I believe in the magic and
authority of words.
René Char
“You want to write great
fiction? Then read poetry.” It’s what I tell young writers all the time. Surely
such late great novelists as Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce spent many a
patient hour at the feet of their favorite poets. Only glance at their fiction
and see. Read the opening pages of Heart
of Darkness, of In Search of Lost
Time, of To the Lighthouse, and try (just try!) to restrain your admiration,
your awe. Read but the last few paragraphs of Joyce’s short story "The Dead”
and you’ll be struck at once by the genius and poetry of this complex, this revolutionary, this
beautiful prose.
Of course it makes sense: literary
modernism—the movement within which the language of each of these writers was
forged—was distinguished, above all, by the patent, if sometimes tacit, determination
to elevate the lowly novel as a form to the time-honored status of poetry. And
how did these writers achieve this? By making their prose more expressly poetic, by coopting and adapting for the
novel and short story many of the conventions by which poetry as an art was best
known. Of these many and venerable traits, perhaps the one these writers found
most appealing was the dense, allusive, often highly symbolic nature of the language
itself. No longer would their prose be just the invisible cousin to plot and
character and theme, the wire by which the current was carried to the bulb, but
would boldly take its place beside them in the tale, regularly calling
attention to its charms, sometimes—drunk with wonder at itself—even obscuring what
happens and to whom (see Molloy and Malone Dies, see Ulysses, see Finnegan’s Wake)!
Rita Dove once said that “Poetry
is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” It is an idea affirmed by
poet Frances Mayes in her remarkable introduction to the reading, appreciation,
and writing of poetry, The Discovery of
Poetry. Again and again she insists that poetry is the language art for the way it teaches us about the often simple words
we use each day, restoring weight and consequence to our expression, to our every
verb and noun, to our every comma and period and dash. Good writing is deliberate writing; it is language under
pressure—a fact well known to poets. Indeed arguably no writers put more
pressure on their language than poets, toiling daily with the challenge of
capturing the obvious and the ineffable, with “the naming of things into their
things.” Poets are nothing if not meticulous, obsessive, precise. Writes Edward
Arlington Robinson, “This morning I deleted the hyphen from ‘hell-hound’ and
made it one word; this afternoon I redivided it and restored the hyphen.”
Crazy? I don’t think so.
It’s what poets do, restlessly reinventing our language for us (its glory, its purpose,
its pitfalls, its might) and by extension our very sense of ourselves—as
people, as human beings. As much as ever now we are our words, our poets (and the novelists who revere them) the subtle
crafters of our being, our fate. Writes the great modernist, T.S. Eliot, “For
last years’ words belong to last years’ language/And next year’s words await
another voice.”
Here again are some of my
favorite novelists—each of them steeped in poetry—who have answered Eliot’s
call: Lowry, Barnes, Cela, Ellison, Castellanos, Bellow, Qian,
Saramago, Camus, Carpentier, Oe, Böll, Dorfman, Niwa, Voinovich, Manea,
Ishiguro, Rushdie, Gordimer, Saghal, Jin, Brink, Malamud, Cortázar, Gao,
McCarthy, Styron, Amado, Pamuk, Vargas Llosa, Jelinek, Klíma, Stein, Wright,
Grossman, Mistry, Gombrowicz, Lispector, Morrison, Sabato, Silko, Pavese,
Coetzee, Nabakov, Kahout, Olesha, Oz, Levi, Okri, Appelfeld, Bernhard, Platanov,
Farah, Aksyonov, Fuentes, Bolaño, Ulitskaya, Emecheta, Sebald, Unsworth,
Martin, Trevor, Erdrich, Kaniuk, Petry, Naipaul, Szabó, Hong, Chacel, Borges,
Bowles, Yehoshua, Sōseki, Tišma, Walser, Ford, Head, Green, Duffy,
Abish, Cohen, Ghalem, Agnon, Baldwin, Handke, Ivo, Rulfo, Benet, Mahfouz, Ali,
Megged, Murdoch, Hrabal, Novakovich, Bowen, Houllebecq, Ocampo, Zhang,
Rodoreda, Asturias, Sábato, Soyinka, Müller, Fox, White, Adler, Vollmann, Ford,
Lenz, Márquez, Platonov, Toer, Narayan, Schulze,
Carey, Wallace, Bedford, Ying,
Nooteboom, Achebe, Arenas, Desai, Páral, Énard, Lamming, Robbe-Grillet, Kraznahorkai,
Machado de Assis, Del Paso, and Gass.
Peter
Adam Nash
No comments:
Post a Comment