I feel so strong a disagreement with some of the following that my first instinct is to suspect that I misunderstood it. But, casting this momentary doubt to the side, I hurry on with my first impressions. For repetitiveness and indiscriminate prolixity one can do no better than the very British Dickens. Fielding may have experimented somewhat with slowing a narrative to a crawl with helpless verbosity but he was merely one of Dickens’ many teachers in the long long repetitive repetitive repetitive sentence, paragraph and page. And Dickens was determined to leave all his teachers choking in a cloud of his dust.
The American Samuel Clemens came far enough along behind Dickens to be eager to go and hear him read, more as entertainment than as a living example of literary genius. And this lapse in time and taste between writers from two nations may be why Clemens could send a runaway boy and a black slave down 800 miles of the world’s greatest river, at that period (and maybe even today, as well) in less time than it takes a Dickens’ character to go 30 miles by coach. That is because Dickens feels called upon to describe every stump, every fence, every cow, every pretty little girl, drunken sailor or sinister old granny that the coach passes, and describe, as well, what the person in the coach thought about all of them, no matter how major or how obscure the character in the coach may be.
As for Mr. Twigg’s three versions of the lines from PF, here we have excellent proof — paradoxical as it may be, considered with what I have said — of how, in poetry, less is often not only not more , it is often even less than it may seem, and certainly less than one needs.
For now, leave VN’s lines as they are and look at edited version #1. Where is our proof that the weather is inclement and the time is night? Without a blurry shape, we lack crucial information on the portentous event about to take place, and the the mood of this essential moment. Now look at the second line of version #1. We no longer know the temperature, which is a key ingredient in the conditions. We need the crackling of that thin sheet of ice that has spread on the swamp surface, web-like from reed bed to reed bed.
Version #2, of course, needs little discussion. It is merely a lessen in how one turns poetry into doggerel. If Dick, Jane, and Spot were poets, this is what they would write.
In fact, prolixity, too much detail, too much repetition (usually unintentional and careless) are not characteristics of the writing of any nation or of any time. They are eternally and universally the signs of a writer who either doesn’t trust his or her readers, or nervously fears that his or her whole baroque house of cards will blow to pieces unless they themselves micromanage every moment of the reader’s attention.
Andrew Brown
On 1/5/07 5:21 AM, "Chaswe@AOL.COM" <Chaswe@AOL.COM> wrote:
Some of the characteristics of American writing in general seem to me to be repetitiveness, and indiscriminate prolixity. Why use five words, when fifty will do: never leave anything out, which obviates accusations of undemocratic selectivity. Although VN is not repetitive, and is very discriminating, he is nevertheless prolix.