phone sobbing as she tried to coax me out the door to the subway to meet her. I remember how difficult it was to communicate through the oxygen mask strapped over my mouth as the EMTs alongside my bed in an ambulance asked me questions — I’d just collapsed in a shaking heap at the gym from a particularly fast-acting and surprising episode of panic. I remember arriving at the emergency room, unable to talk because my jaw was clenched shut from adrenaline. I remember the drawer in my desk where blue hospital wrist bands accumulated in piles; I saved them like a soldier might save shells from the bullets that nearly killed her.

During this time, I was writing prolifically, and I feared that taking medication to ease my anxiety and panic might destroy my urge or ability to create. I had heard of many artists who had gone mad or suffered from horrible depression, and took the popular prescription of the day, never to write or create again. Their troubling symptoms had been muted, but so had everything else, their thoughts, perceptions, libidos, and ability to access deep feelings. They reported feeling emotionally void, deadened, seeing life as if through a veil. I also heard of artists who went mad and died, victims of suicide, drug overdose, or fatal manic episodes, and that scared me even more. David Foster Wallace, a writer I admired and sympathized with for his closeness to the raw fire of his own internal demons, committed suicide during my second year of graduate school, when my emotional world was crumbling, and it shook me to my core.

Creatives of all modalities have for centuries have suffered from mental illnesses like anxiety and depression, and they have resisted treatments that could improve their conditions for fear it would alter or cloud their minds, drug them into submission, or quash their creative impulse. Edvard Munch famously proclaimed, “I want to keep my sufferings. They are part of me and my art.” Van Gogh said, “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence, whether much that is glorious, whether all that is profound, does not spring from disease of thought, from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.”

Psychologist Maureen Neihart, in a paper called “Creativity, the Arts, and Madness,” cites several studies that illuminate shared characteristics between creative production and mental illness, such as mood disturbance, a tolerance for irrationality, greater openness to sensory stimuli, restlessness, speed of thinking, and obsessiveness of thought. Similarly, Freud posited that artistic creativity is a product of neurosis; Marcel Proust claimed that, “everything great in the world is created by neurotics;” and Seneca quoted Aristotle as having said, “No great genius was without a mixture of insanity.” Many psychologists believe that artists use their work to heal and soothe their minds. But if drugs heal artist’s minds for them, is their work still needed, or would it even be produced?

What if the touch of the madness had been medicated out of van Gogh, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Sexton, Plath, and Wallace? They very likely would have lived longer, fuller, and more enjoyable lives, but would they have created their works of genius? It’s a strange calculation we make, now that we can tinker with the chemicals that seem to make us who we are, which aspects of our personality are worth enduring for the gifts they can bestow? What if those aspects end up costing us our lives? What if saving our lives with medication robs us of the very thing that gives our lives meaning and makes us who we deeply are — sensitive, scared, hyper-aware, but also exultant, perceptive, and insightful into the human condition?

Though therapists, friends, and family had tried for years to convince me to give medicine a try, one bright afternoon in my third year in Manhattan, a friend said something to me in such a way and at such a time that I was finally able to hear. She said, “I used to feel that if I just peeled away one more layer, one more layer, I’d get to the center of my anxiety, the core issue, and solve the problem. But I realized, the onion had no center. I could keep peeling forever. Now that I’m taking medicine, I just love the world.” I wanted to love the world too. I started asking friends for psychiatric referrals the next day.

The idea of medicine scared me so much that I felt that while I tried it I needed around-the-clock care, and I either had to check myself into a hospital, or move back to my parents’ house in Boston. I chose my parents’ home, leaving an apartment I loved and phenomenal friends and community and all the titillating freedoms I’d found in the city to live in my childhood room on a tree-lined street in the suburbs of Boston. With the help of a new therapist, some SSRIs, a regular dose of benzodiazepines, and the care of my parents, I slowly crawled out of the cave of shadows I’d been living in. At first there were months of weeping, possibly due to the acclimation to new medicines, or to the relief from the constant stresses about my own survival, or to being surrounded by nature and quiet and my parents’ constant love and attention. Within a few months, I slowly added back in the activities that I had eliminated from my life over the past years: showering alone, cutting fruit, eating dinner at restaurants, driving, staying home alone. I soon had a full-time job teaching writing, something I’d been avoiding because the thought of teaching more than a few hours at a time made me extremely anxious and phobic of fainting.

It has now been about five years since I left New York. I’m teaching writing full-time at one school and adjuncting one evening a week at another. For the most part, I have a handle on my anxiety and panic. I’ve worked hard in therapy on strategies for handling a near constant dizziness and hyper-awareness that are classic symptoms of anxiety, and the SSRIs and Benzodiazepines I take are a seatbelt around my panic. Since I’ve been on meds, my trips to the emergency room have steadily dwindled down to none. My relationships have improved because I no longer need to rely on my friends, family, and romantic partners for my safety and emotional stability. But between teaching more than full time, reading voluminous student work, and the lazy happiness the medicines have granted me, I’ve barely written a word. At first, I didn’t need to. I rode my bike, I took a job, I fell in love, I enjoyed eating and spending time with friends again. There was none of the urgency or desire to wrestle with my words in the midst of such a full life. I used to write to live, to push myself out of a dark hole and connect with a reader in the world outside my suffocating den. Now, though I don’t feel quite as alive when I’m not writing, it’s no longer imperative. It’s even at times unappealing — why would I seclude myself from a world I’ve missed out on for so long to sit alone and sift through the crumpled napkins and browned apple cores of my thoughts and experiences as I’d done for years when trying to unlock the mystery of my suffering?

I used to find beauty in certain aspects of my over-stimulated, over-sensitive brain — trees shimmered, and dreams would wake me up with stupefying gorgeous intricate detail. And when the anxiety and panic break through my meds, as they sometimes do, I get a glimpse of the magical, maniacal way of being in the world, and I feel the pull to create return. When the drugs prevent a shaky episode of flooding adrenaline from spiraling into a panic attack, I can feel their presence. I can also feel their presence in my brain when I search for a word or try to complete a line of reasoning in my head. It feels like a transparent block sitting behind my eyes, keeping my brain from spinning off down the rabbit hole of terror, but also from accessing the passion and the language that was once the best place I knew.

I sit staring at a blank screen much more than I ever did without medicine, my associative language center is now sluggish and compromised, and word retrieval is a physical effort. My short-term memory has also suffered. For the first time in my life, I find myself forgetting what I was about to say with my mouth opened during a conversation, or why I walked to the other side of the room. Memory for detail and an ability to translate those memories and impressions into words is a large piece of what has defined me as a writer and as a person. Now, though I can still sit at my laptop and hammer out some thoughts, it takes much longer, and many more drafts, to make sentences that do what I intend for them to do. Often lying in bed, ideas or lines float into my mind unbidden, like they always have, and before I took any medicine I’d wake up and write them down in the morning. Often they were gifts from the subconscious — a perfectly formed sentence or phrase to finish a piece I was working on. But on medicine, those lines have faded by morning. I open a blank word document for that flash of idea, that white heat of image where all stories start, and staring at the cursor blinking on the screen, my mind has lost it.

I wouldn’t trade the happiness, the sense of balance, the self-reliance, or the improved relationships I’ve gained from medicine for writing. And perhaps I don’t have to decide between mental health and creativity. It seems that, whether mad or not, people are driven to create in order to understand something about themselves, the world, or their experiences and perceptions. Perhaps Freud was as wrong about art necessarily stemming from neurosis as he was about penis envy. I agree that powerful art is created out of a deep need, and bears the imprint of the essential raw self or soul. But if my anxiety really is a biological disorder, as doctors and psychologists have repeatedly insisted, then my essential self isn’t the anxious thoughts and existential dread I used to constantly feel. My essential self would lie underneath the layers of catastrophic images and anguished mental chatter. It’s possible that the medicines I take could help me travel a clearer and more direct path to that place, avoiding the potholes and back alleys of phobias, anxiety, and panic. Though it takes more discipline to sit down and write now, since I am not doing so to save my life, I am practicing writing from a place of curiosity rather than pain, fascination rather than desperation, forging my way more safely into a different dark.

Image Credit: Flickr/Dean812

Essays
| 8 books mentioned 25 8 min read
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25 comments:

  2. “Both are falling, but David is waiting for Mel to fall first, so that he can catch her.” Possibly the best line I’ve read all week.

    I’ve always loved quiet books (Marilynne Robinson is a special favorite), so thank you so much for this short list. I would also add Stoner, previously covered by The Millions, except that I haven’t finished it yet so no guarantees.

  3. I read the title of this essay and immediately thought of The Summer Book, which I found by chance in a used bookstore. I had no idea what it was about or who the author was, but it seemed like exactly the type of book I needed at the moment. It was peaceful and gentle and nostalgic.

  4. Thanks for this essay. I’ll be searching out the Yoon and Berlin books, especially. I’m in the middle of The Summer Book (which I’d saved for summer reading, of course!) and am enjoying its distinctive pace. I can recommend Jansson’s The Winter Book, too, but perhaps you might save this until winter arrives?

    As for Cole’s Open City, I found his novel is be an increasingly disquieting quiet read, to the moment when I realized that all his walking is an attempt to put emotional distance on a disturbing event in his past. Then his quiet novel, at least for me, became very loud indeed. I found this book to be even more rewarding when reread . . .

  5. A great list! I can’t wait to look into some of these novels. “Open City” and “Gilead” are beautiful. Might I recommend that “Tinkers” or (if Paul Harding’s first is any indication) “Enon” be added to your list?

  6. This essay was a graceful, quiet read itself, and the list of recommended books is fantastic. Thank you!

  9. I get the occasional need to seek books which provide comforts from the difficulties of everyday life, but the idea that a novel should adhere to some “loud” vs. “quiet” spectrum me is a largely useless dichotomy, if not a timid prescription that would be thrown out of any English class. Fiction should be flexible enough to inhabit ALL emotions: to make the reader laugh and cry, to give the reader noise and quiet (and if you’re seriously viewing OPEN CITY as a “quiet” novel, you’re clearly ignoring, if not misreading, the very loud pain that is buried within Julius and that is just as clamorous as any Harkaway vision).

    This gormless and egregious essay is little more than a retread of the dreaded and utterly useless “unlikable” characters debate. It is designed to encourage a type of pusillanimous and passive-aggressive reader, one who imposes her own dull and blinkered and eggshell-walking view of humanity onto Goodreads and Amazon, who diminishes the full range of literature and discourages authors from taking chances. That this nonsense would be published on a website ostensibly devoted to serious literary discussion is a mark that nobody here is especially interested in minding the store and stirring up real debate and answering to the more serious challenge of how to stay subtle and rational-minded in literature when the world is a mess that no amount of hiding will declutter.

  10. The last few lines are exactly what I envision when I think of a “quiet” novel. Perhaps “quiet,” then, is a misnomer.

  11. Pingback: Ether: Is Social Reading the End of an Intimacy? | Porter Anderson

  12. Re: Edward Champion comments, above

    I’m a big fan of Emily St. John Mandel and someone who has no concern about “likability” in either my characters or my own interactions. I like my fiction quiet. I like my fiction rough. Don’t care, so long as it’s good. Ms. Mandel’s essay displays the same lovely writing style and quietly but sharply perceptive sensibility that marks her fiction. She is a young writer I value and I look forward to following her career.

    As for Champion’s hatchet job, what nonsense. Nothing she is writing about has anything to do with the “unlikable” characters debate. You, sir, have totally missed the point. A “gormless and egregious essay?” “Designed to encourage a type of pusillanimous and passive-aggressive reader…” “Dull and blinkered and eggshell-walking view of humanity.” Balderdash!

    As for your galumphing and harrumphing umbrage that “this nonsense would be published on a website ostensibly devoted to serious literary discussion….” All I have to say to that is… Get thee back to your murky lair under the bridge, Troll!

    Sincerely

    Moe Murph (Definitely not the quiet type)
    Washington, DC

  13. I endorse Maureen’s defence of this essay; it seems churlish to attack it so venomously. The tone was surely intended to be slightly humorous and conversational, to stimulate the kind of friendly, literary discussion one would prefer to see in these comments – not an unwarranted, egregiously misguided attack! Let’s have a bit of quiet, calm comment, please.

  14. Gilead is a marvel. So free of irony and guile and tortured self-consciousness.
    I think Evan Connell’s pair of novels, Mr Bridge, and Mrs Bridge, can be tagged Quiet. So uneventful you can’t put them down. You cant wait to see what doesn’t happen next. Another way of saying that every sober paragraph, every mundane moment, feels (quietly) momentous.

  15. Maureen: How have I missed the point? Would you care to actually offer a defense/? Do you actually have an argument? No, you don’t. And I do. And I will happily debate you at length (or, for that matter, the pusillanimous Emily St. John Mandel, who remains “quiet” and reveals her limitations as a thinker with her silence) using specific examples and taut arguments. But, of course, you have nothing more in your cheap rhetorical reticule other than asserting that the proposition is wrong. Is that too “loud” for you? Have I upset your fragile minds by calling you out on your indolent thinking? Oh dear.

    Simon Lavery also belongs in the dunk tank for failing to argue. Neither of you can offer a bona-fide position. You only wish to declare my viewpoint wrong. That doesn’t fly in any real debate. Are either of you familiar with a constructive argument?

    You people are what’s wrong with America. Learn how to think or you’ll end up dead and useless.

  16. Re: Edward Champion

    My above short comment was in reply to you, I just forgot to name you as the intended recipient, the point being that “quiet” simply refers to a style of writing and not the entirety of the literature put in such a category. Every dichotomy can be deconstructed, but that doesn’t change the self-evident difference in writing style between Marilynne Robinson and, say, David Foster Wallace. And, yes, there are differences in writing style between the authors listed in the article above, but I’m sure you can wrap your “rational” mind around the axis of difference we’re adopting here that shows a greater difference between “quiet” and “loud” styles of literature than between works of “quiet” literature. Again, this isn’t a rigid axis, and the standard is subjective, but, of course, you already knew that, given that literary tastes are always subjective—-as are the taste (or lack thereof) in “rational” comments.

    (Why do I feel like I’ve just been trolled?)

  17. Emily wrote, “some novels are quiet, whereas others are loud,” which is a pretty clear-cut rigid dichotomy that is even more problematic than the speculative riffing Zadie Smith was doing in her essay, “Two Paths for the Novel.” The fact that you, CJ (or should I just call you Lee Siegel?), and Emily would rather ascribe a taxonomic element to writers as deeply complicated and as variegated and as rich as Marilynne Robinson and DFW reveals that you are not especially interested in unpacking the literary ideal I described above: once again, that fiction should encompass ALL human qualities so that one does not approach the act of reading literature in the same crass manner as one orders from a Taco Bell drive-thru.

  18. Re: My dear friend Ed,

    This will be my last post on this thread, and I want to apologize on behalf of both of us for making a bloody mess of the bottom half of this page when such a beautiful article starts it off. Ed, if you still want to continue, you’re on your own.

    Despite the fact that you obviously aren’t looking for an open-minded discussion rather than looking for a mole to whack with your hammer of a brain, I still find just enough logic in your post to warrant a response. Since you’re going so analytical on me, you should also know, of course, that the “some . . . , others . . . ” construction is not delimiting, as opposed to “some . . . , the others . . . .” The sentence you cited could easily have continued, “and others have pink covers, and others still are written in Greek.”

    To return to the contention at hand, I’ve already mentioned that the axis chosen is arbitrary. That does not preclude other equally valid axes from being chosen, resulting in equally valid comparisons. A rationally minded person such as yourself should know very well that the first step to “unpacking” anything is to draw distinctions; otherwise everything is equally singular as everything else and no meaningful comprehension can be made whatsoever outside of, “Oh, that’s a work of fiction.” You obviously believe that more can be said, given the arbitrary standard that you put up: “fiction should encompass ALL human qualities.” Ergo, under this rubric, the closer a work of fiction is to this goal, the better it is. There is no universal truth that supports your axis as “better” or “worse” (or other such nonsense dichotomies) than any other; and I might mention the fact that democracy has no logical connection with truth.

    But that brings me to my third and last point: You’re begging the question. This article never said that “quiet” works are better than “loud” ones always and forevermore. Did your cherry-picking skip over how the author said “I have an immense love for loud books”? And the numbers on the list have no ordinal value attached to them at all, not even implied in the text. There is no evidence period that the author is promoting a “taxonomy” of literature; even if there were, you have provided no argumentation supporting the harm that such a taxonomy would cause to your “literary ideal,” which, again, is as arbitrary an axis as the one you so “rationally” seem worked up about.

    Even when I know I’m having my time wasted, I find this article too good to not defend. (And that, my dear Ed, is a subjective literary taste.)

  19. I am so grateful for this essay. Just gave me two more books to my “to read” list–The Summer Book, and The Harp in the South.

    I’d like to add three more books that I consider quiet books, very powerful, poignant, and unforgettable, and these are the trilogy by Kent Haruf–Plainsong, Eventide, and Benediction. About the lives of people in an imaginary town in Colorado, called Holt.

    I realize that I am slow to add my comments here, and so probably no one will even get to this little submission, but just in case one person reads my suggestion, and then gives these books some attention, I will be satisfied.

  21. Thank you so much for this article, Ms. Mandel. I’ve never conceptualized novels in this “loud” and “quiet” way, but it seems like a really useful way to think about books
    .
    It also helps me personally, as a reader, because lately I keep picking up “quiet” books that I’m sure I’ll like, reading for fifty pages, and then just forgetting to finish them! It’s baffled me, because I know intellectually that the book is good, but I can’t get into it. Whereas when I’ve picked up something like “John Dies at the End,” I can’t get enough of it. I think I set a record finishing that book!

  22. What a lovely essay. I have Gilead in my to-read pile and might just move it up now. I have not read the others on this list but they are now on my list too.

    I can’t recall if I’ve thought of books as quiet or loud but, yes, I get the meaning. And, as I think through my reading this year, I think The Book of Ebenezer Le Page would fall into the “quiet” category as described here – although it is a book that covers an entire man’s life over some 60+ years and filled with so many lovely characters. Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love, which I re-read this year, might fall into the “loud” category, even though I loved it even more this time around.

    Thank you for this lovely piece.

  24. Good article, I’ll have to check out some of these books.

    Ironically it ended up provoking the loudest noise I think I’ve ever seen on this webpage. For a second I thought I was on thermps or htmlwhatever with the kids.

  25. Love books like these; thank you to Emily for giving me more to read! Have always loved the quietness of So Long, See You Tomorrow by James Maxwell. Its refusal to draw attention to itself makes it all the more compelling.

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Essays

Leaked Literature: Why We Should Respect Salinger’s Wishes

Essays
January 2, 2014 | 8 books mentioned 14 5 min read

Literature fans have doubtless heard about the three unpublished J.D. Salinger stories leaked online last month. A scanned manuscript entitled Three Stories in a style reminiscent of the Bantam Salinger editions surfaced on a torrent site in November, and the stories, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” “Paula,” and “Birthday Boy,” were previously kept under wraps in the research sections of the Princeton and University of Texas libraries. The most viable theories say that the manuscript was photocopied in the years before the libraries cracked down on security, or that someone surreptitiously copied it in longhand when no one was looking.

Though “Birthday Boy” and “Paula” are rougher, less succinct drafts with typos and cross-outs, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” will hold the most interest for readers, as it contains a young Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye and shows the death of Holden’s younger brother, an incident only alluded to in the novel. The story is memorable, insightful, and funny, and easily ranks among Salinger’s best. So why did he insist it not be published until 50 years after his death?

When Salinger was writing Catcher, he was also writing short stories about Holden Caulfield and his family. Some got published, and some didn’t. Like “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” some of them are narrated by Holden’s older brother Vincent, an aspiring writer renamed D.B. in Catcher, where he’s off “being a prostitute” of a screenwriter.

Vincent Caulfield’s status as narrator evokes Buddy Glass from Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour — An Introduction, two of Salinger’s interconnected stories about the Glass family of child geniuses now grown up. With Vincent, we can imagine Salinger as a young writer playing with themes and relationships he would develop more fully later on. Salinger also does this with two early stories narrated by Holden Caulfield himself, “I’m Crazy” and “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” in which readers will recognize events from Catcher. Check your copy of the novel: the title page says that incidents from the story previously appeared in Collier’s and The New Yorker, and these are the two they’re talking about.

So where does the hidden story “Bowling Balls” fit in? In Catcher, Holden talks about his younger brother Allie, who wrote poems all over his baseball glove and died of leukemia in Maine when Holden was younger. We don’t hear much about Allie, except that he “was about fifty times as intelligent” as Holden, and after he died Holden was so upset that he slept on the garage floor and smashed all the windows with his fist. The scene comes early in the novel and shows a lot about Holden through his childhood trauma.

In “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” we see the day Allie died — except here, his name is Kenneth; the family’s in Cape Cod, not Maine; and Allie dies of a heart condition, not leukemia. Vincent Caulfield narrates Kenneth’s last day, and we hear the precocious Kenneth chastise Vincent about a clichéd story he’s written and share a cynical letter from a young Holden that shows Salinger’s ability to capture childhood grammar and misspellings. Salinger fans will also recognize a girlfriend of Vincent’s who keeps her kings in the back row when they play checkers — a bad sign for their sex life, but a charmingly naïve observation coming from Kenneth. The climax comes when Kenneth suffers heart failure during the stress of an ocean swim, and Holden pauses in his nose-picking to scream when he sees his brother passed out.

“Bowling Balls” is certainly as good as any of Salinger’s Nine Stories, but aside from its continuity issues, it shows a version of Holden Caulfield far tamer than the one in Catcher, weakening the character mythos the novel creates. Holden’s letter home — albeit clever and funny — shows signs of, but doesn’t quite match the voice that gives Catcher its distinction. One can forgive this difference by arguing that Holden is younger and less misanthropic than in Catcher, though there’s no disputing that the story’s end does little to show how Kenneth’s death has affected him. Aside from the aforementioned scream, Holden’s reaction to the death fails to match Catcher’s angst, and the story’s final, mournful reflection belongs only to Vincent. Compare this with Holden’s version of the incident in Catcher:

I was only thirteen [when he died], and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them. I really don’t. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it.

What readers can infer as a violent, emotional scene reads as more subdued through Holden’s distance from the event, but its severity remains vivid. Holden tells us everything we need to know before filing the incident beside his reflections on Stradlater’s razor and Jane Gallagher’s checker-playing habits, though generations of readers have used it in their own attempts to psychoanalyze Holden.

Do we really need Allie’s death played out in a separate story, to know any more about it than what Holden tells us in Catcher’s one and a half pages? Do we really need the scene filtered through a narrator we don’t know very well or have as much invested in? The answer to both is a resounding no. To see Allie’s death as it happens removes the mystery that Catcher lends it, and detracts from the raw power of Holden’s window-breaking.

Writers experiment with ideas when they’re writing novels. When these ideas don’t work, the writer throws them away. When they kind of work, the writer reshapes them into something that does. Vincent Caulfield is a likeable, well-developed character, but he doesn’t narrate nearly as well as D.B. Caulfield listens in Catcher. “Bowling Balls” would work well as a stand-alone story with different characters, but the story as is has no place in an official Salinger canon. Readers should approach it not as a prequel, but an instance of a young writer figuring out how one character’s death fits into a larger story, a curiosity for those interested in how Catcher came to be.

Maybe Salinger kept “Bowling Balls” hidden because he knew readers would try to fit it into a Caulfield saga, and would inevitably emerge from this quest confused and frustrated by their attempts to reconcile its differences from the novel. If that’s the case, he was right to preserve the integrity of his canon so the Caulfield family in Catcher would feel as consistent as the Glass family does in his novellas. How would we view A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man if one of Joyce’s early stories showed Stephen Dedalus as a contented extrovert?

However, those interested in Salinger’s early work and the development of his characters can still seek out his other published stories about the Caulfield family: “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise,” “The Stranger,” “I’m Crazy,” and “Slight Rebellion Off Madison.”  All of them appeared in magazines in the 1940s, and all are available online. Though these Caulfield stories don’t fit into the family canon any better than “Bowling Balls,” they’re different in that they’d already been published before Catcher came out. Salinger couldn’t keep people from tracking them down in the library storage room, but he could stop them from mass market re-publication. With “Bowling Balls,” his task was much easier. Readers will no doubt gain enjoyment from reading the leaked Three Stories manuscript, but they would do well to partially respect the author’s wishes by viewing its stories as experiments from an earlier time.

Essays
| 8 books mentioned 14 5 min read
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Essays

Of Mondegreens and Eggcorns: Language Keeps Talking About Itself

Essays
April 6, 2017 | 8 books mentioned 1 4 min read

1.
When the writer Sylvia Wright was a child, her mother would read to her from Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, including this stanza:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
Writing in 1954 for Harper’s Magazine, the grown-up Wright recalled tears coming to her eyes over the tragic image of the Earl Amurray and Lady Mondegreen clasping hands as they perished together. Though the poem described the Earl at great length, it didn’t mention Lady Mondegreen before or after that moment. But that fact didn’t strike Wright as odd at the time. She knew all she needed to know about Lady Mondegreen’s fatal loyalty to the dashing Earl from one simple line.

It was only later in life that Wright learned what was already clear to anyone who had read the poem in print rather than heard it recited aloud: There is no Lady Mondegreen. The line that begat both her existence and her demise actually reads “And laid him on the green.” In honor of her misinterpretation, Wright coined the term mondegreen for instances of mishearing a word or phrase in a way that gives it a new, unintended meaning.

Language is laced with such legends about itself. If someone falls victim to a mondegreen, is corrected, but stubbornly insists on continuing with the error, we call that a mumpsimus. The term stems from a Catholic priest who flubbed the Latin term sumpsimus during mass and then continued saying mumpsimus thereafter. This story was first relayed by the theologian Erasmus in a letter dated 1516. And here we are 500 years later, with mumpsimus appearing on a Huffington Post listicle of “10 Useful Words for Work.” (The blended word listicle is a portmanteau, a term coined by none other than Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.) The name of the recalcitrant priest is long since forgotten, but the relic of language he inspired lives on.

2.
If you search for information about mondegreens, you may fall down a linguistic rabbit hole, following mondegreento homophonyto heteronym. The churning sea of language raises its watery head to look around and then dives back into itself, splashing out words like litotes, genericide, and yes, metaphor. I collect these terms like Easter eggs, thrilled to have names for the ways we outfit our messages with color, rhythm, and nuance.

There are those of us who worship language and what it can do, arriving at the altar at a young age. As we learn, we stack up vocabulary into semantic pyramids — to forget is an infinitive is a verb; forgotten is a past participle is an adjective (sometimes) is a modifier (usually). We are the ones who read ahead in our English textbooks and who sign up for high school Spanish and French classes to see if other people in other corners of the world wield language differently from our own clumsy grips. We become readers to consume language and writers to spread it and editors to protect it.

Those early dissections, slicing language into sentences and paragraphs and extracting subjects and predicates, are our first lessons in the vocabulary of language’s favorite subject: itself. Lewis Thomas writes in Et Cetera, Et Cetera, his collection of meandering etymological essays, “The language keeps talking about itself, cannot seem to have enough of itself. At a guess, I’d say there are more roots for the various ways of using language than for all other human activities together, some of them hidden away inside longer words that seem to be designed for other purposes, most of them standing baldly out in full view.” ­

3.
Mondegreens are particularly prevalent in song lyrics. (Consider all the people who thought Taylor Swift was singing about lonely Starbucks lovers.) When a mondegreen involves song lyrics from another language, it’s called soramimi. When a mondegreen results in a nonsensical phrase, it’s called a malapropism. But if the ersatz word or phrase makes some sort of twisted sense, such as “old-timer’s disease” in place of “Alzheimer’s disease,” it’s an eggcorn (itself an eggcorn for acorn).

Language cares about these subtle distinctions. It digests the complicated things we try to do with it and feeds us back distilled linguistic pearls, from anacoluthon to zeugma. It looks in the mirror and describes its patterns (hypallage, paligogy); it opens its mouth and listens to how it sounds (fricative, glottal). It teases apart its letters only to coax them back together more closely (blend words) or in a different order (metathesis), lop some letters off (haplology), or add new ones (paragoge). It tracks the movement of its words across questions and responses (pied-piping, wh-movement).

For every linguistic guideline, there’s a word coined to denote how to skirt that guideline for rhetorical effect. “I came, saw, and conquered” just doesn’t have the same decisive intonement without the phrase-beginning repetition of anaphora, nor would we still be singing Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” had he not employed the phrase-ending repetition of epistrophe.

Language flexes and adapts. It knows it will be both mangled and elevated, depending on who wields it — quite often by the same person. The damage of careless or misleading words can be immensely far-reaching, as history has borne again and again. At its worse, language can be used to confuse facts and cloud intention, sowing fear, hostility, and oppression. But at its best, it’s the ultimate form of synecdoche, when a term for part of something refers to the thing in its entirety. Language lets us use things as small as phonemes to represent our entire world.

Image Credit: Flickr/Thomas Quine.

Essays
| 8 books mentioned 1 4 min read
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