I’ve been reading Tristram Shandy on and off and am finally reaching the end, after many months. Apart from Shakespeare, I think it’s the oldest piece of fiction I’ve ever read (written 1759-1767). The prose style, naturally, is thoroughly antiquated. In a childish way, I keep feeling a little proud of myself for being able to make sense of it, for being able to feel the human experience coming through this stuff that on the surface seems so foreign and dated.
When reading something like this, style ends up being like a strong flavor, an aura that sits heavy and mysterious over the whole affair. When I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a kid, the peculiarities of the Victorian language made the fantasy that much more pungent; it had a particular smell to it, a particular something. When you’re really young, all books seem this way, because all language still has the characteristics of “style” – nothing is truly transparent. Eventually, certain styles become so familiar that they cease to have an effect – like wearing tinted glasses so long that you don’t really perceive the tint anymore. Common language usage doesn’t “smell” like anything; it smells like water.
Art that uses the common, odorless language of its medium, the style of the times, communicates through content. I can still be moved by words even if the words don’t have that thickness, that mystery of being used in a peculiar way. I can be moved because of what they describe. This is what pre-20th-century art was. Paintings moved us for what they portrayed and how well they portrayed it; novels moved us for what happened in them and how well it was conveyed. The fairy-tale strangeness of style was part of it too, but always, always secondary. Foreignness arose naturally, when styles grew old and became extinct, or when styles were taken from parallel cultures – exoticism and neo-whateverism. Artists would look to the past or other cultures for that rich flavor of “style.”
When they realized they could create it themselves, that was the break. Reading Ulysses (another book where I felt proud of myself for understanding the life behind the words) there’s definitely a pungency in the use of language, a scent in the air, but it’s entirely the author’s. It’s the art: what if this had been a way of speaking? What if this had been the world at one time? A bit like the concept of “fantasy” art and literature, but fantasy of style, rather than content.
Perhaps this happened in poetry first. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been very able to appreciate poetry; I think because that certain flavorful “otherness” is often the point and yet it’s accomplished with so few words that I don’t feel confident in my footing. It feels like climbing a rickety ladder into a fairy-tale rather than walking through a gate.
So-called “fantasy” art and literature is, to me, the same as all other literature except more extreme. Which is usually an indication of crudeness and lack of restraint, which is indeed why most “fantasy” is awful.
Not Don Quixote, first volume published 1605? Thought you said you’d read that. (I haven’t.)
And, which of course reminds me of:
“I had not then read any real novels. I had heard it said that George Sand was a typical novelist. That prepared me in advance to imagine that François le Champi contained something inexpressibly delicious. The course of the narrative, where it tended to arouse curiosity or melt to pity, certain modes of expression which disturb or sadden the reader, and which, with a little experience, he may recognise as ‘common form’ in novels, seemed to me then distinctive — for to me a new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself — an intoxicating whiff of the peculiar essence of François le Champi.”
Heck, the preceding paragraph as well:
“And even what in such pieces supplied a material need, since it did so in a manner to which we are no longer accustomed, was as charming to her as one of those old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage of our modern tongue. In precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects. And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time.”
Oh yeah, good point. I read some of Don Quixote. But it doesn’t relate to this discussion because I read it in translation. The style of a translation is inevitably watered-down and brought closer to the common parlance of translator’s culture, no matter how conscientious the translator may be about trying to keep it characteristic of the era. And even if the style is still notably “weird,” I as reader tend to attribute it to the fact of the translation rather than to the source material. If Tristram Shandy had originally been written in Spanish, you can bet that no modern translator would ever be so bold as to produce the wild English text I’m reading.
Also, the second of your two quotes (which in the source precedes the first) is about enjoying antiquities because one can enjoy the fact that they are antiquated, something slightly different than what I’m talking about. My experience that there is something going on in Sterne’s style (and Lewis Carroll’s, etc.) does not actually arise from an awareness of how old it is – as I said, I get much the same experience when reading intentionally abnormal style written in the 20th century, or when reading children’s books. On the other hand, the two kinds of experience mingle with one another in this case. I guess the phrase “nostalgic longing for impossible journeys” is on the money – just not necessarily through time. I think Proust eventually gets around to this, by the end, talking about how the emotion of wanting to move through time is actually the longing to live outside of time. Wanting to live in a fairyland, even one that’s not specifically nostalgic, is also satisfying in its atemporality. If I might use the word atemporality.