Dog Paddling

 

Die meisten Menschen wollen nicht eher schwimmen, als bis sie es können.

Most people will not try to swim before they are able to.

This is probably the most famous line of Novalis, thanks to Harry Haller quoting it approvingly in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. The irony is that it is contradicted by the behavior of most would-be writers, who tend to write before they are actually able to do it properly. (Perhaps this is true with all the arts.) I know that, in my own case, I have written for years (grant proposals, articles, reports, newsletters, verse, and finally, after many years, fiction) without ever having the basics of English grammar fully in my grasp. I hated the subject of grammar in school (although I thought that the phrase “vowel diphthong” was funny, and I was glad that some verbs were finally getting the help they needed), but I do have to confess that in the end I found more useful writing tools in the study of linguistics (on my own) and music theory than anywhere else. I’ve picked up a few grammar tips here and there, though I can’t think of a more interesting use of words from a creative standpoint than the reversing of homophones in a sentence: “Nothing compliments a meal like a nice complement on the cooking.” “Of coarse, it’s important not to make it course.” Language play is so important to me! When I write, I find that allusiveness, polysemy, tropes, in-jokes, idioms, and innuendos—as well as the musicality of language—matter more to me than plot and characterization, although they are useful props to hang those other things on. To be honest, I do care about plot and characterization, although I tend to think of the whole more in terms of mood and message than anything else. And those things can best be expressed with the tools of metaphor, intimation, sound play, allegory, and the like. Sometimes, when I’m stuck, especially while editing, I go to composing software (like MuseScore 3) and use my minimal piano skills to compose a little something. It makes it so much easier to return to editing or writing—to find the right word or phrase. As James Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake, “Bite my laughters, drink my tears. Pore into me, volumes, spell me stark and spill me swooning, I just don’t care what my thwarters think.”

    I’ve always rebelled against certain orthographic conventions (mostly in the realm of punctuation). But as much as one might like to throw out all convention, there are rules that must be followed in order to be able to communicate with the reader. On the other hand, an author like Joyce continually overrode linguistic conventions and gave us something completely amazing and unique. It’s interesting to note, however, that the line from Finnegans Wake, “—Three quarks for Muster Mark!” uses traditional sentence structure, which helps us penetrate its opaqueness. Suppose it had been written as “—Muster three Mark quarks for!” Its meaning would be completely obscured. (Generative grammar theory attempts to give us some good explanations as to why this is the case.) But the truth is that a somewhat more unusual sentence structure could have been employed by Joyce that would still have given us a sense of its meaning, something like, “For Muster Mark—three quarks!” This is not to say that Joyce didn’t break down normal sentence structure in Finnegans Wake—but he did so at a cost to intelligibility, and very few authors can dance on the terrifying knife edge between incoherence and ambiguity as Joyce did. It is usually safer to stay with “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” though I personally prefer “For Muster Mark—three quarks!” because it adds a sense of immediacy to the words.

     Sometimes it’s better to jump right in rather than stand at the side of the pool—but one has to be ready for a little discomfort and a lot of dog paddling.