Because I thought there was a RIGHT way to use commas. You know, like the way the grammar book tells you.
Obviously, Ishmael Reed needs to go back to elementary school grammar class or else there is a totally different way of looking at the rules and conventions of writing that I never learned. Here is one of his "sentences."
The dazzling parodying punning mischievous pre-Joycean style-play of your Cakewalking your Calinda your Minstrelsy give-and-take of the ultra absurd. (152)
Pardon me, the humble unpublished student, but if I ever wrote that in a paper I would be murdered by my English teachers.
"Use commas!" they would say. "You need a clear subject and a verb!"
"Clarify, clarify, clarify."
But here I am, reading this sentence in a book in an English class and it isn't being used as an example of poor grammar. Instead it is praised as an example of cleverly stepping outside the bounds of grammatical and structural conventions to question why they exist in the first place.
Welcome to the world of postmodernist writing where you can no longer call bad grammar, "Bad grammar." No, you have to appreciate the courage it takes to break the mold and believe that there is no absolute right or wrong even in grammar.
Maybe it is a good thing, a way of bringing new thoughts into the world. But whatever it is, that sentence still doesn't make a lot of sense. What is a "give-and-take of the ultra absurd"?
2 comments:
I personally think that Reed's writing style is very slippery and a lot of that has to do with the fact that he doesn't use conventional grammar. I agree that it does take a certain amount of courage to step outside the bounds, I'm just not sure that not using commas is the right way to go. I mean, isn't Reed's narrative doing that already? For me, it would make much more sense for Reed to stick with his ideas but present them in a not necessarily conventional way, but in one that makes his point clear to his audience.
-Aishwarya
A loose and "creative" approach to punctuation and prescriptive grammar doesn't begin with postmodernism (although Reed is a great exemplar, as he takes such audible/visible delight in flaunting the rules--as with the title pages and frontmatter of the book, and the citations, and countless other examples). Grammar is an Atonist conspiracy! Well, in a way, yes--there is an overwhelming sense of *freedom* in this novel that is indeed crucial to its "iconoclasm." Reed doesn't aim to be correct--politically or grammatically.
But the fact is, the rules have always been stricter in formal, expository, nonfiction contexts, and poets and writers of fiction have always taken liberties. (An analogy might be made to visual arts: an architect's drawing has to "do work," so it must follow established conventions in order not to be misconstrued, and the drawing very importantly *must* correspond to recognizable, measurable realitry. But a creative painter is of course not bound to "representation" at all. With art, the rules are made to be broken.
An analogy might also be made to jazz or other experimental musics: before you improvise outside of the scale, you need to know your scales. There's a difference between a deliberate tweaking of the convention and a total ignorance of the convention.
Just don't try any of this fancypants stuff in English class! The red pen of doom will descend!
Post a Comment