Now before I post the comment, as I have done below, let me say that there is only one person who has ever given me the sort of downright whup-ass critique of one of my stories and who writes with the same incisive wit and intelligence with which the following comment was written. If it is you, then thank you and I hope The Boy is a bit more secure in who calls you, me in particular. If it isn't, then that particular allusion, while it may have some gossipy value as it stands, is one you wouldn't get.
Now for the comment:
"Are you being serious? I have not read your book but if this is representative I don't think I want to. Allusions are the literary equivalent of hip-hop samples--they are only as good as their provenance and they have to be strikingly original yet fit so seamlessly there could be no thought of an alternative version.
"We feasted lustily off each other for over two months,
is there another way to feast? Implicit in the verb is the connotation of excessive consumption. Also, "lustily" as an adverb when making an allusion to sex? Might as well say we had sex sexily for the amount of nuance that word added.
she drank of my body, I tasted her flesh,
This is tritest allusion available in the largest source for potentially trite allusions. It's like the national anthem, so overdone that unless you're Whitney you're going to find that your hackneyed caterwauling elicits only polite applause
and sometimes, sated, and drifting off to sleep, my dark bulk cradling her elven paleness,
You can only get away with this phrasing in three cases:
a) the female in question is actually an elf and you're a grizzly bear in which case it's a neutral statement of fact.
b) you're making a pitch for Mills and Boons market share.
c) you actually wanted to underline an obvious dark-light contrast and what better way to do than to utilize the most obvious language possible. Cigars (obviously) for everyone.
I committed the sacrilege of imagining that those eyes staring at me in adoration,
Sacrileges don't usually work in this direction. The adored necessarily is sacred and the metaphor does not work if the adoree is not the source of defilement/betrayal in this case.
willing a resurrection, a second or third coming, before the four short hours she had paid for ran out,
At best this is juvenile humor which conflicts with the tone of the rest of the passage. At worst it's an unfortunate slip in a bad passage and confirms that the author is tone-deaf in regard to his own writing.
were those of the vapid woman who inhabited my apartment and whose love, even in those hours, my own heart yearned for."
Vapidity, by definition, does not inspire great emotion. Later, a narrator may come to realize that a woman is vapid, but he could not yearn for the love of a woman he recognizes as vapid and still be in any way a reliable narrator. Should you argue that this a willful shift of perspective from recitation of events to reflection in a few lines, to what effect?
Good writing holds up (thrives actually, and reveals textures and subtleties upon further inspection) under close reading. This struggles and ultimately fails to survive."
I am now heading across to this writing workshop but let me leave a bulleted critique of the critique:
- First of all, the passage is not representative of the book and I did say as much in the very post you commented on. The thing with extremely intelligent people, and I am guilty of this, is that they believe that everything can be judged ex pide. The problem of course is when you ignore the obvious. Samples of my work are littered around this blog, and I can always send you the complete book(s).
- "Allusions are only as good as their provenance..." et cetera sounds like a wonderful prescription but you've failed to (a) say that the particular mechanics of the allusion is unoriginal and (b) if so, how? It is like saying Walcott's obvious homage to and subversion of Homer in Omeros is intrinsically trite because of the availability/popularity of the source material.
- Brilliant point about the source of sacrilege, and you can be excused since you were not privy to the beginning of the opening of the paragraph from which this is excerpted; never mind that it is implicit within the excerpt that the adoration/devotion is mutual via the very corruption of the Blessed Sacrament which you commented on. It is not, "she drank of my body, she tasted my flesh...", theirs is a mutual devotion, and thus his transference to his wife is sacrilegious.
- I give you the point about juvenile humour, but again it is only because you have not been privy to the overall tone of that section of the story, or indeed the story itself. The tone is ironic, oscillating between the voice of a man growing into his manhood and the teenager (juvenile) that he still remembers and sees the ghost of within himself. It is deliberately juvenile, as is the term "good ganja weed."
- Your comment on "my dark bulk..." is prescriptive and not really a true critical point...I could have easily been more straight forward in this but the visual contrast is not the only thing I intended. "Elven" to qualify the "paleness" cannot be deemed unnecessary simply because of the critic's personal preference for WYSIWYG, since it not only gives a specific hue but also an implicit moral quality, with reference to Tolkien, to the description. I also had in mind the Othello/Desdemona allusion in mind as a sub-text but it was not "seamless" in my mind so I 'discarded' it, as much as you can discard something that you never intended to specifically allude to anyway.
- Finally, if it is you, that latent viciousness has always been your one weak point, the flaw in the diamond that you are. And if it isn't, brilliant critique nonetheless and I hope to God you're a hot woman and we meet up some day.
2 comments:
You have been given the literary equivalent of a colonoscopy. Ha Ha
Your club-bopping and bed-hopping are irrelevant. Red herring dispensed with, now on to the work.
• I missed the part where you said it was unrepresentative. Perhaps I should refresh my cache. I did, however, notice the portion where you shared “an example passage in Fictions which is the sort of thing I believe the discerning reader should enjoy”. I also read one of your earlier posts where you discussed your ideal reader, who, based on your characterization, is a member of a thin subset in an already slender sample. The other portion where you advise that “any reading of Fictions, not to offer a Cliffs Notes on my own book, should be done the way you drink a particularly fine Merlot, rinsing it around in your brain a little before digesting it” also made a dent on my consciousness. So, if you are to be believed, this unrepresentative excerpt is an example of work that can be mined for deeper meaning, and yet you would recommend that your discerning readers, primed to decipher such meaning no doubt, read Fictions in a manner that would support those sorts of minute excavations. Sisyphus will want a copy. If the excerpt is unrepresentative, as you now claim, I have a few questions. Is Fictions littered with passages that your discerning readers would not enjoy? If I don’t enjoy it, am I undiscerning?
• Hyperbole without humor is a bit too acrid for my taste. Omeros is not, by any interpretation of the words, as popular or widely read as the Bible/Tolkien (ha!) I believe originality, and not opacity, was the metric I used to determine success. In case my previous comment did not bring the point home, your allusions are unoriginal because they were both drawn from a banal source and simply sit on the page, unremarkable and unchanged. Using a well-known source raises the bar on the output (if I sing a song to which you know every note, you will be much more sensitive to problems of pitch on my part); obscurity might have piqued the interest even when artistry failed. Also, through no fault of yours, I’ve seen those same allusions employed to much better effect by numerous authors. I will concede that your allusions are just as obvious as Walcott’s, but that’s where the similarity between this (I’ll force myself to stay on topic, but your insinuation that the mere mention of an elven woman and a dark man warrants an association to the great master is unforgivable, particularly when it was as clumsily executed as this was) and Omeros ends. A pastiche of choppy metaphors does not equal ironic mimesis utilized as a tool of repudiation and reclamation.
• Mutual adoration is not implicit in the excerpt. It may be so in the preceding paragraphs. In this snippet, the adoration is ascribed solely to the female character; the male in the very next line reveals that his capacity for adoration has been spent elsewhere. The rest, religious undertones aside, is just sex. The act of eating and drinking alone do not connote adoration. Judas (and Peter after a fashion) ate, drank and betrayed. That may well be your subtle, though rich, meaning.
• If the juxtaposition of high and low art is your thing, then Junot Diaz might be of interest to you. It took him ten years to write BWLOW and with good reason. He is so nimble at his craft that you never see the sleight of hand or suffer a ponderous fumble as he shifts flawlessly from the lowbrow to the sublime. http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/12/24/071224fi_fiction_diaz?currentPage=1
• The canon is littered with wispy elves you can reference simply for their trusting innocence. If you must have this imagery, pick any of them. Tolkien’s elves are far more complex. Furthermore, you’d be hard-pressed to tie your hero and heroine’s (based on their actions in the snippet) morality to that of Tolkien’s elves, especially in reference to sex and marriage.
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