redundancy patrol
this from a novel i was reading recently: Fifty yards upstream the four-point buck deer, horns in velvet, stared at them in poised surprise. do we need "four-point", "buck", and "horns" all in the same sentence? wouldn't any one of these words establish the gender of the deer? a poet might use this stream of of monosyllabic words "four-point buck deer" for its bam bam bam bam cadence. or she might use the clumsy prose to make the deer stand out in the sentence in much the way that it stands out in the woods. though, the practice of using clumsy prose to highlight a fleet-footed animal is questionable, and i doubt this was the author's intent anyway. especially when the above sentence was followed by this one: Then was gone in dolphinlike leaps into the brush. "dolphinlike leaps"???? it's a deer for christ sake. it makes deer-like leaps. its deer-likeness is implied. couldn't you spare the poor creature its dignity and just let it leap into the woods on its own? sigh. maybe i'm just being cranky, but words really do matter.
Comments
Man, this is (again!) why I love you. This is brilliant. This is awesome. If you ever delete this post, I shall be forced to, I don't know, start prank calling you or something.
This reminds me so much of Mark Twain's annihilation of what's his face, the Deerslayer guy. Fenimore Cooper. You've read it, I assume?
ah geez gb, homework? you didn't tell me there was going to be homework when i joined you in the blogosphere. i haven't read the novel or Twain's comments, but i will now. sigh. so much to do, so little time.
can you please clarify. do you think McCarthy authored the sentences i quoted in my post or are you just stating that McCarthy also writes these type of sentences and should thus be avoided.
The second. Sorry, we may be separated by a common language!
The passage reminded me of McCarthy; whom I like (I actually like the passage you quote too). It could be considered precious I guess, and when I'm grumpy I don't have patience for prose that aspires to be poetry. Other times it seems very beautiful.
He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he'd been sitting there and God had made the treees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one lese had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was.
It's good reading, meaning fun to read aloud, creates a mood, and has, to me, a poetry-like rhythm. But depending on how much caffeine I have on board, I have to stifle a certain 'oh please get on with it'. And I think Hemingway could have done it in half the words.
But, see, I think the McCarthy is poetic and lush, while I thought the original passage (the four-point buck deer thingie) was just silly.
But that's just me.
thanks for the example. it's interesting, McCarthy's sentences don't feel labored or redundant to me. instead each sentence adds, stresses, or qualifies description without feeling superfluous. here McCarthy is creating an image of an apocalyptic old soul and the complexity of the image warrants his "prolonged" treatment. his phrasing is indeed poetic and wonderfully so. i have no quarrel with poetic language and phrasing in prose. when done well, it blisses me out. when done poorly, it clinks, clanks, and clunks like a trunkload of cans on their way to the recycler. for me, ascribing dolphin-like leaps to a deer produces a clink, a clank, and at least half of a clunk. i wonder if the same author would describe dolphins making deer-like leaps out of the water? maybe so.
I do certainly know the feeling of wanting to go to my back door and hurl a book baseball-like as far it will go, though, so I sympathize with your clunk-avoidance.
I'm not familiar with W.G. Sebald, but i'll definitely check him out. thanks for the tip!
hurl a book baseball-like as far as it will go. hark, is that another arc i see hurling my way?
happy reading!