Wayne Booth lays the smack on Steinbeck
From The Rhetoric of Fiction:
And I really loved that turtle, too.
One of the problems with having nothing to do is that you have no excuse not to structure your time with healthy activities like exercise... or maybe it's that weird gene, that all my immediate family seems to share, which acts as a self-guilting mechanism when it comes to health issues. Either way I've spent this month, literally, running in circles at Webb Bridge Park. However, the time at which I've chosen to run is also the time when all the moms come out from dropping their kids off at school or the old people come out to wander aimlessly in the natural world. This means that I'm usually the only one running, which gives me a twisted sort of superiority as I pass the strollers and the walkers. And when I have to move out of the way for these people who insist on walking the left side of the trail in my opposite direction, I half-exhale and half-sigh, in a way that suggests exhausted but infinite toleration on my part for the slower members of the human race.
This week is the World Domination Theatresports Tournament, but so far I've only gone to one show, long enough to snag a DG shirt before I leave for Chicago. The first half featured Atlanta v. Edmonton, and the second half was Los Angeles v. Toronto. The one noteable scene, performed by LA, involved McDonald's adopting a controversial new slogan, "I'd Hit That!" which evoked the feeling in customers that they were actually having sex with the quarter-pounders.
Nobody can say I haven't spent my summer with legitimate theatre.
I went with Jason to the new Mediterranean restaurant that took over the old Portabella's Pantry where I got a more than decent gyro for eight bucks. The waitstaff there are very friendly, since they're still in that "please come back, give us money" phase. When we were finished, the guy busing our tables told us, "I am sorry, I do not bus the tables very well. It is not my real job. You know Ingles? Supermarket? I'm grocery manager there most of the time. People see me here and they say, 'You! What are you doing here?' and I say, 'I am busing the tables! What do you think!'" In my mind, he sounded French the way Aniele's dad was French when we did impressions of him, but really he was some kind of middle-eastern. I also thought it might be sad if he felt he had to tell everyone this, that he wasn't just a bus boy for this restaurant and that he actually held a very important position elsewhere. I think I'd be inclined to do the same thing, like at Starbucks, when I always brought up my SAT score when talking with customers.
Finally, the movie Proof, by ex-Off-Off Campus Tony-monger Dave Auburn, is finally coming out this month, two years after they wrapped filming on my campus. Fortunately, the trailer is now online, providing enough money shots of UChicago to last me another 10 days.
From The Rhetoric of Fiction:
At one time the invention of the turtle, heading southwest across the highway in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), paralleling in his direction, his helplessness, his determination, and his pace the Joads' hopeless, dogged lives, may seem brilliant, while Tolstoy's interchapters seem heavy and lumbering and obvious. But after twenty years that turtle seems decidedly outmoded and obtrusive, and Tolstoy's commentary, nearly a century old, has somehow taken on a new vitality. Symbolic commentary, like any other kind, must be done with genius, or at least with craftsmanship, if it is to endure beyond the shifts in fashion.
And I really loved that turtle, too.
One of the problems with having nothing to do is that you have no excuse not to structure your time with healthy activities like exercise... or maybe it's that weird gene, that all my immediate family seems to share, which acts as a self-guilting mechanism when it comes to health issues. Either way I've spent this month, literally, running in circles at Webb Bridge Park. However, the time at which I've chosen to run is also the time when all the moms come out from dropping their kids off at school or the old people come out to wander aimlessly in the natural world. This means that I'm usually the only one running, which gives me a twisted sort of superiority as I pass the strollers and the walkers. And when I have to move out of the way for these people who insist on walking the left side of the trail in my opposite direction, I half-exhale and half-sigh, in a way that suggests exhausted but infinite toleration on my part for the slower members of the human race.
This week is the World Domination Theatresports Tournament, but so far I've only gone to one show, long enough to snag a DG shirt before I leave for Chicago. The first half featured Atlanta v. Edmonton, and the second half was Los Angeles v. Toronto. The one noteable scene, performed by LA, involved McDonald's adopting a controversial new slogan, "I'd Hit That!" which evoked the feeling in customers that they were actually having sex with the quarter-pounders.
Nobody can say I haven't spent my summer with legitimate theatre.
I went with Jason to the new Mediterranean restaurant that took over the old Portabella's Pantry where I got a more than decent gyro for eight bucks. The waitstaff there are very friendly, since they're still in that "please come back, give us money" phase. When we were finished, the guy busing our tables told us, "I am sorry, I do not bus the tables very well. It is not my real job. You know Ingles? Supermarket? I'm grocery manager there most of the time. People see me here and they say, 'You! What are you doing here?' and I say, 'I am busing the tables! What do you think!'" In my mind, he sounded French the way Aniele's dad was French when we did impressions of him, but really he was some kind of middle-eastern. I also thought it might be sad if he felt he had to tell everyone this, that he wasn't just a bus boy for this restaurant and that he actually held a very important position elsewhere. I think I'd be inclined to do the same thing, like at Starbucks, when I always brought up my SAT score when talking with customers.
Finally, the movie Proof, by ex-Off-Off Campus Tony-monger Dave Auburn, is finally coming out this month, two years after they wrapped filming on my campus. Fortunately, the trailer is now online, providing enough money shots of UChicago to last me another 10 days.
5 Comments:
Surprising as this might sound coming from me, hater of all fiction, I frequently have this argument with my mother about the effectiveness of certain kinds of description. Usually, I end up defending Hemingway for writing things like, "And she was beautiful" over Tolstoy, who wrote ten pages about every detail of Anna Karenina's face. I think Booth is probably referring to War and Peace when he talks about Tolstoy's "commentary," of which there is decidedly less in Anna Karenina, but I have never heard anyone praise that except Booth. I don't recall Steinbeck's turtle being particularly obtrusive either. I don't know; his conclusion seems kind of arbitrary to me.
It looked to me, from the little I could gleam with the sound down and a distracted psyche, that they might have turned Proof into a family sapfest and veered from some of the play's humor and intelligence. But I may also be ejaculating this prematurely.
Yes.
Rita: The premise of the book is Booth challenging modern assumptions that novels have to "show" and not "tell" and critics who condemn authors for directly addressing the reader in their own voice (this is Tolstoy's "commentary"). In this quote, Booth is basically saying that sometimes an author directly "commentating," while seemingly less artistic, can be preferable to second-rate symbolism like the turtle.
Daniel: It could just be the way they cut the trailer. Thank you, though, for the enlightening imagery.
So, um, how is "commentating" different from a third-person narrator? Is it just a very friendly third-person narrator with verbal diarrhea?
The commentating that Booth is talking about is when an author like Jane Austen says things like, "So-and-so was a very wicked, foolish man." Many modern critics call that sort of practice inferior. The opposite example is Camus's THE STRANGER, which provides no kind of "comment" from the author on Meursault's actions or character... Camus himself would even purport that he doesn't use certain literary devices like "plot," with all its happy coincidences and conveniences, but that his novel is "organic" and "realistic" in composition and narration.
So don't think of the commentating in terms of just how much the narrator is "talking" as in long versus economic descriptions; it's how the author leads the reader in terms of what character they should identify with or what message they should warm to, at the same time that the author is breaking the "illusion" of reality in the novel by saying, "i'm the author, this is what this person's character is like." Booth's argument is that these critics shouldn't say reality is valuable for its own sake, especially when even authors like Camus employ a kind of "rhetoric," even though they deny it.
Can we take this outside? We might be scaring away some of the regulars.
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