Sarah Wrote That | Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey
photographed by Richard Avedon in New York City, January 28, 1958

"[I]n a good book, an opening sentence is seen, or read, doubly: as itself, and as the first of a category of sentences […] that first sentence functions like a Rosetta Stone, translating one’s knowledge of speech and of other books into knowledge of the language games and systems here in this book."

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Harold Brodkey, in “Jane Austen vs. Henry James,” goes on to discuss the opening of Pride and Prejudice:

[Austen] is not using a private tone. It is not the tone of a letter written from the provinces; it is not the tone of religious reflection […i]t is a woman’s tone, but oddly and not wholly […] This is a public tone, but not of political address or outdoor storytelling; and it is not the tone of the coffeehouse or of the Houses of Parliament or the court. One does not talk like this. It is bookish but it is not the tone of letters or diaries or of newspapers or of military reports. It is not fanciful; it is very factual.

It is a woman’s imagined or invented public speech and it takes place in an imagined public space […] I consider it one of the greatest inventions of literary space […] It becomes the space of the art novel. It is the governing space of Madame Bovary—which may be taken as a considerable revision of Pride and Prejudice, say, and which could be subtitled Actual Provincial Erotic Pride, Actual Cruel Human Prejudice […] But Austen invented this reactive mental space […It] is constricted—and this is part of the drama—[to] a naturalistically peceived world. Nothing widens out into the heroic, or descends into picaresque, or moves into bildungsroman.

[…]

One way to attempt to define, amateurishly, what she did is to say that she elevates honesty […] above literary precedent and artiface.

(p 301-3)

Brodkey’s collected essays are all over the map, in the kind of magisterial sentences no one writes anymore. This, originally published in The Threepenny Review in 1988, is one of the sharpest exercises in close-reading I’ve seen, and I find something new every time I return to it.

[Sea Battles on Dry Land, p 298]

27 Apr 2011 01:02

Book Looks, Lit Mags & Wish Lists

Karen Brown’s story in the current issue of Five Points is fantastic. Also: Birkenstock nuns! Ummm, band name…

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Adam Shatz: In Orhan Pamuk’s fiction “happiness is always a thing of the past.”

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Robert Scheer interviews Martin Jacques about Jacques’ When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (positive if qualified Times review here).

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I was making an Amazon wish list to distribute the spring semester reading list to my independent study. The last list I’d made was for Christmas 2006, and it’s a little startling how many of books and (non-downloadable) albums have since become unavailable, or are now available only as downloads.

Dana Spiotta’s Eat The Document is out of print, but available from $ 0.01. You can still get the European version of Saint Etienne’s Tiger Bay on CD; worth it for the lovely “I Buy American Records” (!). Harold Brodkey’s gorgeous This Wild Darkness: The Story Of My Death is also out of print but available from $0.01, apparently the going rate. When Brodkey disciplines his larger arc, as he does in Wild Darkness, his sentence structures are so beautifully expansive:

I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.

Jeffrey Eugenides reads and discusses Brodkey’s short story “Spring Fugue” in a New Yorker podcast.

12 Jan 2010 11:42