Thursday, December 13, 2012

My high-flying muse

I had a student ask today why some lines, like Shakespeare's "something wicked this way comes", stick around and almost nothing else does.

"Good question," I replied. "I have no idea. But when I do have an idea, I'm going to write a book and fill it up with nothing but lines that stick."

She laughed, but I was totally serious--at least the over-reaching, irrational writer part of me was serious. And that's the part that comes out of me all too often.

You see, I have a sickness. I want every line I write to become an idiom in some distant tomorrow or far-flung culture. I want every phrase unique, every syntax choice surprising (but more effective for it!), every cliche unsexed (thanks, Lady Macbeth for that one). 

It's a chronic sickness I suffer. 

But there's hope for me, because I've noticed that writers I would call good don't try to hit everything a mile. They understand that there is a time--and it's most of the time, including right now--for the prosaic. Meaning is carried most effectively through clear writing, and the clearest writing is often the simplest and most mundane. Active voice is simple. Subject-verb- complement is simple. Short words tend to be simple words. 

O, but these are goads I kick against.

I want to write Augustan sentences--compound/complex sentences in passive and active voices. I want syntax that spins the head. That spins the head syntax I want! To heck with your short words. I want prefix and suffix, compounds, and much hyphenation. I want syllables!

Were it not an impertinence, I would demand the subjunctive mood!

Your pardon. The sickness grips me even now.

And yet, I have some clarity, for I can call to mind those extended times of health, when the high-flying muse is subdued. It's then I find that the gems in the plainest settings shine brightest, that there's something better in one or two good phrases punctuating a long, plain paragraph than in overwrought attempts to fill it up with more.  

Whew. 

Can you tell we're starting the Romantics unit this week? When that muse is subdued again, I'll re-write this post. 


  

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Sophocles is onto something

In Sophocles' play Antigone, the conscience of each character is fixed with the same message: submit to the gods, it says. The drama begins with this assumption,and then builds through two dynamics: 

1) All the characters are called to respond to the same moral dilemma; and...


2) Each character has a different ability to hear the message of the conscience. One hears it just fine. One is too fearful to hear it. And one is too prideful. 


Antigone, the central character (though not the tragic figure--that's reserved for one of the more confused) hears it clearly and acts as a sounding board for everyone else. As pressures are applied to the conscience-challenged characters, each is forced to come to terms with the disconnect between actions and what he or she knows is right. Both see the truth too late, but with drastically different consequences.


Sophocles was onto something. Like his characters in Antigone, we too have consciences with a fixed message: obey God, they say. And we too have other things obscuring the message. 


But where the play's characters are able to respond freely to their circumstances--one repeatedly ignores pleas to reason; the other, out of guilt, embraces the message of her conscience--we are not so free. Our ability to heed this particular message is dead, and only a work from God will animate it. 


"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." ~Ephesians 2:8,9

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The Writer's Habitat


British Lit is a survey course, so we jump from one period to the next. Usually the periods are divided at points of reaction to a previous movement. For example, the Romantics of the early 19th C. were writing in reaction against the rational strictures of the neoclassical folks before them. The Victorians were reacting against the Romantics, and the 20th C. began with writers throwing out the Victorians.

And so on...

But the interesting thing about what writers do right now is that they can never get the bird's-eye view that makes sense of their own work. It is only (with the exception of the few early Romantics who were consciously changing the literature of their time) by the perspective of distance and the establishment of the next big thing, that the current thing--the period I work in now--takes on identity. It is only when we're done with it that we can see what in the heck we were doing.

The writer in any age must be ok with groping along in the shadows. It is our habitat.