Nothing produces greater culture shock, one felt straight to the literary innards, than reading a good Victorian or even modern classic novel. Wilkie Collins & Virginia Woolf both happen to be authors I've lately read and, frankly, they couldn't have come at a better time. Just when I thought Berger and Pynchon had killed it Collins reinstates my belief in expert narrative skill, &Woolf, well, nobody's been able to match the great Virginia Woolf for phrasal brilliance and control (Here's a Youtube sample, the only recording of her available). But I'm not interested in the novel genre so much as the benefits for poetry to be found in language expertly executed by the masters. Joseph Hutchison has recently commented on Stanley Fish's latest book How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, inspiring some good 'comments' discussion about the state of the sentence today. The idea's occurred to me since that perhaps poets owe a great debt of gratitude to the novelist: perhaps more than they'd care to admit.
The great literary stylists, in fact, seem preeminently qualified to reveal the more egregious language difficulties in which poets find themselves today, & which John Latta in a recent "Isola di Rifiuti post has likened to a comically absurd sort of self-display. The novelist's control of language materials, one almost always amounting to a pure poetic utterance, can be seen as a kind of generic Sentence representing the best literary qualities of the novelist and her sources. In contradistinction to Ron Silliman's 'new sentence' whose "interior poetic structures" are expected to lead to desirable "ambiguity and polysemy" (Silliman, The New Sentence, 90), as if verses were pulled out of the rarefied air of poetry alone, I maintain the great novelists can write exquisitely well-crafted prose & offer it as an exemplar for all types of writing, including poetry. Literary language and the Sentence become practically interchangeable. Using a Flaubertian insight, I'll say that there's no inherent distinction to be made between the poetic & prosaic in the very finest writings.
And they do that always through the most insightful juxtapositions & contrasts (never just connections) between the human condition and a readily available language of passion & death. In short, the more feelingly they write, the greater the need for an almost 'revelatory' medium, a style always sensitively attuned to the life-narrative's most difficult moments and always expertly composed to render them to the imagination in as vivid a way as possible. Woolf never forgets this. The refined medium of language that results in the hands of the great novelist is, in my view, what almost makes it inseparable from poetry, and that type of poetry has a real stake in the way things are. I'll take two examples from Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.
The intensity of an early lesbian love and the very conditions for its emergence in the reminiscences of the aging Clarissa Dalloway (through whose limited omniscient viewpoint a significant part of the story of a single sultry day in London, 1942 is told) couldn't have merged more perfectly. Only Woolf's novelistic talents could have brought together withering reality and the passion associated with the remarkable Sally Seton. Only the perfect Sentence could have achieved it. In expertly (and sensitively) cadenced & sharply registered sentiments the unhappy 52-year old wife of a London MP, who normally passes through wave after wave (almost surrealistic) of faux nostalgia, regret and a heightened sense of the absurdity of lamenting lost possibilities with a former lover, can relocate rapture in the gathering ennui of her life in London. Prose turns into Sapphic verses almost in an instant:
The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up. It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally's...Absurd, she was—very absurd. But the charm was overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember standing in her bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her hands and saying aloud, 'She is beneath this roof... She is beneath this roof!' (28 in the Oxford edition)The reader doesn't need to impart to this passage any sort of narrative impetus that isn't already there, its lyrical force somehow to be released from the cage of classical prose through the imposition of literary theory. None of Language's wooden exercises here and the detached sentences they produce. Woolf's passage, wonderfully stylized and lived as a literary event on its own, could happily make the switch from prose to poetry with the aid of diction, rhythms and even perhaps the nascent Modernist insights it already bears. I could try rearranging the lines to make strophes out of sentences & still leave intact the original purity. Nothing would be easier:
On looking back, the purity, the integrity of Sally,Similarly in the case of Septimus's worsening condition (and Woolf purposely pairs Septimus and Clarissa as types of the same neurasthenic, a condition equally attributable to suppressed passion) only a poet's language of dark idiom and rhythms could soften its most insidious aspects, & make it even seem whimsical and charmingly eccentric. The War memories of Septimus Warren Smith, unlike Clarissa's own, don't revitalize depressed spirits even if they sometimes hover round his beloved Evans: they seem, despite his physician's cheery prognoses, to hurry more inexorably both patient and post-traumatic distresses to the inevitable suicide. The novelist leaves the verdict of death hanging by a thread (a favourite image of Woolf's), a verdict liable to go one way or the other, as if something else not tied to a simple inquiry into causes were ultimately responsible. The almost Dickensian quality of physician-patient interaction is ghoulishly set against the fact of human savagery in the world, and the patient is certainly lucid enough to attribute a good deal of his own misery to some despicable wartime conduct:
like one's feelings for a man:
disinterested & existing between women only,
between women grown up,
protective,
sprung from a sense of being in league together,
& a presentiment of something that was bound
to part them
Absurd,
but the charm was so overpowering
she could say,
in her bedroom, at the top of the house—
'She is beneath this roof
She is beneath this roof'
So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed; that was worst; but all the other crimes raised their heads and shook their fingers and jeered and sneered over the rail of the bed in the early hours of the morning at the prostrate body which lay realizing its degradation; how he had married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her; outraged Miss Isabel Pole, and was so pocked and marked with vice that women shuddered when they saw him in the street. The verdict of human nature on such a wretch was death. (77)The poetry that ensues is necessarily dark and yet the verse, because of the flawless Sentence it comes from ,wouldn't cast an entirely gloomy, bodiless light, retaining the moral and existential ambivalence of the original. Again, the transition to poetry is perfectly natural:
Whatever the excuse, the sin for which he's condemned,
& that he didn't feel,
like Evans who'd been killed,
his crimes raised their heads, shook their fingers,
jeering, snorting,
at his prostrate body: the verdict was death
Even how he'd married
without love,
and seduced and even outraged Miss Isabel Pole
and was so pocked & marked with vice
all the women shuddered-
whatever the excuse, the verdict was death.
