Literary High Wire Acts

Sometimes you run across a book that seems to do the impossible, that seems to either describe or explain a state of mind that you hadn’t till then quite understood, or that uses language in a unique yet accessible manner, or brings together disparate elements in a way that doesn’t appear to break the rules even though it really should.

1. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.

Above is the hotter newer cover and below the one I encountered, the Picador cover which matched the other Hobans I had already run across (my once a year reread Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit, and Turtle Diary). I have little memory of Kleinzeit but Turtle Diary has one of my favourite lines of all time where a person is rebuffing an acquaintance who wants to take the relationship to a more intimate level by maintaining that “a friendly presence scarcely known can be a wonderful thing”.

Mr. Hoban’s writing space from a Guardian series on author’s rooms:

Kind of a much cleaner version of Bacon’s studio.

Some time after reading this book I was able to use it for a psycholinguistics paper. The book is written in a postapocalyptic English, the sort of English that might be spoken a thousand years from now after civilization is still crawling back after near the end of the world. What’s really interesting is that though you have trouble reading the first little while, in a chapter or two it becomes quite easy, and eventually as transparent as regular language; you read without noticing any differences at all. And looking at it now for the first time in years, I see an interesting parallel with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

There come a man and a woman and a chyld out of a berning town they sheltert in the woodlings and foraging the bes they cud. Starveling wer what they wer doing. Dint haveno weapons nor dint know how to make a snare nor nothing. Snow on the groun and a grey sky overing and the black trees running ther branches in the wind. Crows calling 1 to a nother waiting for the 3 of them to drop. The man the woman and the chyld digging thru the snow they wer eating maws and dead leaves which they vomitit them up agen. Freezing col they wer nor dint have nothing to make a fire with to get warm. Starveling they wer and near come to the end of ther strength.

From a linguistic or language processing vantage this is quite intriguing because it ilustrates the malleability and adaptability of our processor or parser. We already know that having somewhat fuzzy filters allows us to decipher the speech of the drunk, the sleepy, the impedimented not to mention just all the differences that come with gender, age and cultural variation. And we know that people vary in how adaptable they are to the speech of others. Its not a yes or no proposition like sight.

With Riddley, we are first of all at sea with the new words and unusual constructions, messed up grammar and all but our remarkable general problem solver goes to work, and because the new pattern is both closely related to what we already know, and because it is quite consistent, we shift in such a way as to match the new flow.

The other example from writing that I used in the paper was Louisiana cook Justin Wilson’s cajun patter. I was particularly caught by his going against what I thought was a fairly concrete rule when he said “eight or seven things” or “three or two crawfish” -always the higher number coming first.

The Riddley cover in my collection.

Still to come: Rupert Thompson’s The Insult, James Ellroy’s Cold 6000 and Dan Simmon’s Ilium and Olympus.