Monthly Archives: January 2009

Landsknechts

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More from A Time of Gifts: the young Leigh Fermor is attempting to  comprehend the origin of the exuberant blend of mediaeval and Renaissance architecture in the towns of Southern Germany. With a thrill he recalls an illustration depicting three colourful figures:

‘Landsknechts in the time of Emperor Maximilian I’ was the caption. They were three blond giants. Challenging moustachios luxuriated over the jut of their bushy beards. Their floppy hats were worn at killing angles, and, under the curl of ostrich feathers, the segmented brims spread as incongruously as the petals of a periwinkle. Two of these men grasped pikes with elaborate blades, the third carried a musket; their hands on the hilts of their broadswords tilted up the scabbards behind them. Slashed doublets expanded their shoulders and quilted sleeves puffed out their arms like Zeppelins; but on top of all this, their torsos were wrapped slantwise in wide ribbons, loosely attached to their trunks by a row of bows at an opposite slant, and bright bands fluttered about their already-voluminous arms in similar contradictory spirals: scarlet, vermilion, orange, canary, Prussian blue, grass green, violet and ochre. From buttocks and cod piece to knee, their legs were subjected to the same contradictory ribbon-treatment, and, with cunning asymmetry, the bright bands were arranged differently askew on each leg … They were swashbuckling, exuberant and preposterous outfits, yet there was nothing foppish about the wearers … miles of plundered silk were sliced up to patch the campaigning tatters of some lucky mercenaries: they went berserk among the bales; then carried away, they started pulling their underlinen through the gaps and puffing it out … Once I got hold of the Landsknecht formula-mediaeval solitary adorned with a jungle of inorganic Renaissance detail-there was no holding me!

Juxtaposition

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Manguel on Borges:

It isn’t impossible that in some way, in order to be with a woman, any woman of the many he desired, to be privy to her mystery, to be more than just a wordsmith, to be or to try to be a lover and be loved for his own sake and not for that of his inventions, Borges created the Aleph, again and again, throughout his work.

But I’d go further. I suspect that Dante constructed literature’s best book in order to insert a few meetings with the unrecapturable Beatrice …

Intempestivus

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Whenever you read a book and come across any wonderful phrases which you feel stir or delight your soul, don’t merely trust the power of your own intelligence, but force yourself to learn them by heart and make them familiar by meditating on them, so whenever an urgent case of affliction arises, you’ll have the remedy ready as if it were written in your mind.

Petrarch (imagining a conversation with Augustine) from Alberto Manguel’s History of Reading.

Sentence Construction

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The gemstone in this month’s Believer is an article on the construction of the sentence. Gary Lutz writes passionately and eruditely:

The aim of the literary artist, I believe, is to initiate the process by which the words in a sentence no longer remain strangers to each other but begin to acknowledge one another’s existence and do more than tolerate each other’s presence in the phrasing: the words have to lean on each other, rub elbows, rub off on each other, feel each other up.

Yesterday’s reading of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts provided an evocative example:

Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day’s doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots.

As Sontag identified in her essay Where the Stress Falls:

… the frontier between prose and poetry has become more and more permeable — unified by the ethos of maximalism characteristic of the modern artist: the create work that goes as far as it can go. The standard that seems eminently appropriate to lyric poetry, according to which poems may be regarded as linguistic artefacts to which nothing further can be done, now influences much of what is distinctly modern in prose.

Time’s Flow Stemmed: An Introduction

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On the one hand, the literary object has no substance but the reader’s subjectivity … But on the other hand, the words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us … the work exists only at the exact level of his [the reader] capacities; while he reads and creates, he knows that he can always further in his reading, can always create more profoundly, and thus the work seems to him as inexhaustible … Thus the writer appeals to the reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of his work.

(Sartre 1967)

Reading literature is a collaboration between writer and reader. The writer exerts a degree of control over the reader’s interpretation. Is this control more or less significant than the part a reader plays in determining the meaning of a narrative? In part this will depend on the skill of the writer’s intention and narrative style. The writer guides but whether the reader grasps the significance of what he reads will depend on experience, imagination, knowledge and ability. Returning to a text after the passing of a decade inevitably presents fresh ways of exploring concepts and ideas.

My own reading is impelled by appetite and desire. It is in part a necessity to create meaning but also offers a way to observe life through another filter. Great literature provokes an aesthetic and emotional reaction. What to make of a particular author’s imagery and symbolism? What was the writer’s intention? How to read more closely and create understanding more profoundly?

It is my hope to participate in a conversation about literature, narrative style and meaning, about how to read more profoundly and to discover fresh sources of inspiration.