Thursday, July 28, 2011

LITERARY COMPARISONS


I hope readers will indulge me with just one more post on the subject of literary comparison. I love battles between writers. The way to do it is the way it's done here, with two paragraphs side by side, and with each writer describing the same thing. Battles like this get bloody. Reputations are won and lost. It's not for the faint of heart.





Here's the first comparison, from Ayn Rand of all people. In an essay In "Romantic Manifesto" Rand compares a passage by literary novelist Thomas Wolfe (above, top right),  and one by down-and-dirty pulp novelist Mickey Spillane (above, top left). She prefers Spillane. See what you think. Both writers attempt to describe New York city at night. 



Thomas Wolfe: "The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, a city of night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match."



Mickey Spillane: "The rain was misty enough to be almost foglike, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy yellow lights off in the distance" 

Rand comments: "There is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane's description; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness." Wolfe, she argues, uses only estimates, "and in the absence of any indication of what aroused these estimates, they are arbitrary assertions and meaningless generalities."



Here's (below) another interesting comparison, two versions of the first paragraph of Genesis. I'm only comparing line number two ("And the Earth..."), but I'll start with the first four lines just to put everything in context: 

<< Genesis 1 >>
King James Version


1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Okay, here's the comparison:



GOD'S WORD® Translation (©1995)
The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep water. The Spirit of God was hovering over the water.
King James Bible
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Obviously the King James version is superior...but why? Well for one thing, "formless and empty" is merely descriptive. The KJ version milks more drama by dividing "formless" into two words, and contracts "empty" into the more masculine, one-syllable word, "void," creating more contrast, and giving us a deeper sense of loss.




"Darkness was upon the face of the deep" is pure genius. Who'd have thought the deep could have a face, but it works. Anything that does something to a face gets our attention.  

"The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" is even purer genius! Imagine the spectacle of a miles long face of God cruising at awesome speed above the sea, regarding what He created. And there's that word "face" again! If only it were possible to know who wrote/translated this version!

I wish there was a whole book of comparisons like this. Imagine how much you could learn from it!

BTW: Don't confuse Thomas Wolfe (above), the novelist who wrote "Look Homeward, Angel",  with Tom Wolfe, the author of "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."


8 comments:

JohnDoe123 said...

I love reading different books from different authors, especially stronger ones. Mainly because of how different each author has over their literary prose. Just recently I purchased "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon and had to put it down. His command over the English language was way too much for me to handle. Now I'm reverting back to Sci-fi and reading Asimov!

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Damiano: A long time ago I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow but it wasn't my kind of book, and I put it down. Like you I retreated into science fiction. The problem is, by the time I got into sci-fi it had turned into a medium for conveying social messages.

thomas said...

Hey, where did that other pulp cover go? Great art work, I thought.

I agree about the Wolfe being inferior. Seems like the writers relate differently to the reader. Wolfe tries a kind of seduction to blur the difference between writer and reader, which turns into a miasma of subjectivity. The Spillane is plainly more objective, coming close to a kind of reportage which recognizes the reader as separate entity.

Wolfe is trying to convey his feelings, Spillane is trying to convey his writing.

Do you think there's an analogy in animation?

Anonymous said...

Eddie, this is a really good book if you're looking for the history behind the King James Bible.

http://www.amazon.com/Wide-Waters-English-Revolution-Inspired/dp/0142000590/ref=pd_sim_b_4

Good anthologies can be useful to writers in the same way your Wolfe/Spillane comparison is. Sitting down with the Oxford Book of 17th Century Verse, you really get a sense for just what's possible with our language. The varieties of tone and style are immense, but the subject matter all these poets were writing about is fairly similar: love, death and God. And yet, contrasting Shakespeare and Milton, Donne and Jonson, Marlowe and Marvell, the possibilities seem inexhaustible!

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Stephen: Thanks a million for the link! The book looks great! Some of the ones mentioned by Amazon's commenters sound interesting, too.

Thanks also for the reference to the Oxford anthology. I'll look it up!

Thomas: There's some great cartoon dialogue! What do you think of Peter Lorre's dialogue in "Birth of a Notion" where Lorre says, "Why did you hit me with dat baseball bat, Theodore? Don't you know...that makes me want to do... TERRIBLE.....HORRIBLE things to you???" Well, you have to imagine it spoken by Peter Lorre. I think that was written by Warren Foster.

Nobody making cartoons today does dialogue better than John Kricfalusi. The opening "psycho" monologue in my Worm Paranoia cartoon started with dialogue he made up. I love the John line in that film: "Look to yourselves why don't you? It is unto YOURSELVES you should be looking!" John has the ability to use Elizabethean-style dialogue and make it seem modern and cool. He's by far the best dialogue writer in the industry and he never gets credit for it.

I can't stand bad or even average dialogue in a cartoon. How-to-write books encourage writers to think of structure rather than words. That's evil advice by people who don't know what they're talking about. Good writing always employs beautiful words.

thomas said...

Yes, just the mention of that Peter Lorre scene, makes ya kind of break up laughing.

And I agree about John K's and your own cartoons.

And I think you can draw an analogy, so to speak, to actual animation. Say, the Wolfe piece being more like the naturalism of post Snow White Disney, and Spillane being more like Warner Bros.
The weakness of the Wolfe writing just reminds me of a lot of things that John K. and yourself have said about the "hippy" influence on animation.

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Thomas: I noticed you spelled hippie as "hippy." Which one of us is right? I know my ending looks like a plural, but I could swear I saw major magazines spell it that way...or maybe I imagined it.

thomas said...

I started to spell H-I-P-P-I-E, but halfway through changed because I thought I was spelling in the plural, but I wasn't really thinking, it was more instinct.

But in support of H-I-P-P-Y