Beautiful mistakes

Earlier this week, Anne shared the whimsical discovery of a new word:

I was listening to “Proud Mary” and googled the lyrics to figure out the phrase “pumped a lot of tane.” The Tina Turner version is ‘tane, for octane, which makes sense as the kind of lousy, hard job someone might have in New Orleans, but wikipedia suggests, too, that the line may be a mondegreen, helpfully linking to an entry on the topic.

The coinage comes from a 1954 essay by Sylvia Wright in Harper’s:

When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [sic]
And Lady Mondegreen.

The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green." As Wright explained the need for a new term, "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original."

I was immediately reminded of Walker Percy's essay "Metaphor as Mistake" (from The Message in the Bottle):

I remember hunting as a boy in south Alabama with my father and brother and a Negro guide. At the edge of some woods we saw a wonderful bird. He flew as swift and straight as an arrow, then all of a sudden folded his wings and dropped like a stone into the woods. I asked what the bird was. The guide said it was a blue-dollar hawk. Later my father told me the Negroes had got it wrong: It was really a blue darter hawk. I can still remember my disappointment at the correction. What was so impressive about the bird was its dazzling speed and the effect of alternation of its wings, as if it were flying by a kind of oaring motion.

Percy goes on to explore the implications of this sort of linguistic "error":

It might be useful to look into the workings of these accidental stumblings into poetic meaning, because they exhibit in a striking fashion that particular feature of metaphor which has most troubled philosophers: that it is "wrong"--it asserts of one thing that it is something else--and further, that its beauty often seems proportionate to its wrongness or outlandishness.

It's a fascinating essay that praises the lovely paradox of metaphor and the possibilities of poetic meaning:

That is to say, is it the function of metaphor merely to diminish tension, or is it a discoverer of being?

The reversal of alienation

Last Thursday, Maud brought up a telling issue:

American creative writing instruction, in my experience, tends to discourage would-be novelists from working with philosophical concepts. Large, abstract ideas are seen as the province of scientists and Nobel laureates. Everyone else, the thinking goes, should stay squarely in the realm of concrete troubles like adultery or thievery or murder.

But don’t the best novels — Crime and Punishment, for instance, or The Sea, The Sea or Disgrace — blend the two? Aren’t we interested in the reasons for and implications of characters’ predicaments and actions?

She went on to cite an interview of Walker Percy's where he explained how Kierkegaard had already laid the philosophical foundation for what he wanted to do in The Moviegoer.

Paul Elie's group biography, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, takes a good, long look at the abstract ideas behind Percy's fiction (as well as the work of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day).

In his essay, "The Man on the Train," (republished in The Message in the Bottle), Percy begins by explaining,

There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation. In the re-presenting of alienation the category is reversed and becomes something entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter riding a train. (On the other hand, Huck Finn's drifting down the river is somewhat the same as a reader's reading about Huck Finn drifting down the river.) The nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable; the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character and the author.

Elie further explains the difference (using Percy's essay):

Put a novel in the commuter’s hand and things get more complicated. The train rounds a bend. Sunlight glints off the glass. There is a pretty girl waiting to board on the platform up ahead. Still, the novel is absorbing. This is what art does: it lets us escape our alienation temporarily. But some works of art do this better than others. Some banish our alienation; others distract us from it; some show it to us without offering any consolation. Whether they do so is a matter not only of quality, but of kind.

Making these distinctions, Percy is oddly assured: he seems to be writing from experience, even though [at this point] he has never completed a novel to his satisfaction. Repetition, he declares, is usually diminished in a work of art; as the hero goes home again his passionate quest for the meaning of his life will strike the reader as interesting at best, because the reader wasn’t there the first time. Alienation, in a novel, becomes something else: the novel of alienation, like a symbol, re-presents alienation, and so will dispel it in the reader, and as the alienated reader recognizes his condition in the text, the book "heals the very wound it re-presents."

This achievement, Percy says, "is an aesthetic victory of comradeliness, a recognition of plight in common. Its motto is not 'I despair and do not know that I despair' but 'At least we know that we are lost to ourselves'--which is very great knowledge indeed." Whereas "the nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable," Percy goes on to explain, "the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad: Yes! That’s how it is!"

That is ecstatically said, and for a moment the insight banishes alienation in just the way Percy claims it does. It also suggests that Percy is celebrating the novel of alienation. After all, he says the reversal of alienation is "the supreme intersubjective achievement of art," which is to "set forth the truth of it: how it stands with both of us."

Greater than logic

Am thoroughly enjoying William Gass' discussion and translation of Rilke. Such rich work to sink my teeth into.

Not all properties of the conceptual systems we use to describe experience are characteristics of experience itself. Obviously we can use the German language to talk about the world, to say Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist, or employ arithmetic to measure a room, or use a thermometer to take the temperature of the roast. But Nature does not speak German, the space of the room is not infinite just because between any of the numbers used to measure it there are an infinite amount more, and 20°C is not twice as hot as 10°C to the leg of lamb. Logical connections do not exist in Nature, only in Logic. And poetry is merely...merely poetry.

This is the first of Gass' work that I've read, and I'm thrilled (yet again) by how my expectations are being exceeded. I hope to write (quote) more soon, but his blow-by-blow account of his word choices in translating Rilke--in the face of 14 other translations of the same work--is revelatory. (And his unfailing sense of humor keeps everything in perspective.)

I've long thought that poetry transcends logic--that although it is a contruct (being a "created" thing), it makes much more than "sense." I'm reminded of Walker Percy's "Metaphor as Mistake" and the mystery of how literal "lies" (a living heart cannot actually be made of ice) come closer to truth than "factual" renderings. It's a favorite line of thinking that I'm finding traces of in what Gass is exploring in Rilke.

Another goldmine.