Thursday, December 14, 2017

The music of words …

Mr. Minto quoted Mr. Gass as claiming: “There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions” (Fiction and the Figures of Life).
Ah, but I have a story to tell, characters to create, a plot to contrive, you may, with incautious confidence, insist. No. That’s what moviemakers do. They make hokum. You do not tell a story; your fiction will do that when your fiction is finished. What you make is music, and because your sounds are carriers of concepts, you make conceptual music too (Temple of Texts).

2 comments:

  1. The point on description vs. construction seems reasonable. For the rest, I think of Marvin Mudrick's essay "Character and Event in Fiction"; where or what is the music of Flaubert, Mann, Tolstoy for the English-speaking monoglot?

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  2. That's a very good question. I know something of Mann's, since I've read him German. But the others? Does some sort of music translate perhaps?

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