Sharp Objects
A reply to David Bentley Hart in a thousand cuts.
People who saw my tweet last week lamenting the existence of David Bentley Hart’s essay in The Lamp on “How to Write English Prose,” will probably find this extended response a bit anticlimactic. But having given more thought to the matter than was probably warranted, I concluded that a full counter-manifesto in my own words would be excessive. There’s nothing to add to what I’ve already written. Indeed, the matter is very simple. You either have an idea and put all your faculties to work in finding the form that best articulates it, or you don’t have an idea and you do something else—or nothing at all. That’s it. The rest is prejudice.
And what prejudice flows through Hart’s piece! As befitting the terminal Anglophilia in the wider Lampiverse, Hart sees American literature through the narrowest of scopes. And he sees Irish literature (from which the finest English language writing is derived) hardly at all. So I thought to myself, “I can be also be prejudiced. I can be way more prejudiced than Hart or his editor put together!” This, then, is my stab at extreme literary prejudice. And I use “stab” advisedly.
My biggest contention with Hart is his view that “language is magic.”
It is invocation and conjuration. With words, we summon the seas and the forests, the stars and distant galaxies, the past and the future and the fabulous, the real and the unreal, the possible and the impossible. With words, we create worlds—in imagination, in the realm of ideas, in the arena of history. With words, we disclose things otherwise hidden, including even our inward selves. And so on. When you write, attempt to weave a spell. If this is not your intention, do not write.
Leaving aside the fact that I have no idea what any of that means, I resent any attempt to dictate what my literary intentions should and should not be. For starters it is quite rude; but more importantly, it offends my own principles. I don’t like magic. I actually think magic fucking sucks and is fake. I am Chris R. Morgan, not Criss Angel MINDFREAK. But if your voice reaches its fullest development in writing magically and nothing else, I’m hardly going to prevent you from doing so. To do otherwise is the prerogative of a tyrant. The same goes for those writers for whom language is something other than a spell. It may be a costume, it may be architecture, it may be bitter medicine, a blunt instrument, or a sharp object.
I find beauty in sharpness. Beauty and variety. My commonplace book is filled not only with knives but with pins, pikes, needles, nails, and broken glass. And rather than go on and on about the splendor of sharp things, I will follow Mr. Hart’s dictum this one time. I will not write. I will, however, share the writing that has a stinging sensibility—sometimes a wounding one. But, oddly, a refreshing and revivifying kind of wounding.
What follows is neither complete nor systematic. Nor did I want to repeat too much those writers (or certain works by them) I’ve referenced many times before. All told, this isn’t even the worst I could do. I wanted versatility as much as impact. Anything from the sternest counsel to the most bad faith advice to the most acerbic portrait has its place here.
Few Lyes carry the Inventor's Mark; and the most prostitute Enemy to Truth, may spread a Thousand without being known for the Author. Besides, as the vilest Writer hath his Readers, so the greatest Lyar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lye be believed only for an Hour, it hath done its Work, and there is no farther Occasion for it. Falshood flies, and Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceived, it is too late, the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect: Like a Man, who has thought of a good Repartee, when the Discourse is changed, or the Company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible Medicine, after the Patient is dead.
—Jonathan Swift, The Examiner no. 14 (1710)
If your son, Master Jacky, should have cut Miss Lucy across the face with his new knife; or your daughter, Miss Isabella, should have pinched her arms black and blue, or scratched her face and neck with her pretty nails, so as to have fetched the blood; and poor Lucy to prevent any farther mischief to her person, should come and make her complaint to you; do you, in the first place, rate her soundly for provoking the poor children, who, you may affirm, are the best-natured little things in the world if they are not teased and vexed. But if by the blood streaming from her face or arms, it appears plainly that the girl is very much hurt, you may (to show your great impartiality) say, that you will send for the children in, and reprimand them. “For it is not my way,” you may say, “to suffer the lowest creature in my house to be ill-used; nor will I on any account permit my children to behave themselves unbecoming their station.”
—Jane Collier, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753)
“In strange contrast with this Dandiacal Body stands another British Sect, originally, as I understand, of Ireland, where its chief seat still is; but known also in the main Island, and indeed everywhere rapidly spreading. As this Sect has hitherto emitted no Canonical Books, it remains to me in the same state of obscurity as the Dandiacal, which has published Books that the unassisted human faculties are inadequate to read. The members appear to be designated by a considerable diversity of names, according to their various places of establishment: in England they are generally called the Drudge Sect; also, unphilosophically enough, the White Negroes; and, chiefly in scorn by those of other communions, the Ragged-Beggar Sect. In Scotland, again, I find them entitled Hallanshakers, or the Stook of Duds Sect; any individual communicant is named Stook of Duds (that is, Shock of Rags), in allusion, doubtless, to their professional Costume. While in Ireland, which, as mentioned, is their grand parent hive, they go by a perplexing multiplicity of designations, such as Bogtrotters, Redshanks, Ribbonmen, Cottiers, Peep-of-Day Boys, Babes of the Wood, Rockites, Poor-Slaves …”
—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1831)
You were convicted of two offenses. One of them, not of great enormity, and yet to be greatly avoided, I feel you are in no danger of repeating. The other you are not so well assured against. The advice of a father to his son “Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, beware that the opposed may beware of thee,” is good, and yet not the best. Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the best of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.
—Abraham Lincoln, letter to James M. Cutts, Jr. (1863)
The town of Corinth was a wretched place—the capital of a swamp. It is a two days’ march west of the Tennessee River, which here and for a hundred and fifty miles farther, to where it falls into the Ohio at Paducah, runs nearly north. It is navigable to this point—that is to say, to Pittsburg Landing, where Corinth got to it by a road worn through a thickly wooded country seamed with ravines and bayous, rising nobody knows where and running into the river under sylvan arches heavily draped with Spanish moss. In some places they were obstructed by fallen trees. The Corinth road was at certain seasons a branch of the Tennessee River. Its mouth was Pittsburg Landing. Here in 1862 were some fields and a house or two; now there are a national cemetery and other improvements.
—Ambrose Bierce, “What I Saw at Shiloh” (1881)
Lions have no historians, and therefore lion hunts are thrilling and satisfactory human reading. Negroes had no bards, and therefore it has been widely told how American philanthropy freed the slave. In truth the Negro revolted by armed rebellion, by sullen refusal to work, by poison and murder, by running away to the North and Canada, by giving point and powerful example to the agitation of the abolitionists and by furnishing 200,000 soldiers and many times as many civilian helpers in the Civil War. This war was not a war for Negro freedom, but a duel between two industrial systems, one of which was bound to fail because it was an anachronism, and the other bound to succeed because of the Industrial Revolution.
—W.E.B. Du Bois, “On the Ruling of Men” (1920)
He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile.
—Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
A lady lecturing recently on the Irish language drew attention to the fact … that, while the average English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words, the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4,000. Considering what most English speakers can achieve using their tiny fund of noises, it is a nice speculation to what extremity one would be reduced if one were locked up for a day with an Irish-speaking bore and bereft of all means of committing murder or suicide.
My point, however, is this: The 400/4,000 ration is fallacious; 400/400,000 would be more like it. There is scarcely a single word in the Irish … that is simple and explicit. Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complete a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express contrary meanings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts that have no bearing on either. And all this is strictly within the linguistic field. Superimpose on all that the miasma of ironic usage, poetic license, oxymoron, plamás, Celtic evasion, Irish bullery and Paddy Whackery, and it is a safe bet that you will find yourself very far from home.
—Flann O’Brien, “Cruiskeen Lawn” column (1941)
I have thought that, just as half our physical lives passes in sleep, it is perhaps intended that our mental life should e equally distributed between the assertion of our uniqueness and its renunciation. If that trance-like state of submersion in a public or collective mood bears analogy to sleep, it would reflect our individual and self-centered lives by very simple images and phrases in dream-like sequences. … The [procession] slogans were the shadows of human thinking in which their thoughts merged restfully, just as their footsteps concurred in the broad beaten track upon the snow, and we do not expect faithfulness in tone or form or colour from shadows.
—Hubert Butler, “Peter’s Window” (1946)
It is not an accident that Gulliver has become a child’s book; only a child could be so destructive, so irresponsible and so cruel. Only a child has the animal’s eye; only a child, or the mad clergyman, can manage that unhuman process of disassociation which is the beginning of all satire from Aristophanes onwards; only children (or the mad) have that monstrous and infantile egotism which assumes that everything is meaningless and that, like children, we run the world on unenlightened self-interest like a wagon-load of monkeys. What a relief it is that the Dean’s style is as lucid and plain as common water; it runs like water off a duck’s back. If Gulliver had been written in the coloured prose of the Bible, bulging with the prophetic attitudinisings of the Jews, the book might have caused a revolution … but a moderate church Tory like the Dean had no intention of doing that.
—V.S. Pritchett, “The Dean” (1951)
Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on their solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth or cork rocks and cardboard trees.
—Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)
I looked at the natural world, and it seemed to share my feelings, by trying in vain to escape its approaching doom. The waves of the sea sped in disorderly flight towards the horizon; the sea birds, the dolphins, and flying fish, hurtled frenziedly through the air; the islands trembled and grew transparent, endeavoring to detach themselves. To rise as vapor and vanish in space. But no escape was possible.
—Anna Kavan, Ice (1968)
All over Moderan, when we were beginnings-new and our plans were not set-mold, they came walking in, struggling, falling down, getting up to come on, most of them with one aim in view—not to let that disappearing surviving rat husband get away with a thing. I’M YOUR WIFE, seemed, in their minds, to say it all and leave no question of any kind. Doom was final; doom was sealed-down doom. That gray twilight terror-life of wife husband husband wife (WEEAAOOOHHYEEAAOOOHHOOHHOHH) must never be changed, not even by the ending of a world.
Well, we fellows in Moderan did not stand that nonsense. We had other ideas. Moderan was man country with man aims and man views. When it became stark-clear that the forever-life was not feasible with a flesh-strip helpmate of female steel that could not be turned-off turned-on, we moved them out. It was as simple as that. We formed a Commission for the Relocation of Old New-Metal Shrews. We moved them to a place prepared for them, the walled province of White Witch Valley. The walls are high there; it is a prison; vast and maximum security; the guards, we hope, will never sleep there, nor relax on their rounds on the walls. My God help us all if there is ever a prison break from the walled province of White Witch Valley!
—David R. Bunch, Moderan (1971)
[Charles] Haughey’s general style of living was remote from the traditional Republican and de Valera austerities. He made a great deal of money, and obviously enjoyed spending it, in a dashing eighteenth century style, of which horses were conspicuous symbols. He was a small man and, when dismounted, he strutted rather. His admirers thought he resembled the Emperor Napoleon, some of whose better-known mannerisms he cultivated. He patronized, and it is the right word, the arts. He was an aristocrat in the proper sense of the word: not a nobleman or even a gentleman, but one who believed in the right of the best people to rule, and that he himself was the best of the best people. … People liked him, I think, not for possession of any of the more obviously likeable qualities, but for lending some colour to life in a particularly drab period and … for seeming to be “his own man”, not in the sense of owning any deep well of inner integrity, but in the sense at least of appearing of what he himself wanted to appear, and not what others expected of him.
—Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (1973)
There has always been a peculiar irrationality to all the biological arguments that supposedly predetermine the inferior social status of women. Bulls mount cows and baboons do whatever; but human females do not have estrus or go into heat. … Only humans face the often complicated reality of having potential and having to make choices based on having potential. … We have possibilities, and we make up meanings as we go along. … Yet when we look at the human condition, including the condition of women, we act as if we are driven by biology or some metaphysically absolute dogma. We refuse to recognize our possibilities because we refuse to honor the potential humans have, including human women, to make choices. Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us?
—Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (1987)
"Based on our initial forensic observations, we believed the crimes to be the work of the same man," Bloch said. "But a closer look revealed an obvious departure from the Happy Loving Couple Killer's attention to detail. I mean, why weren't the Thomasens' hands meticulously entwined? Why weren't the usual Valentine hearts drawn on their chests with the other's blood? Why were there no African violets stuffed into their mouths? Just sloppy. And tying their necks together with a white silk scarf is just an unnecessary flourish, introducing a violent, erotic-fantasy-fulfillment theme that undermines the simplicity and emotional directness that is the real Happy Loving Couple Killer's signature style. The second I stepped on the scene, I knew something was horribly wrong.”
—The Onion, “Copycat Killing ‘Misses Subtleties Of Original,’ Say Police” (2000)
To write a sentence is a feat of no lasting significance, until we evolve to the point that we project images onto any surface it is required of all people who wish not to remain silent to use words. Words in themselves are as effective as a single pin when used to puncture an elephant’s heart. Words are made more effective when one is exacerbated by them. Though one knows writing is a debtor’s gamble, so is everything else that involves reaching out to others. The best writers are the worst communicators, crossing off resort after resort until one is left with two final resorts of writing or arson. While good writers bide their time until the taboo of the setting of fires on the property of others is lifted, they replicate the sublimity of the flame in the sentence.
—Chris R. Morgan, Biopsy no. 3 (2010)
Even Bacon’s harshest critics agree that one of his best paintings is Jet of Water, from 1988, made when Bacon was seventy-nine years old. … I don’t personally subscribe to the belief that—explicitly or unwittingly expressed by so many critics and curators—that a movement toward abstraction marks some kind of commendable, teleological progress in an artist’s career, or in the history of art itself. Nevertheless, I would have been very curious to see equivalent work by a seventy-nine-year-old Plath; I would loved to have seen Plath’s Jet of Water.
—Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty (2011)