Adam Gopnik, a critic for The New Yorker magazine, wrote a review of the new Mark Twain Autobiography on 29 November 2010. The book contains over 1,000 pages and was dictated by Twain over a period of a number of years toward the end of his life. Gopnik offers a sad indictment of the book, but then has a sentence that puzzles me. Here is the passage:
[The book] "emerges now as a disjointed and largely baffling bore. This is a fault not of the editors but of Twain's conception and, it must be said, of his dictated prose, which is slack and anti-rhythmic. [My Italics] Scarcely a single sentence in the whole thousand pages stands out to be admired. People who write by ear, as Twain did, are often really writing by eye; the variations in sentence length and syllable count, which give the effect of speech, depend on seeing the sentences set down. Left to our own devices, we all speak sentences of around the same length."
So, according to this passage, Did Twain write by ear and by eye? And what are the consequences? [I think this is a point worth discussing in class, since it is a component of good writing, but Gopnik has provided us with a bad sentence--where you hear it or see it!
Oh, the sentence I had specifically in mind in the is passage, begins "People who write by ear..."
ReplyDeleteYou're right, that is a bad sentence. I think when he says "People who write by ear, as Twain did," he's referring to the conversational quality of Twain's other writings. He then suggests that when people write by ear, as Twain did, they are really writing by eye. I think he's emphasizing the importances of crafting words on the page. In this way, he's trying to provided a means to understanding how this book, which is a "baffling bore," could have been produced by a writier who on all other occasions seemed to seemed to be anything but a bore. This autobiography, which was transmitted orally, deprived Twain of act of "writing by eye" and that is the reason it lacks the quality of his other works... I think that might be what he means... I think...
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that when he says "as Twain did," there is really no way of knowing whether he is referring to this particular autobiography, or to Twain's work as a whole.
Agreed, the sentence is enigmatic, almost self-contradictory. The reason this sentence is confusing because of the generality of the first part "People who WRITE by ear, as Twain did". His use of the present progressive tense, "write" implies that this was Twain's general practice, to write by ear - dictation. But that can't be what Gopnik means. His entire point seems to be that the autobiography is bad precisely because Twain went out of his normal practice of writing by sight and wrote by ear - dictation.
ReplyDeleteHow could it be clearer? My attempted edit: "When people step out of their normal practice of writing by sight and attempt to write by ear, as Twain did in this instance, they find writing by sight necessary. The variations in sentence length and syllable count...depend on seeing the sentences set down." A little wordy, but I think this makes it clearer what Twain's general practice was and doesn't imply a contradiction to his main argument as his original sentence did.
People who write for the "sound" of their words, as Twain did throughout his illustrious career, are often still writing by sight. You have to see the sentence on the page before you know how it will sound. Twain did't get to do that for this dictated work, and you can tell.
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