Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Syntax Club: "XXX. Distances"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

Geryon goes out for a late dinner with the yellowbeard and a gaggle of philosophers, including one named Lazer with whom Geryon will consider a question that has vexed him: what is time made of? Lazer and Geryon somewhat settle on time being a matter of distances--variable, not totally interchangeable or communicable--between individuals. Geryon feels a kind of widening happiness and creates a photograph prominently featuring his wings.

Questions

What do we make of the wings?

The wings are indeed presented as literal ones (frequently I have students who assume for the first chunk of the novel that the wings are an elaborate metaphor for otherness, but as we move through the book that reading becomes increasingly impossible). Geryon generally seems comfortable existing in the world as some kind of odd winged being, but we will see at least a few instances complicating that later on.

Why do all of Geryon's emotional states seem so heightened? He rarely seems to have a normal experience in the world; everything from going out to supper with some odd philosophers to sitting on airplane acquires a kind of sublime dimension.

Many possible reasons: he's an artsy weirdo in terms of disposition; he likely has some kind of synaesthesia; he's a gayboy; he's young (and thus everything is dramatic and intense); he's experienced a variety of traumas; he's a character designed to through our normal understanding of emotional range into doubt through mythic elevation.

Sentences

"What is time made of?" is a question that had long exercised Geryon. (93)

Obviously the verb exercised here is the charming, luminous bit; we might think of a question as a type of philosophical exercise, a ground or basis for practice, but rarely do we see the agency posed like this. It isn't that Geryon mulls over a thing to tease out an answer but rather that he finds himself being put into action or practice by the question itself.

The yellowbeard rode proudly at the front
like a gaucho leading his infernal band
over the pampas. (93)

I love the lush, lurid, strange intensity to the descriptions of the yellowbeard, cast here as in literally hellish terms. But despite this Geryon does seem to have some affection for members of the infernal band by the end (or at least Lazer).

The pimiento stung his mouth alive like sudden sunset. (94)

Sharp economy to this. Note how alive and sudden sunset are worked in so seamlessly (not made his mouth feel alive, not like a sudden sunset, or any other such construction).

Geryon who felt himself starting
to slide off the surface of the room
like an olive off a plate. When the plate attained an angle of thirty degrees
he would vanish into his own blankness. (95)

The tonal juxtapositions here are great; our dear gayboy protagonist is having some kind of reverie at best and quasi-disassociating at worst and the whole ordeal is rendered for us in terms of an olive plate achieving theoretical angles.

I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. (97)

The greatest of life aspirations. The casual, laconic, good-natured thought reminds me a little bit of Diogenes asking Alexander to stop blocking the sun.

And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness. (97)

There's something rather pleasing about seeing Geryon, even for a brief and highly qualified moment, approaching happy, isn't there? Frailest leaves of life is an obviously appealing bit of alliteration, but I also like how the happiness is given in external terms. Widening happiness doesn't spring up within Geryon but rather he finds himself contained in it. A nice reminder that the tendency to describe emotions entirely as internal wellsprings is a very modern conceit; the ancients likely would not have had any issues rendering emotional states in external or projected terms.

The fantastic fingerwork of his wings is outspread on the bed like a black lace
map of South America. (97)

Strong imagery, made all the stronger by the relative sparsity with which Carson directly describes the most notable feature Geryon has: his wings (as I mentioned earlier, many of students think them metaphoric at first).

Exercises


Verb Switcheroo (Again)

Describe an agent performing an action, then rewrite it such that the typical relationship between the verb and the agent is somehow complicated, reversed, or inverted (see: the question exercised Geryon). This works better with more abstract or metaphorical actions, probably; not sure it has quite the same impact if you attempt basic scene-work with it.

Exterior Emotions

Describe a character having a strong emotional experience through figurative language which locates the emotion outside the character proper (see: Geryon contained in widening happiness).

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Tomorrow:
--Tango

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Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.

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