This is my first bona fide snow day since a blizzard hit Chicago in 1978. (Or maybe it was ’79.) Reporters don’t get snow days; neither do the self-employed. But today was my day to teach at Goucher, and the campus is closed because of some pretty wretched conditions.
Still, I’m at home, working, and I found this sentence in one of the greatest books ever written:
“A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.”
Is it just me, or is this godawful? Could it have been consciously godawful? I will note that the masterpiece that contains this work was written 80-plus years ago. Have times changed?
My head hurts. I think I need to put the literature down and go watch some Project Runway reruns. Comments on how literature changes. Or doesn’t. And how everything depends on context. I have no doubt that I would draw a vicious red line through this in a student’s paper, but how can I critique one of our greatest writers?
My SO, stopping by to deliver roses — ! — defends the sentence.
Here’s what I know: If a student wrote it, I would be firm in saying no, no, no. I would beg the student to write: “He smiled.” It’s sort of like being a driving instructor and starting with right turns. I’m not saying that left turns cannot be made, or should not be made, but that they should wait for a day when one is more experienced.
If a writer I admire wrote it, I would turn myself into knots trying to forgive it.
If a writer I didn’t like wrote it, I would laugh myself sick over it.
And yet, here, in just ten minutes time, we have reasonable people, with reasonable yet conflicting views.
Good use of a snow day.
Ha! Context is everything. If I read that sentence in, say, a John O’Hara novel, I’d cringe — but somehow knowing that it’s Joyce makes me think he must have meant something specific by the quiet breaking.
Lucky, lucky you to get a snow day…
Yes, we want to give James Joyce the benefit of the doubt.
Yet . . . we’re all comfortable with Dreiser’s hideous writing. I adore Dreiser — in terms of understanding how people really think, he might be one of the greatest — but oh, those sentences! Such as: “Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility.”
Yet, this follows the rather lovely: “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” If that had been the opening of SISTER CARRIE, rather than the third paragraph, it might rank up there with: “It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .”
Wait — we’re talking about craft. GET DAVE WHITE. Or, better yet, check out what Pau Guyot had to say about going in for a tune-up, over at Murderati.
My James Joyce exercise for the day:
Cheese, milk, cow, black, white.
Whew, that was a workout!
I liked the sentence – it put a smile on my face. Actually, the phrase I find generic, several lines before it, is “…his even white teeth glistening here and there…” Sure, taken out of context and minus what was glistening, but does a book containing another quarter of a million words need to be critiqued sentence by sentence instead of by how the overall ‘picture’ is being painted?
Both quotes are at the very beginning of the book and perhaps Mr. Joyce was just getting warmed up for what was to come.
And didn’t Joyce so love to parody other writers? Wilde and Dickens spring to mind from some class notes taken decades ago. I don’t think Joyce can be read like others… always needs some degree of analysis of the constant wordplay.
Happy V Day, all!
For more context: The reason I pulled ULYSSES off the shelf today was because I wanted to make a point to a student about clarity/stream of consciousness. We may not know exactly what’s going on in the opening pages of ULYSSES, but we can follow the conversation, and we know who’s speaking to whom, and the antecedents line up neatly.
Does any book need to be critiqued sentence by sentence? Probably not, no matter its length or place in the canon. In fact, I find most lines out of context don’t work for me, whether a reviewer is citing the line as proof of brilliance or idiocy. I usually end up thinking: “Well, I don’t see why that’s so great/godawful.”
Several thoughts:
Times and tastes have indisputably changed.
Context is all.
Most younger readers these days would not be able to get through much of James Joyce’s work. Many would think *all* of his sentences were godawful.
I have to admit that I find quite a bit of Dickens unreadable.
It’s a bit jarring because it’s a mix of the senses, a visual thing with hearing references. It stops you when you read it, and in general the type of books most of us read and write today, we don’t want to be stopped in our reading. We want things to flow. 75 or however many years ago you said this was written, readers weren’t so concerned about the flow and were more likely to want to be impressed, and to stop to appreciate choices in words or phrases.
But, Laura, a smile did break quietly over my lips as I read that! Anyway, Dr. Phil is on at 3 pm, WJZ, and is good for a break.
I’m not very impressed by “our greatest writers” – perhaps i should be more so but I never was a fan of most “classics” and tend to have this twitch when someone tells me you HAVE to read him he’s GREAT, he’s a genius. I’ve read a lot of “our greatest writers’ and hate their stuff, so I’m just not to be trusted here. But “quiet smiles” don’t break and I think the sentence stinks. Roses or no.
I think Sandra’s right that tastes and styles change so what once was magnificent might not be today. But then I can’t read Joyce, hate Hemingway, never thought Dickens was brilliant, and struggled through most of “literature” when I had to read it in school. And alas, when i think of his teeth glistening “here and there” I see Gene Kelly in “Singing in the Rain” with his famous glinting teeth. Dignity, always dignity.
I thought I was the only one, Andi. I am not a lover of the classics either. And if a writer doesn’t grab me right away, I stop and find a book I do like. So… I’m sure I’ve missed out on tons of great stuff. Oh well.
The sentence wasn’t awful but a little show-offy, I think, to quote Laura’s rewrite: He smiled.
A smile sure exploded off my kisser.
Two thoughts: 1)enjoying “our greatest writers” demands letting them escape that tombstone phrase. In my 40′s I discovered lots of writers newly available to me, I think precisely because the ghosts of all my English professors had been laid to rest and I no longer gave a damn what anyone else thought. Mr. Dickens, so glad you came; how do you do Ms. Wharton; I even picked up Moby Dick and within a few pages knew at least in part why I’d hated it in high school–I hadn’t gotten any of the jokes. 2) Fiction readers surrender their world to the world of the fiction. We go inside another mind and among the wondrous things we find there is new syntax. When Henry James’ sentences start not to cloy, we have been transformed by a personality far far from our own (from mine anyway).
The new movie sent me looking for All the Kings’ Men–some show-stopping sentences in there.
English teachers often present literature-as-duty. We would create more readers teaching literature-as-joy.
Ab Logan
I remember reading GATSBY, taking a couple of chapters to adjust because every other paragraph contained stylistic bits I’ve had pounded into me NOT to do.
Too bad I hadn’t read that in high school. I could have said, “Oh, yeah? Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald did it.”
(Of course, the response would have been “You’re not Fitzgerald.” But if you knew my English teacher, you’d know it’d be worth watching her turn purple.)
Ab . . . does this mean an entire generation of Boys Latin students are going to grow up cursing THE SUGAR HOUSE? <g>
No! Remember that I teach Literature-as-joy. But also, I send THE SUGAR HOUSE up against lightweight competition–Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, J.D., John Updike, Sherwood Anderson–in that company Tess Monaghan kicks butt. On my final exam, several of the boys wrote beautiful essays–fine thought and good writing. One wonderful boy used THE SUGAR HOUSE a lot to back up his thesis that inner-experience and outer-experience must coexist in a story. He said that only when we see how the adventure registers internally do we know how to respond–he used the scene (in SUGAR HOUSE) of the fire to substantiate the point.
One young man (who shall remain nameless) wrote a very disorganized essay (true to his style) in which he said that the difference between the men and the women among those we had read was that the guys were willing to write tragedy, and the women weren’t. He backed up his thesis saying, “This woman Alice whats-her-name wrote a book in which the narrator is raped and murdered in the first chapter and she turns it into an upbeat experience.” These young readers have insights when they don’t feel there’s an EXPERT with a trump card.
ab
Of course, Ulysses was filled with typos ’cause Joyce’s poor eyesight couldn’t catch them all in the proofs. I believe in the original ms. the line reads, “A pleasant simile broke quiety over his lips.” Now isn’t that better…and so nuch more Joycean.
Completely OT, there is only one time in any year that I am nuts about receiving roses and that is Valentine’s Day from my spouse of 33 years. I am pleased to hear your SO gives them, too.
Doesn’t matter that it was written 80+ years ago. Not every word — even from our most lauded scribes — is gold.
You were right the first time. It’s godawful.
That is truly godawful. Although the horror of the writing seems to actually match the horror of what was happening when a man just did that exact thing with me, so it’s sort of cleansing in a way.
I didn’t think that it was THAT bad! One of my favorite authors (she ranks right up there with you, Laura) is Elswyth Thane. Her prose is incredibley descriptive, one of my favorite lines of hers is describing a woman who had “piled white hair and a bosom”. Another time she describes people who need a drink as “needing restoratives” and when it’s warm they sit on the patio with “something tall and cold in glasses that clink”. I so want to be there with them!
It’s not a good sentence, but I’ve read wrose. Hell, I’ve probably written worse.
Context, tone, voice, so many things go into writing. It’s easy to pull out certain sentences and rip them. Mostly because there are so many more bad sentences around than good. It’s very hard to write a great sentence.
I can’t think of one book, 80 years old or 8 weeks old, where every sentence was perfect. God, would I love to read THAT book.
And I think times do change. And writing and writers reflect that change. We chronicle that change.
I’ve certainly written worse and definitely read worse.
But can you imagine what a critic would do to a genre writer who wrote that line? It would be singled out as the proof of hackdom.
But because it’s — tada! — James Joyce, in ULYSSES, my hunch is that he gets a pass.
Perhaps I should be embarrassed to admit it but I kind of like the sentence. Which now has me wondering, are readers less exacting than writers? Do readers who are not writers not recognize bad when we see it as readily as readers who are writers? I would not have thought so but now I’m not as sure.
I remember that snowstorm; I was going to school at Loyola of Chicago at the time. It was pretty darned nasty, if I recall. Can’t remember if it was 79 or 80, I was thinking I was a sophomore or maybe a junior. I guess either year could work for either student status.
I don’t like the line, either, but I don’t recognize the story and don’t know the context. I think even “hacks” sometimes write elegant passages, and even “masters” come up with a clunker now and then. I guess the difference comes from the balance between the two. Scott
Twenty-four hours late (that is, one day past Valentine’s Day) can I get mushy and say that I really love the people who come to this strange little blog and comment?
I know that “To blog or not to blog” is a question for a lot of writers, and one can argue either side. But I really enjoy the exchanges here, and the things that I learn, not to mention the memories that have been shared so unstintingly.
I was so horribly scarred by the eighth grade experience of Great Expectations that I can NOT look at a Dickens book today. So, Andi and Peg made my day! Had a great teacher, btw, and Shakespeare does not give me the shivers the way Dickens does. My mother has tormented me into reading all of Austen, and those long-ass sentences just about killed me. Still, the characters linger.
Read All the King’s Men for the first time recently and felt I deserved a gold star when I finished. It was Work. Ditto for Sister Carrie and Jane Erye.
‘Course, this could be because Mr. Logan’s addition went completely over my head. Is this the difference between readers and writers?
I think perhaps “the classics” are ruined for us because we are forced to read them too early. I’m a reasonably intelligent person and, with the exception of Jane Austen, I hated every classic I had to read in high school and thereafter tried to steer clear of those authors. I hated the standard high school Steinbeck fare, The Pearl, The Red Pony, The Grapes of Wrtah but read East of Eden (under duress in a book club) 15 years later and loved it. I hated Great Expectations in high school but read Bleakhouse in law school and that was one of my all time favorite reading experiences. Read Anna Karinina in a literature course in college with a great professor and loved it but probably would have hated it on my own or with a lousy professor.
I guess I’m trying to say that I think it’s not just the text itself but what we bring to it and where we are in our lives that sometimes makes or breaks a book for us.
I think you’ve hit it, Diane. I can’t stand Steinbeck to this day because of being forced to read The Pearl in high school. I found no symbolism in it, all I wanted to do was smack some sense into the characters! I do remember that we also read To Kill A Mockingbird in that same class and I loved it. My lit classes in college were so much better, but that’s probably because instead of having a crush on the instructor like I did in high school, I genuinely liked and respected the professor (I took the same guy for several courses) and got so much more insight. He introduced me to the works of A.B. Guthrie. Fast forward about 30 years. I’m talking to my hubby about something and discovered that while I was in college reading The Way West, he was in some hotel bar in Montana getting drunk with A.B. himself!
I never read Joyce. In college I was supposed to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I got the Cliff’s Notes. I couldn’t get through it. I don’t mind this sentence. Anyway, he was probably drunk when he wrote it.
“can I get mushy and say that I really love the people who come to this strange little blog and comment? “
We love you too, punkin.