ROBBIE asked me to forward this for discussion:
Martha, on her blog, has this to say about quoting from lit:
'Was poking through Waiting for Godot this afternoon, avoiding a deadline and looking for something to quote at the current world news. Discovered, as usual, that really good writers are mainly unquotable. Any text that's part of a well-written whole is hard to take out of its original context. It may be applicable elsewhere, but it'll be hard to cut in a way that makes sense outside the original, because every word in the original will depend on every other word.'
I was highly surprised by this assertion. We may have stumbled here on yet another good reason to downgrade Beckett from his over-adulated position: his writing is so diffuse that Martha, searching for something to quote about a mad world full of death and error, can find nothing that can reach the universal outside of the text; indeed when I saw a production of Endgame in the West End recently I felt the play was rather measly for its great reputation. Certainly Shakespeare had seen and summarised Hamm and Clov's ninety minutes in a matter of lines, which might not be an argument against Beckett's play writing per se but is definitely an argument against his adulation. Almost any episode of Steptoe and Son, for example, is as good as Godot or Endgame: you get more jokes but the Beckettian world is there in aces as well, or rather there if you want to see it; if you don't see it, you get a laugh; with Beckett, if you don't see it, you don't get anything.
But getting back to Martha's comment. I found it surprising because to me, the quotability of something is a sure sign of quality, whether you reference it in writing, or read it as an epigraph--a well chosen epigraph sets a novel up well I think. Off the top of my head I think of the George Eliot quote at the start of Our Man in Havana: 'And the sad man is cock of all his jests.' or as a response to an event. Shakespeare comes out on top with this and the application of his words--outside their immediate context of his plays, such as to one's own experience or an event--is what makes his work so great and universal. Choose your own examples.
Posted by Alan Allport at May 11, 2004 09:00 AMA quotation is a convenience. I don't think that something pithy is necessarily more universal than something which works on a larger scale. The scale of quotability is arbitrary--just something short enough to remember and recite without boring everyone. Quote a bit of Hamlet and people think you're deep; quote a whole scene and they'll ask you to shut up.
Why can't a chapter, or a play, or a book, put in a specific context (outside of the rest of the work, outside of its genre, its original historical environment, etc.) be just as meaningful in its new application? And if it can be, then that's universality, isn't it?
Maybe the answer is in the word "application". How do you apply a whole chapter? Recite the whole thing? But then plays are different since they are meant to be performed and are therefore already communal. Quoting is a kind of performance, after all.
The best example of something that deserves to be quoted but never will be is from the Faerie Queene, I. ix. Here the Redcrosse knight confronts a personification of despair, and though a lot of that poem annoys me (never made it through the whole thing, in fact), I really love this part. I've often wished it wasn't hundreds of lines long so I could share it with people. As it is most aren't interested in wading through Spencer's intentionally archaic spelling and diction for that long.
Ere long they come, where that same wicked wightPosted by: Alan Hogue at May 11, 2004 10:56 AM
His dwelling has, low in an hollow caue,
Farre vnderneath a craggie clift ypight,
Darke, dolefull, drearie, like a greedie graue,
That still for carrion carcases doth craue:
On top whereof aye dwelt the ghastly Owle,
Shrieking his balefull note, which euer draue
Farre from that haunt all other chearefull fowle;
And all about it wandring ghostes did waile and howle.
Well, certain kinds of fictional and expository writing are built like those dry-stone Roman arches and domes where each block both supports and depends on its neighbor. Pull a block out and it's just a block, not a part of a whole. (There: I've found a better way of putting it than that unfortunate stuff about the cow.)
I've found this with Orwell very often. For example, only a few phrases are frequently quoted out of "Politics and the English Language " -- largely the list of rules at the end, and the paragraph that begins, "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible...." But if you look at the rest of the paragraphs they mainly fit better where they are than in any new context. Some other Orwell things are even more that way. For example, "Inside the Whale." I tried quoting that during the awful third week of September '01 and ended up typing out a whole lot of it in an effort to preserve its sense at all.
No, on reflection, all writing is not like that. The best contrary example is probably Yeats' "The Second Coming," which is responsible for at least three frequently used tag lines that each independently have wider application than the complete poem, such that at least two of the three lines have inspired famous book titles. (The ones I can think of are Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem -- but are there others?).
So, OK, maybe there's *a certain kind of* good writing that can't be excerpted.
Re: Beckett specifically, I don't think of his work being "diffuse" as a fault. It's a characteristic. Not everything is punchy. What Beckett is good at is descriptions of how to boil a frog, and he does that very well, and it's worth paying attention to what he has to say. He's "diffuse" and not easily quotable because what he is talking about in the first place is the evil in boredom and banality.
We were listening to a recording of Satie's piano music last night. He's much friendlier than Beckett of course but he shares the characteristic of working to create a distinctive atmosphere rather than easily quotable moments. He can be witty, of course -- being a piano teacher's kid, I laughed my head off at the "Sonatine bureaucratique" with its mocking quotes from that awful rinkydink Mozart thing that twelve-year-olds like to pound out at double tempo -- but when Satie is serious he's good at something that Ornella Volta's liner notes to our recording pick up nicely: "...the music of this odd composer, who appeals less to any virtuoso technique than to a certain state of mind in the interpreter...."
Nothing wrong with appealing to "a certain state of mind" as a way of writing. Nothing wrong with constructing an argument out of interdependent phrases. Being good at one-liners is just a different skill from being good at building a whole.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 11, 2004 11:48 AMWell, certain kinds of fictional and expository writing are built like those dry-stone Roman arches and domes where each block both supports and depends on its neighbor.
This is also almost universally true with pop songs, except that in this case the indispensible context is the music. No matter how good the song is, you can't type out the lyrics and expect anyone to get it if they aren't already familiar with the song.
Leonard Cohen, whatever you think of him, is one consistent exception. I've always thought this must say something about an essential difference between modern lyrics and poetry, but I've never been able to figure out exactly what.
Then again maybe I shouldn't say modern. Most poems intended to be lyrics have this same problem when they are isolated on the page, however old they are.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at May 11, 2004 12:14 PMNo, on reflection, all writing is not like that. The best contrary example is probably Yeats' "The Second Coming," which is responsible for at least three frequently used tag lines that each independently have wider application than the complete poem, such that at least two of the three lines have inspired famous book titles. (The ones I can think of are Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem -- but are there others?).
Slouching towards Ayodhya (?)
Slouching towards Gomorrah (Bork)
Slouching towards Kalamazoo
Things fall apart: an analysis of the problems of thirteen small Botswana firms
Things fall apart: a history of the State Bank of South Australia (I'm not making these up)
The Center cannot hold: the search for a global economy of justice
The centre cannot hold: Britain's failure in Northern Ireland
The centre cannot hold (George Woodcock - aha!)
Martha said 'Nothing wrong with appealing to "a certain state of mind" as a way of writing. Nothing wrong with constructing an argument out of interdependent phrases. Being good at one-liners is just a different skill from being good at building a whole.'
Nothing worng with any of what you said except that my idea of a good writer is someone who frequently makes a good turn of phrase while building a good whole. Those that that don't, and Beckett doesn't, at least in the plays I know--his novels maybe different but from the ones i've glanced at they look similar--do that and so, regardless of his virtue as a maker of wholes and his making a career out of a few lines of Shakespeare (like the way some people get whole careers out of a phase of Picasso, Bowie or Dylan) I consider him overrated.
Quoting novels is an interesting one; Powell, in Dance, often has philosophical passages, as it were, at the start of each chapter and these could be lifted out of the whole and quoted elsewhere, see for example the opening paragraph of chapter two of A Question of Upbringing.
Your 'Beckett' rules bears out for someone like Mamet whose plays have a universal significance but not in very quotable ways since they are often rendered in a very locked-in mode of speech.
His essays on the other hand have loads of potential quotes.
But I dislike your reductionist view of memorable, quotable lit as 'one liners'.
I've paid attention to Beckett and still think he is a one trick pony and a miserabalist with academics and pseuds thrusting profundity on his and maybe it is there (and maybe it ain't--we're in Dylan country now) but it is elsewhere also, in much less regarded writers roughly contemporary to Beckett (think here of Galton And Simpson) who produced more entertaining work; there's nothing entertaining about Endgame (unless you particularly guffaw at his blarney Brechtianisms, but Hamlet was conceived as entertainment.
The other thing is, is that in the long run people can me more equivocal about the Beckett type of writer: a lot of the claims made for it are arguable; it's the modern school of obscurity; maybe you could find an irony in the atheistical outlook of the work, having to do with taking obscure artists on trust. There again DH Lawrence said trust the tale not the teller, but with Beckett, the great flat joke is that there is no tale.
Alan A. wrote:
...Slouching towards Kalamazoo...
Kalamazoo? Do tell.
Alan H. wrote:
This is also almost universally true with pop songs, except that in this case the indispensible context is the music. No matter how good the song is, you can't type out the lyrics and expect anyone to get it if they aren't already familiar with the song.
Leonard Cohen, whatever you think of him, is one consistent exception.
What about Dylan's early Symbolist stuff? "Hard Rain" doesn't need a tune. But then maybe it's an exception that proves the rule, since it's so closely based on "Lord Randal" (or "Henry My Son" or the scout-camp classic "Green and Yeller," which turns out to have a music-hall origin) that anyone with a folk-song background will mentally supply some lyrical but workmanlike Brit-folk tune even if it's not the one Dylan used...
(Funny, I can see Orwell sitting on all of our shoulders. AH says "This is almost universally true..." and "...is one consistent exception." I said, "The best... example is probably..." etc.)
(And AH's first post above just begs for the Orwell bit from "Why I Write":
When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and association sof words. The lines from Paradise Lost --So hee with difficulty and labour hardwhich do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling 'hee' for 'he' was an added pleasure...
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee,
....and thanks again to the Alans for allowing HTML in this space. It's so much fun to be able to format stuff and throw in text links.)
Well, didn't I ramble. Better stop here.
God, I have a terrible habit of doing stuff like that. Maybe I'm just too unique, or maybe the English language is slightly dead.
Yeah, the Dylan's another good example. I think one problem with most lyrics is that they are either too lose rhythmically (because the music will make up for that), or too tight and predictable rhythmically (which can be fine in a song (like endless repetition), but gets old on a page). Hard Rain is right in between. That would be one deficiency that would pop right out without music.
Maybe it really is true that lyrics aren't written as well because they don't need to be. A part of me never wants to believe that, though. I hate easy explanations.
And I know exactly what Orwell meant about the funny spelling. I used to get excited about it. But in my defense, it was Spencer who did it, and most of that was archaic even in his time. I guess that's why editors of The Faerie Queene don't like to modernize the spelling.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at May 11, 2004 01:46 PMFrom Robbie:
...but with Beckett, the great flat joke is that there is no tale.
Well, yes. He's out to explain entropy and despair to people who haven't been paying attention. You could argue if you wanted to that that's why academics with reasonably pleasant lives are the ones who groove on him. Doesn't make him a bad writer, just one to be taken in moderate doses.
Alan H --
About verses that depend on tunes, there are some songs that never had tunes but that just about force the reader to supply a tune. Like Tolkien's "Troll Song" -- from memory (this may be slightly wrong) it starts:
Troll sat alone on his seat of stoneI can't read that without adding the tune of "The Fox Came Out On a Chilly Night." Is it the same for others?
and munched and mumbled a bare old bone
for many a year he'd gnawed it near
for meat was hard to come by
done by!
gum by!
So if we're talking modern rock lyrics, no, I don't think lyrics have to be written as stand-alone poetry to be valuable -- do they? Being a Dire Straits fan (for my sins) I'll pick an example from them: "Telegraph Road." The title song, not the whole album. The way that high-pitched note grows out of nothing at the beginning doesn't depend on words. It's the sound a kind of industrial fan makes on a quiet night. There's one of those near here. The words are part of a whole.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 11, 2004 02:57 PMNever said he was bad, just terribly overrated.
Posted by: ROBBIE at May 11, 2004 03:06 PMThat troll song follows (if I'm not mistaken) a four beat pattern, which is probably the most common popular song form, so I'm sure that has something to do with it. Just as you can instantly recognize a limerick or rhymed "fourteeners" (nursery rhymes), a four stress line with no real meter has its own distinguishible sound, though maybe less obvious.
I agree that lyrics don't need to work as poetry to be good. I would argue that some of the best rock songs ever made look completely retarded when written down. I could provide plenty of examples but I'm sure no one needs to see them.
Let's frame the question another way. There is presumably nothing wrong with poetic lyrics. So, is there any valid reason why lyrics that make for awful poetry are preferable in a song? If not, then are most lyrics "bad" from a poetic point of view just because of laziness on the part of song writers?
Hm. Makes me wonder what would happen if someone tried to make a song out of a Coleridge poem. Oh wait, Rush already did that (to humanity's eternal shame).
Posted by: Alan Hogue at May 11, 2004 03:58 PMAH SAID: 'A quotation is a convenience.'
Again, rather a reductionist view. And quoting Hamlet to seem deep is strictly for under 20s no?
Posted by: ROBBIE at May 12, 2004 04:23 AMAs far as I'm concerned, judging the worth of literature on its quotability is itself reductionist. I think you missed the point with my Hamlet example.
A writer might work on a larger or smaller scale, but ideally, if they're really good, they work on all of them simultaneously. It's a kind of virtuosity which I think is very rare.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at May 12, 2004 09:23 AMAlan H says:
'As far as I'm concerned, judging the worth of literature on its quotability is itself reductionist. I think you missed the point with my Hamlet example.
A writer might work on a larger or smaller scale, but ideally, if they're really good, they work on all of them simultaneously. It's a kind of virtuosity which I think is very rare.'
That's exactly what I said! And I did not say one should judge the worth of literature solely on its quotability ( It was reductionist of you to say so) but great lit can stand outside of itself, as it were; there are always exceptions to the rule, but Beckett's still overrated; another thing we have academics to thank for.
Posted by: ROBBIE at May 12, 2004 11:30 AMYou may want to experiment with html in your comments; italicizing quotes is a good way of demarcating what you're saying from what you're responding to, and can avoid confusion. See this link for details. (Use the 'preview' button to see if you've done the coding right before you publish).
Anyway, I think this thread has run its course now.
Posted by: Alan Allport at May 12, 2004 11:38 AM