The Book of Literary Terms
Other Books by Lewis Turco
Nonfiction
The Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, 2012
La Famiglia / The Family: Memoirs, 2009
Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New
England, 1580–1697, 2009
Fantaseers: A Book of Memories, 2005
The Book of Dialogue, 2020
The Book of Forms, Fifth Edition, 2020
The Life and Poetry of Manoah Bodman, Bard of the Berkshires, 1999
How to Write a Mi££ion, with Ansen Dibell and Orson Scott Card, 1995
Emily Dickinson: Woman of Letters, 1993
The Public Poet: Five Lectures on the Art and Craft of Poetry, 1993
Il Dialogo, Italian Translation by Sylvia Biasi of Dialogue, 1992
Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, 1986
The New Book of Forms, 1986
Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, 1973
The Literature of New York, 1970
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, 1968
Fiction and Poetry
The Sonnetarium, 2018
The Hero Enkidu: An Epic, 2015
The Familiar Stranger, 2014
Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, 2012
The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems, 2010
The Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories, 2008
Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 2007
The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 2004
A Book of Fears: Poems, Italian Translations by Joseph Alessia, 1998
The Shifting Web: New and Selected Poems, 1989
The Compleat Melancholick, 1985
American Still Lifes, 1981
Pocoangelini: A Fantography and Other Poems, 1971
The Inhabitant, 1970
Awaken, Bells Falling: Poems, 1959–1967, 1968
First Poems, 1960
the genres of fiction, drama, nonfiction, literary
criticism, and scholarship
SECOND EDITION
Lewis Turco
© 1999, 2020 by Lewis Turco
All rights reserved. University of New Mexico Press edition published 2020
by arrangement with the author.
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8263-6192-9 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-8263-6193-6 (electronic)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936548
Designed by Felicia Cedillos
This book is dedicated to
JEAN
whose idea it was in the first place
contents
Foreword
Introduction to the Discipline of Literature
The Genres of Fiction
The Genres of Drama
The Genres of Nonfiction
The Genres of Literary Criticism and Scholarship
Acknowledgments and Bibliography
Author and Title Index
General Index
foreword
The three companion volumes, The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of
Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism and Scholarship, Second Edition;
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Fifth Edition; and The Book of
Dialogue: How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama,
and Poetry, Revised and Expanded Edition, have been designed to be the most
comprehensive set of their kind available. The three books may be used as
personal references, as creative writing texts, or as literary guides in virtually
every course in the English curriculum.
However, The Book of Literary Terms is something more than simply an
alphabetical listing of terms. It is organized in seven sections, the first of which
is titled “Introduction to the Discipline of Literature”; this chapter is followed by
“The Genres of Nonfiction,” “The Genres of Fiction,” “The Genres of Drama,”
and “The Genres of Literary Criticism and Scholarship.”
Each of these chapters consists of brief essays covering various topics having
to do with the overall subject under discussion. For instance, in “The Discipline
of Literature” there are essays having to do with definitions of “Form,”
“Syntax,” “Genre,” “Diction and Style,” and “Literary Movements.” Each of
these essays contains illustrations of the terms discussed. At the end of each
section will be found a Chapter Glossary containing terms that have not been
covered in the essay, or fuller discussions of some terms that were mentioned in
passing. Thus, the book may be used not merely as a reference work in all
literary contexts, but also as a textbook in one genre or in several of them.
For instance, if one were working in the genre of fiction and wished to look
up “character” or “characterization,” one would turn directly to the chapter titled
“The Genres of Fiction” and check through the chapter for sub-headings that
apply. One might also turn to the Chapter Glossary and look up the term in
question. If one wished to find wider applications of the term, one would turn to
the index at the back of the book to look up the term and find the numbers of all
the pages where that term appears in the book. Or one might wish to begin
directly with the index.
Another plan might be simply to begin reading the chapter, or the essay
containing the term in question. One would discover close at hand other basic
elements of the short story, such as “plot,” “atmosphere,” and “theme.” Nearby
also would be such terms as “narrative voice,” “rising action,” “denouement,”
and so forth, all arranged in such a way as to lead the reader through the
elements of the short story. Such a layout and plan make the book more lively
and interesting to read than an ordinary handbook.
The index is comprehensive, and it will usually indicate that a particular term
is to be found in more than one place in the body of the volume; for instance,
many of the elements of fiction are also the elements of drama, and in looking up
these references the reader will discover not merely similarities between terms
used in fiction and drama, but the differences as well—“narrative voice” or
“dramatic irony” would mean similar, but somewhat different things in each of
the genres.
Speaking of drama and story writing, readers of these three texts will discover
that although one of them is titled The Book of Dialogue, that volume contains
complete information about, and examples of, all the elements of fiction and
playwriting, not just dialogue.
Furthermore, throughout this text and its companion volumes the reader will
find references to expanded information of various terms in the other books of
the set. The one genre of literature that is not covered by this text is poetry, and
that genre is covered exhaustively by its companion volume, The Book of
Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, known throughout the trade as “The poet’s
Bible.”
A draft version of The Book of Literary Terms was field-tested in various
undergraduate and graduate classes at the State University of New York at
Oswego and elsewhere during the spring semester of 1995, and as a result of that
test the manuscript was extensively enlarged and revised. It is the belief of the
author that this volume is both comprehensive and comprehensible, and that
those who consult it will find it both useful and enjoyable to read.
Introduction to the Discipline of
Literature
Form
Every element of language is a form of some kind. The letters of the alphabet
are forms, conventions upon which the members of a culture have agreed in
order to communicate; so are words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, whether
spoken or written. Phonemes are the elemental bits of sound, like the sonic units
represented by the letters of the alphabet, including the vowels (a, e, i, o, u), and
the consonants (all the rest of the letters) that make up morphemes, which are the
smallest language units that carry meaning, such as a single-syllable word like a
or it, or a prefix like pro- as in “proportion” or a suffix like -ing as in “walking.”
An allophone is a standard variation of a phoneme, such as the variations of the
vowel u in but and mute—see consonance. Words, which are the basic spoken or
written signifiers (units of signification) of people who speak a language, are
comprised of various kinds of sounds, including liquid sound (like el and ar),
voiced sound (like ar, dee, and the runic thornsound in Þat); plosive (like pee
and dee), sibilant (like ess and zee); guttural (like kay and gee); open (like the
vowel sound in thaw; closed (like ee); unvoiced (like ess, tee, kay, and the thorn
sound in Þaw); and continuant, like ell, em, and ng). A diphthong is a gliding
sound between two contiguous vowels (as in aerie, cooperation, leonine).
The Word
The science of language is linguistics which studies the attributes and
composition of human verbal communication, the morphology or form and
structure of the words of a language, including etymology; their historical origins
and derivations; phonology, inflections; semantics, meanings; transformations
shifts in morphology and semantics, and the formation of compounds: words
made up of two or more individual words, such as backyard, highboy, and
nestegg, or of the combination of transformed elements of words, as in
philology, the love of language or of words, from the Greek “philo,” meaning
“loving,” and “logos,“ meaning ”learning” or “words.”
Semiotics is the study of the signs used in communication. According to
Roland Barthes, all signs may be subsumed under five codes or rubrics:
hermeneutic, semic, symbolic (see these terms elsewhere in these pages),
proaireitic (having to do with actions), and cultural (referring to a body of lore
or a field of inquiry). Stylistics is the branch of linguistics that studies the use of
constituents of language such as tropes—figures of speech, including
descriptions, similes, and metaphors—in specific contexts. The origins and
history of proper names is onomastics.
Etymology, as was mentioned above, is the study of words and their historical
origins, relationships with words in other languages, and alterations in
morphology—form and meaning. An etymon (plural etymons or etyma) is a root
word in a language that serves as the basis for words in other languages or as the
original word form in a later version of the same language, or it is a morpheme
that serves as the basis for derivatives that is, words that are derived from some
source, and compounds, that is, words that are made up of combinations of two
or more sources. Each word is an aural—heard, or indited—written sign that
stands for something else. An agreement on the meaning of a word or other
language unit is a definition. For example, if one were to say to someone else, “I
blygle your mordalpot,” the other person might say, “What are you talking
about?”
“Well, where I come from blygle means ‘a strong feeling of admiration and
caring,’ and mordalpot means ‘the filaments that grow on one’s head.’”
“Oh, you mean you love my hair! Thank you. Your hairdo is nice too.”
Verbs (like blygle) are words that signify actions: run, jump, laugh, handle,
kiss, for example. Nouns (like mordalpot) are substantives, concrete nouns that
stand either for objects such as table, brick, shoe, or roadway, or abstract
nouns that stand for thoughts and ideas such as God, love, soul, honor,
happiness. Basically, concrete nouns may be conventionally defined, whereas
abstract nouns cannot be, for no two people will agree absolutely on definitions
for any of these words. Many abstract nouns, such as these last mentioned, and
some concrete nouns, such as flag, and apple pie, are cues, words that elicit
conditioned responses, as an actor is conditioned to respond to a spoken cue in a
play.
An adjective is a word or phrase that modifies a noun, generally by preceding
it: pretty baby, blue sky; an adverb modifies a verb, (ran slowly, ate carefully),
an adjective (a wonderfully pretty baby), or another adverb (ran extremely
slowly).
An archaism is an obsolete word, one that no longer appears in the average
lexicon—that is, dictionary or list of words—of a language. For instance, the
word “chirming” once meant the sound that birds make when they flock in the
trees in the fall preparatory to migration. The English language no longer has a
current word for such a phenomenon.
A colloquialism is a word or phrase used in ordinary conversation that is not
considered to be in good enough taste, or at a high enough level of diction, to be
used in polite conversation or in literary writing. It lies between slang and formal
speech—see levels of diction. Cacozelia denotes the use of neologisms, which
are nonce words minted for particular occasions or situations, as for instance the
terms “hip” and its variant “hep” (as in the 1940s jazz slang term “hepcat” and
perhaps derived from the etymon “hipi” or “hepi” from the Wolof language of
West Senegal, meaning “to be aware of”) were once American slang neologisms
meaning “in the know,” particularly about jazz. Later, in the 1960s, the
neologism “hippy” was coined to mean someone who was a free spirit or
“bohemian,” with ties to the drug scene. Later still, the term developed into the
neologism “Yippy,” at least partially an acronym meaning “a member of the
Youth International Party.” When the fun-filled days of the Vietnamese “police
action” (a euphemism) were long over, a further derivation was invented:
“yuppy,” another acronym standing for “young, upwardly-mobile professional
person”—actually, it should have been “yump-y,” but the coiner or coiners
evidently wanted the overtone (secondary definition) of “yes-men” to be implied
by the slang term “yup.”
A coinage is a neologism invented by a known author, as for instance the
word “ent” coined by J. R. R. Tolkien in his trilogy (three-novel cycle) The Lord
of the Rings. (Tolkien actually invented an entire language for these books,
“Elvish,” spoken by the elves who were characters therein.) An “ent” is a “treebeing” or “tree shepherd” which itself looks like a tree but is capable of motion,
albeit slow motion.
An adopted word is one that is taken from another language; soraismus is the
use of foreign words from various languages and sources, and a type of verse
that humorously mingles foreign words with one’s “native” language, or that
makes words in one language conform to the grammatical rules and structures of
another language, as in macaronic verse. The French (and French Canadians)
have set up institutions which, even quite recently, have attempted to keep the
French language “pure” by banning adoptions from English. However, when the
Norman French invaded and occupied England in the eleventh century, they
brought with them their language and imposed many of their words on English
which was radically changed thereby—a very large part of English vocabulary is
French-derived. For instance, the Normans brought into English the Old French
word “beuf” (from Latin “bos,” “bov”), modern French “bœuf.” This word
became “beef” in English, and the term “beefsteak” was a derivation therefrom,
which long ago the French adopted as “bifteck.” At the end of the twentieth
century the French were worried that the “English” word “beef” was appearing
frequently in their language.
Poor choice of words or bad grammatical construction is called solecism.
Barbarism is the use of foreign speech in a literary work, or a misuse of one’s
own native tongue, as in a malapropism, named for the malapropos (from the
French, mal apropos) manner of speaking of Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley
Sheridan’s The Rivals, who confuses one word inappropriately with another, as
in, “I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny [prodigy] of
learning.” Sexisms are usages which show biases toward one gender or the other,
traditionally toward the masculine at the expense of the feminine as for instance
by using “he” or “his” when the neutral “one” or “one’s” is called for, or when
the antecedent is a noun of indeterminate gender, such as “teacher” or “doctor.”
Vocabulary means all the words of a given language or, in the case of
individuals, all the words understood and used by a particular person, as for
instance, “The vocabulary of Chaucer,” which may be ascertained by a study of
the words to be found in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, or “the King’s English,”
meaning an educated, proper version of the language. Lexicography is the
discipline of compiling and defining words for a lexicon or dictionary; the
discipline of spelling is orthography.
An epithet is a characterizing term such as “bright-eyed” in “the bright-eyed
baby,” or it is a term used to substitute for the thing described, as in “the virgin
queen” rather than “Elizabeth the First” (see substitutive schemes). A transferred
epithet is one that moves a modifier from the word it would ordinarily modify to
a proximal (nearby) word, as for instance, instead of writing, “the dreary tolling
of the bells” saying, “the tolling of the dreary bells.” A stock epithet is one that
is conventionally used in poems, such as epics, ballads, madsongs, and nursery
rhymes that are composed extemporaneously, the poets drawing upon such
descriptions in the heat of composition, as for instance the Homeric epithet or
the Anglo-Saxon kenning, which are brief metaphorical synonyms comprised of
two words; Homer’s “the wine-dark sea” for instance, or, in the Old English
poem “The Wanderer“ (see below), “chest-locked” means secret; “mind-hoard”
means secret thoughts; “shield-friends” means fellow warriors; “hall-men”
means clansmen; “youth-yore,” yesteryear; “heart’s cavern,” loneliness; “loaflord” means a chief who shares his “loaf” (his bounty) with his warriors, and so
on.
An epithetic compound is two descriptive words made into one (deathgush,
thickdark, sunbright). A portmanteau word (which is itself a neologism coined
by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland) combines parts of two different
words; for instance, “hassle” is perhaps made out of haggle and tussle. An
oxymoron is a descriptive phrase that combines terms that seem mutually
exclusive but, in context, are not: “sweet pain,” “religious logic,” “terrible
beauty,” “burning chill,” and so forth.
Syntax
A language is the words of a cultural group arranged in such a way as to form
larger units such as phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, subsections,
sections, chapters, volumes, books, and series. The arrangement of words in
sentences is called syntax. The system of arrangement of words in language is
called grammar. Grammatical parallelism or parallel construction is the
symmetrical arrangement of words, phrases and clauses in sentences. For
instance, one would not say, “John likes running and to jump.” Both these
constructions are verbals—that is, nouns derived from verbs, but the first is a
gerund, and the second an infinitive. Parallel construction demands that both be
gerunds or infinitives: “John likes running and jumping,” or “John likes to run
and jump.” A complete sentence is an independent clause containing a subject
and a predicate. A subject is a substantive—a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase—
that indicates the performer of an action or the recipient of that which is depicted
by the predicate. A predicate contains an intransitive verb (one which does not
require an object to complete the action) or a transitive verb (one that does
require an object) plus all grammatical elements required to complete the action,
such as a predicate nominative (I am he), an object (Henry lifted the book), or
phrases (The book is very heavy). Incomplete sentences are sentence fragments
and are generally words, phrases and subordinate clauses standing alone.
Parallel structure, then, is the structure of symmetrical lists within the
sentence and among sentences in a paragraph. These lists may be parts of
speech, such as infinitives (I like to run, to jump, and to swim); proper nouns,
(Alice, Bill, and James like to exercise); prepositions (This is a government of,
by, and for the people); phrases (This is a government of the people, by the
people, and for the people); gerunds (I like running, jumping, and
swimming); independent clauses (I came, I saw, I conquered), or any other
sentence elements, even compound elements such as subjects and predicates
(Alice, Bill, and James like to run, jump, and swim). The controlling word is
“symmetrical” lists, for one does not write, “I like to run, jumping, and to
swim,” even though the sentence makes sense. The elements of the list, of the
catalog (frequentatio), must be in the same form.
A paragraph is a manifest subdivision of a text that begins on a fresh,
generally indented line, addresses one concept or delimited topic, and, with the
exception of dialogue, consists usually of at least two sentences.
The elementary unit of Biblical parallelism is the sentence, called the “verse.”
Each sentence is compound, divided into two or, sometimes, three parts or cola
(singular, colon) by caesurae or pauses, each colon being syntactically and
semantically independent, generally an independent clause. Those verses that are
divided by a medial caesura—that is, by a caesura that divides the sentence in
half—may be divided in either a balanced or an unbalanced manner; that is to
say, there may or may not be more words or syllables in one colon than in the
other.
Sentence elements of less than independent clausal length also exist, however,
and sometimes these are introductory, exclamatory, or rhetorical: “Thus saith the
Lord,” is a common introductory colon; “O Israel!” is an example of the
exclamatory colon to be found in the Bible, and “Selah” or “Amen” of the
rhetorical.
Three general types of parallelism have been distinguished in the Bible,
semantic parallelism, structural parallelism, and emblematic parallelism. In
semantic parallelism what is said in the first colon is echoed or repeated either
negatively or positively in the second. In structural parallelism there is
syntactical (that is, words), or metrical parallelism (that is, syllables) in the cola
of the verse, but not semantic—that is, there is not parallelism of meaning
although there may be the same number of words or of syllables in each half of
the parallel. Emblematic parallelism is similetic in nature; that is, the first colon
is the beginning of a comparison, and the second is the conclusion of the
comparison: “As a father pities his children, || so the Lord pities those who fear
him” (Psalms cii.13).
There are four major types of parallel grammatical structures that may be
isolated in the Bible: synonymous and antithetical parallels are semantic
parallels; synthetic and climactic parallels are structural parallels. Synonymous
parallelism breaks each sentence into two cola. The first colon will say
something; the second colon will reiterate, that is, repeat or paraphrase the same
thing as the first. The first sentence of Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America
Singing” is a synonymous parallel: “I hear America singing, / the varied carols
I hear.” Antithetical parallelism also breaks the verse in half, but the second
colon rebuts or contradicts the first: “All things are silent; / the stillness is a
tumult.” Another example is this: “The sun is setting; / heaven’s fire flickers in
the west.” Synthetic parallelism divides the verse into two cola, but the second
gives a consequence of the first: “In the sky there is darkness; / birds settle out
of the air.” Climactic parallelism is simply the apex of the symmetrical list;
each succeeding colon in the parallel builds to a climax, as in the last sentence of
Whitman’s poem mentioned above:
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
This climax is written in what syntactically is called paratactic style, meaning
that the elements of its sentences follow one another without distinction as to
importance or order, even without overt connection except, minimally, the
connective “and.” Often, a climactic parallel is simply a catalog, a listing of
things in parallel. Writing in balanced parallels is called rounding periods, and
the sentences are periodic, meaning that the main clause or the predicate of the
clause is withheld until the end of the sentence, as in, “Despite his absence and
in the presence of his enemies, notwithstanding the fact that he had spurned the
occasion, Marlon Brando was given the Oscar.” This sentence is also an example
of hypotactic style, in which the relationships of the parts of the sentence are
distinguished by subordination and causal links.
The opposite of the periodic sentence is the loose sentence, which is not a
belittling pejorative term. A loose sentence is complete grammatically before it
reaches its ending, as in the case of a complex sentence beginning with an
independent clause and finishing with a dependent clause, as in, “John left the
kitchen and closed the door, having found what he wanted in the refrigerator.”
Perissologia is surplus of language in clauses and phrases, sentences that are
too long and oversubordinated, too complex, full of mannerisms, as in some of
the work of the novelist Henry James, or as in euphuism. Periergia is
oversaying, belaboring a point or description, overwriting.
Ciceronian style, after Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), a great Roman
orator, was periodic, cadenced, balanced, and tropic (full of tropes, figures of
speech). The Renaissance Ciceronians, who wrote in Latin, refused to use any
word not found in the works of Cicero.
Genre
Literature, in the sense that it is used here, is the body of writing, in the language
modes of prose, that is, unmetered language, and verse, that is, metered language
(see this subject treated at length in the chapter titled The Genres of Poetry) in
all genres, that is, types of writing, that has been deemed to be worthy of study
and preservation in the languages of the world, but particularly, in the present
case, of the English-speaking world. In metered language syllables are counted
or measured in lines or stichs. In prose unmetered language syllables are not
counted.
The types of writing to be found in literature are called genres; the primary
genres are fiction, drama, poetry, and nonfiction—all of these terms are umbrella
terms, for there are subgenres in each category, such as the novel, novella,
novelette (long story), short story, short-short story (very short story), episode
(one incident or event in a longer work of fiction), and anecdote (a short account
often of humorous interest) of fiction; the tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy,
melodrama, and skit (a short dramatic presentation of a humorous or satiric turn)
of drama; the autobiography, biography, essay, and discourse of nonfiction, and
the lyric, verse narrative, and verse drama of poetry. Any of the genres may be
written in either of the modes: there may be prose fiction or verse fiction, prose
drama or verse drama; prose poetry or verse poetry, prose nonfiction or verse
nonfiction. That group or listing of works of a language, in all the genres and
both the modes, which is considered to be central to its literature is called the
canon. The word may also mean a list of works of a particular author, genre,
literary period, and so forth.
A writer of literature is an author, and there are as many types of writer as
there are genres: novelist, dramatist, essayist, fictionist, poet, critic, scholar,
playwright, scriptwriter, speechwriter, journalist, biographer, and so forth.
Much literature is written in the literary language of the culture, which is a
more refined version of the language, as distinguished from the vernacular,
which is the ordinary form of the language spoken by most members of an
ethnic, cultural or national group. Dialect is the sub-form of a language that is
spoken either regionally, as for instance the dialect of American English spoken
by the Cajuns of Louisiana, or as a form of a particular language, as for instance,
the Romance languages like Italian, French, Spanish, Rumanian, and Portugese,
all of which are derived from the classical language Latin. Such derived
languages are called vulgar, to be distinguished from vulgar language, which is
obscene, base, or otherwise unacceptable language in speech or writing. Patois is
a close synonym of dialect, to be distinguished from pidgin, which is a rough
amalgam of one or more languages, like the “pidgin English” spoken in parts of
the South Pacific islands. Idiom has to do with the peculiar expressions of a
particular language or dialect; that is to say, one cannot understand, from an
etymological analysis of the expression, either its derivation or its logical
definition. For example, only someone conversant with American English would
understand that the expression “She kicked the bucket” means “She died.” This
is an Americanism. “I’ll knock you up tonight” is an Anglicism meaning, “I’ll
drop by to see you late tonight.” As an American expression this latter means
something entirely different. Idiom also may refer to the peculiarities of an entire
language, dialect, or jargon. Slang, which is generally considered to be vulgar
language, is an argot or jargon used by a particular group of people consisting of
a vocabulary that is interspersed with coined words and idiomatic expressions
that identify the speaker with that group, as for instance the Afro-American
street talk of the cities of the United States, which is itself derived largely from
the argot of jazz musicians. Argot is a special vocabulary that is used by a
particular group of people, such as physicians; for instance, anyone who watches
one of the current hospital shows on television will hear a plethora of argot,
much of which will be gibberish to the average listener. Jargon is a near
synonym of argot, as is lingo. A localism is some form or usage that is peculiar
to a locale. An idiolect is the particular speech pattern of an individual, distinct
from his or her culture or group.
Diction
Whereas syntax is concerned with the form of the sentence, diction has to do
with its tone—that is, the impression left upon the reader as to the attitude of the
author or narrator toward his or her material and the audience, and with its style,
or manner of locution—“way of speaking.” The level of diction of the person in
the street is usually different from that of a high churchperson. The latter might
speak in an “elevated style,” the former, perhaps, in the vernacular or an
“idiomatic style.” These styles are dependent upon the levels of diction in which
these individuals choose to speak.
In his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality. . .” William Wordsworth wrote, “To
me alone there came a thought of grief.” A churchperson might say such a thing
in such an affected style, but not likely a laborer because the sentence would not
be in character; the level of diction is poetic, not vernacular (that is, everyday,
ordinary speech). To be believable as a character, the laborer would have to say
something like, “A sad thought came to me by my lonesome.” The level of
diction would thus be in keeping with the character, and the sentence would be
an example of base style rather than mean or high style. If an older, welleducated woman character were written into the script, a different version of the
same sentence might fit: “A thought of grief came to me alone,” an example of
mean style. Only in the case of the churchperson’s sentence is the word order, the
syntax, out of normal order. It is “artificial syntax“; it does not seem “natural,”
but it is perfectly good English.
Poetic diction is a manner of speaking designed specifically for writing in the
genre of poetry. For instance, in ordinary middle-class speech one might say, “A
thought of grief came to me alone.” In this sentence the syntax is “normal”: the
subject of the sentence comes first, then the predicate. But in Wordsworth’s ode
the syntax is reversed: “To me alone there came a thought of grief.” The two
sentences say exactly the same thing, but the level of diction of the second is that
of nineteenth-century period style because its tone has been “elevated” through
syntactical inversion. Poetic diction has nothing to do with mode—prose or
verse; it can be found in both.
Walt Whitman wrote his poems in prose mode, but his diction was the same
elevated poetic diction that William Wordsworth used in verse mode. Opening
Whitman’s Complete Poems at random, one may find examples everywhere:
Section 4 of “The Return of the Heroes,” for instance, opens with this line:
“When late I sang sad was my voice.” This passage in normal syntax would be
written, “My voice was sad when I sang late[ly]”; or, in middle-class diction,
“My voice was sad when I sang recently,” or even, “When I recently sang my
voice was sad.” Much more original was the idiosyncratic poetic diction of
Emily Dickinson, as in the poem that begins, “Of Course—I prayed—/ And did
God Care? / He cared as much as on the Air / A Bird had stamped her foot—.”
In every era there are always two sorts of poetic diction: that of the “period
style,” as we have here been discussing in terms of the nineteenth century
Romantic style, and any number of “idiosyncratic styles“ invented by individual
poets. Such writers we call “stylists.” The nineteenth-century poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins sounded little like his contemporaries; here is the opening of
“Hurrahing in Harvest”:
“Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise Around; up
above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviours
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?”
Clearly, this is “poetic diction,” but in Hopkins’ case it has less to do with
rearrangements of syntax than with effects on the sonic level of poetry and with
vocabulary.
The English-language Neoclassical or Augustan period of the eighteenth
century also had both its period style and its idiosyncratic styles. Alexander Pope
exemplifies (according to received opinion) the best of the period style, as in
lines 259–60 of the “Essay on Man,”
What if the foot, ordain’d the dust to tread,
Or hand, to toil, aspir’d to be the head?”
To flesh this passage out in ordinary prose is to illustrate the difference between
ordinary and elevated language : “What if the foot, ordained to tread the dust; or
the hand, ordained to toil, aspired to be the head?” Poetic diction is generally
intended to intensify the aural, that is, the listening, experience.
Samuel Johnson’s contemporary Christopher Smart sometimes wrote his
poems in the poetic diction of the Neoclassical period style, as in Section VII of
“Hymn to the Supreme Being”:
Yet hold, presumption, nor too fondly climb,
And thou too hold, O horrible despair!
Considerably before Whitman he also wrote poems in the prose mode;
however, in those prose poems Smart’s poetic diction turned away from the
period style and became idiosyncratic, as in “Of the Sun and the Moon”:
For the Sun’s at work to make me a garment & the Moon is at work for my
wife.
For the Wedding Garments of all men are prepared in the Sun against the day
of acceptation.
For the Wedding Garments of all women are prepared in the Moon against
the day of their purification.
Here, the syntax is normal, but the form of Smart’s sentences is based upon the
scheme anaphora and the sensory level (that is, the aspect of language that
utilizes figures of speech) of the passage is unusual and arresting.
Another poet of that period who wrote in both prose and verse mode, William
Blake, had his own poetic diction, but it was the same or quite similar in both
modes. The syntax of this so-called “pre-Romantic” poet was more normal than
that of the succeeding Romantics, as in the beginning of “A Little Girl Lost”
from Songs of Experience:
Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.”
This was a verse poem, of course, but “Creation” is prose:
I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.
I will not reason compare [an inversion: ‘compare reason’]. My business is
to create.
The twentieth century also has its period-styles and idiosyncratic poetic
dictions. W. H. Auden and his group in the pre-World War II period blended
formal verse structures with an urbane conversational style, as in Auden’s
“What’s the Matter?”—
To lie flat on the back with the knees flexed
And sunshine on the soft receptive belly
Or face-down, the insolent spine relaxed,
No more compelled to cower or to bully,
Is good; and good to see them passing by
Below on the white side-walk in the heat,
The dog, the lady with parcels, and the boy:
There is the casual life outside the heart.
Writing in this style became what is known as “academic poetry“ in the
United States, and it persisted even into the so-called “free verse“ of the post-war
generations: here is the contemporary poet William Stafford in “Adults Only”:
Animals own a fur world;
people own worlds that are variously, pleasingly, bare.
None of this sounds at all like the poetic diction of Auden’s Welsh
contemporary, the idiosyncratic Dylan Thomas who owed more, perhaps, to
Gerard Manley Hopkins than to anyone else, as in, “Hold Hard, These Ancient
Minutes in the Cuckoo’s Month” which is also the first line. The poem
continues, “Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan’s hill, / As the green
blooms ride upward, to the drive of time”; nor does it sound like Theodore
Roethke in Part 2 of “The Visitant”: “Slow, slow as a fish she came, / Slow as a
fish coming forward, / Swaying in a long wave”; or the Postmodern American
poet John Berryman in “Old Man Goes South Again Alone”:
O parakeets & avocets, O immortelles
& ibis, scarlet under that stunning sun
deliciously & tired I come
toward you in orbit, Trinidad! . . .
A good deal more information about diction is to be found in The Book of
Dialogue, a companion volume to The Book of Literary Terms.
Literary Movements
It has been postulated that there have always been two kinds of poetry, each of
them stemming from pre-history and the Golden Age which, according to Hesiod
(eighth century BC) was the original age of humanity when people lived in
harmony with creation and neither fought nor labored, as in the Hebrew Garden
of Eden. In the Golden Age “sympathetic magic” (a term of Sir James George
Frazer [1854–1941], author of The Golden Bough) was the system assumed to
prevail in human affairs. The dual laws of similarity and association were seen
to be operative; that is, in the first case, “like begets like” (sprinkle water ritually
upon dry earth to produce rain), and, in the second case, “things once associated
with one another are forever associated” (speak the “secret name” of a god and
he or she must do one’s bidding). Because there was a god for everything, those
whose business it was to placate the deities were required to know the ritual
words that would conjure the gods and request or require them to serve
humanity’s interests. This became sacred or devotional poetry which was
religiously fervent, prayerful, supplicatory, and was the province of priests and
shamans. See Amergin’s ancient Irish chant, “The Mystery “ in The Book of
Forms, a companion volume to this text which will give some idea of early
sacred poetry in Britain.
Words used to entertain—to tell stories, to play games, to remember the
traditions and history of an ethnic group, to praise the feats of the leaders, record
the deeds of the warriors, and to honor the dead—was social poetry, and it was
the province of the balladeers, the songsters, the grandmothers and grandfathers.
The Age of Gold was followed by the Age of Silver when men disobeyed the
gods and lost their innocence, then by the Age of Bronze, when war was
endemic and violence a way of life. At last, there came the Age of Iron, the age
of corruption and betrayal, in which mankind lives still.
The Platonic view (after Plato, 427–347 BC, a student of Socrates, 470?–399
BC), sees poetry not as “literature,” but as a means to an end, the original end
being to placate the gods, but in the modern world to catch a glimpse of
universal “Truth” or to achieve or express a visionary experience. The American
Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) said in his essay titled
“The Poet” that the poet is “the namer, the sayer,” not a person of mere “poetical
talents.” A poem, then, is not an “artifice of language” but a manifestation of
“higher” or “cosmic” consciousness. It is not the artful manipulation of words
(not social poetry or art poetry) but Truth transcendentally perceived. Thus,
poetry is more akin to religious incantation than to writing, and the poet is more
priest than maker (Scottish makir; bard). The Platonic poet searches for vision
through language, and “vision” may not be defined as merely “world view” but
as transcendent experience. There are two roads to vision, the via affirmativa and
the via negativa. The former is the “affirmation of images,” a poetic avenue that
moves outward from the self toward cosmic consciousness; the latter is the
“negation of images,” an avenue that moves downward into the self toward
cosmic awareness. The Book of Genesis says that “In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and the visionary
poet wants to know that Word so as to be at One with God (or at least something
greater than the self). The path of the intellect is specifically rejected as a means
to know the Word; intuition and inspiration (nervous excitement) are the
appropriate means. In other words, Platonic poetry is sacred poetry or carmen—
inspired, prophetic, or oracular song. Such poets were classically called vates,
vatic poets However, all serious poetry of whatever tradition may be considered
to be essentially religious in that the poet is interested in the human condition,
and it is through poetry that the poet’s perception of this condition is reflected
and mankind’s relationship to the world and to the universe is sought.
Poetry having as its base the view that poetry is language artifice is based
upon the precepts of Aristotle (384–322), a student of Plato, who studied the
literary works of his day, particularly tragedy, and abstracted certain qualities
and elements that many of them had in common including the unities, the
mimetic nature of art, and the principles of proportion and balance. These topics
are covered more fully in the discussion of tragedy in the chapter “The Genres of
Drama.”
The neo-classical period of the eighteenth century set up these qualities as
ideals so that succeeding periods of literature have seen Aristotelian poetry as
being primarily of the intellect and not of the emotions, but such poetry is not
truly Aristotelian or classical; it is, in effect, ideational verse. Aristotle did not
reject vision in the Platonic sense, but would include as part of the definition of
vision a “world view.” Aristotelian poetry is classical or Apollonian poetry, after
Apollo, the god of music, medicine, poetry, and prophecy; in other words, it is
social poetry. The Apollonian impulse is to create order and beauty from
existence.
It should be noted that the definition of Aristotelian poetry is broad enough to
include Platonic poetry, but the reverse is not true. Platonic poetry is Dionysian
poetry, after Dionysus, the Greek god of revelry, wine, and fertility. When a
Platonic poet is moved to write, he or she is filled with divine afflatus, passionate
frenzy, the furor poeticus—poetic drunkenness. The Dionysian impulse is to
express a sense of the chaos and irrationality of human existence. Both
Apollonian and Dionysian poets are in the care of the Muses, the nine daughters
of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, and Zeus. The Muses of poetry, who live on
the slopes of the sacred mount Parnassus, are Calliope, the muse of epic poetry;
Euterpe, of lyric poetry; Erato, of erotic poetry, Melpomene, of tragedy,
Polyhymnia, of sacred poetry, Terpsichore, of song and dance, and Thalia, of
comedy. The other muses are Clio, muse of history, and Urania, of astronomy.
The poet rides the winged horse named Pegasus who, with its hoof, struck open
Hippocrene, the Muses’ well of inspiration, on Mount Helicon.
The Alexandrian period was circa 330–30 BC, and the term Alexandrian
pertains to Hellenist—that is, influenced by Greek culture—writers of that
period living in Alexandria, Egypt, which was a center for learning and a
repository of many of the world’s greatest manuscripts. The neo-Platonists were
a school of philosophers of circa 200 to 400 who posited that all good emanated
from the Absolute which was the origin of all things.
England and the British Isles have been home to several literary languages
over the centuries. The earliest inhabitants of the British Isles were the Picts who
were driven by the Romans into the outlands of the north where they merged
with the Celts. The Pictish language was extinct by the tenth century and is
known primarily by a few place names. Prior to the sixth century BC the Isles
were invaded by Celtic tribes from the European Continent, and their welldeveloped languages were eventually known as Erse (Gaelic), Welsh, Manx, and
Cornish which has been extinct since the eighteenth century.
The Romans began to invade by 55 BC bringing the classical language and
literature of the Latin tongue with them, reaching the peak of their rule by the
first half of the third century AD. By the fifth century Rome had withdrawn its
support of its legions in Britain and the Isles were subjected to a series of
invasions from the Continent by Germanic tribes and internal pressures from the
north by the Celtic tribes. England became a checkerboard of fiefdoms and petty
kingdoms with numerous related Germanic languages spoken by tribes such as
the Angles, the Saxons, the Danes and the Jutes.
The so-called Dark or Middle Ages ensued which, by one reckoning,
extended from circa AD 476 to about the year 1000 and, by another, the period
from the end of classical civilization to the rebirth of learning in the West, the
“Renaissance.” The phrase Anglo-Saxon England describes the period from AD
450 to 1066 when the Scandinavian tribes were making their incursions into the
British Isles and establishing enclaves and colonies, and this period was marked
by the installation of the language now called Old English. By the eighth
century, in all probability, the first major poem in a European vernacular
language (as distinguished from classical Latin and Greek) had been written.
The poem takes its title from its heroic protagonist, the legendary “Beowulf.”
Norman England began in the year 1066 when William the Conqueror of
Normandy (1027?–1087), after having been promised the English throne by
Edward the Confessor, his cousin, invaded England and defeated Harold II at the
Battle of Hastings. From this point, French was the official court, literary, and
legal language of England, although Latin remained the language of the church.
Such poets as Marie de France of England (ca. 1160–1215) wrote in the French
language and in syllabic prosody while, in the countryside, the native poets
continued to write in strong-stress prosody. “Norman” means “Northman,” and
these people were of the same racial stock as the Englishmen they had
conquered, the difference being that in England Norse culture had prevailed over
the Roman and Celtic, whereas on the Continent the invading Norse had instead
adopted French culture. Thus, by the eleventh century the literary languages of
Britain had been Celtic, Latin, Germanic, and French. Each of these languages
had a literary tradition.
Courtly love was a medieval and Renaissance movement and convention that
was chivalric in nature and had as its basis the idealization of illicit love and
womankind, generally the married kind. The would-be lover, a knight or
courtier, addressed his noble paramour with unrequited or virtuous passion,
generally in poetry, and his complaints were judged and arbitrated by an
aristocratic Court of Love.
The Latin prosody of the Romans was, early on, an adaptation of the Greek
quantitative accentual-syllabic prosody and, later, the Biblical prose system we
call grammatical parallelism. The Celts wrote their poetry in a prosody (a system
of composition) that we call syllabics; the Germanic prosody was a system we
call alliterative accentuals (Anglo-Saxon prosody) or strong-stress prosody, and
the French system for writing poetry was a different form of syllabics from that
of the Celts. By the fourteenth century all of these prosodies had been in use in
Britain for centuries, giving the English language an exceptionally broad
prosodic base, and rhyme (originally spelled rime, but corrupted by confusion
with the word rhythm) had been added by the Normans to the stock of sounds the
Anglo-Saxons used in their language music.
Over the course of three centuries an enormous French vocabulary blended
slowly but surely with the Anglo-Saxon tongue, and by the time of Geoffrey
Chaucer this amalgam had resulted in a new dialect (actually, a new series of
English dialects) that we now call Middle English. The Anglo-Norman period
lasted from about 1100 to 1400. By the fifteenth century not only had Norman
French and Old English merged, but the Age of Chaucer was marked by a great
flowering of poetry in England, some of it written in alliterative accentuals, as in
the work of William Langland (1332?–1400), author of The Vision of William
Concerning Piers the Plowman and “The Gawain Poet,” about whom nothing is
known except that he or she is very likely the author of both the elegiac The
Pearl and the great alliterative romance or epic, Gawain and the Green Knight.
Some of the literature of this period was written in French and Latin, as in two of
the works of John Gower (1325?–1408), and some of it in English, in the new
prosody, the invention of Gower in his English poem, Confessio Amantis, and of
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400) in all of his work including his masterpiece,
The Canterbury Tales. For examples of Chaucer’s poetry see “Merciless Beauty”
in The Book of Forms.
For 100 years between the death of Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400) and the
beginning of the English Renaissance in 1500, accentual-syllabic verse was
largely forgotten in England, but it was kept alive by Thomas Hoccleve (1369?–
1450?) and the so-called “Scottish Chaucerians” (the Scots language even today
is a version of Middle English) who included Robert Henryson (ca. 1480) and
William Dunbar (1460?–1520?)—see Henryson’s “Robin and Makyn” and
Dunbar’s “Lament for the Poets” in The Book of Forms.
In England itself during this century the prosodic system had slipped halfway
back to accentual prosody in the “folk poetry” of the “border balladeers” (on the
border between England and Scotland) who wrote in the system we now call
podic prosody, a misnomer, for “pod” means “foot” and there are no verse feet
involved. For examples of these sorts of poems see “Lord Randal” and “Tom
O’Bedlam’s Song” in The Book of Forms, as well as for complete information on
and examples of all the known prosodies used in the British isles over the
centuries.
While he was in Bruges learning the ways of the new invention called the
printing press, Thomas Caxton (1422?–1491) printed the first book in English,
his 1475 translation from the French of Raoul le Febre’s The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye. The next year he moved back to England and set up his press
in Westminster, and over fourteen years published many translations and other
works including The Temple of Glass by John Lydgate (1370?–1451?), several of
Chaucer’s works, including The Canterbury Tales (1478 & 1484), Gower’s
Confessio Amantis, and in 1485, Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory (ca.
1470).
The Renaissance had begun in Italy in the fourteenth century, and it spread to
the rest of Europe over the next two hundred years, reaching Britain in the
sixteenth century. The Renaissance was marked not only by a rediscovery of
Aristotle’s scientific method, Galen’s medicine, and other classical learning from
ancient Greece and Rome, but also by a revival of Arabic and Hebrew learning.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century Middle English had become what we
call Modern English, and Chaucer’s accentual-syllabics was rediscovered and
used in some of the poetry of the transitional poet John Skelton (1460–1529)
who also wrote in podic prosody (see “Upon a Dead Man’s Head” in The Book
of Forms), and in the work and theory of early English Renaissance poets like
Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) and Henry Howard (1517–1547). The courtly
makers were English Renaissance court poets of the time of Henry VIII (1509–
1547) whose children were his successors, ending with Elizabeth I (1558–1603),
Muse of the Elizabethan Age.
John Skelton has been called the last of the English Medieval poets by some,
and by others the first of the English Renaissance poets. No doubt he was both,
for he wrote not only in podic prosody, like the anonymous English poets since
Chaucer, but in accentual-syllabic prosody as well, like the Scottish Chaucerians,
Chaucer himself, and almost all other English poets up through the nineteenth
century.
This era was followed by the Jacobean period, the era of James VI of
Scotland who succeeded Elizabeth as James I of England (1603–1625). The
School of Spenser, who were influenced by the archaism and Medievalism of
Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), included William Alexander (1577?–1640),
William Browne (1590?–1645?), John Davies (1569–1626), William Drummond
of Hawthornden (1585–1649), Giles Fletcher (1588?–1623), Phineas Fletcher
(1582–1650), and George Wither (1588–1667). The University Wits was a group
of young writers, primarily playwrights, who toward the end of the sixteenth
century gathered in London to write and experiment with plays. Included were
Robert Greene (1558?–592), Thomas Kyd (1558–1594), Christopher Marlowe
(1564–1593.), Thomas Nash (1567–1601), and George Peele (1556?–1596). The
Tribe of Ben was a coterie of seventeenth-century epigones—imitators—who
followed the classical precepts of Ben Jonson (1572–1637), the great
contemporary of William Shakespeare (1564–1616).
The chief members of the “Tribe” were also known as the Cavalier Poets,
including Robert Herrick, (1591–1674), Thomas Carew (1595?–1639), Richard
Lovelace (1618–1657?), and John Suckling (1609–1642). The school of
Metaphysical Poets in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England was
a suborder of the Caroline Poets of the reign of Charles I; they included John
Donne (1572–1631), George Herbert (1593–1633), Andrew Marvell (1621–
1678), and Henry Vaughan (1622–1695). All these writers were formalists, (and
examples of poetry by some of them may be found in The Book of Forms), but
the Metaphysical poets used the conceit (an archaic form of the word “concept“),
a controlling image or extended metaphor, in their work which also relied upon
such rhetorical tropes as irony and paradox. For an example and analysis of this
sort of poetry, see Donne’s “The Ecstasy” in The Book of Forms.
Another style of the period was euphuism, after the protagonist in the novel
Euphues by John Lyly (1554?-1606), characterized by excessive ornamentation
(aureate language), highly wrought parallelism, many sonic techniques such as
alliteration, and extreme elegance of syntax and diction. The inkhornists were
those who advocated introducing directly into the English vocabulary Greek and
Latin terms. They were successful in this endeavor in the case of many rhetorical
and poetic terms, including the Greek names of verse feet even though these
were basically inappropriate to English language prosody. A similar Spanish
style of the era was Gongorism named after its inventor, Luis de Góngora y
Argote (1561–1627), and in Italy Marinism, after Giambattista Marino (1569–
1625) was the term used. The Greek model for such styles was that of Isocrates
(436–338 BC). All these styles are examples of “fine writing” or preciosity, often
marked by sigmatism, the overuse of sibilants.
Hudibrastic, after Hudibras, a mock epic by Samuel Butler (1612–1680), is a
term that refers to a type of savage satire written in rough tetrameter couplets
(see The Book of Forms for a description of Hudibrastics). Butler’s poem was
aimed at Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and the Puritans who overthrew the
British monarchy in the English Civil War (1642–1648), and ruled during the
Commonwealth Period or Interregnum (1649–1659) until the beginning of the
Restoration in 1660.
The Battle of the Books was a late seventeenth-century debate over the
relative merits of the ancient classical writers and those of the contemporary
period. It was during the Renaissance that two things occurred: the wisdom of
the ancients was recovered, and the age of science dawned; the debate was about
which was most important, lore or progress. The first English principals of this
debate were William Temple who, in his An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern
Learning (1690) took the side of the classical writers, and William Wotton who,
in Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694) took the opposite
view.
Neoclassicism, the manifestation of the twentieth-century poet T. S. Eliot’s
theory of the “dissociation of sensibility,” was a resurgence, in late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century Augustan literature, of the Aristotelian ideals of
logical thinking, formalism, control and balance. Such a program was espoused
by Jonson and, later, by Dryden. It became dominant during the eighteenth
century in the work of Alexander Pope (1688–1744), reached its zenith with the
Age of Sensibility or, alternatively, the Age of (Samuel) Johnson, and began to
wane in the non-fiction of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) and the “preRomantic” poetry of Robert Burns (1759–1796) and William Blake (1757–
1827).
The Scriblerus Club, founded in 1714 by Jonathan Swift with members that
included John Arbuthnot (1667–1735), Henry Saint John, Lord Bolingbroke
(1678–1751), William Congreve (1670–1729), John Gay (1685–1732), and
Alexander Pope had as its goal the lampooning of bad writing and bad writers.
Its primary document was The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and
Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, the main author of which was Arbuthnot.
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) began his London literary career as a Grub
Street hack—one who writes for money only, producing potboilers—and turned
himself autodidactically into the complete person of letters. He published his
definitive A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 and his multivolume
Lives of the Poets from 1779–1781. He was immortalized further by the
biography written by James Boswell (1740–1795). The Literary Club, organized
by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1764, was comprised of members of Johnson’s circle
of friends. There were seven charter members including Reynolds, Johnson,
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774).
A synonym for the “Neoclassical” or “Augustan” period (The Age of Reason)
is The Enlightenment, but this term is more properly applied to a religious view
of the era which held that humanity can attain perfectibility on earth without
waiting to achieve it in heaven. This doctrine was a part of the religious Deism
of the age, a belief that God had created Earth and its creatures, was no longer
directly involved with His Creation, and it was now up to humankind to act
rationally and decently, and to preserve the world and society so that they remain
useful and viable.
Primitivism is a belief that humanity was a much better creature in the earliest
stages of its existence, and the closer it remains to its origins, the purer it is. The
cult of the Noble Savage of the eighteenth century idolized the American Indian
and other “primitive” cultures, and poetry written by rustic or working-class
poets such as Robert Burns and John Clare (1793–1864) was lionized.
In North America there was beginning to be a literary culture. The
Connecticut Wits, sometimes inappropriately called the Hartford Wits, was a
group made up of Joel Barlow (1754–1812), Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), and
John Trumbull (1750–1831), the three most prominent members, and of others
including Richard Alsop, Theodore Dwight, Timothy’s brother; Lemuel
Hopkins; David Humphreys, and Elihu Hubbard Smith.
The literature of sensibility was a late eighteenth century sentimental
response to Thomas Hobbes’ assertion that human beings are driven not by any
form of altruism but only by self-interest and the impulse to achieve social status
and personal power. Critics posited in opposition to this theory the affirmation
that people are innately good and sympathetic and that they are sensible to the
situations of others. The Gothic Revival of the same period refers to literature
that took a morbid if elegant interest in the decaying, the macabre, the grotesque,
as in Horace Walpole’s (1717–1797) Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto and, a
century later, Mary Shelley’s (1797–1851) Frankenstein. This genre continues to
be produced, a twentieth-century offshoot being called Southern Gothic, as in the
work of Carson McCullers (1917–1967) or of William Faulkner (1897–1962) in
such a story as “A Rose for Emily.” One of the manifestations of the Gothic
Revival was the Graveyard School of poetry which included elegists such as
Thomas Gray (1716–1771) whose “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” was the
most widely-read poem in the English language for many years, well into the
twentieth century. The pre-Romantic poets of the Augustan age, such as William
Blake (1757–1827) and Robert Burns (1759–1796, see “To a Mouse” in The
Book of Forms), exhibited certain tendencies that would become dominant in the
succeeding Romantic Period.
Romanticism is a term later used to label the work of early nineteenth-century
English writers such as William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (1772–1834), George Gordon (1788–1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792–1822), and John Keats (1795–1821). It had as its dual purpose to make
the mundane seem vivid, and to make the eerie seem real. The central document
of Romanticism, which was a term never used by the writers of the Romantic
movement (no more than the term “Preromantic”), was the “Preface” by
Wordsworth to the 1800 (second) edition of Lyrical Ballads, a book of poems
co-authored by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth proposed to write
poems in the language of ordinary people, rather than in the artificial diction of
the preceding century. Nevertheless, the common person could not be expected
to write poetry, only the “great man” [sic] or “great poet” could do so, which was
one of the Romantic concepts that the contemporary novelist Thomas Love
Peacock satirized. However, this person had earlier been described by George
Puttenham (ca. 1529–1590) during the Renaissance, in his The Arte of English
Poesie (see bibliography), where the euphantasiote was described as one who is
“. . . illuminated with the brightest irradiations of knowledge and of the verity
and due proportion of things . . .” The “Cockney School” was a pejorative name
used by Tory critics for those poets and writers, including Keats, Shelley, Leigh
Hunt (1784–1859) and William Hazlitt (1778–1830), who were prone to rhyme
words with a Cockney accent, to use base diction, and to be deficient in
sensibility and manners.
The satirical novelist Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866), in his essay, “The
Four Ages of Poetry,” rearranged Hesiod’s ages of man somewhat, and applied
them mockingly to the poetry of his time, particularly that of William
Wordsworth (1770–1850); however, Peacock’s satire was also directed at the
work of the other “Lake Poets,” a school which took its name from the region
around the northern Cumberland lakes of England where this group, which
included Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and Robert Southey (1774–
1843), spent varying amounts of time.
The Knickerbocker School of writers existed during the first part of the
nineteenth century in New York City. Members included William Cullen Bryant
(1794–1878), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), Joseph Rodman Drake
(1795–1820), Fitzgreene Halleck (1790–1867), and Washington Irving (1783–
1859). The Schoolroom Poets were those American poets of the nineteenth
century whose work, during the early twentieth century, was almost exclusively
the only American poetry taught in grammar schools and high schools. They
included William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892), John
Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), and
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). Poets such as Walt Whitman, who were
considered either too vulgar or too lightweight by the schoolmarms of the
period, were not taught in the classroom which generally followed a curriculum
that was not at odds with the genteel tradition of literature, that is, literature as
moral uplift. This is a form of censorship or banning of certain texts by members
of the community who do not wish children to be exposed to “moral corruption”
or literary “indecency.” Nothing was to be taught that was not acceptable to the
“feminine sensibility.” The ally of the genteel tradition is the Philistine, who
cares nothing for art or the life of the mind, but only for materialism and
practicality. Grundyism is a term that applies in this situation, for Mrs. Grundy,
who does not actually appear as a character in the drama Speed the Plough by
the American colonist Thomas Morton (ca. 1600–1647), is nevertheless a
pervasive influence on the other characters who constantly ask, “What would
Mrs. Grundy say?”
The Transcendental Club, founded in Boston in 1836 at the home of George
Ripley (1802–1880), met thereafter at odd times and informally at the home of
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Members included Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888),
William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), Nathaniel
Hawthorne (1804–1864), and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) among others.
The Victorian period overlapped and followed the Romantic period,
corresponding roughly with the reign of Queen Victoria. Algernon Charles
Swinburne (1837–1909; see “Sestina” in The Book of Forms) and the Brownings
(Robert, 1812–1889, see “Porphyria’s Lover”; and Elizabeth Barrett, 1806–1861,
see “Grief” in The Book of Forms) were “Victorian” in terms of chronology, but
“Victorian” has pejorative overtones of prudishness, fussy gentility, and
conformity, which certainly did not fit Swinburne; therefore, suborders of
literature are generally conjured to distinguish the many viewpoints and schools
that flourished throughout the period.
The critic Walter Pater (1839–1894) introduced into England from France
some of the precepts of Aestheticism. Pater was interested in style and artifice
and in sensual experience. Others of those who shared such interests were the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a school of London area poets and artists of the
mid-nineteenth century organized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882).
Later in the century in both France and England the Age of Decadence
ensued. Its participants showed signs of exaggerated aestheticism,
ornamentation, and a search for ever-heightened sensation. In England Oscar
Wilde (1854–1900) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) were counted
decadents. Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, depicted the effects of
decadence upon a man who remained forever young while his portrait grew
older and showed in its face the ravages of his degradation.
Realism, like Romanticism, was a literary program of the nineteenth century
which set out to write about ordinary people in ordinary situations, using
ordinary language. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert, the Russian Fyodor
Dostoevsky, the Englishwoman George Eliot, and the American Stephen Crane
were all Realists. Regionalists are those realists who used details from a specific
locale or area to give their work local color. Writers who used slice of life
technique presented the reader with unedited and unexpurgated, almost
“photographic” reality. Critical realism is a term distinguishing between realistic
fiction and such fiction intended to criticize the society which it discusses. The
slave narrative of early to mid-nineteenth century America was an account of a
former slave, sometimes almost wholly fictive but masquerading as
autobiography, written in the service of abolition. The Kailyard school of
Scotland, which included J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), used dialect during the late
nineteenth century in their depictions of common people in everyday situations.
In the twentieth century Realism was supplanted by a bleaker program,
Naturalism, which maintained that people’s lives were controlled by external
forces, such as economics or environment, or by people’s inner limitations.
Naturalism might perhaps be defined as “Marxism [after the Communist theories
of Karl Marx] without hope.” Another synonym for Naturalism is Determinism;
the American novelists Frank Norris and James T. Farrell were Naturalists.
Impressionism was a style both in art and in literature of the 1870s in France
and elsewhere. The term indicates that the sensory level was to be used in such a
way as to evoke mood and to suggest rather than to state. The American
Modernist poet Alfred Kreymborg (1883–1966) in his poem “Nun Snow” was an
Impressionist, as were Amy Lowell and Hilda Doolittle in much of their work,
although they are both thought of as Imagists.
The French Symbolists of the late nineteenth century included Charles
Baudelaire (1821–1867), Stéphane Mallarmé, (1842–1898) and Paul Verlaine
(1844–1896) who were interested in the archetype; that is, in the prototype, the
original model of something, and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) whose work
subsequently influenced the Surrealists. The Symbolists were themselves
influenced by the American poet Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) both as regards
technique and the usages of the sensory level of their poetry.
Jungian psychology, named after its founder, Karl Jung, diverged from
Freudianism, founded by Sigmund Freud, in that it disagreed with Freud’s
dictum that all neuroses and psychoses could be traced to a sexual root. Jung
maintained that there were other human drives besides the sexual, including
hunger, power, anger, and so forth. Each of these drives has its symbol or
archetype, and these remanifest themselves in each generation because they
reside in the race memory or collective unconscious. Thus, the Greek authority
symbol Zeus remanifested itself as the Roman Jupiter, the Hebrew Jahweh, and
the Christian Jehovah. Or, to turn to the distaff, the Greek goddess of love,
Aphrodite, became, successively, the Roman Venus, the Italian Mona Lisa, and,
more recently, Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. The symbols of the Symbolists
were of this magnitude.
The Celtic Renaissance took place in Ireland during the late nineteenth
century with the participation of such writers as the poets William Butler Yeats
(1865–1939), and Æ (George William Russell, 1867–1935), and the playwrights
John Millington Synge (1871–1909), and Lady Isabella Augusta Persse Gregory
(1852–1932), one of the founders, and the director, of the Abbey Theatre in
Dublin.
The Edwardian period extended from 1901–1910, the reign of Edward VII. It
was characterized in literature by its anti-Victorian tenor and iconoclasm. The
playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), the novelist Joseph Conrad
(1857–1924) and the poet-novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) are often
counted Edwardian writers.
The period in England between 1910 and 1936, when George V was
monarch, is called the Georgian era, and certain poets of the second rank who
looked back toward Victorianism rather than ahead, or even to more viable
movements of their own period, are called Georgian poets. Their more avantgarde—that is, experimental—contemporaries have come to be called
Modernists, like the Bloomsbury Group of London: Virginia Woolf (1882–1941),
Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), E. M. Forster (1879–1970) and others. Modernism
was a movement of the first half of the twentieth century that was characterized
by formal and stylistic experimentation, rebellion against Victorian standards of
literature, morality, and style, and the sense that the present, unlike the past
which had seemed to have a religious center, was adrift and searching for a
direction. Americans like Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) who left the United States
to escape the middle-class Victorian mores of the period called themselves “The
Lost Generation.” They included such people as Ernest Hemingway (1899–
1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940).
Imagism, the original Modernist movement, founded by the poet Ezra Pound
(1885–1972), discovered its best slogan, perhaps, in the remark by one of its
members, William Carlos Williams (1883–1966), that there ought to be “No
ideas but in things.” This school believed that the sensory level of poetry was the
most important, and it underplayed the sonic level. T. S. Eliot’s (1888–1965)
notion of the objective correlative was that, if one chose the proper object or
vehicle for one’s metaphor, one would not need to mention the subject or tenor at
all, for one would have chosen that object which is relative to the idea being
expressed; the idea would be clearly seen in the image itself.
Much of the poetry of Modernism returned to the Latin practice of writing
prose poems in grammatic parallel prosody which had been kept alive in English
literature by such poets as the Renaissance translators of the King James Bible
(The Song of Songs, The Psalms), the eighteenth-century poets Christopher
Smart (Jubilate Agno) and William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell),
both of whom wrote poetry in prose and verse alike; the 19th century English
poetaster Martin Farquhar Tupper (Proverbial Philosophy); American poets
Edgar Allen Poe (Eureka!) and Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), and the
twentieth-century Imagistes led by Ezra Pound (The Cantos) who popularized
dispersing the grammatic parallels by line-phrasing (or “lineating” them): by
breaking the independent clauses into phrases, each of which was assigned a
“line” to give it the appearance of verse, called “free verse” after the nineteenthcentury French term vers libre.
T. S. Eliot believed that the metaphysical poets were the last to have a
“unified sensibility”—that is to say, a balance of mind and emotion—which
manifested itself in their work. According to Eliot, in the subsequent late
seventeenth century and all of the eighteenth, a dissociation of sensibility
occurred, particularly among the Restoration Poets, the chief of whom was John
Dryden (1631–1700), and people wrote only with their minds, not with their
feelings, until the Romantic period of the early nineteenth century when a
reaction set in and poets wrote with their emotions, not with their minds.
This is much too pat a theory, however, for in all of history since the Classical
Greek period there have been both “romantic” and “classical” poets.
Nevertheless, it is true that in some ages one predominates over the other, and in
the United States the two points of view have tended to war with one another
ever since the Platonic theories of the nineteenth-century transcendentalist critic
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) gave rise to the anti-formalist, extreme
Platonism of the prose poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) whose influence upon
the Modernists was vast.
Symbolists of the early twentieth century were the Irish poet William Butler
Yeats (1865–1939), who was converted from the Celtic Twilight to Modernism
by Ezra Pound and others; the Anglo-American T. S. Eliot and the American
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) whose metapoetry (poetry about poetry)
subsequently influenced later schools.
As an example of the Symbolist method, consider the poem titled, “Not Ideas
about the Thing but the Thing Itself” by the American Wallace Stevens (1879–
1955). The first stanza is a statement:
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
The poem is a narrative, then, and if it were a piece of prose fiction one
would say that its narrator is the author telling a story in the third person from a
single angle (one person is followed in the poem) and with subjective access—
that is to say, the author knows not only what is going on in the protagonist’s
vicinity, but in his mind as well.
The second stanza tells the reader that the protagonist of the poem was sure,
despite the sound’s seeming location “in his mind,” that its true origin was at
dawn or just before, “In the early March wind.”
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
Of course it would. The season was advancing, and the sun no longer
appeared to be a bedraggled plume of feathers worn by the winterscape. But
there is a suggestion—an overtone—here that the bird, the utterer of the cry,
might itself be a panache, battered or otherwise; might, in fact, be the voice of
the rising sun.
The protagonist could be sure that the sound he had heard was not the echo of
a dream, a voice “not from the vast ventriloquism / Of sleep’s faded papiermaché . . .” because surely “The sun was coming from outside.”
“That scrawny [‘battered,’ ‘bedraggled’] cry—” was the utterance of “A
chorister” whose note, a “c[,] preceded the choir[,]”that is to say, the full chorus
of daylight. And it was, indeed, “part of the colossal sun” after all, the voice of
the world of reality, not of dream or imagination, which would reach full throat
in the daylight when the sun would be “surrounded by its choral rings, / Still far
away.” The pun on “choral rings” is evident. The sun is a volcanic atoll in the
oceanic sky, surrounded by sound and living things. “It was like / A new
knowledge of reality,” Stevens says in a figure of speech, a simile. The thing
itself, the “scrawny cry,” was like a knowledge of reality to the listener at dawn,
but it was reality in and of itself. That is the thing the listener, the narrator, and
the reader must understand.
Many of the Modernists were Jungians, but they were also influenced by
Freudianism, including the British novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence (1885–
1930) and the Irish writer James Joyce (1882–1941). One experimental
technique of the period was stream-of-consciousness which attempted to convey
to the reader the impression of how a mind actually works, as Joyce did in his
prose epic Ulysses, Woolf did in The Waves, and William Faulkner did in his
novel The Sound and the Fury—for an example and further discussion see The
Book of Dialogue.
Existentialism, a modern nihilism that maintained that each individual was
alone in a meaningless world and responsible for his or her own actions and
well-being, was the order of the day. The existentialist approaches the problem
of human existence as a personal confrontation with a reality which is chaotic,
meaningful only through an effort of personal will, in Wallace Stevens’ terms, “a
rage for order.” Stevens also believed, and stated in the first line of his poem
“The Snowman,” that “One must have a mind of winter” [italics added], the state
of objectivity of observation that an artificer must cultivate in order to produce
art and order out of the chaos of existence; the striking of balance between
intellect and emotion (see sensibility) in the artist and in the artifice. For an
expression of Existentialism, see “The Fog,” below, and “Pocoangelini 7” in The
Book of Dialogue. A central existential document of Modernism is T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land.
Another movement of the Age of Modernism was Expressionism which
intended to distort reality so as to express the inner senses or experiences of the
characters in drama, as in Eugene O’Neill’s (1888–1953) play The Hairy Ape or
the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Dadaism (1916–1923), a French movement
founded by Jean (or Hans) Arp (1887–1966) and others, ridiculed conventional
values by producing works marked by nonsense, caricature, and non-conformity.
Dada prosody produced poetry that was based upon the principle of randomness.
A Dada author might take something he, she, or someone else had written, cut
out each word separately, and drop every one into a sack. The sack would then
be shaken and each word extracted from it and pasted on a sheet of paper in
random-length lines. Although the results were often unreadable, at other times
they were oddly interesting, and even the Dada method is a prosody; its
organizing principles are not absolutely random, for one needs certain things: 1)
words; 2) a bag; 3) paper and paste, and 4) someone to drop the words into the
bag, shake it up, extract the words one by one, and arrange them in lines (a
maker). The Gallic nation seems always to have had a penchant for chaotic art,
for the descort is an old French form of logaoedic or ibycean verse whose only
requirement is that each line of the poem be different from every other in all
ways; that is to say, discordant. The descort mixes meters, line lengths, stanza
lengths, and is itself of no fixed length. For another experimental prosody, from
the 1940s, see lettrisme in The Book of Forms.
Surrealism, which succeeded Dadaism, was a movement in the arts and in
literature which distorted reality in ways that called attention to the absurdity of
existence. One of the great Surrealists among writers was Franz Kafka (1883–
1924), whose protagonist, in the short story “Metamorphosis,” woke up one
morning to discover he had been turned into an insect. Kafka wrote about his
distortions in an ordinary style, which merely made his situations seem all the
more bizarre. Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936) in his plays approached the
surreal in much the same way, for his Spanish personae did not speak in a
distorted manner. The Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b. 1928) is a
late, Postmodern Surrealist.
The Fugitives was a school of American poets and writers associated with a
literary magazine, The Fugitive, published at Vanderbilt University in Nashville,
Tennessee, from 1922–1925. Members of the group were Donald Davidson
(1893–1968), Merrill Moore (1903–1957), John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974),
Laura Riding (1901–1945), Allen Tate (1899–1979), and Robert Penn Warren
(1905–1988), some of whom were also associated with the politically oriented
Southern Agrarians and with The New Criticism.
The Angry Young Men of the 1950s in the United Kingdom was a group of
novelists and playwrights, some of them of working-class origin, who expressed
hostility toward the Establishment in their work. Members of the group were the
novelists Kingsley Amis (b. 1922), John Braine (1922–1986), and Alan Sillitoe
(b. 1928), and the playwright John Osborne (b. 1929).
In the United States the Black Mountain school originated at the sometime
Black Mountain College of Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1950s and gave rise
to an anti-academic academy whose “Rector,” Charles Olson (1910–1970),
called himself “the poor man’s Pound” and whose style was derived from The
Cantos of Ezra Pound, was the center of attraction for many of the disaffiliated
writers of the period, including many who were known in other contexts as the
Beats or “the Beat Generation” and the San Francisco School. All of these
“beatnik” writers stood against the poets of the academy who were seen as
rigidly formal and genteelly correct. The war of the anthologies took place
during the 1960s when various collections of poems by both camps were
published and all the poets in the United States were required to declare their
allegiance to one camp or the other or be branded, by the academics, as either
drug addicts and perverts or, by the Beats, as war mongering members of the
“military-industrial complex,” a term that had been coined by President Dwight
D. Eisenhower in the previous decade. The onset of the Vietnam War caused the
academic poets to abdicate their responsibilities as teachers and to join the ranks
of the anti-intellectuals so that their students would not perceive them as
uncaring reactionaries, a situation that caused great damage to the education of
poets for decades.
The very slow rise of neoformalism (The New Formalism) in poetry,
beginning in the early 1980s, was spurred by publication and word-of-mouth
advertising of the first edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, in
1968 (see Bibliography). The volume had been in development since 1959 but
was unpublished in any version for eight years because, though publishers
thought it was a good book, they felt that there was no audience for it. They may
have been right, for academic poets had been so thoroughly intimidated and
bully-ragged by the Beats and their allies, that no other books emphasizing craft
were published during the years between 1968 and 1986. Indeed, the last major
anthology of contemporary poetry to be published that contained formal poems
was The New Yorker Book of Poems in 1969.
The deep image surrealism of the Postmodernist Robert Bly (b. 1926),
although the term was invented by the Black Mountain poet Amiri Baraka (born
LeRoi Jones, 1934–2014), was a late development of Imagism.
Together with neoformalism, the experimentalism of the 1950s was carried on
into the twenty-first century by a school calling themselves, after the periodical
they established, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets.
A late twentieth century development of Realism in fiction was Minimalism
(which paralleled a similar music in classical music composition). It operated on
the theory that “less is enough.” Narration was laconic, the dialogue often flat
and without evident point, the stories anticlimactic. For an example from Bret
Easton Ellis’s appropriately titled novel Less Than Zero, see The Book of
Dialogue.
Chapter Glossary
ad card. The page in a book that lists other works by the author.
Algonquin round table. A group of New York wits, including Robert Benchley,
Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, who met regularly at the Algonquin
Hotel in Manhattan during the early twentieth century.
archetype, archetypal, see symbol, symbolic.
basilect. A neologism invented in 1964 by the American linguist William A.
Stewart meaning a dialect scorned by those who speak the primary language,
such as ebonics, another neologism invented to denote the street language of the
Afro-American ghetto.
belles lettres. Writing for literature’s sake, not for a particular purpose.
belles-lettrist. One who writes without a didactic purpose. Not a hack, someone
who will write anything at all for money, like the ghost writer, one who writes
something for another person to put his or her name to as the purported author.
bibliobibuli. H. L. Mencken’s word for people who read too much, thus living
their lives in a fog.
buzzword. A neologism of the late 20th c. meaning a word currently in fashion,
as for instance “alternative” in “alternative life style” or “alternative education.”
dilettante. One who dabbles in literature or various of the arts.
dittology. According to Sir James Murray, “A two-fold reading or
interpretation.” See irony and double-entendre.
doggerelist. See poetaster.
enigmatic. See hermeneutic.
epitheton. See epithet.
franglais. A macaronic version of French and English combined treated as the
vehicle for humor as in the books of Miles Kington.
free verse. See grammatical parallelism and prose. For a complete discussion of
these topics, see The Book of Forms.
inklings. A group of Oxford University writers, including C. S. Lewis (1893–
1963), J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) and Charles Williams (1886–1945), who
met regularly to read and discuss one-another’s work.
invocation in a poem is a plea for aid, generally in writing the poem, addressed
to a muse, a god, or a spirit; an introductory invocation or a preface is a proem,
and a prelude is an introductory poem. See Phillis Wheatley’s “An Hymn to the
Morning” in our companion volume, The Book of Forms.
littérateur. A writer who is adept in several genres or one who devotes himself
or herself to literature in general.
macrologia. See perissologia.
man of letters. See litterateur.
natural symbol. See symbolism.
nickname. A descriptive synonymic name for a person, as for instance “the
Manassah Mauler” for Jack Dempsey, “the Sultan of Swat” for Babe Ruth, or
“the Velvet Fog” for the singer Mel Tormé.
nouvelle. See novella.
pangrammatist. The writer of sentences that contain every letter of the
alphabet, such as “John P. Darby, give me a black walnut box of quite a small
size.”
poetaster. A dabbler in poetry, a versifier, one who writes in verse but is
incapable of rising to the level of the artist, or a doggerelist, one who writes the
crudest sort of verse.
preface, prelude, proem. See invocation.
private symbol. See symbolism.
recit. A long story; see novelette.
semiology. See semantics.
sexist language. See sexisms.
Significant. See polysemous and semic.
syllabary. A set of symbols that represent all of the syllable sounds available in
a particular language, like that invented by Sequoia (ca. 1770–1843) for the
Cherokee language in the early nineteenth century.
symbolism, symbols. See signs. A natural symbol holds within itself an aspect
of that which it symbolizes, as for instance the spider, which symbolizes death. A
private symbol is one invented by a particular author who, unless its significance
is made clear, may be obscure rather than illuminating.
tour de force. A powerful performance.
versifier. See poetaster.
woman of letters. See litterateur.
The Genres of Fiction
With the possible exceptions of recipes and how-to items, all writing is fiction.
Take the genre of writing we call “history,” for example. What is it? It is not the
manipulation of real events, obviously. Rather, it is the manipulation of arbitrary
written figures—words—that stand for those events, which took place in the
past. Moreover, those events took place in many and various areas and eras of
the earth, and they involved millions of people each of whom experienced only a
limited number of the events during her or his lifetime, and saw those few events
from a single, subjective viewpoint.
Then what is it that the historian does? She or he researches as many of the
events of history as are relevant to the study in hand, and that study will be
limited. The sources the historian uses will themselves be forms of fiction:
documents written out by various people, newspaper, journal, and book items,
possibly even eyewitness reports which will be accounts of particular events
seen by single persons and related from discrete points of view. All of it is
narration, stories told by people about the events they are trying to convey to an
audience of readers or viewers. Every account is subject to exaggeration,
understatement, skewed viewpoints caused by one’s political, religious and
social beliefs, madnesses, neuroticisms, axes to grind and so on and so forth. In
the case of manuscripts, especially before printing was invented and scribes had
to make copies by hand, errors crept into the texts generation by generation.
It is impossible for there to be such a thing as “objectivity” in theology,
history, journalism, philosophy, biography, even (or perhaps one should say
“especially”) in autobiography which depends upon fallible memory, though one
can attempt a neutral or an even-handed approach to one’s subject. One will fail,
of course, but one must sometimes try.
The kinds of writing—genres—listed in the previous paragraph are called
“nonfiction” by many, but in fact there is no distinction to be made between
fiction and nonfiction. The techniques and subjects of one are the subjects and
techniques of the other. In the early twenty-first century we even have such
hybrid terms as “nonfiction novel,” “docudrama,” “reality TV” (was there ever a
form less real?) and “infomercials,” not to mention old terms such as “film noir,”
“realism,” “eyewitness news,” and so forth.
All stories of any kind are concerned with one thing, and one thing only:
human behavior. People dealing with human problems are the basis of all
narratives, and a dramatic situation is necessary to any story. It is human conflict
in which readers are interested, and that is true even if the protagonist is an
animal, or a bird, or an insect, or any other sort of creature, for that creature will
display human characteristics with which the reader or listener will sympathize
or empathize.
The study and theory of narration is called narratology. Narratives can
emphasize any one of the four basic elements of fiction: plot, character,
atmosphere (which includes mood and setting), or theme, or any combination of
the four, depending upon how much space is available for development of any,
all, or a combination of some of these elements. A narrative that emphasizes plot
is a complication story; one that stresses character is a character sketch;
atmosphere, is a mood piece, relying upon ambience, and a short narrative that
relies primarily upon theme is a thematic story.
The Dramatic Situation
The quality of pathos in a work of literature arouses in the reader feelings of
sympathy or pity for the leading character or protagonist. Empathy (German
Einfühlung) is a stronger emotion than sympathy, a state of identification of
oneself with a character or even with an animate or inanimate object; the reader
puts himself or herself in the place of the character or creature.
In fiction conflict and problem are at the root of any dramatic situation, and,
generally speaking, a dramatic situation is the basis for all story-telling.
Furthermore it is human conflict in which the reader is interested, and that holds
true even if the protagonist is an animal, or a bird, or an insect, or any other sort
of creature, for that creature will display human characteristics with which the
reader or listener will sympathize or empathize.
Narrative Structure
Plot concerns the series of events that take place in the narrative and the
resolution of the conflict between protagonist and antagonist. Just as theme is the
thread of thought that binds all elements of the narrative together, plot can be
defined as the thread of actions that carries the story and serves to exemplify the
theme.
The complication story emphasizes plot. Often a complication story will
involve a sub-plot or secondary story line that runs parallel to the main
narrative, particularly in longer narratives. The sub-plot (minor plot or
counterplot) generally involves secondary characters of the narrative, and the
actions of these characters serve to complicate or impede the main action. Often
the protagonist will have to deal with the sub-plot’s impediments before he or
she can go on to deal with the main conflict, hence the term “complication” for a
narrative that emphasizes plot and action. The framework story is a “storywithin-a-story,” and it is one structural method by which a narrative may be
complicated.
An example of a novel with a double plot is Middlemarch by George Eliot
(1819–1880). One plot concerns the story of Dorothea Brooke, who marries
twice; the other has to do with the deeds of Dr. Ludgate and the Vincy family. It
would be difficult to say which of these stories is the major one, for they are
seemingly equally important and, although they are apparently separate, they are
not actually so, for the one bears upon the other at critical junctures.
Another novel that more clearly has one major story and a sub-plot or, to be
more accurate, a series of sub-plots, is Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
(1812–1870). The protagonist is Pip, but an important secondary character is
Estella, the adopted niece of Miss Havisham, who has been raised to hate men in
order to avenge Miss Havisham’s having been jilted on her wedding night. Pip’s
expectations of being a gentleman seem at first to be dashed, but then he
receives an inheritance from an unknown source who ultimately is found to be
Abel Magwitch, a convict whom Pip had helped in earlier years, the father of
Estelle. All these problems and situations, and many others, have to be worked
out before there can be a happy ending.
Most complication stories will contain such features, beginning with the
initiating action (inciting moment): the story begins at a crucial point in the plot,
often in medias res, “in the center of things”; that is, in the center of the main
action.
The first sentence of the narrative is the narrative hook which is intended to
create the opening single effect, capture the reader’s attention and pull him or her
into the tale being told. Ideally, the narrative hook should give brief partial
answers to as many of these questions as possible: who? what? when? where?
and how? A classic example of the narrative hook is from the short story “A Dill
Pickle” by Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923): “And then, after six years, she
saw him again.” In nine brief words the reader is plunged into the center of the
main action and knows, first, that two people are concerned, a woman and a
man; second, that there had been a relationship between them at one time; third,
that since then half a dozen years had passed, and, finally, that they are going to
reopen the book of their acquaintance. The reader’s curiosity is whetted, and one
wishes to know what is going to happen next.
The story then offers the reader exposition, bringing him or her up to the
inciting moment with necessary background information and providing expanded
answers to the questions listed above, but exposition should never overshadow
action, for it is essentially static. A special sort of exposition is foreshadowing,
giving a hint of what is to come in the story, a presentiment or premonition.
The body of the narrative is a series of rising actions or increasingly stronger
attempts on the part of the protagonist to achieve the desired goal. These actions
begin with the exciting force which gives rise to the inciting moment or defining
event at which point the nature of the conflict between protagonist and
antagonist is made clear. Each successive action culminates in a crisis or critical
moment, when protagonist and antagonist are pitted against one another. In each
attempt, the protagonist either fails or only partially succeeds. At some point in
the story the protagonist will understand her or his situation completely, passing
from “ignorance” to “knowledge” at the moment of discovery or recognition,
which may mean literally recognizing the true face of the enemy. In time, the
series of rising actions leads to an ultimate crisis, the climax, when protagonist
and antagonist are pitted against one another in a final effort. At this point, the
protagonist either overcomes the antagonist and achieves the goal, or the conflict
is lost. The black moment is the point in the climax when things look darkest for
the chances of the protagonist. The climax in some stories is followed by the
falling action, the denouement (lysis) or unraveling of the plot in which all
actions reach their resolution and the narrative is completed. The beginning of
the falling action is the tragic force or ending of the climactic event, and what
follows may be a relief scene, meant to alleviate the tension created by the plot.
The conclusion of the story leaves the reader with a dominant impression, and
it is either open or closed: all loose ends are tied up neatly or the story ends
ambiguously: the actions may have been resolved, but not necessarily the
attitudes of the narrator, the author, or the reader. There are several ways to
conclude a story: with a hanging ending—many modern narratives are openended; they are inclusive; with a surprise, twist or trick ending, or with a circleback, in which the last sentence of the story harks back to the opening paragraph
—traditional narratives are often closed; they are exclusive.
Analysis of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”
The narrator of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is not the author, it is a
citizen of the southern town in which Miss Emily has lived her whole life. Since
this is fiction, not autobiography, the reader may not assume the author was in
fact a citizen of the town except, of course, imaginatively; thus, the orientation
of the narration is character-orientation. In this case the character is a minor
one, a mere observer of the actions. The narrator is not talking about himself; he
is talking about Miss Emily and the actions and incidents that took place during
her life and afterwards; therefore, it is third-person narration. Furthermore, Miss
Emily is not the only character whose actions and incidents are narrated; rather,
the narrator tells the reader about the events and people that revolved around the
protagonist. But certain things are hidden even from the narrator until the very
end of the story, so the angle of the story is multiple-angle, not single-angle or
omnipresent-angle. Finally, the story is told at a distance. The reader is not
allowed into the minds of the characters except by implications generated by
their actions. Hence, the narrator has only objective access to his characters. The
viewpoint (point-of-view), then, is minor character-oriented, third-person,
multiple-angled, objective narration.
Miss Emily is the protagonist, and Homer Barron seems to be the antagonist,
except that he never really enters the story. All his actions have taken place in
the past. The past is a very important factor in this story, as is the present. In fact,
the time of the story is the present time, but the events of the main action are told
in flashback, that is, dramatic exposition, working up to the present at the
conclusion of the tale, where past and present merge. Even Miss Emily is dead
already as the story begins.
Miss Emily’s desire appears to have been to be left alone to live in the past,
which was the time of the late nineteenth century. Somehow, during her life, she
has managed to stave off the twentieth century. Even her house, in a once fine
Southern neighborhood, stands in the first two paragraphs as a solitary bastion
encroached upon by “garages and cotton gins . . . lifting its stubborn and
coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore
among eyesores.” The reader recognizes this atmospheric description as
metaphorically Miss Emily herself. Standing in the way of the elderly woman’s
desire are time and progress—the younger generation. “Alive, Miss Emily had
been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation on the town, . .
. When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and
aldermen,” the special remission of Miss Emily’s taxes—set up at the end of the
nineteenth century—“created some little dissatisfaction.”
This situation leads to the first rising action, the confrontation of Miss Emily,
as a symbol of the decayed past, with modernity as symbolized by the new
powers. The main conflict is a conflict of generations. The old is dying hard as
the story opens, but it easily vanquishes the new in an initial test of strength.
Miss Emily will not come to the town fathers, so they must go to her, confront
her on her own ground, in all the classical decadence of what has come to be
called Southern Gothic. The deputation of town officials mumbles to silence in
the parlor filled with dust and a “crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father.” In the
stillness they hear the slow passage of time, “the invisible watch ticking at the
end of the gold chain,” Miss Emily, looking like a bloated corpse, orders Tobe,
her Negro servant—himself a representative of a no longer viable past—to show
the men out. “So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had
vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.”
With this sentence the reader is led into the true past, and thereby into another
manifestation of the conflict. This was the third time that Miss Emily stood
against the town. Already, even here, the main conflict is over—that which took
place between Miss Emily and Homer Barron, the Yankee engineer who had
been her lover and who had deserted her. The townspeople had not cared for a
peculiar smell as of something decaying that emanated from Miss Emily’s house
shortly after Homer Barron disappeared. But the townsfolk did not, on this
occasion, dare to confront Miss Emily, so they sneaked into her cellar and
outbuildings to sprinkle lime over everything. “After a week or two the smell
went away.”
At this point begins the major exposition of past events leading up to the
death of Miss Emily’s father two years earlier. Slowly, carefully, Faulkner leads
the reader deeper and deeper into the past, like peeling an onion layer by layer.
An incident, a foreshadowing, is planted that hints at the story’s climax, but
subtly so that one does not see its significance until the end of the story: Miss
Emily, utterly refusing to accept change, meets a delegation of grievers at the
door after her father has died and insists that her father is not dead. “She did that
for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to
persuade her to let them dispose of the body.” On this first occasion of
confrontation with the town, “Just as they were about to resort to law,” Miss
Emily “broke down, and they buried her father quickly.” Miss Emily, not yet
used to being on her own in her battle to stop time, lost this first fight, but she
would not lose another.
When next the reader sees the protagonist, she has become younger, to all
appearances. Homer Barron (notice the characterization by nomenclature)—a
foreigner, a modern man, a representative of change and new ways—appears for
the first time, keeping company with this Southern belle. Now, other
complications ensue. Miss Emily is censured by the townsfolk for keeping
company with this interloper from the North, this man of no “quality.” But Miss
Emily carries off the situation haughtily. Evidently, during her illness after the
death of her father, she had decided (like Mr. Schaeffer in the Capote story
discussed below) to be alive and young, to live now, in the present, and Homer is
very much of the present. No one, including the narrator, knows much about
him; however, the reader does not get close to him as a solid personality. Emily
knew him quite well, though, and soon rumors were flying. Still, Miss Emily
“carried her head high enough—even when we believed that she was fallen.”
Almost incidentally, at this point, Miss Emily buys some rat poison.
Evidently there has been personal conflict going on between Miss Emily and
her lover. The townsfolk—who have operated throughout the story like the
chorus of a Greek tragedy, commenting on actions that take place offstage,
behind the scenes—fear suicide. Perhaps, considering her disgrace, “it would be
the best thing”—for “She will marry him” had been changed to “she will
persuade him yet,” though Homer had made it known that “he was not a
marrying man.”
Again the townspeople become indignant: “. . . it was a disgrace to the town
and a bad example to the young people.” They force a minister to confront her in
this second battle of wills, but he is evidently routed so badly he will neither
speak of what happened nor return to the house. So the folk write to her
relatives, and some of them come to Miss Emily to help bring things to a head.
“At first nothing happened,” but at last it seems as though Emily and Homer are
married, which is a great relief to the neighbors. Miss Emily orders “a man’s
toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece.” She buys a man’s outfit.
The cousins had done their work. “So we were not surprised when Homer
Barron . . . was gone.” “. . . we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss
Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins.” Eventually the
cousins leave and Homer reappears. In the light of later events the reader
assumes that Barron has delivered an ultimatum offstage: “The cousins or me,
and no marriage under any circumstances.”
Homer is not seen again, and as time passes, Miss Emily quickly grows old.
Her door is kept closed; the smell is ancient history—only Tobe is allowed in or
out, except during a period of several years during which Miss Emily taught
China-painting to “daughters and granddaughters” of the older generation, each
of whom brings a “donation,” for Miss Emily couldn’t work for a living any
more than she could accept “charity.”
“Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town,
and the painting pupils fell away and did not send their children . . .” Miss
Emily, Tobe, and the house grow older and more decayed; the neighborhood and
town change, becoming modern. Thus Miss Emily “passed from generation to
generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil and perverse.
“And so she died.” And, as at last the representatives of a new age appear on
the doorstep, Tobe opens the portal and vanishes. The cousins reappear, the
funeral is held. The very old men, come wearing Confederate uniforms, talk of
Miss Emily “as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing they had
danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical
progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road, but,
instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them
now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.” And the
structure of the story, its architectonics, has mirrored this confusion and
bottleneck of time.
In that meadow, in the bed in the sealed-off room upstairs, which the
townsfolk were careful to leave closed until Miss Emily was decently
underground, there lay the decayed corpse of love, of youth, of the harbinger of
change and new ways, in “the attitude of an embrace.” The reader is given to
understand that Miss Emily had continued to lie with Homer Barron on their
“wedding” bed, but that living flesh was no more capable of withstanding decay
than dead flesh, and that at last even Miss Emily had to succumb to the ravages
of generations and time.
Here is a plot story.
THE DEMON IN THE TREE
I was about twelve when Sidney Gottlieb began living in the tree next to our
house. It’s possible to be more specific than that—he took to arboreal existence,
more or less, on the same day that Sophronia, my older sister, went up to the
attic to find our grandmother’s old snood which she intended to take with her to
the guru Prahesh Mahindi’s ashram that she was determined to enter as a novice
weirdo.
Sidney was a bachelor. He was somewhere about thirty years of age when he
moved into the house beyond our fence. We didn’t know exactly what it was he
did for a living, but the rumor in the neighborhood was that he was some sort of
free-lance writer. That would explain why he was always at home.
Some of the neighbors, my dad included, thought that this was an exotic and
slightly suspect occupation for a young man, or any man for that matter. Having
literary ambitions myself, though, I thought nothing much about his mode of
living except that I tended to idolize him on not much evidence. So far as I
know, Sophy had never seen Sidney before, her vision being fixed upon the
imminent—should I have said “immanent”?—change in her own lifestyle. I
know he hadn’t seen her.
Sidney lived alone with only his cat Thisbe for a companion. He was devoted
to Thisbe, who used to go for walks with him. That’s right—walks. Some cats
will do that, like dogs, and Thisbe was one. After supper Sidney would come out
of the front door of his house, and Thisbe would emerge with him. Sidney would
set off down the street at an easy stroll, the cat behind or ahead of him,
depending on her mood and state of anxiety, for she’d have to be on the lookout
for dogs, of course.
If she saw one she’d head for the nearest tree. She was a great climber, but
not very good at getting back to solid ground. If she got too high Sidney would
have to go over and coax her down, and that might take some time. When they
got back from their jaunt around the block the sun would probably be quite low
on the horizon and Sidney would be ready to head for his typewriter.
On the particular day in question Thisbe and Sidney had gotten back from
their stroll early. Sidney was busy tapping away at his keyboard, as I could see
and hear from my bedroom window, and Sophy was up in the attic looking for
Grandma’s snood. It was spring. The sun was ducking down beneath the
horizon, but it was still light out. I heard a cat meow, looked up, and saw Thisbe
very high up in the tree that grew just on Sidney’s side of the low fence that
divided our yards.
“Mr. Gottlieb,” I called out of my window. “Your cat’s up your tree.”
“Oh, for . . .” I heard him say. He rose, leaned over his desk and yelled,
“Thisbe, what in hell are you doing up there? You get down!”
Thisbe said “Meow” in a pitiable voice and sat down on the big limb that
reaches across the fence and comes within maybe three feet of our attic window
on that side of the house. Sidney said something inaudible. In a minute or so he
was standing in his yard at the base of the tree—a big maple of a peculiar variety
—coaxing the cat down. I could see him visibly trying to control his temper and
his voice—by that time I was out in the yard on our own side watching the
whole performance, and so was my mother.
“Oh, dear,” she said, “we’ll have to call the fire department.”
“No, ma’am,” Sidney said, glaring at the tree and shaking his head so that his
very full head of brown hair tossed around, “I’ll get her down myself. Wouldn’t
trust anyone else with Thisbe. Thisbe! You get down here right now!” Thisbe
just looked down and said meow, holding it in her throat for quite a while. Sophy
was still in the attic poking around, but she must have been preoccupied, because
I didn’t see her in the window.
We stood around for a while, and finally, when it began to grow dusky,
Sidney went and got a ladder, two lengths of rope, and two harnesses, one small
and one man-sized. He saw me looking at this gear over the fence and he said,
“This has happened before, so I had these contraptions made up, just in case.”
He propped the extension ladder against the tree so that it reached quite high up
the trunk, well into the lower limbs, clipped the ropes to the harnesses, and put
his on. Then he slung the ropes over his shoulder and started to climb.
When he got to the branch just below the one with Thisbe on it Sidney tied
the ends of the ropes to the thick part of the limb, about four feet out from the
trunk, and began to edge out toward the cat, carrying her harness. At first he
cajoled her, keeping his voice low and soothing, but all Thisbe did was mewl
some more and move closer to our attic window. The farther out Sidney had to
climb, the more threatening his voice got—we could hear the edge of fear in it—
and he started mumbling swear words again.
Thisbe didn’t feel safe any more, her branch was bending and swaying so
much, so she stood up on it and teetered there caterwauling. Sidney didn’t feel
safe, either, but he inched closer.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” my mother kept saying, “please be careful.” She was
big-eyed and holding her face in the palms of both hands. When Sidney made a
grab for Thisbe with one hand everything happened all at once. My mother
screamed. Sidney lost his balance and nearly fell. The cat jumped, too, right at
Sidney’s head. She landed on top of it and dug her claws into his scalp so that
the blood began to trickle down his forehead. And Sophy opened the attic
window just then and peered out.
As you have probably figured out by now, my sister Sophy is a peculiar
young woman, very imaginative, and at the time very rebellious for reasons only
other teen-age girls will understand. God knows what she thought she saw, but
what she did see no doubt looked pretty diabolical in the evening light—there
stood a bloody-faced man just outside her window twenty feet above the ground,
his arms raised, and the tail of a cat writhing like a snake out of his deformed
head.
Sophy did the only reasonable thing under the circumstances—she screamed,
too. The cat gave a yowl and turned around very carefully to look at her, digging
its claws in all the way around, Sidney cursing now at the top of his lungs,
swaying on one limb and holding on to another, nearly blinded by blood. When
Thisbe got herself turned around she gauged the distance and gave a mighty
spring through our attic window. She landed on the snood Sophy had in her
hand. Sister screamed again, dropped the snood and cat and just stood there
staring pale-faced at Sidney in the tree.
The apparition freed one hand, wiped the blood off his face with his sleeve,
and saw Sophy for the first time. He nearly fell out of the tree again—we could
see his thunderstruck face in the light spilling out of the attic window.
I don’t understand what it was in my sister that cut Sidney down like that.
She’s a kind of mousy girl—well, not mousy, but very quiet and sort of thin. She
has almost no bust and, though she isn’t ugly, she isn’t what anyone could call
beautiful, either. Her one striking feature is her eyes: large and glowing, pale
blue—a Dresden blue, I guess you’d have to call the color, with a skin to
complement them, so transparent that you’d swear it gave back a slight
reflection of light. The word I want is “translucent,” I suppose.
So Sidney had found his true love and lost her at a stroke, for Sophy wasn’t
the same from that day forward. She believed she had seen Siva, or a demon sent
by Siva to keep her out of the guru’s ashram. And she wouldn’t come down from
the attic from that moment, though this didn’t become apparent for a while. My
mother turned around and ran into the house to let Thisbe out of the attic and
outdoors.
Sidney slowly made his way back to the trunk of the tree. He had to mess
with the harnesses and rope in the dark and in his confused condition, but he
finally made it to the ground. By that time Thisbe was sitting on Sidney’s front
porch asking to get in. Her hackles were down, but she was still upset and
yowling.
“Was that your sister up there in the attic?” he asked me over the fence.
“Yes,” I said. “Looks like you scared hell out of her.” He ignored the remark.
“Why haven’t I seen her around?” The blood was beginning to cake on his
neck and face. He still looked like a demon, or someone who had been mugged
—his clothes were torn and his hair was standing on end.
“Because she never goes out,” I said. “She’s been sitting around getting
herself ready to go into an ashram run by this Indian faker up in the Northwest
Territory somewhere. She says she has to be in a proper frame of mind.”
“An ashram!” Sidney shouted. “An ashram! This is the twenty-first century,
not the nineteen-sixties. Nobody goes into an ashram any more. What is she,
crazy?”
“If she wasn’t before, she is now,” I told him. I had no idea at that time how
true those words were. I could see a look of calculation replace amazement in his
face.
“By the way, that’s ‘fakir,’ not ‘faker,’“ he said. “Let me clean up a little, and
then I’ll come back over and talk to her. I have to apologize for scaring her like
that.” I walked around to the front of the house and waited while he went in to
take a shower and change.
When he came out again looking decent I led the way into our house. My
mother was nowhere in sight, nor my father, who had gotten home sometime
while the tree scene was being played out—his car was parked in the driveway.
Sidney and I went upstairs to find the attic door standing open and voices
floating down from above. My mother’s sounded pleading, and my father’s was
gruff and authoritative. When we got into the attic we could see them standing
behind Sophy who was still staring out the window. They were trying to
persuade her to come downstairs, but she wouldn’t do anything, not even answer
them.
“Mom, here’s Mr. Gottlieb,” I announced. She glanced at us over her
shoulder, but my dad swung full around.
“So you’re the young man who’s the cause of all this,” he said. I could see he
was angry but determined to be as polite as the circumstances would allow.
“The cause of what?” Sidney asked. “I’ve come to apologize to the young
lady for frightening her.”
“Oh, it wasn’t his fault,” mother said. “It was the cat.”
“It was the demon in the tree,” Sophy said. It was so quiet after she spoke
those words in a low and shaky voice that we could practically feel the shivers
running up and down each-other’s spines. She turned around then and looked at
Sidney for the first time. Her eyes were glazed over, and it was clear she didn’t
recognize him.
“I came to apologize to you, miss,” Sidney told her.
“I’ve seen the messenger of Siva,” she said, “as I always knew I would. He’s
come for me, but I won’t go. I shall stay here forever.”
“That was no messenger, Miss,” Sidney said. “It was only me trying to get
my cat out of the tree.”
“I know a demon when I see one,” Sophy replied. “You’re not he. You’re just
trying to get me to come downstairs, but I won’t go. I’ll be safe as long as I stay
here.”
And that was that. We had to rig up a bedroom for her, complete with an old
commode we found in a corner, and she ate from a little table that had belonged
to Aunt Margot years ago. It was coming on summer, so father had to aircondition the attic, but Sophy wouldn’t let him put the machine in the window
that looked out on the evil tree—she had to have an unobstructed view, she said,
so she could face her mortal enemy. “My mortal enemy!” she would cry, and
Sidney, standing in the tree outside so he could be near her, would shudder and
despair.
Naturally, Sophy missed her appointment to go into the ashram. A contingent
of women in white robes came to the house one day to see what they could do.
While they were talking with Sophy they heard the sound of someone outside
the attic window pounding nails. When they looked out they saw Sidney
building his tree house.
“What,” said the Mother Dendrite, or whatever it was she called herself, “is
that man doing out there?”
“That is the messenger of Siva building his house,” Sophy said. “I must stay
here to ward him off.”
“Nonsense,” the woman said, “That’s a mere man, not a demon. And why is
he building that structure?”
“So he can be near Sophy,” I said—I’d been hanging around at the head of
the stairs to pick up what I could. “His name is Sidney Gottlieb and he’s in love
with her.”
“That is not Mr. Gottlieb,” Sophy said, “it is a monster in Mr. Gottlieb’s
guise.”
“My dear,” the headwoman said as the other “sisters”—that’s what they
called themselves, just as though they were nuns—exchanged whispers and a
snicker or two, “you must get hold of yourself and come with us.”
“Sophy shook her head. “As long as I stay here, Siva will be occupied and
won’t bother you at the ashram. I’ll keep him busy.”
“I bet she will,” I heard a young sister whisper, “there are no curtains on the
window.” It was a hoarse whisper and the head sister glared at her.
“He turns his back when I prepare for bed,” Sophy said huffily.
“And your father permits this?” There was outrage in the woman’s voice.
“He can’t do anything about it,” I told her. “As a matter of fact, if Sophy can’t
see Sidney she thinks he’s trying to get into the house and she gets hysterical.
Dad chased him out of the tree once and then had to ask him to come back,
Sophy made such a fuss.”
My mother had come up the stairs just in time to hear one of the guru ladies
say, “Why, they should both be committed!”
“They’re not hurting anyone,” my mother said. “Now I think it’s time to let
Sophronia calm down a little. Won’t you come and have some tea?” Everyone
but Sophy started down the stairs holding on tightly to the rickety banister.
So Sidney began to court Sophy from his tree. Because my sister really did
start to get very strange if he were out of sight, Sidney had to move his study up
into the tree house. He even ran an electric line up the maple so that he could
plug in a coffee pot and his electric typewriter. He had to be very crafty just to
eat.
Sidney didn’t need to be in Sophy’s line of sight, so long as he was whacking
away at his typewriter and she could hear the noise of the keys tattooing away.
What he did was to make a cassette with about forty-five minutes of typing
sounds and other noises on it—throat clearings, foot tappings—and when he got
hungry and Sophy wasn’t looking, he’d turn on his portable boom-box, climb
out of the tree and fix himself something to eat or whatever. When he got back,
Sophy wouldn’t know he’d been gone.
But Sidney didn’t spend all his time writing. He did a good deal of reading,
too. By any standards, the tree house was palatial. It had a front stoop big
enough to accommodate a deck chair, and Sidney would sit out there on a nice
day, the birds flapping around his ears, with a book in his lap. Sophy would be
over by her window or reading herself. They looked like a happy young married
couple if you blocked the ridiculous setting out of your mind.
They would often have conversations, too, if the window were open. Sidney
would never admit to being a demon. “I’m not Siva’s messenger, Sophy,” he
would tell her. “I’m Sidney Gottlieb, your next door neighbor.”
“Then what are you doing up in a tree?” she’d reply smugly.
“Keeping you company. What are you doing spending your life in an attic?”
“Keeping you busy,” she’d say. “As long as you’re there, you can’t make
trouble in the world. It’s almost as good as being in the ashram—better! I can see
my enemy, and he is all mine.”
“You like the idea of having a demon all to yourself?”
“As long as there’s that bit of air between us,” Sophy would say.
“Believe me, Sophy, I’m Sidney, and I’d like nothing better than to keep you
busy. But it’s the air between us that bothers me.”
“Don’t I know it!” Sophy would say, blushing.
“Don’t you like me even a little bit?”
Sophy put her knitting down and looked at him. “Insofar as you appear to be
Mr. Gottlieb,” she said, giving him a cool look, “I like you fine.” She cast her
eyes down and blushed again. “But insofar as you are the messenger of Siva, I
abominate you!” And she looked up at him with those amazing eyes flashing.
“That’s not very good Hindu theology, Sophy,” Sidney said.
Then it got to be full summertime and it was hot. Sophy had to keep the attic
window closed because of the air conditioning, so these incredible conversations
pretty much came to a halt. Sidney and I had gotten to be really good friends by
this time. He let me read his books—even some books he’d written, for he was,
as it turned out, quite a successful writer, mainly of fiction, and I liked the things
he turned out. Some of his stories were for boys my age, in fact, and he started to
value me as a first critic.
Fairly often I’d promise to keep an eye on the demon in the tree for my sister
to give her a break. I’d sit at Sophy’s window reading while she was off lying
down or puttering around among the trunks and boxes. Later on Sidney might
turn on his boom box and take a break too or, after dark, climb down the ladder,
and then we could discuss one of his stories. I even began writing some things
for him to look at. I was well aware that I was privileged to have such a tutor,
and he was a good teacher. But I was, after all, a boy, and what I really wanted
was to be allowed up in the tree house with him. The problem was Sophy, not to
mention my parents.
If I dared to raise the subject in Sophy’s presence she’d fly off the handle.
“Don’t you ever go up in that tree,” she said. “Don’t you ever! He’ll take you
instead of me, or maybe he’ll hold you for the ransom of my soul.” And she’d
fall to her knees and start to pray for all she was worth, scattering strange noises
around faster than Sidney could type.
“Listen,” he said to her one day when the window was open while she was
doing that, “tell you what I’m gonna do. You write that prayer down on a scrap
of paper and I’ll build you a prayer wheel. We’ll put it in the wheel and you can
turn it instead of exercising your lips so much.” Sidney could be quite sarcastic
when he became exasperated. “Maybe we could even rig it up so that the wind
will turn it for you, or your rocking chair while you sit there knitting or tatting or
whatever it is you do.”
“Prayer wheels are Buddhist, not Hindu,” Sophy said icily.
So I learned to avoid the subject of my ascension in her presence. Instead I’d
go over to the house next door when Sidney was having his supper, and we’d
discuss it. “It’s fine with me,” he’d say, “but you’ll have to have your father’s
permission, and we can’t let Sophy see us. Look,” he said once and got
something out of the closet to show me. It was a harness like his and Thisbe’s.
Thisbe had to wear hers often, for she had taken to climbing up with her master
to enjoy his company and that of the birds. “I’m afraid she’ll get to drooling over
a sparrow someday and forget where she is,” Sidney had told me.
We tried mine on for size and it fitted very nicely. It went under the shoulders
and around the torso, and it was strong. “May I take it to show my father?” I
asked.
“It’s yours,” Sidney said.
When I showed the harness to my father he began to relent a little, I could
tell. He knew what a tree house means to a kid, and, truth to tell, I think he half
wished he could go up to visit with Sidney too. He was a bit too paunchy for
that, though, and a little too old, it seemed to me. It wouldn’t have suited his
dignity. But he’d been saying “No” all summer long, so I knew I’d have to work
on it a while longer, even though I had the harness.
Everyone was under pressure that summer. My mother, especially, put the
arm on Sophy to come downstairs once in a while, and my father did, too. So did
I, of course. The problem was to think up a ruse that she’d go for. “I’ve got it!” I
shouted one day. “A harp!”
“What have you got, dear?” my mother said hustling in from the kitchen.
“Are you all right?”
“A harp!” I shouted. “Sophy’s always wanted to play the harp. Why don’t you
buy her one?” In fact, in high school Sophy had even taken some lessons—I’d
had to go to one of her concerts. But harps are expensive, and my father said,
“She doesn’t seem to have the gift. No sense buying one to sit around after she’s
gone into the . . . ’ashram,’ you should pardon the expression.” He tried not to
curl his lip too obviously.
This time, though, dad was ready to part with the money. “It would be too
large to go up the attic stairs,” she said. “She’d have to come downstairs to play
it.” And that’s how we did it. No sooner had the big golden instrument been
installed in the living room than all three of us were scuttling up the attic stairs to
give Sophy the news.
“Why would you buy me one now?” she asked suspiciously, but I could tell
she was tempted. She darted a glance out the window where Sidney sat on his
stoop reading the paper with Thisbe in her harness sitting beside him.
“Don’t worry about the demon,” I said. “I’ll keep an eye on him while you’re
practicing.” We didn’t say anything else, just let the idea cook in her mind a
while.
“Well, perhaps I could get away for just a few moments,” she said. “The
demon seems to be occupied at present.”
“Oh, good,” mother said. “It would do a world of wonders for you, you’re
looking so peaked.”
They started for the stairs, but before my father could follow them I grabbed
his sleeve and said very quietly, really just moving my lips, “Now?” He was
preoccupied, and he nodded his head absently. As soon as I heard the first notes
of the harp downstairs I tiptoed down the attic stairs, grabbed my harness out of
my room, and sneaked out the back door.
Before I began to climb the tree I put on the harness, and as soon as I got out
on the stoop Sidney clipped a stout rope to an eye on my back and tied my line
onto the branch beside his and Thisbe’s knots.
“Well,” he said, “two birds with one stone.” Thisbe pricked up her ears.
“When we hear the harp stop playing, you’ll have to scat down out of here, so be
careful not to trip going down the ladder.”
I nodded happily.
For a while we just sat quietly, listening to the sounds of the harp and the
slamming of the neighbors’ windows up and down the block, house by house.
But before long we started discussing a story Sidney had just written and I had
read. We lost ourselves, I guess, because by the time we noticed that the harp
had quit ringing, it was too late.
“Don’t you dare hurt that boy, you devil!” Sophy screamed out of the attic
window. She slung one leg over the sill.
“Sophy!” Sidney yelled, jumping up in a panic.
Thisbe gave a tremendous yowl—Sidney had stepped on her tail and, hissing,
made a leap for me. I ducked and fell over backwards in my chair.
“Sophy!” my father and mother hollered from the attic stairs which they were
evidently trying to negotiate side by side. By the time they got to the top Sophy
had the other leg out the window and was sitting on the sill, tilting forward.
Sidney was racing like a professional tight-rope walker along the branch.
Sophy cast a look back over her shoulder and saw my father making a grab
for her. “Take me, but let my brother go!” she screeched and launched herself at
the demon who grabbed her and hugged her as hard as he could while he fell
sideways off the branch which was springing up and down like a whip. Sophy
set about trying to scratch his eyes out, but she was so tight up against Sidney
that all she could reach was the back of his head. I was falling, too, and so was
Thisbe. It happened in a second, but everything seemed to be in slow motion.
Somehow, I missed all the big branches, though a lot of little ones broke my
fall, but Sidney bounced from limb to limb all the way down, thrashing his legs
while he held on to Sophy so that she could hardly breathe. We all came to a stop
dangling about four feet off the ground. Nobody said anything at all until my
father showed up, puffing around the corner of the house. He stopped goggleeyed.
My dad is not known for his sense of humor, but he started laughing so hard
that tears ran down his face and his knees buckled. My mother showed up late—
she’d stopped on the way through the house, with incredible presence of mind,
to phone for an ambulance.
“Stop laughing and take your daughter,” Sidney said to him.
Somehow, he did, and collapsed to the ground with Sophy sitting on his
paunch. It was a funny sight, but the three of us in midair didn’t feel like
laughing yet. My legs were quivering badly, but I couldn’t fall down even
though I felt like it.
Sophy said, “Why, you’re not the messenger of Siva!”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Sidney croaked. We could hear the
ambulance in the distance, and the neighbors were collecting in our back yard.
Sophy turned her head to look down at father. “I can enter the ashram after
all,” she said.
“First get off me,” father said.
“Oh, no, you can’t,” Sidney managed to gasp—he had two cracked ribs, we
were to find out, and a broken leg. Most of the hair was gone from the back of
his head where Sophy had gouged him.
Sophy got up and brushed herself off. “Oh?” she asked, “and why not?”
“Because you gave yourself to the messenger of Siva up there,” Sidney said
pointing painfully aloft.
“But you’re not the messenger. We’ve settled that. You’re Sidney Gottlieb,”
Sophy replied, her eyes wide and glittering. It was as though she had achieved
some sort of revelation.
I saw a crafty look come into Sidney’s eyes. The paramedics were working at
getting him down by this time, and my mother and father were listening
carefully so that they could hear the conversation above the uproar of the crowd
in the background.
“But you thought I was,” Sidney said. “And I caught you.”
And that’s how I got myself both a brother-in-law and a tree house.
Character. The only person absolutely necessary in a story is the protagonist,
a main character or hero/heroine, although these latter terms, derived from
classical drama, really have more specialized meanings. In modern fiction and
drama the protagonist sometimes exhibits the opposite of the characteristics of a
hero; such a persona is called an antihero like Yossarian in the novel Catch-22
by Joseph Heller (1923–1999). This term is not to be confused with antagonist,
which is a character, force, or circumstance that stands in opposition to the
protagonist. A narrative can have a multiple protagonist—a group or village, for
instance, as in the short story, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (1919–1965)—
though normally one person will represent such a composite protagonist. A naïve
hero is a protagonist who is so simple or honest that his view of what occurs in
the narrative is obviously wrong or misguided to the audience or the reader;
Miguel de Cervantes’ (1547–1616) Don Quixote is a naive hero. Other personae,
or even the narrator of a story or play, may be naïve as well.
The protagonist possesses a desire to have, to be, or to do something (there
are no other options). This desire will drive the protagonist toward an objective
or goal, but attainment of the goal will be blocked by an antagonist. The
opposition of protagonist versus antagonist leads to conflict, which is essential to
the dramatic situation.
The antagonist is often another person in logical opposition, but it need not be
a human being, for it may be a situation (being lost in a blizzard), a force
(society, a corporation), or oneself (an inner conflict). If one is lost in a blizzard
and one’s desire is to reach shelter and be saved, the force of the storm is the
antagonist. If one is unhappily married, but there are children, one may be torn
between a desire for happiness, or at least relief from misery, and duty to others.
In such a case the antagonist is oneself, and the conflict is an inner conflict. This
is the classic formula for fiction: desire, opposition, conflict.
In a story of any size, the conflict must be prolonged over the duration of the
narrative, which means that protagonist and antagonist must be evenly matched,
and the narrative ends only when the protagonist achieves his or her desire, or
fails to achieve it. Besides his or her desire, a protagonist has a dominant
personality trait, such as courage, generosity, or fervor. However, a character
should never be so consistent as to be ruled absolutely by this dominant trait, for
real human beings are complex because they have traits that often contradict one
another. Therefore, a protagonist ought to have at least one counter-trait that
renders him or her not entirely predictable.
For instance, a dominant personality trait in a character might be courage.
However, a counter-trait might be a fear of heights. If, in a given situation, the
character must display courage while he is on a rooftop, the counter-trait will
throw the protagonist’s response to danger into question. Character (in the sense
of moral character) has to do with these personality features of the persons in
the narrative. These personal characteristics determine the actions and reactions
of the persons in the story. A character will have other traits and characteristics
as well, including the physical—eye, hair and skin coloration, body build, a
nervous tic, a particular manner of speaking, and so forth. All of these
characteristics should blend in such a manner as to make the persona interesting,
to give him or her individuality.
A modern well-made story must ordinarily be “truer to life than life.” In most
narratives, therefore, there can be no coincidences that are important to the
struggle of the protagonist with the antagonist, for the protagonist must solve his
or her own problems.
Aside from the protagonist and antagonist, there may be other sorts of
characters in a story, including a foil who is a persona that serves a particular
purpose in the narrative. A foil is often a sidekick, a companion who sometimes
gives the protagonist important information or insights, often accidentally, as Dr.
Watson does in the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–
1930), or as Captain Hastings does in the Hercule Poirot stories of Agatha
Christie (1891–1976). A confidant (feminine, confidante) is a minor character or
foil who acts as a sounding-board for one of the major characters, often the
heroine.
Characterization is the depiction of personality in fiction. The best means of
characterization is through action; the second is through dialogue. Other means
of characterization are through the dialogue and actions / reactions of other
characters in the story, and it is also possible to use characterization by
nomenclature. A hero may be named, perhaps, Sherlock Holmes, but his sidekick
might best be named Dr. Watson, and the villain of the piece would aptly be
named Professor Moriarty. A static or flat character is a persona with only a
surface, no depth; in other words, a stereotype. A round character is one that is
filled out, that is believable as the characterization of a real person.
Here is a character story.
TONTINE
As she sat waiting at the card table set up in the school gym, the phantom image
of Billy-Bob Martin swayed by. His head was buried in the ample cleft of Suzy
Boozer who was a head taller than he. Tontine could almost hear the music they
danced to, but not quite. “I remember the night you dipped your wick the first
time,” she called after his receding back, “and it wasn’t with Suzy!” He paid no
attention and danced off into the shadows around the gymnastic equipment.
Tontine fingered the chain of class rings on the table, each joined to each by a
gold-colored slit-ring, the kind janitors wear on their belts. Her elbow rested on a
sheaf of well-thumbed documents. She counted the rings again: fifty-two,
including her own—one less than the number on Melinda Cobble’s chain.
Tontine choked down the gorge that rose in her throat and snorted. “Where is
she, anyway? Just like her to be late. Always has to make the grand entrance.”
She glanced up at the gym clock behind its wire shield: nine o’clock. The
reunion had been scheduled to begin an hour ago. There were few decorations—
a roll of colored crepe unwound behind the band platform on which stood
another card table holding a small phonograph; a sign that read, “Houlihan High
School Class of 1907”; some electric candles. “Pretty pitiful,” she said. “Where
the hell is she, anyway?”
Tontine gestured and the waiter emerged from a doorway, a bottle of
champagne in his hand, a towel over his arm. He came over and poured her
another glass. “No sign of her yet?” He shook his head. “Well, start the music,
then. It’s too quiet in here.”
He left the bottle in a basket of ice on the table and went over to start the
phonograph. The records were scratchy. “How did we ever grow up listening to
that stuff?” Tontine asked herself as she raised the goblet. She curled her lip, not
at the taste of the wine, but at the sight of the fold of loose flesh that hung like a
wattle beneath her arm, from elbow to armpit. She shivered. It was chilly in the
gym—it was going to be an early winter. Tontine drew the shawl down farther
over her shoulder and wiggled her frozen toes. Outdoors the wind sang around a
corner of the building and hurled snow at the dark windows.
Tontine was not her real name, which was Nathalie Gatch. Her classmates had
begun using the nickname in their senior year after she had thought up and
proposed the tontine. She had been class secretary, and so would be given the
responsibility, each five years after graduation, of organizing the reunions. It had
been at a meeting of class officers in April of 1907 that she had made her
suggestion.
She had leaned on the table with her elbows, her hands clasped beneath her
chin, and stared directly at Melvin Lantern, the class president. “Why don’t we,
each member of the class, bequeath our rings to our surviving friends?” Her eyes
had unfocused, and as Melvin’s face had dissolved before her, she had a glimpse
down the corridor of years to some ultimate moment when the rings had
devolved upon the survivor, the last to remember. She felt herself washed by a
peculiar emotion, a triumphant melancholy. When the vision vanished suddenly,
she saw that they were all staring at her with their mouths open.
“What an idea. Honestly!” Melinda Cobble sat at Melvin’s right hand and
shook her blonde head. She was the first girl ever to be elected the vice president
of a Houlihan High School class, and she never let Tontine forget it. “What an
idea,” she repeated.
“I think it is a fine idea,” Billy-Bob Martin exclaimed. “It will keep us
together over the years.” Billy-Bob was treasurer because his father owned the
biggest store in town—Martin’s Variety Department Store—where they had
ordered the rings. Billy-Bob would have the business one day, and he was
always thinking up promotional schemes. Tontine had looked at him gratefully.
He smiled back—his jowls were a bit porky, he was short, but Tontine intended
that he take her to the Senior Ball.
“’Tis a morbid idea,” Melinda had said.
“Put it to a vote, then,” Melvin suggested. He was an athlete and the best
scholar in the school. He had already been accepted at State where he would
study law. “All in favor, respond by saying ‘Aye.’“
“Aye,” Billy-Bob and Tontine said.
“All opposed?”
“Nay,” Melinda said.
“I vote aye,” Melvin said.
“But what if our classmates don’t agree?” Melinda was outraged. Her eyes
glittered.
“Don’t worry, that will be my job—to convince them. Advertising! That’s the
thing,” cried Billy-Bob. “I know!” He jumped to his feet, excited. “The store
will offer a prize each five years to the classmate with the most rings!”
“You are making me ill!” Melinda closed her eyes and managed to look a
little green.
Melvin sat back in his chair and put on a thoughtful air. “And I shall draw up
a document of bequeathal. Do we have enough money in the treasury to have it
printed?”
Billy-Bob nodded. “Good, then. We shall get everyone to sign in duplicate,
and Tontine”—he nodded at Nathalie, using her new nickname for the first time
—“can keep a copy in the class files. I shall design it so that there will be
sufficient spaces for several names. That way, each survivor can write in the next
classmate’s name, and the documents can be passed on with the rings.”
“Oh, my sacred Aunt Nelly!” Melinda swore. And that was how it had
started.
Both Tontine and Melinda were married by the time the first reunion was
held. They brought their husbands to the gymnasium, which was the only hall in
town large enough to be used for the banquet and dance. Gordon Perk, one of
their classmates who had become a local restaurateur, catered the affair. He sat
with the rest at one of the long tables, smiling but obviously nervous. Now and
then he would gesture to one of his people. The meal went off well enough.
Afterward there were funny speeches and prizes awarded—for the alumna
with the most children, the alumnus who had come farthest to attend. Then there
was a quiet that settled down over everyone as Dwayne Pule, who was in
divinity school now that he had graduated from college, rose to say a prayer for
Alice Sooker who had died of a burst appendix, and Road-Hog Hanson, the
victim of an automobile accident the year before.
“Road-Hog gave his ring to his best friend,” Tontine told her husband
afterward: he was not a native of Houlihan, had moved to town after his medical
internship, and had little or no knowledge of these people other than what
Tontine told him in preparation for the evening.
He nodded and smiled.
He and Tontine had arrived a bit late, so they’d had little time to mingle
before the meal, and Melinda had not gone out of her way to approach. Now, as
the dancing began, she and her husband—someone she had met at college—
came over, but Tontine knew it was not an act of friendliness.
“So nice to see you again, Tontine,” Melinda said. They introduced their
spouses and talked for a few moments. Tontine wanted to wipe that smug smile
off Melinda’s lips, and she tried to keep her eyes off Alice Sooker’s ring—it
dangled from a chain around Melinda’s neck. Her own ring gleamed on her
finger.
It was a relief when Billy-Bob joined the group and said loudly to his wife, “I
wanted you to meet the other woman in my life, the one I took to the senior ball
—Melinda, this is my better half, Johnny Jones’ little sister Belle.” Tontine was
delighted to see Melinda color slightly as she took Belle’s hand.
When they were alone again Tontine said to her husband, “Alice Sooker was
Melinda’s only ally the spring before we graduated. They made such a fuss over
the tontine that we had to hold a referendum.” She smiled as she remembered.
“The vote wasn’t even close. Nearly everyone loved the idea. That got Melinda
so mad that she went after Billy-Bob. She knew I wanted him to take me to the
Ball.”
Her husband smiled affably, not much interested. They danced. At one
o’clock the band played its last number, and Melvin closed things by looking
forward to their tenth reunion in 1919. Dwayne Pule said the benediction and
they all went home.
Tontine looked at the gym clock again—9:30, and Melinda still hadn’t
arrived. The phonograph was still playing, and the waiter was beginning to look
impatient. He approached and said, “The food will be spoiled, ma’am.”
“You may as well serve it,” Tontine answered. As he turned and walked away
she saw Billy-Bob again, drifting past with Melinda in his arms. They were
dressed for the Ball and obviously very young. Tontine bit down hard on her
dentures. “That was very low of you, Melinda,” she said. “Too bad you didn’t
get pregnant.” Melinda’s phantom ignored her.
Then Tontine saw herself waltzing across the floor looking very stiff in the
formal embrace of her partner, Lester Lisk. He had acne. Tontine wore a corsage
that looked as though it had been picked from Lester’s mother’s border garden.
Lester had been one of the several men missing from their fifteenth reunion in
1922, most of them casualties of the Great War. He had never married, and his
ring had come to Tontine. The fact had shaken her. The day it arrived at the
hands of Lester’s mother she had sat weeping for hours, filled with remorse. “I
used to call him ‘the acne of perfection,’“ she whimpered to herself over and
over.
Afterward, she had been angry with herself for being so foolish—she hadn’t
led Lester on after the Ball. Still, it was pathetic, and days had passed before
Tontine could begin to settle the conflicting emotions she felt.
At the fifteenth reunion Tontine wore Lester’s ring on a chain around her
neck, and she was pleased to note that Melinda still had only the one ring besides
her own. When they got home she and her husband had a drink before the fire.
“Did I ever tell you about Lester Lisk and how he pestered me to marry him,
though we never went out again after the ball?”
“Yes,” her husband said. “Any number of times.”
Tontine bridled and sniffed. “I still have the letter he wrote saying he was
volunteering for the Army because his passion was unrequited, and he might as
well go to be cannon fodder for the Huns.”
“I know,” her husband replied.
“I’ve read it.”
“I never answered it,” Tontine told him, but he said nothing.
Tontine, musing in the gym, came out of her revery because she heard the
music stop, but the needle went on scratching in the last groove. She looked up
and saw Lester standing alone by her table, staring at her. Her younger self was
nowhere in sight—nor were the other phantoms.
“What are you looking at?” Tontine asked him and shuddered in the chill. “I
never encouraged you. All I wanted was a date to the ball after Melinda stole
Billy-Bob from me. I didn’t ask you to go out and die.”
Lester just stood looking at her. She snorted, got up, and went to change the
record. When she got back, Lester was gone.
“I’m sorry, though,” she said as she sat down.
“Beg pardon?” asked the waiter, who was serving the food.
“Nothing,” Tontine said and began picking at the roast beef.
At their twenty-fifth anniversary reunion in 1932 Tontine had worn the ring of
Melvin Lantern as well—he had made some money from his law partnership,
invested it, and lost it all in the Crash of ’29. He had been the Class’ first suicide.
“Which just goes to show you that money is the root of all evil,” Melinda had
said as they stood talking in a corner of the gym, their classmates huffing and
puffing about them in the dance.
“That’s ‘the love of money,’“ Tontine had said. She now had three rings,
counting her own, but Melinda was wearing five on a chain about her neck.
“Isn’t it amusing how the class has enlarged itself?” she asked. She was still
thin, but so was Tontine. “There have been three heart attack victims since last
time.” Tontine had felt as though she’d have one if she listened to another word,
so she had taken her husband by the arm and they had joined the dancing.
The thirty-fifth reunion in 1942 had been a particularly depressing one,
Tontine recalled. She and her classmates had been fifty-two and fifty-three years
old, most of them. The talk was of the war, of children fighting or killed or
scattered. Tontine’s chain of rings was beginning to feel heavy: seven now to
Melinda’s six. Tontine had pulled ahead for the first time, and it was becoming
fashionable for their classmates to choose sides and write one or the other name
into the bequeathal forms.
They were becoming walking memorials. As they stood or crossed the floor
someone would be likely to stop them, finger the rings one by one, and
reminisce.
Dalmer Sorensen said, pointing to one of Tontine’s circlets, “Yes, she was a
beauty.” He sighed. Tontine smelled the strong tobacco and whiskey on the
farmer’s breath but tried not to blanch. “I got her in my father’s barn once, but it
was the only time. What was it, cancer?” he asked.
“Childbirth,” Tontine responded. “Her seventh, but she was too old.”
“One too many, eh?” Dalmer chuckled. Tontine felt like punching him, but
she remembered just in time that he was drunk. She started to walk away, but he
had said, “I’m going to will mine to you so that we can be on the same chain.”
“I still wonder what he meant by that,” Tontine said. She tried to pick out his
ring among those spread on the card table, but she couldn’t find it. She thumbed
through the stack of bequeathal forms, though, and found the right one. She
looked at the clock: 11:30, and still no Melinda. “This is an outrage,” she said.
“I’ll have to leave at midnight,” the waiter told her. Behind him the wraiths of
her classmates did comic geriatric imitations of the twist, just as they’d done in
’52, or was it ’57?
“All right,” Tontine said.
“The Sheriff said he’d look in at 12:30 to close things up.”
She nodded. The snow was piling up on the window ledges. Five years
before, at the sixty-five-year reunion of the class, she and Melinda had had their
showdown. Only five of the classmates had been present, though seven had been
living. Two of the attendees had been in wheelchairs, including Melinda. BillyBob had been ambulatory, but barely. They were all seated at two card tables.
“Well, here we are,” Billy-Bob had said, his jaw trembling as with the ague,
“the survivors. I propose a toast to survival.” He went to raise his glass high, but
managed only about six inches. The weight of rings around his neck threatened
to force his head into the glass, though he had fewer than Tontine and Melinda.
“No, no, Billy.” Everyone looked at Dwayne Pule. “The first toast should be
to the departed, rest their souls.”
“You were always a bleeding heart,” Melinda said to him, her washed-out
eyes staring from the bluish-red rims surrounding them. “At our age the first
toast should be a wish that we all follow them, the sooner the better.”
Billy-Bob looked astonished, Dwayne was hurt and reproachful.
“After you,” Tontine said. She raised her glass and took a sip.
Melinda had just smiled, saluted her, and downed her champagne in four
swallows.
Dalmer Sorensen had drunk, too, and then begun to cough. He kept coughing,
and they had become alarmed. Suddenly, he had pitched forward and fallen out
of his wheelchair into his empty plate.
When the hubbub had died down and the ambulance had taken him away,
Tontine thought she heard Melinda say, “He was always such a literalist.” She
was sure she said, though she could hardly believe her ears, “Who gets his
rings?”
“You do,” Billy-Bob had said, handing them to Melinda. Tontine had watched
her add the gold to her hoard. How had she managed to change Dalmer’s mind?
“Let me see the form,” Tontine had managed to say. Billy-Bob gave it to her, and
sure enough, there was Melinda’s name written in under Tontine’s, which had
been scratched out. It was impossible, even now, for Tontine to describe the rush
of strong and dismal emotions she had felt on that occasion. She looked up and
saw the ghost of Dalmer Sorensen leaning over the table.
“Why?” she asked. “How could you?”
“Beg pardon, ma’am,” he said—her vision cleared just then and she saw it
was not Dalmer, but the waiter. “Beg pardon, but a cab has just pulled up
outside. Is it for you? It’s getting kind of late.”
“Why, no,” Tontine said. “I haven’t called a cab yet. But you’re right, it’s
getting late and I’m tired of waiting.” She began to get up, and as she did the
gym door swung open.
“Sorry I’m late, Tontine,” Melinda said out of the swirl of snow that blew in
with her. “I had the devil’s own time getting through this blizzard.” She had a
curious grin—was there a touch of malice in it?—as she walked forward
unbuttoning her coat. Walked, or staggered, rather, under the weight of the
necklace of rings that lay winking on her sunken bodice.
“Well, Melinda, you’re just in time,” Tontine told her. The waiter, an
unreadable expression on his face, pulled out a chair and helped Melinda to seat
herself at the card table. “I was just leaving.”
“Oh, it would be too bad to spoil the reunion. We’re all that’s left, you know.”
She pushed her silver delicately with her little finger, arranging it just so.
“Is the cab still here?”
“Yes,” Melinda said. “I asked the driver to wait.”
“Then I’ll use it. I’ll tell him to come back for you in a while, after you’ve
eaten.” The waiter had set some clammy food on the table before Melinda. “But
before I go, I’d like you to have something,” she said. She removed her own
necklace of rings and dropped it clanking on the table. Tontine took a deep
breath. “They’ve gotten too heavy for me.” She turned to go.
She had nearly reached the door when she heard Melinda say, “Wait, I’ll go
with you.” Tontine turned in time to see Melinda rise from her chair. She picked
up a strand or two of class rings and pushed them into the waiter’s hand. “Here’s
your tip,” Melinda told him, “don’t wait too long.” She got up and crossed the
floor. Together, she and Tontine struggled to push open the door.
Atmosphere is the mood of the narrative, and mood is created by means of
setting (locale and surroundings in which the narrative takes place), attitude (of
the narrator and of the characters in the narrative), and descriptions. Though
atmosphere and setting are connected, they may be considered separately to a
degree. The setting of a story is the location or locations in which the story takes
place. Setting is to written narrative what a set is to a play.
The exposition (or antecedent action) of a story is its background, which is to
be distinguished from its setting.
Atmosphere is the aura of mood that surrounds the story. It is to fiction what
the sensory level is to poetry. In fact, it is often said that a story which has as its
strongest element a mood or atmosphere is a “poetic” story. Such narratives
were perhaps more popular in the past, especially in the gothic fiction of the
nineteenth century, than they are in the twentieth. Gothic literature emphasizes
the enigmatic, the dark, the distorted: the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne or
Edgar Allen Poe were often gothic stories.
The mood story attempts by descriptions and emotive means to influence the
perceptions of the reader, to call into play sensations and emotions. The setting
of the story will have a great deal to do with these evocations of mood. What
would a ghost story be without an old Victorian mansion with creaking doors, or
an ancient castle full of cobwebs, or some other such Gothic setting? This is not
to suggest that an author might not write a ghost story about a primrose cottage,
merely that such a setting would be unusual and untraditional, and the writer
would have to do certain things to compensate for these missing elements of the
Gothic. Even more important than setting, however, is the manner in which
characters, actions, and locations are described. These ways are often
metaphorical, as in poetry: The descriptions are heightened through simile and
metaphor.
Analysis of Truman Capote’s “A Diamond Guitar”
Truman Capote’s short story “A Diamond Guitar” is about men in prison where
there is a great deal of time for reflection. Capote puts the emphasis upon such
constructions as these: “. . . and at night with the pines waving frostily and a
freezing light falling from the moon . . .”; “He stood there whispering the names
of the evening stars as they opened in flower above him. The stars were his
pleasure, but tonight they did not comfort him; they did not make him remember
what happens to us on earth is lost in the endless shine of eternity.” “To be alive
was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady’s hair.”
“Of the seasons of the year, spring is the most shattering; stalks thrusting through
the earth’s winter-stiffened crust, young leaves cracking out on old left-to-die
branches, the falling-asleep wind cruising through all the newborn green.”
Heightened language operates on more than one level. Taking this last
quotation as an example one may see that, on the surface—on the narrative level
—the descriptions are of spring, and they help the reader to sense the season,
which is part of the setting. Many readers, at least on a conscious level, may let
it go at this, but it is not only the season Capote is describing. The passage is
also a metaphorical depiction of Capote’s protagonist, the elderly prisoner
named Mr. Schaeffer. Tico Feo, a young man and a new fellow prisoner, has
come like spring to waken Mr. Schaeffer out of the winter sleep into which he
has fallen since he has been incarcerated. This “sleep” has been protective. The
crust of winter has kept dreams of life from bursting through the surface,
“shattering” his deliberately inculcated composure, his “contentment” with
prison life.
But now, like an old tree, Mr. Shaeffer has been wakened to life when it is too
late ever to be young again. Nevertheless, he begins to hope, to put forth
“newborn green” leaves. The “left-to-die” branches unwillingly begin to stir in
the spring of a new awareness. Yet Mr. Schaeffer must know that this hope is
deceptive. He can never be again as Tico Feo is, young and “free,” at least in his
mind and in his expectations. Capote’s protagonist is driven, despite this
knowledge, to enter life again, to feel the blood and the sap flowing in brittle
wood and bone. These images of rejuvenation are parts of a controlling image
which help to give the story its shape and temper, its timbre.
Every story, whether fiction or drama, has its background as well. Many
stories begin in the middle of the first major action of the plot, and though such
a beginning is intriguing to the audience, the writer will eventually have to
explain how things got to such a pass in the first place. That is its exposition. For
instance, “A Diamond Guitar” begins in medias res, with Mr. Schaeffer already
in prison, and Tico Feo almost immediately arrives to begin the old man’s
transformation. The action of the story is concerned with the prison, but both Mr.
Schaeffer and Tico Feo got there somehow in the first place. Perhaps it doesn’t
much matter how they became prisoners so far as the plot is concerned, but it
does matter so far as logic and reader interest are concerned.
The reader is therefore given, as the story progresses, certain information
about the backgrounds of the two main characters. At this point one might notice
that, though Tico Feo is a sympathetic character, he is nevert heless the
antagonist, because it is he who causes Mr. Schaeffer to come into conflict with
his situation; this is an example of conflict without enmity. The reader is given to
understand that Mr. Schaeffer is an essentially good man who committed only
one “truly bad” act in his life—he killed a man. Although the man “deserved to
die,” Mr. Schaeffer had to pay the price of his deed. Likewise, Tico Feo was sent
to prison because he was involved in a knifing. He killed no one, so his sentence
is short. Even so, he can’t wait two years, and he plans to escape. This exposition
serves two purposes here: first, it satisfies the reader’s curiosity as to how these
men got to prison; second, it helps to characterize them.
Here is a contemporary atmosphere story.
THE CITY OF THE DEAD
The first time I went out to La Guardia by bus I was astonished to see, out of the
window to my left, the City of the Dead. But “astonished” isn’t quite the right
word, and “appalled” won’t do either. For acres in Queens there are cemeteries. I
almost said, “miles and miles,” and that may be accurate, but I can’t trust my
judgment in this, for it may be that the effect of the stone landscape has altered
my perceptions, distorted them so that reality has been exaggerated, but I don’t
think so, for one scene I am sure is real predominates and gives me some
perspective:
In one section of the City of the Dead there stands a factory of some sort, a
factory with a large physical plant. Set in what seems to be the midst of the
headstones, monuments, and crypts—though I cannot see the other side of the
plant, and am therefore uncertain whether it is in fact completely besieged by the
legions of mortality—the factory rises incongruously into the skyline, chimneys
smoking, windows glinting. I cannot fathom it. It is a relatively modern building,
surely not as old as the surrounding graveyards which lie about its very
foundations. At first I entertained the fantasy that the plant was involved in the
manufacture of death, but on reflection I was embarrassed by such an overtly
symbolic and romantic notion. Likewise, I put aside the thought that the graves
had spontaneously thrust up out of themselves this manifestation of cold stone to
entomb the living.
For a very long time now I have been struggling to define the emotions I feel
when I consider the City of the Dead. None of the terms normally associated
with the subject of death will do, although “grisly” is to a degree appropriate if it
is applied specifically to the factory set among the markers.
As the bus passed and passed along the edges of the streets and avenues of
that gigantic memento mori, I did not think of “horror” or “anguish,” nor of
“terror,” “fear,” or any of those other words we are so used to in such a context.
Instead, I imagined a woman walking through the rows of the past to find one
stone that had been forgotten by everyone else. I imagined her lost and likewise
forgotten among the generations, this forest of stones the only real place for her,
she the only one who recollected, and that remembrance a culde-sac among the
many losses, a labyrinth without return. I thought of her standing in a dark dress
before the one stone that was more solid for her than the others.
It was gray and dingy. At its base, lichen had set in like mildew on the granite
surface. It stood in an endless row of monuments, and behind it, barely six feet
away, there was another stone in rank. There were no trees. The sun, such as it
was, laid its cold glamour fitfully among the shadows that slanted away from the
stelae over the nearly grassless ground.
She had gotten used to the feeling of dust about her in the air, though there
was no dust, or very little, so far as she could see—only Manhattan smog riding
air currents beneath the broken clouds through which light struggled. She stood
cradling her handbag and inspecting the marker which bore her own name as
well as that of her late husband: Norma, wife of William, b. June 17th, 1902; d.
—and the date blank, waiting.
She wondered how much longer she would be able to make this monthly
pilgrimage, though she didn’t think of it as a pilgrimage, but a visit. The long
cab ride from the neighborhood near United Nations Plaza, then the longer walk
down the paths, stopping now and then to regard some stranger’s slab and rest
until she gathered enough reserve to continue.
These pauses were enjoyable in a way. She would set her mind to imagine the
unknown person who lay at her feet under the hard soil. Had he or she any who
had remained behind to recall, or had time been stopped with the breath? She
sometimes felt that a stone had been laid upon her own chest as she watched the
years rise and fade at random before her on the headstones while she walked into
the City of the Dead.
When she returned home she stepped out of the cab into an avenue of old
brown brick apartments that had private yards—small parks with trees and
benches and graveled or cobbled walks—on one side of the street. On the other
side where she had lived ever since her marriage, the buildings were older, and
the doorways were only slightly set back from the sidewalk. There were no
doormen. “Thank God for rent control,” she thought, though not without a
twinge of guilt, for Will hadn’t left her badly off.
When she raised her eyes from her purse, from which she had taken her keys,
she saw in the plate glass of the door the spectre of an old woman, thin, wearing
a cloth coat, her gray hair partially hidden by a fashionless hat. She almost did
not recognize who it was that extended her hand to the lock, turned the key, and
entered.
The foyer was dimly lit by low-watt bulbs in sconces. She went to the
elevator and waited inside while it clicked and whispered. There was no sense of
rising. When the door opened she got out, walked a short way, and entered the
past where William was waiting.
“Hello, I’m home,” she said. “I went to visit you today. It was a little chilly.”
She unpinned her hat and placed it on the small marble-topped table in the
hall, next to his picture in a speckled wood frame. She took off her coat and put
it in the closet. “I should have worn the fur, but I don’t like to these days,” she
said. She ran her fingers down the arm of the mink before she closed the door
and went into the living room. Even here it was brown and chilly.
Norma took a silver lighter from the mantel, bent, and lit the gas log in the
grate, then she straightened, took a narrow cigarette from a packet lying next to
the settee, lit it, and replaced the lighter. She sat down and smoothed the dress
over her knees. Soon there was heat spreading into the room. She glanced at the
clock on the mantel—it was four-thirty. She wouldn’t need to think of food for a
while.
The clock was a crystal bell set over a face and three glass balls that oscillated
about the mechanism. William had liked to watch it sometimes. He had brought
it home from his jewelry shop one day many years ago, and it had been standing
in the same place ever since, doing what it was made to do.
Norma looked to her left, out the window with its small panes. The scene
there had not changed over the years, not, at least, what she could see from the
settee, but if she got up and went to the glass, then looked to her left, she would
just be able to see the U. N. Building rising beside the East River. She seldom
did that.
“This isn’t quite the same place, Will,” she said. He had been dead five years
now. He had been retired no more than a half-year before he had left her. She
filled her lungs with smoke and exhaled.
There were traces of a bright lipstick on the filter when she stubbed out the
butt in the ashtray.
She had turned on no lamps when she came in, and the light falling through
the window had a stained quality. It wasn’t the glass—the twice-a-week maid
kept things immaculate and was decently paid for her labors. Norma felt it must
be her eyes. She had noticed that there were more shadows lately. The rug had
used to glow mornings, its Persian patterns warm to the sight.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve been to the theatre,” she said to Will. “One
of these evenings we’ll have to go again.” She rose and went to the bookcase
that covered the wall behind her. Few books were in it, though there were some:
art books, and a few with fancy bindings, a row of old best-sellers still in their
dust-jackets. For the most part, though, there were pictures and knick-knacks—a
baseball signed by Lou Gehrig, a small stein filled with swizzle sticks from
various restaurants. There was also a stack of theater programs, musicals mostly.
Norma went through them, picked one out, and returned to the fire.
Though it was the playbill of the last show she had seen with Will in 1970, it
was not of the play that she thought, but of the restaurant where they had eaten
that evening. It was located on one of the streets off 42nd, not far from the public
library.
Entering, one’s eyes had to accustom themselves to the dimness. They
checked their coats, then descended three carpeted stairs to the bar which spread
off to the right. To their left was the familiar restaurant. They waited until the
maitre de seated them toward the front at a table which was rather cramped
against the wall. Will said, “Do you remember the first time we came here?”
“Oh, sure,” Norma replied.
“A long time ago,” Will said. He picked up his menu and looked at it, his
glasses glinting in the candlelight—Norma could see herself reflected in the
lenses.
“But it hasn’t changed much,” she said. There was a burst of laughter from a
long table not far away. Will turned to his right to look. “I think they’re having
an office party.” Norma smiled and opened her menu.
When the waiter came they ordered drinks and their meal. “You used to have
lunch here sometimes, didn’t you?” Norma asked.
“Sure, when I had the shop and Jack, the owner, was still alive.”
“You talk like that was so long ago. When did he die?”
“A couple of months can be a long time. Jack got cancer last year and died.”
“Cancer!” Norma exclaimed. She shuddered. “How awful. Did he suffer?”
“I think he did. Ellen runs the place by herself now.”
“How do you suppose she manages?” Norma sipped her highball and ate an
olive. “It must be hard. I’d like to say hello to her if she comes in tonight.”
“So many memories here,” Will said. “Jack and Ellen were almost like
family.” Someone at the long table got up and made a funny speech, and the
people began giving presents to the old man at the head of the table.
“He must be retiring,” Ellen said.
Will nodded. “Look, there’s Ellen now.” A woman in her fifties, dressed in a
green jump suit, bustled over to the long table and said a few words. Everyone
laughed. She went to another table and sat down with a young man, and they
went over some papers together. A waiter brought her a drink. After a while she
got up.
“Look, she’s coming this way,” Norma said.
“Hold it,” Will said and turned around. “Ellen!” he called.
The woman paused a moment and came over smiling, but it was a business
smile. “Ellen, my wife and I wanted to tell you how sorry we were when we
heard about Jack.” He leaned sideways and backwards to see her.
“Oh, thank you,” she replied, but there was no recognition in her voice.
“It must be very hard for you. We remember when you and Jack were first
opening up.”
“Oh, yes,” Ellen said. “The years seem to get away from you, don’t they?”
“We were some of your first customers,” Will told her. “Our niece had her
wedding party here, back in ‘sixty. Do you remember? Her married name was
Mendel, but she’s divorced now and living in California.”
Ellen shook her head, gave a nervous laugh. “You know how busy things can
get. I can’t keep anything at all in my head.” Both Will and Norma nodded
sympathetically. “Well,” Ellen said, patting Will on the shoulder, “you two enjoy
yourselves now, and come back again.”
“Oh, sure,” Norma smiled. Will said, “You take it easy now, and don’t work
too hard.” He waved and Ellen waved back.
“Lovely woman,” Norma said.
“That was quite a party back in ‘sixty,” Will said. “Funny she doesn’t
remember.”
“I hope it’s not Alzsheimer’s,” Norma said, thinking back. She had been fiftyeight then.
A few days before her niece’s wedding she had stopped in at Will’s jewelry
shop to pick up something as a gift. She had decided on a large, silver-plated
punch bowl. Will had waited on her personally, and they had taken the wrapped
package into his office to exchange a few words before she went home.
“Do you think it’s right?” she fretted.
Will looked at her with a frown. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never thought
much of mixed marriages.”
“Not the marriage, the punch bowl!”
“Oh, sure,” he said, “sure. It’s a nice punch bowl. Costs a good hundred
dollars retail.”
“You look nice today,” Norma told him. “That’s a nice suit.” It was a pinstripe
she had picked out, and the jacket was cut so that it disguised his paunch.
“You have good taste,” he said. “I’ve got to admit you were right about the
punch bowl, too. She’ll like it.” He stood behind the desk and flicked some dust
off his sleeve.
The surface of the desk had a high gloss, and Norma could see herself in it.
She looked away. “I always get misty-eyed at weddings. I hope I don’t cry.”
“Why should you cry? You haven’t seen much of her over the years. How old
is she now?”
“Twenty-six.” Norma rolled her eyes and giggled a little. “She finally got a
man. Harvey and Lenore were beginning to get hysterical, but she finally made
it.”
“Harvey!” Will shook his head. A strand of gray hair came out of place and
he smoothed it back against the skin. “He never liked me, and I can say the
feeling is mutual. He’s not just a Democrat, he’s a stupid Democrat. Big deal
teacher. I bet I make five times his salary.”
“Now, Will,” Norma said, “it’s not like I made you see him every weekend.
Be nice at the wedding. Get along. It will all be over in a day. You can handle a
day, can’t you?” she approached him and smoothed his lapel. She smiled that
smile he’d always liked.
He laughed. “Sure, sure. What can I say when you look at me like that? I’m
putty.” He put his arm around her waist—what there was of it—and kissed her
on the nose. “But now I’ve got to do some business. You go on home and I’ll see
you around five-thirty. Okay?”
Norma left carrying her package and feeling like a girl. How long had she and
Will been married now? Thirty-eight years. She hoped her niece would be
married that long.
Their twenty-fifth anniversary she and Will had taken a Caribbean cruise—
that had been thirteen years earlier, in 1947, two years after the war. Her
memories of the trip were confused—the water in the sunlight, glinting so that
she had to wear dark glasses all the time; the strange dark people sitting in the
dust, when they went ashore, selling carved things, fruits, beads—she practically
had to step over them to get away from the boat, holding her skirts tight against
her legs as she moved past.
There were such nice people on the boat, though. Will told her one day that
they’d been invited to sit at the Captain’s table for dinner. He beamed at her like
the cat that had swallowed the bird, so she knew something was up, but Will
wouldn’t say what.
That night she got dressed in her best gown and went to the dining salon on
Will’s arm. Will introduced her to the Captain, who smiled and said, “Charmed,
Ma’am,” and then introduced them all around the table—eight people, including
Captain Macon.
“Is this your first cruise to this part of the world?” he asked her. She reached
over and touched Will who looked so spiffy in his blue blazer.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Our first cruise anywhere.”
“War, you know,” Will said, and the Captain nodded. Will ordered drinks for
them, and when they’d finished them Norma took the swizzle stick out of her
glass and as inconspicuously as possible stuck it into her purse. The captain
offered her a cigarette, which she took nervously and held, leaning forward so
that he could light it for her. She ordered another drink and was feeling tipsy by
the time the dinner arrived. She could think of very little to say to her neighbors,
but Will was holding up his end of the conversation pretty well.
“I was too old for the war,” he was saying, “forty-two when it started, but I
did my share.” His eyes skidded over those of the captain, who was looking at
him. Norma could see that Will felt sheepish, knowing, as everyone did, how
Captain Macon had been torpedoed three times in four years. Will had helped
sell War Bonds and organized things, sat on a ration board. Norma felt he had
nothing to be ashamed of.
Just then the Captain raised his hand at the band, and it broke into the
wedding march. Everyone stopped talking and listened, their eyes darting
inquiringly about the salon, and when the band stopped the captain got up and
announced that Will and Norma were celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary.
People applauded, the men standing up. A waiter brought a bottle of champagne
to the table, “On the house,” the captain told them and proposed a toast to the
happy couple. Norma could still remember her multiple reflections in the raised
glasses of bubbly. Will put his arm around her and gave her a hug. She felt like
crying.
It had been her mother who cried at Norma’s wedding, not the bride, who was
beside herself with happiness. The ceremony had been simple and beautiful. Her
gown was of pure white silk with embroidery. Will was immaculate in a tuxedo,
his hair full and dark, slicked down under the yarmulka, his shoes polished to
mirrors.
Afterwards, the reception was held in her mother’s garden and on the lawn in
back of their house. That was grand too, the band playing jazz, a pavilion of
many colors that served food and drinks.
Her father patted her mother on the back, she looked so mournful when she
said, “But they’re so young. Norma’s only twenty.” She spoke as though her
daughter were a million miles away instead of standing with Will right next to
her. Will shuffled his feet and tried to hide his awkward feeling—the dust rose in
a little cloud about his shoes and settled in specks on the high shine that gave
back Norma’s face when she looked down.
She said, “Oh, mother, I’m old enough. Isn’t it all so wonderful?” She looked
around at all the people, her friends and relations, having a terrific time, dancing
and drinking and conversing. Harvey waved at them across the lawn. “After all,”
she said, “we’re only going to be in Manhattan. We’ll see each other practically
all the time.” She squeezed Will’s hand.
“That’s right,” her father said. “The kids are all set up. Will’s a partner with
his father now.”
“We might even open up a Queens branch of the shop someday,” Will said.
“It’s doing pretty well. Maybe inside of ten years or so who knows? We might be
neighbors.”
“Oh, I do hope so,” Norma’s mother said, smiling at last. “By then there will
be children, I should imagine. I’d like so much to see them playing here.” She,
too, looked around, and just then it was time to cut the cake, and everyone
gathered around while Will and Norma posed before the many-tiered confection,
the monument of their lives.
Later, when she went to change out of her gown, she found that the hem was
soiled. Before she left she asked her mother to have it cleaned, and then she and
Will raced out to his open car under a storm of rice and confetti. Someone had
put a sign on the back of the car, and there were paper ribbons all over it.
Will drove down the street, beeping his horn. They waved at everyone
standing in the road calling and waving. Norma felt wonderful.
When they got out onto the highway Will impatiently pulled out and passed a
bus. Everyone on the left side craned out of his seat to look at the newly-weds,
except one middle-aged man who just looked a little soberly at them. Norma
picked him out to wave at as they sped by, and she finally got him to wave back.
Theme
Theme is the thread of idea that underlies the story. All narrative elements
support the theme, which must be distinguished from the subject. The subject of
a narrative can be expressed in a word or phrase, but the theme is always
expressible only in a complete sentence: “Death” may be a subject, but what one
says about death is the theme, which may be expressed perhaps, in the sentence,
“Each time a friend dies, a bit of oneself dies as well.” Stories ought not to
moralize—overemphasize the theme.
A term closely related to theme is leitmotif or motif, which are ideational
elements that recur from time to time throughout a literary or other artistic work,
such as a musical composition. Some standard motifs are the ubi sunt (“where
are they now?”), the similar ou sont les neiges d’antan (where are the snows of
yesteryear?); the carpe diem (“seize the day”), and the contemptus mundi (the
real world is beneath contempt); the mea culpa (I am guilty), a staple of the
confessional literature genre. For an example of a contemporary thematic story,
see “One Sunday Morning” in The Book of Dialogue. Here is another.
THE LAUGHTER
A moment after he heard the insane laughter Weldon Rogers was picked up off
his feet and hurled head-first into the solid oak door. He didn’t wake up for two
weeks, and when he did the first face he saw was that of his wife, Carolyn. Hers
had been the last face he had seen as well, for she had been standing beside him
when the lights went out. He startled her when he said—croaked, rather
—“Carolyn! What happened?” She had been holding his hand and staring off
into space.
“Weldon?” she said when she had focused her eyes. “Oh, thank God!” and
she burst into tears.
A nurse heard her and came running. “What’s the mat . . . oh!” she said, “he’s
awake.” She grabbed Weldon’s wrist and began to take his pulse. She nodded her
head, put down his arm and said, “I’ll fetch a doctor.” And she was off.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Where am I?” He reached up and felt his head
—it was all bandages. “Jesus!” It began to come back to him, but it seemed
unreal. How could it have happened the way he remembered it?
“You’re in the hospital,” Carolyn said. “You had a concussion, a fracture, and
a cerebral hemorrhage.”
Just then the doctor arrived with a trail of nurses. “Ssshh!” he said. “Don’t
make him talk yet.” He adjusted his stethoscope and began listening.
“She didn’t make me talk,” Weldon said, “I just want to know what
happened.”
“Quiet!” The doctor put away the stethoscope and got out his flashlight to
look into Weldon’s eyes. The nurses stood around the bed. Now and then one
whispered to another. He straightened up and ran a hand over his thinning hair.
“When you feel up to it, the police would like to speak with you.”
Weldon didn’t answer because he was feeling woozy. “Can I have a drink of
water?” he asked. One of the nurses poured him a fresh glass from the bedside
pitcher and put a plastic tube into it. The doctor stepped aside; she held the glass
and put the end of the tube into his mouth so he could sip without having to
move.
After a while they all left except Carolyn. “He’s going to be all right now,”
the doctor said standing in the doorway. “But don’t tire him out.” The door
swung to behind him.
He and his wife were quiet for a moment or two. Then Weldon asked, “Do I
remember laughter just before it happened?”
Carolyn looked at him through frightened blue eyes. Her ordinarily thin face
looked gaunt. Her lipstick seemed too red for the pallor of her cheeks. She
nodded.
Weldon was startled. Then it had been real. “Tell me what you remember,” he
said.
Tears began to brim in Carolyn’s eyes. She dabbed at them with a tissue. “We
were just standing there talking,” she said. “Then . . . then . . .”
“Then somebody picked me up off the floor and threw me into the door,” he
said, staring out at her from under his swathed brows. He remembered it in slow
motion, the door coming at him in minute increments, and then an explosion and
blackout. Weldon expected Carolyn to say yes or to nod, but she did neither.
She shook her head. “No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“No one else was there.”
Weldon stared at her. After a while he said, “You couldn’t have done it.”
“Of course not!”
“Then . . . ?”
Carolyn shrugged. “I just don’t know, darling. We were talking, there was a
horrible laugh, and then you smashed into the door and fell down, unconscious.
You were bleeding horribly.” She shuddered. “It was so sudden I was shocked. I
couldn’t move. I felt something brush by me, and then I must have fainted too,
because the next thing I remember is both of us in the ambulance on the way to
the hospital.”
“That’s it?”
She nodded. “That was two weeks ago.”
“Two weeks!”
The door opened and a pair of police walked into the room, one of them in
uniform, the other in a dark brown suit. The uniform was a woman. The suit said
to Carolyn, “You remember me, Mrs. Baker. Detective lieutenant Boyd Carson.”
Then, to Weldon, “We asked the hospital to let us know as soon as you woke up.
I’d like to talk with you privately.” He cast a glance at the uniform who
motioned for Carolyn to come with her out of the room.
“I’ll be just outside,” she said.
When they were gone Boyd said, “Please tell me in your own words what
happened when you received this wound.”
“There’s nothing much to tell,” Weldon said. “My wife and I were talking.
Suddenly I heard this maniacal laugh, and then I was picked off my feet and
smashed into the door head-first.” He fell silent.
The policeman seemed to be waiting for something further. Finally he said,
“Is that all?”
Weldon nodded, and regretted the motion.
“Who else was present?”
“Not a soul that I know of.”
“Do you and your wife get along?”
Weldon flushed. “What the hell kind of a question is that?” he asked. His
head began to pound. “Of course we get along. Do you think she’s big enough to
pick me up and toss me like a football? How about an earthquake. Was there an
earthquake that day?”
“No earthquake,” the cop said. “No hurricane or tornado either. You didn’t get
a start and run yourself into that door, did you?”
Weldon was amazed. He just lay there and stared at the officer who hunched
his back and shook his head. “We can’t figure it out,” he said. “Your wife’s story
is pretty much the same as yours. But something nearly killed you,” he said.
“Well, thanks for your cooperation. When you get back on your feet, would you
drop into the station and give us a statement? Ask for me.” He put one of his
calling cards on the table, nodded, and started to walk out.
“Wait a minute,” Weldon said. The cop turned around. “Has anything like this
happened before, that you know of?” Carson shook his head. “Do me a favor?”
“If I can.”
“Run it through your computer system and see what you come up with.”
Carson stood looking puzzled for a minute. Then, “What category should I
ask for? Mysterious events? Flying saucer appearances?”
“Try ‘unexplained assaults,’“ Weldon suggested.
Carson shrugged. “I can give it a try.”
“Thanks. And let me know, okay?”
Carson didn’t show up again for two days. Weldon was still in the hospital,
but “You look a hundred percent better” the cop said as he pulled up a chair and
sat down at bedside.
“Did you find anything?”
Carson was holding a manila envelope which he held up and shook dubiously.
“Well, yes and no,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that I’ve found some other cases something like yours around the
country,” Carson said, “but there are no answers.” He handed the envelope to
Weldon who opened it and found a computer print-out and a few news clippings,
which were the first things he scanned:
“MAN HURLED THROUGH PICTURE WINDOW,” one of them read.
“Daniel Westley, 46, of Morrow Heights, Illinois, was watching television in his
living room when he was suddenly and inexplicably propelled through a picture
window into his front yard. He suffered multiple cuts and abrasions and a
sprained spine in the accident. ‘I heard somebody laughing just before it
happened,’ he told authorities.”
Another read, “WOMAN KILLED WHILE HANGING CLOTHES. The
body of Mrs. Abner Mulcahy, 32, who was last seen hanging clothes in the back
yard of her Cape Elizabeth home, was found floating in her swimming pool. The
cause of death, however, was not drowning but a broken neck. The only other
marks on her body were bruises under her rib cage, according to police sources.
Neighbors did not see or hear anything unusual except a burst of loud laughter
an hour before the victim’s body was discovered by her husband when he
returned from work at approximately 5:30 p.m.” There were others that were
similar. When he had finished looking the material over Weldon raised his eyes
to the policeman. “What do you make of it?” he asked.
“Beats me,” Carson cleared his throat and hunched forward, leaning his
elbows on his heavy thighs.
“Can you leave these things with me?” Weldon asked.
“Sure. It’s a duplicate set.” He got up. “If you get any bright ideas, I’d sure
like to hear them,” he said as he left.
When Carolyn arrived later during visiting hours she found Weldon lying
propped against the cranked-up bed, the clippings scattered about him, the
envelope and print-out lying beside his hand resting on the blanket. “What’s all
this?” she asked.
“Take a look,” he said.
After she had spent some time with the material she said, “It’s a lot of cases
like yours,” she said. “But what does it mean?” Her eyes showed puzzlement
and something else—frustration or fear or both.
“What do you think it means?” He blinked at her through his black eyes.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. I can see it.” She stared at him. “You know the old Sherlock
Holmes adage,” he said. “Eliminate the impossible, and whatever is left,
however improbable, must be the truth.” She kept staring and began to shake her
head slowly. Her eyes got wider. “That’s right,” Weldon said. “There’s
something invisible, invisible and insane, some sort of monster that’s going
around hurting and killing people.”
As soon as he said it Carolyn took a big breath of air and sighed as she let it
out. “That’s silly,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
“Well, I do,” Weldon said, sitting up and glaring at her. “There’s just no other
explanation. And I’m going to track it down.”
A pause, then, “And do what with it?”
“Kill it. It’s got to be stopped. It damn near killed me, and I’m going to kill
it.” His voice was trembling with rage. “Nobody has the right to do what it’s
doing.
“Nobody?” Carolyn asked. “You think this is a person?”
“Have you ever heard any other creature laugh? Only human beings laugh.”
“Loons laugh, and jackals do too.” Carolyn put the clippings and the print-out
neatly back into the envelope and laid it on the bed.
“This was no bird, and no jackal, either.” Weldon’s face was flushed with
fury. His lips were so tight and thin and white you could hardly see them.
This wasn’t the husband Carolyn knew. Weldon was one of the most easygoing men she had ever met. She couldn’t picture him turning into a sleuth. He
was a computer researcher for a small on-line data base company servicing boat
people. He knew a lot about where and how to find marine equipment and
sailing craft that were for sale, but his favorite reading was sports novels and
biographies, not mysteries or science fiction. “I don’t believe it. And neither will
you when you get to feeling better.”
But when Weldon got out of the hospital he still believed it. The first thing he
did was subscribe to a clipping service. He asked for any and all news items that
had to do with unexplained assaults. The next thing he did was to upgrade his
already excellent computer and subscribe to the internet. Then he bought a
police scanner and a powerful handgun. He put a large map of the United States
up on the wall of the family room in the finished basement where he installed his
equipment and materials, and he began putting pins in it showing where all these
assaults had taken place.
“We can’t really afford all this, you know,” Carolyn told Weldon. When she
saw all the paraphernalia she experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of her
stomach. Her husband had changed radically since his experience.
He ignored her. He began spending all his time in the family room, but he
wouldn’t let Carolyn watch television there to keep him company because he
wanted CNN on at all times. So that the sound wouldn’t interfere with his
listening in on the police band, he bought a captioning machine for the TV set.
“See?” he said to her one evening when she wandered downstairs to see what
he was doing. “The pins are beginning to show a pattern.”
Carolyn looked at the map and did notice that the pins in the map were
forming a widening spiral expanding outward from a center in the midwest.
“We’re located here,” Weldon pointed to one pin in particular, “in the outer
ring.” Then he moved to the next pin, and the next. “He’s hit two other people
since he got me.” His long finger trembled with excitement. His face was nearly
recovered from its bruising, but he still wore a bandage on his head, though it
was small enough now to show the sandy hair over the intense blue eyes.
He had lost weight and was now too thin, Carolyn thought—he had been on
the verge of being well-filled-out when the accident had occurred.
Carolyn shook her head. The dark hair that framed her very fair face with its
gray eyes kept its shape while it moved. “I never see you anymore,” she said.
“You’re always down here.” She sighed. “Please, Wel, can’t you let it go? Tell
the police about it and let them handle it.”
Weldon snorted. “The police!” He spun in his chair to look at her. “I’ve talked
to the cops over and over. Carson’s beginning to think I’m the madman.” He
paused to pass a hand over his brow. “If I don’t do it, nobody will.”
“You weren’t the only victim. Have you spoken to any of the others? Why
don’t some of them do it?”
“I’ve talked to them,” Weldon said. He stared into the computer screen.
“Some of them are on the internet. Some of them are helping me. We exchange
information all the time.” Carolyn watched for a while longer and then left.
Not long after this exchange between them Carolyn saw her husband come
out of the family room with his pistol tucked into his belt and a frenetic energy
radiating from him. His eyes darted about excitedly. “I’m on my way,” he said.
“I think I know where the thing is going to strike next.” He headed for the front
door.
“Wait, Wel!” she said and took him by the arm as he brushed by her. “Please.
Don’t do this.”
“I’m meeting somebody there,” he said. “We’ll get him.” And he was gone.
Carolyn stood, confused, in the hall, then she got her light jacket and purse
and went out into the summer evening. Weldon was just pulling out of the
driveway. He backed into the street, straightened out, and headed east. Carolyn
ran for her car parked in the drive, got in, and followed her husband. “I can’t
believe he’s doing this,” she said to herself. “It’s too strange.”
Weldon raced toward the interchange where Main Street met I82. He hit the
highway doing eighty. Somehow Carolyn managed to keep up, but her heart felt
as though it were pulsing in her throat rather than in her chest. There was little
traffic, which was a blessing.
After a fast forty miles that seemed to her to take forever Carolyn braked and
followed Weldon down an off-ramp to Garretsville. He wormed through the
streets until he came to a house in a residential neighborhood, stopped, and piled
out. He still had his pistol, Carolyn saw as she stopped behind his car at the curb.
The door opened before he got to the front stoop. Carolyn saw a tall man
standing there, and behind him someone else in silhouette against the light. She
got to the door before it could close, but even so she was nearly too late to see
what happened. She heard the laugh clearly.
As she pushed the door open and stepped inside hard on the heels of her
husband the maniacal laughter rang through the house and a middle-aged woman
hung suspended in the air in the living room. The tall man had a camera in his
hand—the flashbulb went off at the same time as Weldon’s gun. There was a
shriek. The woman fell to the floor, and once again something brushed by
Carolyn, but this time she could hear it breathing. Its breath came in rasps and it
stank.
The front door behind Carolyn was torn from its hinges. A cool evening
breeze flowed into the house.
Carolyn turned to see Weldon bent over the woman on the floor who was
sobbing. “Thank you, thank you,” she said. She was middle-aged and on the
heavy side. Her hair was prematurely iron gray and she was dressed in slacks
and a blouse. Carolyn went to help her up and over to a couch. The tall man tore
the picture he had taken out of the polaroid and handed it to Weldon who, before
he looked at it, asked his wife what she was doing there.
“Following you,” she said.
“It was foolish and dangerous.” He took the picture and looked at it.
“Look at who’s talking.” Carolyn could hardly speak. Weldon showed her the
picture. The woman hung suspended in the air just as Carolyn remembered. Just
then the tall man took a step forward and began to slide. He caught himself
before he fell. Everyone looked down at the floor, but nothing was there that
would cause him to slip like that.
Weldon stooped to touch the floor. “Phew!” he said. “It’s wet. It smells like
blood.”
The tall man sniffed at Weldon’s hand and jerked back his head. “It also
smells bad,” he said in a husky voice. But there was nothing on Weldon’s
fingers.
“Call 911, somebody,” he said. Carolyn did so, and soon the police arrived,
stepping over the fallen door warily, their hands on their holsters.
“What’s the problem?” a sergeant said.
Even with the evidence of the Polaroid shot, the smashed door, and the
invisible blood, which a forensics man had collected on slides, no one would
believe their story. The tall man, who turned out to be an insurance salesman
named Sam Rogal from Weedsport and, like Weldon, an earlier victim of the
Laugher, explained things clearly, and Weldon told them how he and Sam and
others had put things together so as to be able to predict when and where the
invisible being would strike again, but no one believed anything until two days
later when the lab reports came back—the invisible liquid was, indeed, blood,
despite everything. It had become visible with stains, and it had proven to be, if
not quite human, at least humanoid.
“As close as chimpanzee blood,” State Police Lieutenant Boyd Callone said,
showing Weldon the microscope photographs. They were sitting in the Rogerses’
livingroom. The day was warm, so Carolyn had served some iced tea. It sat
melting while they stared at the prints and at each other. “So, what now?”
Weldon asked.
Callone leaned forward, his forearms resting on his razor-creased knees. “You
say you’ve figured out this thing’s pattern?”
Weldon nodded. “It may be insane, but it’s absolutely methodical. You saw
the map.”
“Where is it supposed to strike next?”
Weldon shook his head. “It was supposed to strike again today at 11:45 a.m.,
but it didn’t.”
Callone leaned back and sighed. “I was afraid of that. You’ve disrupted his
schedule, and you’ve wounded it. I wish you had informed us of what was going
to happen, then we could have made plans to capture it.”
“What are you talking about? I did inform the police—a local guy named
Carson who investigated my incident. Didn’t you know that?”
Callone leaned forward again. He had a brush cut and blue eyes.
“The local police aren’t the state police,” he said.
“Would you have believed me?”
Callone was silent. “That’s what I figured,” Weldon said.
“Now you’re going to have to watch out.” The policeman’s eyes flicked back
and forth between Carolyn’s and Weldon’s.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because, unless it’s dead, it may want revenge.”
Something thick swelled up in Carolyn’s throat. Weldon looked startled. “Oh,
my god,” she said. “Do you really think so?” Weldon had risen and walked to the
mantel. His pistol had been confiscated by the police for evidence, but he had
purchased another and a shoulder holster, which he was wearing.
“You’re going to have to let me have that firearm, Mr. Rogers,” Callone said.
“You tell me I have to worry about this thing, and then you want to take away
my protection,” he said. “But this gun is legal.” He reached into his pocket and
handed the officer his registration certificate.
“It’s a concealed weapon if you put on a jacket.”
“This is my home. I’m not wearing a jacket.”
Carolyn said, “You mean you think it may come after us?” She was
trembling. Her question hung in the air a moment before it was answered by a
tremendous crash as the front door splintered and caved in. All three of them
heard the laugh, and Carolyn was knocked to the floor violently. Weldon had his
weapon in his hand. He aimed at nothing and fired shot after shot until the
magazine was empty. There were shrieks and a groan. The groan came from
Callone who fell back on the sofa, blood spurting from his chest. Caroline heard
heavy breathing, smelled the same stench she had smelled the last time the
Laugher had appeared. She heard something heavy fall to the floor, and then she
heard it dragging itself across the room and out the front door.
Carolyn got up and went over to Callone. “My god!” she said.
“I got him, didn’t I?” Weldon felt the rug and followed the trail of invisible
blood to the door. “I think he must be dead,” he said. “That’s one monster that
won’t show up without warning to kill people.”
“No,” Carolyn said, looking down at the trooper on the sofa. “But now we
have another one,” and she looked at her husband with fear and loathing.
Voice
Someone speaks in every poem, story, and essay ever written. Thus, there are
three narrative viewpoints which parallel the three major and traditional
syntaxes: the subjective, the narrative, and the dramatic voices, and there are
other considerations as well. The first is orientation. In the author-oriented
viewpoint, the author narrates the story, either the real author or the putative
author, that is, the supposed author of the narration, as in Gulliver’s Travels by
Jonathan Swift, the putative author of which is “Lemuel Gulliver,” not Swift
himself. In the character-oriented viewpoint, a character in the story narrates,
either a major character (protagonist or antagonist) or a minor character.
Person is the next consideration. The story can be narrated in the first person
singular (“I saw what happened”), or possibly first person plural (“We saw what
happened”). It can also be narrated in the second person singular or possibly
second person plural (“You saw what happened”). Finally, the story can be told
in the third person singular (he, she, it saw what happened) or plural (they saw
what happened).
The third consideration is perspective. From the single-perspective, only the
actions of one character are followed; only what occurs in that character’s
presence is narrated. From the multiple-perspective (double, triple, etc.), what
occurs in the presence of two or more characters is narrated. From the
omnipresent perspective, the narrator has access to actions everywhere in the
story.
Access is the fourth consideration. The narrator might have only objective
access to occurrences, being able to narrate only actions seen or heard, or the
narrator might have subjective access, being able to narrate not only actions and
words but the thoughts and emotions of characters as well.
As with all other elements, the author can blend any combination of
orientation, person, access, and perspective. The omniscient viewpoint is a
combination of author-oriented, third person, and omnipresent perspective
narration with subjective access. In other words, the narrator knows all about
everything, internal and external, everywhere in the story and narrates it thus. It
is important that any writer figure out all the ramifications of the narrative
viewpoint chosen before the story is written, otherwise he or she may have to
switch viewpoints in mid-tale, and that will destroy the reader’s willing
suspension of disbelief—see the unities.
Aspects of Narration
These have to do with the stance, the tone of the narrator, whether he or she tells
the story in a particular manner—so as to make the reader laugh (the humorous
stance) or cry (the melodramatic or tragic or melancholy or reflective stance),
and with tone, which is a distinctive quality of expression or intonation, as in
“tone of voice.” There are as many stances as there are emotions to be evoked,
and as many tones of voice as there are types of people in the world. Certainly,
the author who chose to have his narrator tell the story from a melancholy stance
would consider the tale a failure if it evoked laughter. It would, however, be
possible to choose a serious narrator who evokes laughter by means of dramatic
irony which is an effect produced when the audience knows more about the
character and the character’s situation than the character does. Romantic irony
has the author-narrator of a story stepping back from his creation and discussing
it with an air of detachment, thus displaying to the reader that he or she is
actually uninvolved with and free from the predicaments of the personae of the
narrative. In the twentieth century this sort of narration would be considered to
be authorial intrusion, roiling the waters of the still pond of mimesis or
“imitation of reality” unless, of course, the novelist were writing black humor, as
in the novel Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, who juxtaposes macabre elements with
realistic ones, and ridiculous situations with terrifying occurrences, or in novels
by such metafiction writers as John Barth (b. 1930), whose works, like the story
“Lost in the Funhouse,” often discuss the creation of fiction at the same time that
the fiction is being created.
The frame narrative employs what amounts to a double narrator, for it is a
story-within-a-story. See The Book of Dialogue for two illustrations, and
discussions, of the frame narrative of the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph
Conrad (1857–1924) and the whole short story titled “The Bo’sun’s Story.”
In his frame narration Conrad does not commit author intrusion which occurs
when—the dramatic illusion having been established through the reader’s
willing suspension of disbelief—the author does something that calls attention to
himself, thereby breaking the spell of the story. For instance, in his novel
Falconer, John Cheever (1912–1982) establishes that the narration will be
author-oriented, third-person, single-perspective, subjective narration. His
protagonist is in prison. All goes well until Cheever comes to a spot in the plot
where the narration needs to leave the physical bounds of the prison. That means
that the author must awkwardly shift the viewpoint of the story because, his
prisoner being unable to leave the prison, the perspective must suddenly be
doubled to tell the story of a second person. Cheever has abruptly changed the
terms of the narration he established and called himself to the attention of the
reader, breaking the reader’s concentration on the story.
Another sort of author intrusion is editorializing—the author stepping
forward and taking a position on the story being related. Over the years since the
eighteenth century this convention has grown less and less acceptable, but it
does occur in twentieth-century metafiction.
Motivation
It is the purpose of nearly all literature to convince the audience that the author’s
insight is valid. For example, in a poem, even if the poet writes merely to sing a
song of joy—nothing more—the poet will fail unless he or she convinces the
reader that the joy expressed in the poem is a true joy. Equally, the story writer
will fail to convince if the elements of the story do not support the theme. For
instance, assume that an author has written a story on the theme that “All men
are corruptible.” Assume, too, that in order to prove this point the author chooses
as his characters a loan shark, a politician, a drug addict, and a coward. Will the
story be likely to convince the reader of man’s essentially corruptible nature? If
the author instead chooses a suburban housewife, a priest, a teacher, and a
doctor, what will happen? The difference between these two groups is that the
second is much more representative of mankind in general and will tend to
support the theme better than the first group, which may be more easily seen as
atypical and thus more susceptible to corruption.
The characters of a story must act in accordance with their personality traits if
their actions are to be believable. If the protagonist of a particular story has the
dominant trait of bravery and the author’s theme is that all people feel fear at
times, in a dangerous situation it is believable that the protagonist will feel
afraid, but will act bravely anyway. If, however, the brave person turns and runs
when she or he feels fear, the theme will tend to be disproved unless, of course,
the protagonist gets a second chance and thus proves that she or he is brave after
all. In the story “One Sunday Morning” (see The Book of Dialogue), the reader
will hardly believe that a little girl getting her dress dirty is motivation for her
mother to murder her, but the irony is, of course, that we have legal reasons of
all sorts to commit the legal murder (we call them “executions”) of certain social
offenders . . . including murderers! That is the theme of the story: that no reason
for committing murder is reasonable.
Chapter Glossary
action fiction. Action fiction is the genre that includes spy novels, adventure
stories, tales of intrigue (“cloak and dagger”) and terror, mysteries—that is,
detective stories or tales of ratiocination, as they were called by Edgar Allan Poe
(1809–1849), inventor of the form, a specimen of which is “The Murders in the
Rue Morgue.” These kinds of stories utilize suspense, the tension—a balance
created between opposing principles, situations, or techniques—that is built up
when the reader wishes to know how the conflict between the protagonist and
antagonist is going to be resolved, or what the solution to the puzzle of a thriller
is.
adaptation. To transform one sort of thing into another through transcription, as
for instance, turning a novel into a screenplay. However, the opposite is also
possible, and novelizing means turning a screenplay into a novel.
adventure stories. See action fiction.
animal stories. See children’s literature.
antinovel. The antinovel is a work that denies the traditional structure of the
novel and proceeds without plot, character, atmosphere, or even theme, and is
presented as a series of fragments from which the reader is to construct her or his
own “novel.”
antirealism. Antirealism is fiction of the absurd—see theater of the absurd and
metafiction. Although the antirealist novel and the antinovel would appear to be
synonyms, in fact the two camps reject one-another on theoretical grounds.
James Joyce and Franz Kafka are counted as two antirealist novelists, though the
former is considered a stream-of-consciousness writer and the latter is counted a
surrealist.
apprenticeship novel. See bildungsroman.
authorial intrusion. See dialogue.
backwoods boast. A backwoods boast is a tirade out of America’s pioneering
days, but the brag is an English tradition as old as Beowulf:
I’m the biggest, baddest bald-headed bear this side of the Pecos. I can eat a
pony and a side of rhinoceros with one ear and holler out of the other one.
I can fit a bayou in my left cheek and whistle Dixie too, and when I do,
you know Dixie’s gonna come with a ring-tailed raccoon chewin’ on her
heels, and it ain’t gonna take her no ten minutes neither, no-how. You
wanta know my name? Why, you couldn’t fit it in a six-volume
‘cyclopedia, it’s so long! I’ll tell you what—just call me whatever you like
and I’ll answer, long as there’s a gallon of moon involved, but don’t call
me Fred, ‘cause I ain’t a Fred of any man.
bathos is failed or banal pathos, the depths of sentimentality (as distinguished
from sentiment), the opposite of hypsos, the height of emotion; see the pathetic
fallacy.
Bildungsroman. An apprenticeship novel that shows the development and
civilizing of a young person as he or she matures, like the Künstler-roman which
is specifically about the development of an artist, as in James Joyce’s A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man.
brag. See backwoods boast.
cartoon. See children’s literature.
children’s literature. children’s literature includes such types as picture books
in which illustrations and words are of equal importance to the text or in which
the illustrations are predominant, as they are also in the cartoon, the comic strip,
or the comic book. The pop-up book is a children’s volume in which the
illustration, or part of it, erects itself into a three-dimensional image when the
book is opened. Pictures are often an important part of the collection of nursery
rhymes as well: traditional verses told often under the aegis of “Mother
Goose”—see our companion volume, The Book of Forms.
The fairy tale (German märchen) is a story of fabulous incidents involving
witches, goblins, giants or some such creatures. Animal stories are tales in which
creatures are the primary characters or even the narrators. The just-so story tells
children how something came to pass or to be; for instance, “How the Rabbit
Grew Long Ears.” A fable is a short moral tale that uses animals as characters, as
in Aesop’s Fables. The moral always is one that applies to human beings,
however, and the animals are actually merely human beings in disguise, as for
instance “The Ugly Duckling.” A tall tale is a yarn, a lie told tongue-in-cheek,
such as some of the stories of Mark Twain (1835–1910) and the Uncle Remus
series of Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908). Here is the text only of a children’s
picture storybook, “Murgatroyd and Mabel,” by Wesli Court.
MURGATROYD AND MABEL
Murgatroyd and Mabel were caterpillars, and they were very good friends.
Murgatroyd was a sort of spring green in color, with bright orange spots, and
Mabel was covered with soft brown fur. She had two pretty yellow tufts on her
head, like a hat.
One day as they were out walking—or creeping, rather—a very strange
feeling began to come over Murgatroyd.
“Mabel,” he said, “a very strange feeling is beginning to come over me. My
back itches, and my head is very light.”
“Really, Murgatroyd?” Mabel asked, and she stopped to think for a minute.
Then she said, “You know, I think I’m beginning to feel the same way.” So
Murgatroyd and Mabel stood thinking about their backs itching and about how
their heads felt very light. Suddenly mabel said, “I know what it is, Murgatroyd.
My mother told me this would happen one day.”
Murgatroyd looked at her with a little worried frown on his green face with
orange spots. But Mabel only laughed. “It’s nothing to worry about, silly. It’s
just that the time has come for us to build our cocoons.”
Then Murgatroyd smiled too. Of course, that was it. His father had told him
that this would happen one day. “Let’s build them together, Mabel,” he said.
“There’s a very nice bush over there with a good, strong, forked twig.” And he
began to inch along as fast as he could go (which wasn’t very fast) with Mabel
right behind him.
Finally they climbed up to the strong forked twig. Mabel said, “I’ll take the
right fork, Murgatroyd.” But almost before the words were out of her mouth
Murgatroyd was busily spinning his silken cocoon on the left fork. So Mabel set
to work too, and pretty soon the cocoons were finished. Only the doors were left
standing open.
“Well, I’ll see you in a week or so, Mabel,” said Murgatroyd. He waved his
feelers at her, and she waved back. Then they both crawled into their cocoons
and closed their doors.
The sun rose and set ten times, and ten days passed, but there wasn’t a sound
in the little bush, except when a sparrow perched near the cocoons to sing a
morning song. But on the morning of the eleventh day something began to
happen to the cocoon on the right fork of the twig. The door slowly opened, but
it was so dark inside that nothing could be seen.
Then, at last, Mabel came out. Only—it didn’t look like Mabel! All her brown
fur was gone, and the two yellow tufts on her head, like a hat. Instead, Mabel
wore two lovely lavender wings on her slender pink body.
She stood on the twig slowly waving her wings to dry in the gentle breeze.
Then she called softly, “Murgatroyd, I’m a butterfly now. How are things with
you? Will you be coming out soon?”
In a muffled voice Murgatroyd called from his cocoon, “Yes, I’ll be right
out.” Mabel waited until, slowly, Murgatroyd’s door opened, but it was so dark
inside that she couldn’t see. “Do hurry, Murgatroyd,” she said.
And at last he came out to stand on the twig. “Oh, Mabel,” he said, “you’re so
beautiful. What lovely lavender wings, and your body is such a pretty shade of
pink. How do I look?”
But all Mabel could do was stare. Then at last Mabel said, “Oh, Murgatroyd,
you haven’t changed at all!”
Murgatroyd turned to look down the length of his body—the same old green
body with the same old orange polka-dots. He was very disappointed.
“Mabel,” he said sadly, “it didn’t work. I didn’t turn into a butterfly. Now we
won’t be able to go flying together. I’ll have to creep while you flutter by in the
breeze.”
Mabel was very sad. “No,” she said, “you haven’t changed at all . . . except
for that funny thing on the end of your nose. What is it?”
Murgatroyd didn’t know. So he crossed his eyes to look. It was hard to see
with his eyes crossed, but at last he made out what it was.
“Mabel!” he shouted. “I didn’t grow wings, but I’ve grown a propeller instead
—a propeller on the end of my nose!”
Mabel was amazed. She was so surprised that she lost her balance and fell off
the twig. She fluttered and fluttered down, crying, “Help, Murgatroyd, help!”
“Don’t worry, Mabel, I’ll save you!” Murgatroyd shouted. And, without
thinking, he dived off the twig. But just as he did, Mabel cried, “Oh, I can fly!”
She spread her wings and began to soar as Mugatroyd came swooshing past her,
heading for the ground.
Mabel closed her eyes. She couldn’t watch. “I hope it doesn’t hurt,” she said,
still with her eyes closed.
But just then she heard a strange noise—a buzzing sound. She opened her
eyes just in time to see Murgatroyd come flying past her. “I can fly, too, Mabel.
Look!” And, with his propeller spinning faster and faster, he did a loop-the-look
around Mabel.
Then they both laughed. Mabel fluttered her lavender wings and dipped in the
soft breeze. Murgatroyd did barrel rolls and power dives as they flew together
into the morning sunlight, the grass dewy and green far beneath them. The last
thing Mabel said before they flew out of sight was, “Isn’t it wonderful to be
butterflies?”
But Murgatroyd didn’t answer. He just spun his propeller faster at the end of
his nose and did another loop-the-loop.
The sequel to this story, “Murgatroyd Tries Again,” may be found in our
companion volume, The Book of Dialogue.
character roles. Seven character roles have been isolated in fairy tales: the
seeker or victim, who is the protagonist; the villain, the antagonist; the sought,
who has been lost or captured, often a princess; the dispatcher, who sends the
seeker on his quest; the donor, the helper, and the false hero. Sometimes one
character may fulfill two or more roles in a particular story; likewise, one role
may be played by more than two characters. A refined version of this cast is the
actantial model: the subject, who seeks the object; the object, who is sought by
the subject; the sender, who dispatches the subject on his or her quest; the
receiver, who is the recipient of the object; the helper (or sidekick) of the subject,
and the opponent who is, of course, the antagonist.
cloak and dagger. See action fiction.
comic book. See children’s literature.
comic strip. See children’s literature.
commercial success. See epigone.
computer fiction. See interactive fiction.
conversation. See dialogue.
critical success. See epigone.
detective story. See action fiction.
dialogue. Dialogue (dialogismus) is conversation among characters in a story,
and it is used for many purposes. It is the second best technique after action to
help to characterize one of the personae of the story. Monologue is half of a
conversation, a speech to a character who is presumed to be present, though a
listener may not be evident to the audience. A soliloquy is differentiated from a
monologue in that it is personal thoughts verbalized rather than half a
conversation; it is “talking to oneself,” for no other audience is present or
assumed to be present. For a complete treatment of this subject see The Book of
Dialogue: How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama,
and Poetry, a companion volume of The Book of Literary Terms.
dime novel. See pulp fiction.
dungeons and dragons. See fantasy and science fiction.
dystopia. See Utopian novel.
e-book. See interactive fiction.
epigone. One who writes a lesser imitation of a literary work is called an
epigone. In both fiction and drama, and particularly of late in cinema, the sequel
is the name of the game, for trying to ride on the back of a commercial success
by coming up with another story, and yet another, having the same characters
and situations, and much the same plot, is much better, in the eyes of producers,
than merely achieving a critical success or, to give it its tonier French name, a
succès d’estime.
escape literature. Easy reading, meant to take the mind off one’s own everyday
concerns. See mysteries, science fiction, romance.
epistolary novel. One written in the form of letters or “epistles.”
fable. See children’s literature; see also the fabliau in The Genres of Poetry in
our companion volume, The Book of Forms.
fairy tale. See children’s literature.
fantasy. Fiction about imaginary worlds or happenings; see magic realism,
which is a current form of fantasy. See also dungeons and dragons and science
fiction.
feminist fiction is fiction that is not merely written from the viewpoint of a
woman, but addresses and treats of such concerns as women’s problems in a
paternalist society, self-fulfillment in other than traditional ways, such as childbearing and child rearing, and the expansion of roles and activities. See also
Gaia fiction.
fiction of the absurd. See theater of the absurd in the chapter “The Genres of
Drama.” See metafiction and nouvelle roman.
folklore. The folklore of a people is its oral tradition of passing on its myths and
traditional songs and tales (folktales).
folksong. See folklore and myth. Also see folk ballad in our companion volume,
The Book of Forms.
folktale. See folklore and myth
formula story. A narrative written to a set pattern. The traditional formula story
can follow several patterns. The rags to riches motif has the poor, hardworking
young person rising above his or her environment to become a captain of
industry, or something equivalent. The boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets
girl is a standard formula, as is the eternal triangle love story. The Robin Hood
formula has the popular hero stealing from the rich to give to the poor. See also
pulp fiction.
Gaia fiction is a type of current feminist fiction in which the central focus is
Earth and Earth’s relationship to characters and themes. The word “Gaia,” the
Greek earth goddess, resurfaced as a synonym denoting the world in James
Lovelock’s preface to his 1987 revised edition of Gaia: A New Look at Life on
Earth.
generic narratives. See genre fiction and mythoi.
genre fiction. The term covers specialized fields of fiction other than
“mainstream fiction,” including adventure, mysteries, science-fiction, romance,
confession, children’s literature, and many others that are covered in this
glossary.
ghost story. See supernatural fiction.
gossip. See novel.
Gothic fiction is about dark, gloomy, brooding, and sometimes supernatural
people and events (see the Byronic hero). In it there is often a great deal of
atmosphere, distortions of reality, desolation, and mystery. The genre began in
England in the eighteenth century but achieved two of its greatest successes in
the nineteenth century with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein
and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
historical novel. See roman à clef.
illustration. A picture intended to accompany a literary text. See children’s
literature.
interactive fiction. Novels or stories produced on and for computers having
alternative plots, characters, endings, and/or scenes which in effect allow
“readers” to invent their own “virtual” books within the boundaries of the
computer program in use. Also called computer fiction and virtual fiction.
Internet publishing. A twenty-first-century system of publishing books,
pioneered by Stephen King among others, by means of posting them on the
internet where, for a fee, they may be downloaded to computers or hand-held
palm readers. Alternatively, hard-copies may be produced by printing them from
computers.
interior monologue. See dialogue.
just-so story. The term is from Rudyard Kipling’s collection, Just-So Stories
which includes “How the Whale Got His Throat,” “How the Camel Got His
Hump,” and “How the Leopard Got His Spots.” See children’s literature.
juveniles are stories and books written for young people in the genre of
children’s literature.
Künstlerroman. See Bildungsroman.
legend. See myth.
magic realism. In fiction of magic realism the fantastic is treated in an ordinary
way, as though it were “normal,” part of everyday reality, as in the novel One
Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here is an example.
VINCENT
Vincent’s complexion was as chalky as the soil of Champagne, his native
province. His skin was the color of whey because of the perpetual dusk in which
he worked, the dusk of the caverns hollowed in the chalk cliffs. In these caverns
there was wine, miles of bottles, green and brown, stacked seven feet high lying
on their sides in their cradles. But there was curiously little dust, for it was
Vincent’s responsibility each day, from dawn to dusk, to walk down the aisle that
extended under the hill into the darkness beyond the flare of his lantern, and give
each flagon a quarter turn. A quarter each day, no more and no less.
Vincent carried a lantern. If the flame burned low, began to gutter—which it
had never done in ten years, he would know that the air was becoming noxious,
and he could return to the entrance before he got into difficulty. He would walk
in the center of a pool of yellow light which reflected from the colored glass,
stopping each pace or two to turn the bottles with both hands, reaching to both
sides and stretching above his head. He could work extremely fast, which he had
to do in order to reach the end of the cave by midday.
At noon he would stop to eat his lunch before the great wooden door at the
end of the cavern. The door was locked, and it had been so since Vincent, at the
age of sixteen, had begun to work for the vintner, who had accompanied him on
his first trip down the aisle of the cave. When they had reached the door Vincent
had had the temerity to ask what lay beyond, but the vintner had merely
shrugged.
“There is no key,” he had replied. “It was locked when my father was a boy,
and my father’s father.” Vincent had not asked why the door had never been
forced. He had accepted things as they were, which was his nature and his habit.
But each day as he stopped, set down his lunch pail and his lantern, and prepared
to eat, he would stare at the door and wonder what was behind its dark, rough
wood and rusty wrought iron.
When he was through with the bread, cheese, fruit and wine his wife Melie
had packed for him that morning in the cottage near the vineyard, Vincent would
rise and begin to work his way back up the opposite wall of bottles. When he
had reached the entrance again the sun would be low in the sky, and Vincent
would step out of gloom into gathering dusk. He would close and lock the gate
with the brass key in his pocket, and he would return the key to the vintner
before he walked home beneath the poplars. In the kitchen he would find Melie
preparing the evening meal. She was a bit younger than her husband about
twenty-four, and plump, but not unpleasingly so. She would greet him as he sat
down wearily at the table. She would give him a glass of wine. Vincent would
drink it slowly until supper was served. At such times he would miss the
children they had not yet had.
Vincent would sit and think of a daughter as Melie bent among her kettles and
pots, stirring and seasoning, the steam rising from the stove. He would imagine
the daughter, each day, running into the room when he returned, climbing into
his lap, and saying—as Melie never did, “Tell me about the wine, papa.” And he
would tell her. The child would never tire of the story, of the descriptions of the
cave and the bottles, the saffron lantern, and of the great door at the end of the
passage.
But no children ever came. Melie would serve the meal and they would eat.
Afterward they would sit before the fire, if it were a cool night, Melie sewing or
knitting, Vincent smoking his pipe. After a while they would go to bed,
sometimes to see about making a child, but more and more often merely to sleep.
He did not know how it happened—he could not have imagined it during
those first ten years, but slowly Vincent, without realizing it at first, began to feel
an ache, an ache that eventually solidified around a center of discontentment.
Once Vincent had identified the nature of his ache—after many days, even
weeks, of giving his bottles a quarter turn each day, of many solitary noon meals
before the door that drank up the light of his lantern as though it were wine, he
began to think of what he might do.
At first his thoughts were desperate because they were new and unexpected.
“I will find a new line.” But what new line? He knew nothing else. And more
desperate still: “I will abandon my wife, my childless home, and I will become a
vagabond!” The word astonished him. He sat and pondered it at noon for several
meals, but eventually the astonishment wore off together with the possibility, and
he returned to thinking about the ache.
He questioned his lot only at noon in the beginning, never while he walked
the aisle, when he never thought at all, but one day as he was giving a green
bottle a quarter turn he caught himself thinking, and again he was astonished;
again he had something to consider. More and more often he was startled to
discover himself walking in a forest of reflection while he worked, like an
insomniac who starts awake just at the verge of dropping off into the abyss of
dream. A great deal of time went by, until it was clear to Vincent that he was
obsessed. Even Melie noticed the change in his demeanor and actions, but she
never dared ask what was wrong. What could be wrong? Nothing had changed
excepting her husband. Like many women, she simply waited.
But Vincent had reached the point of action. One morning as he was walking
down the aisle of the cavern he stopped, and as he stared into the pinpoint
reflection of his lantern in the glass of a brown bottle, Vincent experienced a
revelation. He considered it for a long while, lost in marvel. At last he reached
out to the bottle and gave it a half-turn. Then he continued down the aisle with
quarterturns, working faster than usual in order to make up for the lost time, and
as he ate his bread and cheese at noon he dwelt, in the immense silence
reverberating from behind the locked door, on the thing that he had done.
He was apprehensive and thrilled to the marrow at the same moment, but by
the time he had reached the entrance of the cavern and come out into waning
daylight, these emotions had given way to great satisfaction. At home Melie
immediately sensed the improvement in her husband’s disposition, and she
heaved a warm sigh into the steam rising from her pots. That evening they went
to bed early and tried to make a child—it had been a long while. Afterward
Vincent dreamed of a daughter climbing onto his knee and asking him, “Please
tell me about the wine, papa.”
He replied, “Only if you promise never to tell anyone else what I am about to
say to you. It must be a secret between us. You must not tell even your mama.”
After suppressed joy, she promised, and Vincent began the story. He watched
her eyes widen into wonderment when he reached the part where he twisted the
flagon a half-turn—just one half-turn among an eternity of quarter-turns. But
Vincent’s good humor seeped slowly away in the succeeding days. Gradually the
ache returned until he once again found himself compelled to act; his mode
improved; he returned to brooding—Melie was disconcerted by the ebbs and
floods that appeared in the character of her husband and in their daily lives. She
never knew what was going to happen on a particular day when Vincent returned
from work, and at last even she was driven to desperation.
“What is wrong, Vincent?” she asked, and what she had feared would happen
indeed did so—he shouted at her.
“Nothing is wrong! Why do you ask such question? What could be wrong?”
and he was surly in his silence the rest of the evening. But a great deal was
wrong. Her husband could no longer be appeased with turning a bottle halfway
now and again. In the cave he had begun to turn two bottles a week, then three a
week, and at last he gave a bottle a three-quarters turn before he reached the door
and ate his lunch. The tunnel was as quiet as a graveyard at midnight.
“What difference does it make how far I turn the bottles?” he asked the
darkness. “I turn them so that the lees will not settle out, and so that the cork will
stay wet and tight. But what if I turn them a quarter, or a half, or don’t turn them
at all for a day? Will the world be changed? Will the wine be worse?” He
seethed and was morose alternately, for the three-quarter turn had done nothing
for him. He was so caught up in his anguish that he almost failed to hear the
sound when it occurred—a slight scraping behind him. When he realized that he
had, indeed, heard something where he had never heard anything before, he was
struck with fear and astonishment again, as on the first occasion of his rebellion.
He sat for a long time staring down through the shadows that gathered in the
aisle of the cavern, shadows that seemed to turn into a wall of darkness rising
between himself and daylight. It was a long way back. He nearly panicked and
ran, but he made himself sit still and consider. Eventually Vincent gained control
of himself, and he forced himself to turn and look. He saw nothing. He rose,
examined the door, the floor before it, and the hinges. Nothing still. He began to
think that perhaps the sound had been a figment of his fancy.
For several days Vincent considered what had happened, or perhaps had not
happened, and he reached a point of boldness he could not have conceived of at
an earlier time in his life. He decided to experiment. He repeated the threequarter turn in the morning, but he heard nothing at noon. He turned one bottle a
half, and another three-quarters in the morning—again he heard the sound, but
so faintly and, despite his vigilance, so unexpectedly, that he continued to doubt.
Vincent began to try combinations and afternoon turns—these latter did
nothing more than make his lantern flicker, or perhaps that, too, was a sleight of
the eye, or too quick a motion of the hand as he was carrying it. He was so
absorbed in what he was doing that both the vintner and Melie thought that
things had returned to normal. Vincent had always been a silent man, and they
could not know that this latest silence was of a different quality, though Melie,
who had been through so many vagaries of mood with her husband, remained
apprehensive.
On the day that he turned his first morning bottle one whole revolution,
Vincent came to the door and sat down facing it. He turned up the flame and
placed his lantern so that its light shone full upon the enigma of the locked door
—the saffron flare fell into the grainy wood and the iron, and it glowed deeply in
the wine that fell back in tiers into the recesses of blackness down the aisle. He
kept his eyes fixed on the door even as he fumbled in his lunch pail and began to
eat.
He heard it clearly first, and then he saw it—the great door scraped and began
to open. Vincent sat as though stricken to granite, his eyes fastened to the
widening crack of darkness. His lamp flickered, but it did not go out; neither did
its light penetrate into the well of silence and shadow beyond the door, which at
length stood open wide.
It seemed to Vincent as though his heart might explode, as though the pulse in
his ear were as loud as summer thunder rolling over the poplars whipping in the
wind along the road to his home and hearth. And then both pulse and heart
seemed to stop, for Vincent heard a voice say, from the night beyond the door,
“Papa!”—just the one word, but crystalline, like a single lute string being
plucked.
Vincent did not move until his heart began again. Then he drew a great,
rasping breath, took up his lantern, rose suddenly, and began to back away.
“Papa, don’t go,” he heard the child’s voice say. “Tell me again about the wine.”
But Vincent continued to edge backward, and as he did so there was a hesitation
—a pause felt rather than heard, a flicker of light or of shadow—then the door
began to scrape again. Slowly it swung to, and Vincent heard the latch, then the
bolt. Understanding that he had lost something, yet not comprehending what it
was, Vincent faced back to the tunnel of wine racks and, giving each bottle as he
went an efficient, precise, careful quarter-turn as was his habit, he began the
return through amber light.
mainstream fiction. Non-genre fiction; that is, fiction not written in one of the
subcategories of fiction, such as romances, westerns, mysteries, confessions,
science fiction, and so forth.
mannerism. Stylistic affectation, such as the overuse of particular words, or
peculiarities of writing, as for instance the overuse of tag lines. See romance.
märchen. See fairy tale.
metafiction is fiction about fiction, as in the short story “Lost in the Funhouse”
by John Barth which is simultaneously a treatise on how to write a short story
and an exploration of the metaphor that life is a house of mirrors, mishap and
magic.
mimesis. The imitation in literature and art of the real world; the representation
of actuality in art and literature. See naturalism, realism, and verisimilitude.
monolog, monologue. See dialogue.
monomyth. See myth.
motif. See formula story.
mysteries. See action fiction.
myth. The oldest stories are called myths; mythology is concerned with the
supernatural origins of a people and with the legendary “history” of a culture,
including its theology (system of religious beliefs) and pantheon (its gods).
Typically, myths were meant to explain both the natural and the supernatural
worlds in a pre-scientific world. Northrop Frye posited four mythoi: or “generic
narratives” which are central to the study of genre: spring: comedy; summer:
romance, autumn: tragedy, and winter: satire. The monomyth, according to
Joseph Campbell in his Hero with a Thousand Faces, is the central myth in a
particular culture, such as the “quest-myth” or the “creation myth.”
mythoi. See myth.
mythology. See myth.
mythopoesis. Conscious literary mythmaking, as in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord
of the Rings. See myth.
naturalism. See realism and verisimilitude.
nouvelle roman. An innovative theory of fiction introduced in France by Alain
Robbe-Grillet (1922–1989) in his collection of essays, Pour un nouveau roman
(1963). The standard elements of fiction were to be ignored, as in theatre of the
absurd, and replaced by seemingly random impressions, ideas, impulses and
gestures which the reader was left to interpret. See fiction of the absurd.
novel. The term novel is derived from the Italian novella meaning “news item”
or “gossip.” In its modern sense, a novel is a fictive tale of considerable length
having all the characteristics of fiction and the space in which to develop them in
detail. The original term, “novella,” now is taken to mean a short novel: a
narrative that is longer than a short story but shorter than a full-length novel. A
novelette or novelet is a synonym for novella in most dictionaries, but experts
make a distinction: the novelette is the sort of romantic formula story that is
published or serialized, that is, published in installments, in women’s magazines;
the novella is a serious work of fiction.
novel of manners. The novel of manners observed the sensibilities and actions
of the genteel middle class in England, as in the work of Jane Austen (1775–
1817).
novelet, novelette. See novel.
novelization. See adaptation.
novella. See novel.
nursery rhyme. See children’s literature. See also the section “Traditional Verse
Forms” for more about the genres of poetry in The Book of Forms.
pace. See dialogue.
panoramic method. See dialogue.
pantheon. See myth.
parafiction. The term “parafiction,” is meant to indicate a type of nonfiction that
is written like fiction, as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was written like a
novel. Although such nonfiction is not itself short stories, novels, novellas, and
so forth, many of the techniques used in it are those of narration, including plot,
atmosphere, characterization, and theme.
penny dreadful. See pulp fiction.
picaresque novel. A novel that has as its hero a lovable rogue who wanders
about having many adventures. The narrative is organized through the picaro’s
adventures; he is not only its protagonist, but its controlling figure.
picaro. The protagonist of a picaresque novel.
picture books. See children’s literature.
pop-up book. See children’s literature.
prequel. Just as a sequel is a new book, film, or play that continues the story of
an existing work of literature, so a “prequel” is a new book featuring the same
group of characters, actions, and other elements of fiction to be found in the
original work, but at an earlier point in time: a “preceding sequel.”
problem novel. The problem novel or roman à thèse explores social issues, like
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) or Bleak House by
Charles Dickens (1812–1870). A special kind of problem novel is the
proletarian novel, like the Studs Lonigan trilogy of James T. Farrell (1904–
1979), which examines the situation of the working class.
proletarian novel. See problem novel.
pseudo-autobiographies. See true histories.
POD, Publishing on demand. Producing one copy or a few copies of a book
rather than a large print-run, a feature of twenty-first-century publishing made
possible by advanced printing technology.
pulp fiction takes its name from books that are published on the cheapest paper
which, in the modern era, is made from wood pulp. The earliest such volumes
were called chapbooks, a corruption of “cheap books,” which were sold on the
streets by chapmen. The volumes published in Erastus Flavel Beadle’s (1821–
1894) 1860 Dime Book series were known as dime novels. The British
equivalent of the dime novel is the older penny dreadful. Contemporary pulp
fiction volumes are called paperbacks or paperback novels, but, since many
books are published now in paperback format, a distinction is made between
pulp paperbacks and “quality paperbacks.”
punctuation of dialogue. See summary dialogue.
purple prose. See romance.
realism. The technique of giving the impression, in writing, of the real world;
see mimesis and verisimilitude.
roman à clef. The roman á clef has as its characters actual living people
disguised as fictive personae, unlike the historical novel which uses historical
figures and situations but inserts fictive characters as well.
roman à thèse. See problem novel.
romance. Romances; in the modern rather than the medieval sense, are novels of
sexual love between stereotypical adults set in idealized situations, usually
written in purple prose—a breathless, gushy, overwritten style full of
mannerisms, such as the overuse of adjectives. These sorts of novels are often
called escape literature because they take readers away from the cares of the
workaday world for a little while. They are also formula stories with plots that
are virtually indistinguishable one from the other.
saga. The saga was a medieval Icelandic prose narrative written from about 1120
to 1400. Its subject matter had to do with the first settlers of Iceland and their
progeny, and it recapitulated the royal history and mythology of the Norse.
Modern family stories of similar structure are also called sagas; Buddenbrooks,
by Thomas Mann, is an example.
samisdat, samizdat. The underground press in the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics, a means for disseminating proscribed works of literature. Now a
synonym in English for self-publishing. See vanity press.
science fiction (sci-fi) concerns itself with speculative events in future worlds
and societies or with imaginative (sometimes prophetic) scientific and medical
discoveries. Science fiction sometimes is cross-fertilized by other genres, in
particular fantasy, as in the contemporary sub-genres called dungeons and
dragons. For an example of a science-fiction ghost story see “Scot on the Rocks”
in The Book of Dialogue. See also the Utopian novel.
screenplay. See adaptation.
serial. See novel, and triple-decker.
sequel. See epigone.
significatio. The classical term for foreshadowing; hinting at what is to come.
soliloquy. See dialogue.
spy novels. See action fiction.
stereotype. See romance.
stream-of-consciousness. A twentieth-century technique which is intended to
give the impression, through interior monologue, of the way the mind actually
works—wandering from digression to digression, leaping from one association
to another, leaving out connectives, eliding, using disjunctive syntax, and so
forth. James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is an example, as is William Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury.
succès d’estime. See critical success.
summary dialogue. Summary dialogue is the description of a conversation, as
for instance when a character is telling his or her own story within the story: “So
I said to Caroline, ‘What did John Say?’ and she told me that he had said he
wanted to go home to his wife and children and to stop messing his life up with
other women.” Sometimes this is called the “panoramic method” of narrative
exposition. The punctuation of this passage is double quotation marks for the
first conversation, single quotation marks for the conversation within the first
conversation, and so forth, ad infinitum. British fiction uses quotations the other
way around: first single quotes, then double, then single, and so forth. For
another example of summary dialogue see the discussion of minimalism. For
more information about summary dialogue and punctuation, see The Book of
Dialogue.
supernatural fiction is a genre of fiction that is concerned with ghosts and
hauntings, extraordinary psychic occurrences, and so forth. It is a form of gothic
fiction. For an example of a humorous supernatural story see “Scot on the
Rocks” in The Book of Dialogue.
suspense. See action fiction.
tag line. A tag line is one or two words or a phrase that indicates to the reader
who is speaking in a story: “Have you been home today?” the policeman asked.
Too many tag lines in a story are a form of author intrusion and they can
interfere with the pace of the story, the quickness with which the action and
dialogue move.
tale. A synonym for story.
tales of intrigue. See action fiction.
tales of ratiocination. See action fiction.
tales of terror. See action fiction.
tall tale. A lie. Also see children’s literature.
tetralogy. See trilogy.
theology. See myth.
think piece. A fictive “think piece,” as distinguished from a piece of journalism
with the same designation that relies on exposition, analysis, and editorial
opinion, is a thematic story.
thriller. See action fiction.
transcription. See adaptation.
trilogy. A trilogy is a series of three novels, and a tetralogy is a series of four.
triple-decker. The triple-decker novel (sometimes called a double-decker) is a
book of exceedingly great length, like those written by such modern writers as
James Michener (1907–1994) and Danielle Steel (b. 1947), or like those that
were written as serials in the nineteenth century by William Makepeace
Thackeray (1811–1863) and Charles Dickens.
true histories. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the idea of
serious fiction was not yet completely acceptable socially; therefore, many
novels were published as “true histories.” Those that were not appeared as
“romances,” often with prefaces that argued for their legitimacy by referring to
Aristotle’s principles. The “true histories” purported to be what they were not;
they were, in fact, pseudo-autobiographies detailing the adventures of a real
person, as in Daniel Defoe’s (1660–1731) Moll Flanders.
Utopian novel. The Utopian novel, invented by the sixteenth-century English
martyr Thomas More (1478–1535), posits an “ideal” society for hortatory or
satirical purposes, and may be considered an early form of science fiction. Its
prototype was The Republic of Plato (427?–347? BC). Modern examples are
Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) and 1984 by George
Orwell (1903–1950), although the neologism dystopia has been coined to
distinguish between an “ideal” society and an evil version of such a community;
the term would be applied to Orwell’s novel and to William Golding’s (1911–
1993) Lord of the Flies.
verisimilitude. Verisimilitude was a style that was used by both Realists and
Naturalists. The term means, “to give the impression of real life,” the emphasis
being on “impression.”
vignette. A vignette is a finely written literary sketch emphasizing character,
situation or scene,
virtual fiction. See interactive fiction.
web publishing. See internet publishing.
well-built story. The well-built story—in recent years called also the workshop
story—is one that observes the formula that all four of the elements of fiction—
plot, theme, atmosphere, and character—will be present and supportive of one
another.
Westerns. Westerns are novels or stories set in the western regions of the United
States, particularly during the late nineteenth century and the great era of the
cowboys and the Indians, the ranchers and the sheep-herders; the gunfighters and
the outlaws, and the sheriffs and rangers who attempted to keep peace among
them.
workshop story. See well-built story.
yarn. See tall tale.
The Genres of Drama
There are several subgenres of the literary genre called drama. The first type of
drama in the Western world apparently grew out of ceremonial music as it was
performed in sixth-century BC Greece, in the region of Athens; thus, the first
“plays” were musical theater. The Greek poet Thespis invented a form of music
that required a character, which he himself portrayed, and a chorus; these
interacted with one another, telling a tragic story by means of dialogue, song and
dance. This form of drama was soon so popular that in 534 BC a theatrical
competition was held, in honor of Dionysus, the god of drink, fertility and
revelry, to decide the best new tragedy written by the playwrights of the period.
Such contests soon became annual events throughout the Greek world, including
perhaps Hellenic Egypt, for it has been postulated that The Book of Job of the
Old Testament was originally a Greek tragedy, and it has been so reconstructed
in the twentieth century.
Over five hundred tragedies were written in ancient Greece, but only thirtytwo have survived. Aeschylus added a second character to the cast of the
Thespian play in the fifth century BC, and Sophocles added a third. These
innovations allowed the playwright to compose works that were infinitely more
complex psychologically and more active dramatically. Clearly, the form of
tragedy was continually evolving, but in the fourth century BC. Aristotle in his
Poetics analyzed the work of Sophocles as typical tragedies, in effect freezing
the form, as it were, for the study of scholars and tragedians. Nevertheless,
tragedy continued to develop in the works of Hippolytus, Euripides, and others,
and other types of plays were added to the programs of the ancient competitions,
including burlesques such as the satyr play, which was ribald, satirical, and
slapstick, and was performed after every third tragedy just to provide some relief
for the tensions that had been building up in the audience throughout the
performances.
Eventually there were other types of plays being performed as well, such as
comedies, the first of which we call old comedy, examples of which were written
by Aristophanes in the fifth century BC. This type of theatrical piece was
succeeded by the new comedy of Menander. In the original tragedies and in the
satyr plays and old comedies, the characters had been either idealizations,
lampoons, or caricatures of people, but Menander injected an element of realism
into his productions, and his personae became recognizable as actual people
involved in complex situations and actions. The importance of the chorus and
many other elements of the early drama diminished. All of the elements still
associated not only with drama, but with fiction as well, were present in the New
Comedy.
The fiction writer and the playwright have much in common. Both are
concerned with narrative, and both use exactly the same elements of narrative:
character, plot, atmosphere and theme. However, unlike fiction, drama is a
composite genre, consisting of both written material and visual effects. The
strengths of drama enable it to be more immediately apprehensible to the senses
than are words in a book.
The fiction writer is not limited to one or two writing techniques but may
choose from a wide range of narrative devices. The dramatist’s range of writing
techniques, however, is limited, for all that may be used onstage is spoken
language (see The Book of Dialogue), not ordinarily narration or description,
except as spoken by an actor or actress, though on occasion a play—such as
“Our Town” by Thornton Wilder—may have a narrator on the stage filling in
the exposition: background information that the audience may need in order to
understand the significance of the dramatic segments. The writing tools of the
playwright, then, are dialogue, monologue, soliloquy and the aside.
In place of narration, however, the playwright is able to utilize stage action,
and in place of description, the dramatist provides acts, scenes and sets, so that
the audience can actually see and hear the development of character and plot. At
this point in our discussion a consideration of Greek tragedy as it was analyzed
by Aristotle may be of some value, for it is the paradigm upon which all later
drama was founded.
Tragedy
The major and original subgenre of dramatic literature is tragedy, a dramatic
form out of classical antiquity, the elements of which are plot, character,
spectacle, thought, diction and harmony, i.e., the successful fusion of its parts.
Tragedy, according to Aristotle, is the imitation of a “worthy or illustrious and
perfect action.” It has “magnitude“ and is written in elevated language that
entertains, but it is not meant to be read, for it must be enacted upon the stage. It
is a verse drama which has as its protagonist (generally but not always male) the
tragic hero or heroine who has stature but does not excel either in virtue or
justice; nor is he or she brought low through such character flaws as vice or
depravity, but through some error of judgment or circumstance, at which point a
sudden reversal, a peripety occurs. The heroic protagonist struggles to avoid
inevitable defeat (fate), and during the struggle, sympathy and terror are held in
equilibrium as he (or sometimes she) courageously faces the human
predicament. Tragedy exhibits the paradox of nobility of character combined
with human fallibility, especially hubris—excessive pride or self-confidence, a
tragic flaw.
Ostensibly, the antagonist of tragedy is a god, or the gods, but in fact the
antagonist is destiny which is in the hands of the three fates, Clotho, who bears
the distaff which holds the threads of life, Lachesis, who spins the thread, and
Atropos, who cuts the thread when the time comes to do so. This destiny is often
bound up with past actions on the part of the protagonist, as in Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex, in which case the struggle of the play becomes an internal
struggle, so the overt conflict is interior: Oedipus is locked in mortal combat
with himself, with his past, and with the past actions of his ancestors, which he
has inherited.
Although the protagonist is heroic, and as such is in a way godlike, he or she
is also human, and human beings are fallible. Achilles, who is the hero of
Homer’s Iliad (an epic, not a tragedy), was the offspring of Peleus and the minor
goddess Thetis who dipped Achilles in the river Styx so that, like the gods, he
would be invulnerable. But the heel by which Thetis held him when she dipped
him in the magic river that forms the boundary of Hades, the nether world, was
not touched by the water, and he therefore remained humanly vulnerable, and
mortal, in just this one part of his anatomy. It was in this heel that he was
eventually fatally wounded by Paris. Thus, most heroic protagonists have a flaw,
and this flaw, symbolized by the heel of Achilles, leads to doom. The tragic flaw
is usually not physical, however; it may be pride, a lapse in judgment, arrogance,
or some other moral flaw, and the protagonist may not even be aware it exists.
Aristotle believed that the opposite of pity is nemesan, or “righteous
indignation,” but logically the opposite of pity is envy. In any case, whatever the
flaw, it not only leads to doom, but it is also the instrument by which Nemesis,
the goddess of retributive justice, eventually expunges disorder in the universe.
Things must be set right—morally right. Sin cannot be allowed to exist in human
affairs forever. Good must eventually win, evil lose. Generally speaking, the
protagonist must resolve his or her own dilemmas as the incidents of the play are
worked out, but on occasion both the Greek and Roman playwrights called into
use the deus ex machina, which was a god who was lowered by stage machinery
out of the heavens onto the stage to help the hero or heroine out of a difficult
situation. (Such devices would operate to destroy the willing suspension of
disbelief of the contemporary playgoer.)
Since the heroic protagonist of tragedy is essentially good, but is also the
bearer of evil, he or she must be punished; it is this paradox that gives tragedy its
dramatic tension. The audience will see the fall from grace of a great figure, and
the fall will be mighty. It will be an anguished fall; the audience is meant to
sense the irony of the situation, the passion of such a moral spectacle. The hero
or heroine recognizes the fact of impending doom, often in the shape of a person
who bears the message of the protagonist’s fate. Perhaps the protagoinist will
attempt to rectify what is clearly coming, but that attempt produces the opposite
effect, hastening doom instead; this is called peripeteia. Once the climax of the
drama has occurred—that is, the final rising action in a series of rising actions—
and the fall has taken place, the universe will have again been set right, and the
audience should sense the essential rightness of the protagonist’s destruction.
Despite the feeling that a mortal injustice has taken place, a higher or poetic
justice has been served, and this sense of cosmic justice leads to a purging of the
emotions of fear and pity that have been called into play by the actions of the
drama and the character of the protagonist. In the denouement of the play the
loose ends of the plot will be drawn together and the tragedy brought to a close.
Structure. The parts of a tragedy are the prologue, parados, episode, exode,
and chorus. The prologue is all of the first portion of a tragedy that precedes the
entrance of the chorus, which is the parados (parade). An episode is that portion
of the tragedy that takes place between two complete choral odes. The exode
(exodos) is that portion of a tragedy that follows the last song of the chorus.
The stasimon is the song sung by the chorus as it enters from the side of the
stage; the parados is the first speech of the complete chorus, not counting
speeches by members of the chorus. The choral ode itself is constructed of three
parts, the first of which is the strophe. The second movement, called the
antistrophe, is identical in structure to the first. The third and last movement of
the poem is called the stand or epode. Its form is strict, like the first two
movements, but entirely different from their structure.
The content of the strophe is an argument in favor of a viewpoint which is
spoken by a chorus on one side of the stage. To consider the opposite view, the
chorus travels to the other side of the stage to deliver the antistrophe, through
which it voices its concerns, or there is a second chorus on the opposite side of
the stage that does the same. In the epode, the chorus moves to center stage to
deliver its conclusion upon the matter under consideration.
The Unities. Greek drama sometimes observed the unities of action, place,
and time, though later plays seldom did so. The unity of action concerns the plot,
which must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it must be of a proper
proportion, neither too long, nor too short: long enough to amply treat the theme
of the play, but not too long to bore the audience. The plot must be a unified
series of actions, beginning with the protasis in which the major characters are
introduced and the subject delineated. The drama begins in medias res (in the
middle of the inciting action, background information or exposition being
offered as the play progresses), all of which lead to the protagonist’s doom,
which is not a matter of suspense, for the audience already knows the protagonist
will be destroyed, for it is a matter of history or mythology. It is the spectacle of
his or her downfall that enthralls the spectators.
The unity of time is a convention, a social agreement, which assumes that,
during the theatrical time of the play, one day—no more than twenty-four hours
—will have elapsed. If the play asks the audience to believe that larger segments
of time pass while the audience is seated in the theater watching, their willing
suspension of disbelief, the dramatic illusion, will be imperiled.
The unity of place is a convention that all action will take place in one
location and setting, for the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief, and the
Greek theatre’s lack of elaborate stage equipment, required that there be a
minimum of shifting from scene to scene, although the skene allowed the
representation of scenes in an inner chamber or cave. The various areas around
the stage could be used to suggest a variety of exterior settings.
Comedy
Comedy, which also dates from the Classical period, is tragedy lampooned, as in
the satyr play (see satire) which, in classical Greek theater, was a mock-tragedy
that followed the performance of three tragedies. The dramatis personae of a
satyr play were satyrs: half-men, half-goats, with the tails of horses. The
protagonist of any comedy is a humorous, not an empathetic, character, and the
stages by which he or she progresses toward defeat or, possibly, triumph, are
humorous as well.
There are two kinds of classical comedy extant, called old comedy and new
comedy—examples of middle comedy, which apparently was transitional
between the two, did not survive into the modern world. An example of old
comedy is Aristophanes’ “The Birds,” which combines satire, ribaldry, fantasy,
parody (caricature, pastiche or lampoon), and travesty (burlesque). The aside, a
device of old comedy, allowed the chorus to address the audience directly and to
speak from the viewpoint of the author. Menander’s new comedy, which has
survived only in fragments, has a comic plot in which, generally, young lovers
work out the problems that divide them and come together at last.
The division of modern dramas into acts and scenes may have been
foreshadowed by the division of the classical tragedy into episodes separated by
choral odes . Dramatic action is generally considered to proceed in five parts,
exposition, complication, climax, falling action (denouement), and catastrophe,
and it may be for this reason that Roman drama consisted of five acts, one
corresponding to each of these parts. Gustav Freytag’s pyramid is a diagram of
the five-act drama.
Classical drama continued in the work of the Roman playwrights, which
succeeded and imitated the Greek tragedians and comedians, but the religious
element of the Greek plays, which had been diminishing anyway as time went
by, was further eroded in the work of the first important Roman dramatist, Livius
Andronicus, in the third century BC. His plays were clearly intended primarily
as entertainment as were those of Plautus who was not so much an original
author as an adaptor of the plays of the Greek New Comedy. In many of the
Roman plays other elements were added including, often, florid speech,
spectacular stage effects, farce, stock characters, and mime. Many of these
additions were derived from southern Italian and Sicilian Greek commercial
pantomime theater, which was obscene and ludicrous. However, there was also a
serious tradition in Roman drama, which was exemplified in the second century
BC by the work of Terence and, in the first centuries BC and AD, by that of
Seneca.
Eventually, Roman theater died with its Empire, and the Middle Ages ensued
with completely different forms of drama which returned to its original religious
roots. Liturgical drama included miracle plays, morality plays, mystery plays,
which were performed in cycles, such as the English Wakefield Cycle, and
passion plays. Secular folk plays were also written and performed during the
medieval period.
During the succeeding Renaissance comedy and tragedy were rediscovered
and rehabilitated, and all sorts of conglomerates were invented. These included
academic drama or school plays and revenge tragedies; histories or chronicle
plays, comedies of errors, and tragicomedies like those written by William
Shakespeare, and masques, the great English master of which was Ben Jonson.
There have been few modern masques, but here is one that combines some of the
elements of the morality play as well.
Livevil: A Mask
Persons of the mask:
The Logical Man Unborn
Chorus of Days
Birth, Fear, Hate, Love, Greed, Despair, Death
Scene:
The womb
The curtain rises on a bare stage.
Logical. The wind howled down
Like a tongue-tied hound
Out of Canada’s spiring pines
Into Maine where the cold bays
Weep upon the land’s breast.
The hunting wind whined
Into the frost-locked valleys of Vermont
And spring-brooding valleys of New Hampshire;
Snapped white fangs around
Massachusetts farms;
Prowled perimeters of hamlets in Rhode Island.
Whined, howled down and ground
Its icy teeth beneath my window where I slept
Wrapt in Connecticut.
Chorus. The wind was everything that sterile night,
With universes coiled upon its tongue,
But no jaws that could shape the things it knew.
Its fangs and tongue and jowls were ice, blue ice.
Logical. I could hear
That wind-dog a-prowl outside,
Tail between skinny legs,
Its starveling flanks quivering.
Even in sleep I could hear the wind.
Chorus. We are the kennel-keepers of the wind.
We know what winds cannot nip into words.
Outside the land is bitter, wearing veils
To mourn the passing of our fragrant days.
Logical. But I am fast asleep
And wound in dreams.
How can I Choose with my lids shut?
I cannot see
The things I’m choosing.
Chorus. We’ll show you dreams of wakefulness asleep.
It doesn’t matter what you choose, so take
Some of our dreams to heart and rest assured
Your heart will pick the comrades that it wants.
Blinding!
Strange!
Warmth transformed to chill
Within a spinning colorwheel of dim and dark.
A cacophonic mushrooming of terrifying sound
Surrounds,
Swells—
Bursts upon untested senses.
Vivid impressions uproot well-being
And dissipate peace.
Thus, looming huge and uninvited,
Implacably destroying placid blackness,
The ogre Birth arrives.
Birth. Ginger loved things
small and furry:
kittens and their kind.
And she kept birth
folded deep within her mind’s
winding sheets of pain.
She would fondle claws and fur,
she would meditate on
padding things, pawing things.
For cats were gauze
and pink in milk was soft
as silk in winds.
Ginger loved them, Ginger weaned
them, Ginger watched
them purr and pass.
She sometimes half suspected
kittens and their kind
were more complex.
Logical. Is this one of the things
I’m given from which to choose?
Take it away! It’s not for me,
Non in an eon or two.
Chorus. This is for your veins to choose, and they
Have chosen Birth despite the hawk of night
That preys on intellect’s sweet nightingales.
Logical. There’s the wind again, speaking of coins
With heads on two sides.
I can make out a meaning now and then
Among the barren branches of elms and oaks.
Chorus. One choice is spoken for. There are others.
Clouds
Of thick,
Omnipresent fog,
Maliciously released by nethercentered lords
Send suffocating fingers feeling, reeling through each nerve
And choke
Halt
Breath with molten sobs that seem
Intent on separating mind from flesh.
Here, staring and white,
Comes creeping insidiously through mists . . .,
Impalpable, but by no means impotent,
The king of darkness, Fear.
Fear. Miss Agatha was a spinster
of manifold
cerebral convolutions.
And she had memorized, leaf by leaf,
the masterworks of Freud
and the Reverend Peale.
She could trace in pure regressions
of neurons, syndromes, synapses,
man’s clan memories of archetypes.
She’d mapped the paths from roman type
to fig leaves and that coiling length
of adder-in-the-hay.
Few psychologists or modern
lecturers were left unspitted
above the flames of her burning insights.
Miss Agatha wrote finis upon
her own last chapter in absolute
possession of her faculties.
Logical. This fearsome thing you introduced
Turns out to be a two-toned harlequin
Not worthy of a man.
I’ll not have him carousing at my side
While moments drip my life away.
Does flesh choose this, too, automatically,
Or may I say I don’t need fear?
Chorus. Flesh almost always chooses Fear. but there
Are some poor souls who never will. Perhaps
You’re one of them. You need not make a guest
Of him. But here comes still another ghost:
Writing
Fire!
Reason is consumed,
And all that’s left is searing flame and withering heat!
An incandescent, soul-devouring holocaust of rage
Destroys
Mind.
Roaring in an oven made of blood,
Scorching everything that it can touch . . .,
It chars its own hearth.
Here, coughing smoke and spitting brimstone,
Inhabitant of white infernos,
Stands Evil’s minion, Hate.
Hate. Mr. Mell, on Monday mornings,
chews his toast to plug an ulcer,
relishing it with thoughts of labor.
Over his ledgers, hung above columns,
Mr. Mell savors work liberally
with something gnawing at his innards.
The rubble of his mind’s turned out
toward the world: its ashes, heaped
about his eyes, obscure his pens.
Each red scratch is a gash of blood;
every black line’s his evil fortune
spoken darkly and bound in dun.
And Mr. Mell will die, the ulcer
unplugged still, his soul slipping
through the hole in his intestine
Into a place no medicine man’s
discovered, where something red and black
gnaws away life and the hostile world.
Logical. Take him away!
This lump can’t possibly be any hump
I’d walk around with under my skin!
No kin to sanity, he’s to be banished or burned,
Not nurtured.
I’ll hold no such grisly hand;
His talons are dirty and they’ll never dig
Pox pits in my wrist or belly!
Faugh!
And whose minion did you say he was?
What’s Evil, and am I sure to find it
Slinking at my heels if I make Birth’s journey?
Chorus. White,
Flowing out of glory,
Ebbing in the unremitting
Magnetism of restraint.
White,
Erecting its spindrift,
Sea-spume facade
Eagerly toward the ultimate beauty.
Feathered splendor,
Riffled in a midsummer zephyr,
Mirrored in berippled blue fluid,
Growing upward in graceful curves
And living arches;
Delving deeply into the waters
Of an enfoliaged tarn.
This is the swan:
An ideal.
A living arabesque
Is the peacock:
Robed in the sheened garments
Of Oriental princes—
Gold-beaded satins
And amaranthine silks;
Engulfed in an aura of
Tenuous incense, displaying
A lustful, multicolored fan
Spread full to catch and prismatize
Each lance of light hurled by the sun.
Its head—endowed with regality,
Held like the carved figurehead
Of an Egyptian barge—
Is turbaned and jeweled.
Jade and amethyst intertwine
Intricately, swaddling this sultan.
Who denies that here
Is the embodiment of sensuality?
And as the two birds meet
In mortal combat, the stately swan
Is blinded, swiftly vanquished.
The peacock flaunts his flagrant robes,
Mounts uncontested to his throne.
Some people call the peacock Evil, but
For now you can forget it, as it’s still
Ahead of you. Right now another shade
Is waiting to be chosen or eschewed:
Gently
Once;
Twice with sweeping tides
That overflow the dikes of reason, flood all sense
Down drains of passion, turning moons to lamps which fool
the feet
With vague
Shapes,
Changing solids into shadows,
Shadows into obstacles, come couriers
Who, brashly beating on life’s portal,
Herald Time’s forever golden mistress,
The fickle hussy, Love.
Love. Sabrina was a gentle girl,
Sabrina was a willow twig,
And all the greengrass days we spent
Have gone to sleep in twilight’s tent,
And there is little I can say
Except that she has gone away.
Sabrina danced, her skirts awhirl,
A windblown summer lilac sprig
Adrift upon a wanton song
When dusks were short and life was long.
But now there’s little more to say
Except, Sabrina’s gone away.
Sabrina’s feet were slight and swift;
Sabrina’s limbs were slim and brown.
Her hair was soft as sun, her eyes
Were lambent moonstones of surprise,
But there is not much more to say
Except that she has gone away.
And she is milkweed flown adrift.
She is the skybound fledgling’s down.
The sprig is plucked, the willow weeps
Outside the house where summer sleeps,
And there is nothing more to say
Except, Sabrina’s gone away.
Logical. I’ll get up and walk
On water,
Brood into the grain
Of wood,
Lean my head with hope
On rock,
Reel with drunk delight
In air,
Plunge a raging fist
Through glass,
Tramp through tremolos
Of rain . . .,
Then I’ll come and lie
With you.
Chorus. You’ll choose this girl who comes with lips pursed up
To sip your blood and suck your creaking bones?
she’s yours to have and hold, if possible.
If not, she’s yours to lose in any way
You might desire. Step forward, Love, and claim
Another toy to tinker with awhile.
Love. I have him now.
Logical.
I have her now.
Chorus.
You have
Each other. But the choosing isn’t done:
Twisted
Claws
Reach with palms upturned
And, in a fit of avarice, grasp everything
That they can hold; and still they stretch and clutch for even
more!
Driving
Force!
Moving men like puppets on a stage,
Pulling with a strength beyond compare . . .
But leading to nothing!
Insinuating wealth and beckoning,
but made of airy stuff, come
Ambition’s cohort, Greed.
Greed. I myself have seen old man Jones
unwind twine and stuff it down
deep and safe in his pants pit.
I’ve heard he’s hoarded string, rope,
soap, and even single socks
that lost a foot at the laundromat.
If you’re a second-story man,
the block whispers there’s Eldorado
in the lumps Jones dozes on.
That is, if you pad past
the ears; if you skulk by
the eyes: those eyes are quick.
No rag or careless bottle
is unobtrusive enough, nor do
the lids rest twitchless long.
They say that old man Tones’ old man
was open-handed and well-to-do.
when he was well-to-do.
Logical. Greed’s not for me either.
But does Ambition always walk
Beside this stupid miser?
If so, I’ll not be very ambitious.
If not, I’ll be so very ambitious.
Chorus. Greed has no stable friends. It’s possible
To keep Ambition’s company without
Embracing Greed, but sometimes it may be
Impossible to cut in on the street
While walking with your friend. At such a time
Shake hands, say, “Howdedo,” and let him go
Leech onto someone else quick as you can.
Logical. Who’s next?
Chorus. Abject.
Dark.
Buried in a marsh
From which there seems to be no path or exitway;
Within a mire of apathy and thwarted love of life;
Without
Hope,
Dwells a creature known to many men,
Lost in lonely voids and labyrinths
Of mind and of being;
Sunk in depths from which it can’t escape,
Abandon’s bleak companion,
The wanderer, Despair.
Despair. Miss Burnside knew a ruler’s job
and felt at home before
the blackboard’s midnight.
She knew her sums and numbers well
enough, but hated “figures” in
her heart of hearts.
Each day Miss Burnside took her stand
for education with fusty skirts
taped shamelessly to her shins.
All black and gray and white
she was, and bony where
there’s no excuse for cloth.
Her tongue could whip
her sallow lips—the kids
all called her “Bloodless” Burnside.
Except the few who glimpsed her cheeks
should she be speaking in the hall
with some young man.
Logical. Truly, I don’t know whether
I should laugh to scorn
Or cry to pity this poor creature.
It seems to me there’s very little
To be propounded in poor Despair’s defense.
Take him and throw him back
Into the bog he loves.
Are there any more?
Chorus. Just one, the last. Here too you have no choice.
You must accept the final
Peaceful
Sleep.
Welcome night of life,
Enclosing flesh within a restful bed of sod.
The final slumber spreads it mantle over mind and soul,
Keeping
Light
Of the world of harshness we have left
From awakening consciousness and from
Disturbing our dreams.
At last, to life’s parade of spirits,
A long locked door has opened,
Admitting Death.
Death. Deacon Smith was older than
the pews, solid as the boldest
brass pipe in a Sunday organ.
Easter to Christmas to Easter round
and round he passed the plate and frowned
down wrath upon the niggards.
His windy voice was huger than
the choir; his spine seemed surely to
demand the crossbar of his shoulders.
God-fearing Deacon Smith
collapsed one summer Sabbath
during the invocation.
He gasped his swan’s hymn briefly: there is
no doubt at all the Deacon feared
his God’s almighty anger.
His jutting eyes, before the coins
weighed down his sight, swore it
like Genesis and Exodus.
Logical. But surely, after all of life
Something less humorous is called for,
Something a whit less macabre.
Death, as it seems I must eventually
Walk down grim paths with you,
What else can you tell me
Besides this somewhat smaller than cosmic joke?
Death. These were the hilltops:
Greenly knit and stitched
Together by needles of sunlight,
Embroidered with laughter’s
Bittersweet pain, cascading smoothly
Into gray vales.
We follow the descent of slopes
Between kaleidoscopes of rock
And fragrance-stirred brush,
Always in company with Mirth
And Youth (indefatigable
Comrades!) until, at last,
The dusky vale is reached.
Highland rivulets, no longer
Blue-mooned and depthless,
Transform themselves
At the caprice of a falls into mournful
Liquids. Rattling on the stream bed
Like death’s heads, pebbles
File slowly past in an unending
Exodus toward voids.
And in a prominent place, well up
Towards the mouth of the stream,
A group of black ikons druidically
Raise their palms upward, outward
To the vast sea.
Logical. Then I have made my choice.
I have three things out of all time,
Three things only.
And these three are
Death,
and Birth,
and Love.
And of these things,
Birth and Death are dealt with.
In these wintry days of the womb’s darkness,
In the murky hours of prebirth,
In the unremembered time
When life hangs in the branches
Of a willow
Between two worlds,
With the breath of the chasm
Like a sickle
(the frail boughs undecided bending in the dark current of
the wind)
The first of this triumvirate
Is foreordained:
Crowned Victor, Death triumphs
Before its fulfillment.
Two treasures remain.
The one is the kernel,
The other the shell,
Ripe flesh within the fabric
To be plucked out and savored:
I shall crack the shell of life.
I will devour the flesh of love.
Chorus. Sobeit then. The wind is whimpering
Along the shivering landscape. It is time
You stuck your head out into the cold and fed
The famished hound. Come out! The world’s your nut,
And you in turn are but the winter’s bone.
Curtain.
For more information about the masque, see the chapter glossary.
The English theater was killed during the Commonwealth period, but the
English Restoration brought with it the heroic drama, and the ensuing drama
included the last plays of the tradition of the Italian burletta, the comedy of
manners, and the new critical comedy, as well as a revival of the classical
tragedy, like Irene by Samuel Johnson.
The five-act drama invented by the Roman playwrights lasted until the late
nineteenth century when the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)
invented the thesis drama or problem play and changed form by combining the
fourth and fifth acts. The romantic tragedy is a phenomenon of the twentieth
century, as is the three-act drama, which is common, except for musical comedy
and comic opera, which are often written in two acts. The one-act play is also a
twentieth-century phenomenon. All of these types of plays, and others, are
discussed briefly in the Chapter Glossary, below.
Dialogue
The primary means by which drama proceeds is through dialogue, which is
conversation among the characters of the play. Dialogue in ancient Greek
tragedy and poetry is sometimes arranged as stichomythia, the alternation of
lines spoken by actors. A monologue is half of a conversation, a speech to a
character who is presumed to be present, though a listener may not be evident to
the audience, as for instance if the actor or actress on the stage is speaking into a
telephone. A monodrama is, first, a dramatic monologue; second, a sequence of
dramatic monologues by various characters who relate a story, as in the stage
version of Edgar Lee Masters’ (1869–1950) Spoon River; and, third, a one-manshow or theatrical presentation featuring only one actor. If the playwright wishes
to convey directly to the audience an interior state—thoughts or emotions—he or
she must use the soliloquy or the aside—a remark, directed toward the audience,
in a stage whisper loud enough for the audience to hear but, supposedly, not the
other personae on stage. A soliloquy, sometimes called an interior monologue, is
differentiated from a dramatic monologue in that it is personal thoughts
verbalized rather than half a conversation; it is “talking to oneself,” for no other
audience is present or assumed to be present. However, those thoughts or
feelings may be objectified in actions; for instance, if a character thinks she is
ugly, after looking into a mirror she may break it angrily. “For a complete
disquisition on the subject of dialogue, see The Book of Dialogue, a companion
volume of The Book of Literary Terms.”
Dialogue is indicated by means of a script which contains not only all of the
dialogue of the play, but the actions and stage directions as well, and indications
of the acts, scenes, sets and settings, placement and kind of props, stage
business, and so forth. An antiplay is one that violates all the rules of drama, like
those written for the theater of the absurd which is a mirror image of a
traditional play.
In his trend-setting Six Characters in Search of an Author, the playwright
Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) has one of his personae, The Father, say at one
point, “Oh, Sir, you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities, which,
strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.” This
speech puts into a capsule the philosophy of existentialism that is at the basis of
much Modernist literature, including the so-called “theatre of the absurd” and
“black humor.” All of the things that are a part of the traditional theatre—all but
one thing—are called into question. Traditional drama assumes, like all
traditional literature, that there is a cause-and-effect relationship among the
incidents of a plot and that this relationship gives the audience an accurate
reflection of reality, what Aristotle called mimesis (imitatio), and what in the
nineteenth century was called Realism. Thus, a character in fiction or drama has
a dominant personality trait, desire, motivation, a problem to solve, and his or
her attempts at a solution of the problem provide the dramatic situation, the
conflict and the plot of the narrative. What happens, however, if our experience
causes us to sympathize with the view of Pirandello’s “Father”? Then one need
not act rationally; in fact, it would be strange if one did so in most situations.
Life is full of gratuitous occurrences—there is no obvious beginning or end of
any series of actions.
There are, indeed, such things as accidents and coincidences, both of which
are banned from “realistic” literature on the grounds that the audience will not
believe they can have occurred if they affect the outcome of the story, for the
story, in order to be convincing, must be truer to life than life, and the
protagonist must solve his or her own problem, without resorting to a deus ex
machina to help in a difficult situation. If, however, writers fail to show such
things in their narratives, they are not, in fact, being simply “true to life.” By
excluding the absurdity of real life writers are not giving an accurate picture of
life at all. It’s all illusion, artifice. The theatre of the absurd puts its finger on the
basic premise of traditional art and says, “This won’t do. If life is absurd and art
is rational, the one cannot mirror the other.”
Much theatre of the absurd says, therefore, “Let there be no
characterizations, no plot, no atmosphere; let there be no motivation, for desires
are irrational at root. Let the impossible happen, without reason, for that is what
happens in life as often as not. Let there be no exposition, for what has happened
in the past does not necessarily have a bearing upon the present situation, and
even if it does, most of it is accident and happenstance anyway.”
At this point one might ask oneself, “But is such literature art?” And the
answer is, “No.” Then what is it? Perhaps one can answer the question by
replying, “It is anti-art,” which is to say, it is art after all.
That may seem paradoxical, and it is, but a paradox is a self-contradictory
statement that is nevertheless true, and literature of the absurd is paradox, just as
life is. Anti-art is nothing but the mirror image of art, but it could not exist
without something to reflect. If one takes all the conventions of traditional art
and reverses them, one is still reflecting a pattern, and the mirror image will be a
pattern also—a pattern in reverse.
There is one element of traditional art, however, that no one seems to be able
to dispense with, and that is theme.
Pirandello’s play is, in many ways, not merely an excellent play out of theatre
of the absurd, but an essay on the art of the absurd as well. It is metadrama: a
play that is also a treatise in paradox. It is an attack on traditional literature, and
the very situation of the play sets the paradox: six characters out of an unwritten
play break up the performance of a drama, and they ask the actors to produce
their drama, a play within a play, and they want someone, the director (or
manager) to write their story. They insist upon “truth,” and it becomes clear that
drama is incapable of presenting the truth as it appears to the characters. In fact,
the truth appears to be different not only to the actors and the manager, but to
each individual character as well. Art is, thus, a compromise, and the play asks
the question, “Can a compromise be true to life?” The query is a rhetorical
question, one to which the answer is known by all who hear it. Here is a brief
play in the genre of theater of the absurd; it was used as the text for a chamber
opera by the Dutch composer Walter Hekster (b. 1937) in 1987.
The Fog
Dramatis personae. Character A, Character B, and a Voice.
ACT ONE
House lights down, curtain up.
Scene. A bare stage. Two figures are seen standing center stage. It is difficult
to make out whether the figures are male or female, for a thick mist
rolls in from both stage right and stage left. One of the figures speaks.
A. Aren’t we supposed to get somewhere sometime? When are we going to
get there?
B. It’s too soon to tell. Not enough time has passed.
Voice (it is big and resonant). You’re almost there now. Don’t give up.
You’ve almost made it.
A. Who was that? What was that voice?
B. That was some Being who watches over us. I think it was God.
A. What kind of Being? It’s hard to make out any shape in this fog. I can
hardly see you, let alone a Voice. You look as though your body is
made of shadow.
B. It’s possible I’m not even here. You could be talking to yourself. On the
other hand, perhaps I’m here and you’re not. Maybe the mist is a
mirror.
A. I’ve thought of that. I’ve given that very thing a good deal of reflection as
we’ve been going along. But I can hear you breathing. Are you making
this mist with your breath? If so, I wish you’d cut it out so I can see
God. I’d like to find out who it is that’s talking to us.
B. We’re talking to each other. There’s no one else on this road.
A. But I think I heard a third voice. It came from soemwhere overhead, I
think.
B. Pay no attention. Just keep going.
A. The voice gave me courage. I’d like to hear it again.
B. What’s wrong with my voice? Isn’t the sound I make enough for you?
A. Yes. . . . No. That is, maybe. But what if it’s not your voice? What if it’s
just an echo?
B. Then it’s an echo. It’s you giving yourself courage. So what? Isn’t that
enough?
A. I don’t think so. I don’t want to be alone with myself in all this fog. It’s a
frightening thing to think that I have to make it on my own. I don’t
think I could do it.
B. Where is it you think you’re going. Do you have a map?
A. No, and that’s why it’s frightening. I don’t trust my sense of direction.
B. There doesn’t seem to be any direction out here. Every way looks like
every other.
A. That’s the other thing that’s bothering me. Even if I could trust my sense
of direction, I couldn’t trust the directions themselves.
B. then why bother worrying? Just keep going. Follow me and don’t look
back.
A. That’s the third thing. If I follow you, who am I following? And why
should I trust you any more than I trust myself? You might even be
myself—we’ve been all over that. I’d rather follow God. Maybe He
can see better from up there—I wish he’d speak again.
Voice. Keep going. You’re almost there.
A. There! There He is again. Let’s go.
B. Lead the way. I’m right behind you.
A. I thought I was following you! I thought you knew the way.
B. You’re leading now. I didn’t hear Him.
A. That’s very strange. His voice was clear as a bell.
B. He must have been talking to you alone. You’re in charge now. Which
way?
A. The way we’re going must be right. He said we were almost there.
B. We’ve been standing still. We haven’t moved an inch.
A. That’s the fourth thing. The fog seems to be getting thicker. We’d better
hold hands so we don’t get lost. It would be death to be separated.
B. Now I’m beginning to be frightened. Here’s my hand.
A. Something solid at last! You’re not just my reflection after all.
B. Perhaps not. Anything is possible.
A. We still haven’t moved. Do you suppose we should try?
A bell begins to ring offstage, and it continues to ring throughout the next
speech.
Voice. I was wondering when you’d get here. How do you do? I’m very
happy to meet you both. This is it. This is the end in view. (The bell
stops ringing.)
A. Did you hear something just then? I thought I heard a bell ringing in the
fog.
B. It was the wind, I think. Perhaps the mist is lifting a little.
A. Maybe so. Let’s wait here a little while and see if it clears up.
B. All right. I can wait.
The figures stand together in the fog. A bell-buoy begins ringing somewhere
offstage and continues to ring for a while after all stage lights fadeout
and all house lights down and out. Curtain.
Chapter Glossary
academic drama. Academic dramas or school plays were classical and original
dramas produced in the colleges and grammar schools of England during the
Renaissance; two of the earliest known original school plays are the anonymous
Gammer Gurton’s Needle (ca. 1560) and Ralph Roister Doister by Nicholas
Udall (1505–1556).
act. A major division of a play which may consist of more than one scene. See
drama, screenplay, and teleplay.
action. Movement, doing things, deeds. For the various ramifications of the
word, See camera techniques, epitasis, point of attack, and praxis.
actor, actress. Persons who perform roles in a play. See dramatis personae.
Actors’ Studio. A New York City workshop founded in 1947 by Cheryl
Crawford, Elia Kazan, and Robert Lewis, directed from 1948 onward by Lee
Strasberg, for the training of professional actors and actresses. Home of the
acting technique called The Method, it is credited with having developed many
of the leading Broadway and Hollywood thespians of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.
adaptation. The product of one who turns one form of literature into another, as
for instance a novel into a cinema production. For examples of adaptations, see
The Book of Dialogue.
adaptor. One who performs adaptation. See backstage.
A-effect, alienation-effect. The term of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) to identify
his devices for distancing the audience and his actors from his plays so that he
might control their empathy or sympathy. The purpose was to sharpen the
observer’s or the player’s objective, critical sense at the expense of the
traditional willing suspension of disbelief in what was happening onstage (see
the unities). Brecht, who took an intellectual rather than an emotional approach
to drama, wanted the audience in particular to be aware that it was watching a
play, not participating in a real life situation.
agon is the classical Greek term for struggle. See conflict, dramatic situation,
and opposition.
agroikos. See dramatis personae.
alazon. See dramatis personae.
Aldwych farce. A sequence of plays written by the British playwright Ben
Travers (1886–1980) mounted in London from 1925–1933 at the Aldwych
Theatre. The original production was of A Cuckoo in the Nest.
amateur night. An evening in a theater or club featuring non-professionals or
newcomers to the stage. Karaoke bars often require their patrons to sing popular
songs to recorded music.
amateur player. One who acts in plays but is not a professional actor. See
masque.
amateur shooting. See camera techniques.
amphitheater. An outdoor theater.
anagnorisis is the classical Greek term for the protagonist of a tragedy’s
recognition of his or her impending doom.
angel. Angels are wealthy people who, for one reason or another, invest in
theatrical or cinematic productions.
antagonist. That which opposes the protagonist. See dramatic situation and
dramatis personae.
antimasque. The opposite of a masque.
apron. The apron is the lip of the stage forward of the curtain which marks the
proscenium arch proper;
arena theater. Theater-in-the-round. See theater.
aria. A song in a musical production, in particular an opera.
aside. A remark or comment made directly to the audience by an actor by
convention assumed not to have been heard by the cast onstage. For more
information on this subject, see The Book of Dialogue.
auditorium. A combination stage and lecture hall; see theater.
auteur. A director who, like Alfred Hitchcock, imposes his personal stamp and
vision upon a film is sometimes called the auteur—French for “author”—of the
film, and the screenwriter, the author of the film-script, is demoted to second
rank creatively. See also camera techniques.
autocue. See prompter.
backcloth, backdrop. A painted scenic curtain hung at the rear of the stage. See
scene and stage.
backlight. Lighting from the rear of the stage. See lighting.
backstage. Behind the scenes. The backstage crew are the people who are
involved in mounting a play upon the stage. “Backstage” also denotes an area of
the theater behind the stage proper.
balance. Equilibrium; offsetting tensions. See stasis.
balcony. The tier of seats above the main floor of a theater.
ballad opera. A type of light opera.
big screen. Cinema, as distinguished from the small screen, television.
biopic. A film biography.
bit player. One who enacts a small role in a play or movie. See also cameo.
bits. Routines in comedies.
black comedy. Black comedy, a twentieth-century phenomenon, is the theatrical
equivalent of black humor in fiction. Theater of the absurd is typically black
comedy—see the discussion of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an
Author, which is also an example of metadrama.
blackface. Makeup used in a minstrel show.
black moment. That point in a screenplay when the chances of the protagonist
hang in the balance.
blackout. A technique of film editing by means of which the screen goes
momentarily black. There may also be a stage blackout.
blocking. The disposition of the players and their movements scene by scene.
See director and mise en scéne.
blocking character. A secondary antagonist. See dramatis personae.
blooper. A speech or acting error by a television performer. The UK equivalent
of this American term is bloomer.
bomb. To fail badly; a failed dramatic production.
bomolochos. See dramatis personae.
bon mot. A witty bit of repartee such as is to be found in high comedy.
bourgeois drama. A synonym for melodrama.
box, boxes. Private seating in a theater.
box office. That spot in a theater where tickets are sold.
box set. A particular arrangement for a play’s set.
boyish hero. The protagonist of a melodrama.
Broadway musical. The American version of a musical.
Broadway theater. The theater in which the most prestigious American plays
are performed. Broadway theater is the goal of every American playwright, as
the theatre district is of the British dramatist.
burlesque show, burley-cue. The burlesque show, sometimes called the
“burley-cue” by its vaudeville patrons, contained songs, skits, dances, satire of
current events, and comic acts. It was a vulgar version of the revue. See musical
comedy and revue.
burletta. Burletta, also called ballad opera, was a form of musical comedy
containing broad humor, rhyming dialogue, and new lyrics set to old tunes which
survived until the eighteenth century in the work of such playwrights as John
Gay (1685–1732) whose The Beggar’s Opera was revived in the twentieth
century as Kurt Weill’s Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera).
buskins. Two items of costume have become synonyms for tragedy and comedy:
buskins were “lift-boots” worn by tragic actors to give them more height, and
socks were worn by comic actors to decrease their size.
cameo. A small role played by a famous actor or other celebrity.
cameo actor. The cameo actor, usually in motion pictures, is a famous player
who appears briefly on stage, as for instance Alfred Hitchcock, the motion
picture director who always gave himself a cameo role in his movies.
camera angles. The long shot is a panoramic camera angle focusing on an
action or object at a distance, sometimes called the establishing shot because it
sets up the scene and situation. To pan the camera is to move it to follow the
action at a distance. The medium shot shows the object in context from a closer
angle, as for instance lovers kissing in a sylvan bower. The close-up is a shot that
gets very near to its focused object. If the object is seen from above or below, the
camera is taking a tilt shot up or down. A high-angle shot is a tilt down shot, and
a low-angle shot is a tilt up shot, both from a considerable distance. The zoom
shot races in from a distance, the tracking or traveling shot follows a moving
object, sometimes from a crane (a crane shot). A freeze is the movie equivalent
of a photographic still shot, that is to say, it is a snapshot or a portrait embedded
in a moving picture (“still shots” are used to publicize movies in theater lobbies
and elsewhere). A soft focus means a deliberately blurry camera focus, either of
the whole shot or of the background or foreground of the shot, for particular
purposes, such as not to show an actress’ poor complexion in a close-up.
camera techniques. A shot is that part of a television or film production that
corresponds with a scene in a stage play, or that represents one complete camera
roll between the director’s call for action and his order to cut. Normal film
projection speed is twenty-four frames per second; if it is projected at anything
less, it is being shown in slow motion (slomo)
cast. The dramatis personae of a play.
catastasis is the classical Greek term for climax.
catastrophe is the classical Greek term for the winding-up or denouement of the
plot of a tragedy.
catharsis is the classical Greek term for a purgation of the emotions of the
viewers of a tragedy.
chamber opera. A one-act opera requiring a minimum of characters, scenes, and
musicians.
character actor. One of the dramatis personae who portrays a particular type of
person, other than the protagonist or antagonist of a play.
choragos. The leader of the chorus. See also dramatis personae.
choreographed movement. Dance. See masque and noh play.
chorus. In effect the chorus, led by its leader the choragos, is the vox populi, the
voice of the people discussing the situation of the tragic hero. Aristotle said that
it is necessary to consider the chorus as one of the characters of the tragedy, for
as a whole it interacts with the protagonist and the other dramatis personae,
complementing them and extending the drama. See tragedy and opera.
chronicle play. The chronicle or history play was a late Elizabethan historical
drama based upon Holinshed’s Chronicles and other books of the period having
to do with events of British history. Such stage productions were full of
spectacle, pageant (flamboyant display), and scenes of warfare. They were
didactic in nature and took as its their subject matter historical situations
arranged in chronological order. Though chronicle plays often dealt with people
of high rank, they were neither tragedy nor comedy, and they were aimed at a
popular, not an aristocratic audience.
cinema. Motion pictures, moving pictures, the movies, “the silver screen.”
cinema novo. A 1970s Brazilian school of moviemaking featuring melodrama
and fantasy.
cinema verité. Cinema verité (direct cinema) utilizes camera techniques and
materials, such as fast film (which is grainier than slow film), that simulate
amateur shooting and film developing so as to give the audience the impression
that the scenes depicted were caught by passersby through happenstance. The
idea is to lead the viewer to believe that there is a certain element of sincerity in
what is being seen in a cinema or television production.
cinerama. The invention of wide-screen filming by Fred Waller in 1952 which
utilized three projectors, each of which threw a third of one scene onto a screen.
However, this technique was too cumbersome and was followed the following
year by CinemaScope, the process developed by Twentieth Century Fox and first
used in The Robe. Other studios developed their own systems including
SuperScope, WarnerScope, and Panavision. Coupled with Dolby stereoscopic
sound and even SurroundSound, the wide screen enlarged the realistic ambience
of the audience considerably.
cliffhanger. A melodrama that depends upon suspense.
climax. The ultimate conflict between the protagonist or hero of a drama, and
the antagonist or opponent of the protagonist. See screenplay.
closed ending. A neatly tied-up conclusion to a play. See intrusion.
closet drama. A play written particularly to be read rather than produced is
called a closet drama, see problem play.
close-up. A near camera angle.
colloquy. A synonym for dialogue.
comedy. Many comic plays are examples of low comedy, as is the Italian
seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte which was a form of improvisational
theater that depended on a scenario that specified entrances and exits, but
otherwise allowed the actors to draw upon stock dramatis personae such as
“Pantalone” the merchant; a pair of servants, one clever—Arlecchino, and one
foolish—Pulcinella; the physician, Graziano; and, of course, young lovers. This
sort of theater also relied upon bits (stock situations and lines) and pieces of
stage business called lazzi (in the plural, lazzo in the singular).
comedy of errors. A play that postulates a complex plot that depends heavily
upon coincidence—serendipitous occurrences—but that eventually works out to
the happy ending wherein the knots are unraveled and the lovers are united.
comedy of humours. The comedy of humours, those humours being the ancient
bodily secretions that were believed to control the personalities of people—
blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile—had stock characters that represented
types of people (stereotypes) whose humors were out of balance, such as the
miles gloriosus or swaggering warrior; the senex iratus or angry father; the
dolosus servus or crafty servant; the greedy miser, the foolish spendthrift, the
jealous husband, and so forth.
comedy of manners. A type of high comedy that mocks the behavior of the
upper classes.
comedy of morals. A type of critical comedy that skewers hypocrisy.
comedy of wit. A type of high comedy that relies primarily on clever dialogue
rather than on action.
commercial message. A television advertisement. See teleplay.
comic opera. A synonym for light opera.
comic relief denotes intervals of comedy or humor in tragedies, said to provide a
lessening of tension, but often, in fact, by contrast increasing the tension or the
terror of the drama.
comic script. A screenplay for a sitcom or other teleplay or cinema comedy.
commedia dell’arte. Comedies in the comic tradition of Italian theater.
complication. An element that entangles the plot of a play, in particular a
tragicomedy.
compound mode. The use of more than one type of performance in a drama, as
for instance, dialogue, song, dance, and mime, as in the masque and noh play, or
of a combination of prose and verse in the script.
conflict. The agon or contest occurring between the protagonist and antagonist
of a drama resulting in a dramatic situation.
cosmic irony occurs when the gods or fate provide the solution to a problem a
moment too late, or at an inappropriate moment as when, in a comedy, the deus
ex machina descends to rescue the protagonist who is just taking his last breath.
costume, costumier. The costumier designs and supervises the making of
costumes.
counterplayer. A member of the dramatis personae of a play who plots against
the protagonist.
coup de théâtre. A stunning reversal of fortune in heroic drama. The actors who
filled these rôles would emote (overact) and upstage (overshadow) one another,
delivering their lines with bombast (inflated oratorical style).
court comedy. A relative of the masque, court comedy was written to be played
at the court of Queen Elizabeth I.
crane shot. See camera angles.
creature-feature. A horror film featuring bug-eyed monsters (BEMs) or aliens.
crisis. A rising action of a play or screenplay.
critical comedy. Satires like Tartuffe by Molière, (Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622–
1673), which attacks religious hypocrisy, are sometimes called critical comedies
or comedies of morals.
crowd scene. In a cinema or television production, a shot of an assemblage of
people of some sort involving those dramatis personae called “extras.”
curtain. The device that separates the audience from the stage.
curtain raiser. Any preliminary presentation or short play preceding the
beginning of the main feature.
cut. A fast-transition camera technique in film editing.
cutaway. A feature of the box set.
denouement. The result of a series of events or episodes in a drama, the
resolution of the plot.
deus ex machina. A stage device that allows the gods to descend out of the
heavens into the midst of a play.
deuteragonist. A secondary character in a tragedy. See dramatis personae.
dialogue. Spoken conversation among characters in a play. For a complete
disquisition on the subject of dialogue, see The Book of Dialogue.
dianoia is the classical Greek term for thought.
dinner theater. A type of twentieth-century theater-cum-restaurant where both
plays and food are served.
direct cinema. A synonym for cinema verité. See camera techniques.
director. One who oversees the artistic aspects of a drama or movie and
supervises its production, including its blocking; see also auteur.
disaster film. Any movie that is designed to overwhelm the viewer with scenes
of some natural cataclysm such as a ship sinking, earthquake, tidal wave, fire,
and so forth.
disguisings were masques performed in the schools. See academic drama.
disquisitory drama is a synonym for problem play.
dissolve. A type of film editing in which one scene slowly disappears from the
screen as another grows to take its place.
divertissement. An entr’acte to distract the audience while the scene is changed
or while an intermission is in progress.
docudrama. A docudrama is a cross between a documentary, the depiction of
actual events, and a fictive play based on such events.
documentary. A film or television program based upon facts and presented in
an informative manner. It may consist of interviews and news clips presented by
a narrator.
documentary theater. See Theatre of Fact.
dolosus servus. A member of the cast of a comedy of humours.
domestic tragedy. Is a synonym for romantic tragedy.
downstage. The area closest to the audience, near the pit, where the musicians
are situated beneath the stage.
dramatic script. A teleplay.
dramatic situation. The desire, on the part of a protagonist, to be, to have, or to
do something, together with the opposition of an antagonist—another person, a
circumstance, or a condition, resulting in an agon or conflict which must reach a
resolution. See the chapter “The Genres of Fiction” for a more complete
discussion of this term.
dramatis personae. The dramatis personae are the characters of the drama
played by actors and actresses, the cast of the play, including the leading man
and leading lady, character actors and actresses, and other members such as
counterplayers who plot against the protagonist. The personae of tragedy have
been discussed above; they are masked or stylized characters who are
representatives not of abstractions as such, but, first, of historical or
mythological figures and, second, of types of people (see typecasting), plus one
or, sometimes, two choruses, usually representative of the citizens, which
comment on the action.
Types of characters to be found in Greek literature other than the protagonist
and the antagonist are the agroikos or dour rustic, the alazon or braggart, the
bomolochos or clown, the deuteragonist and tritagonist or second and third most
important personae of the drama; the eiron or dissembling confidant, and the
senex or senex iratus, a blocking character other than the antagonist who tends
to stand in the way of the protagonist’s achieving his or her desire.
dramaturge. A dramaturge is the translator of a play or its adaptor from
another medium or language. May also simply be a synonym for playwright.
drame. Another word to describe a problem play.
drawing room comedy. A high comedy whose humor derives from the antics of
the uppercrust.
dubbing. Dubbing may mean various things: the superaddition of music, or
sound effects, or voice to a film; the substitution of voice dialogue in a different
language from the original language used in a film, or even a voice-over: In
cinema and television we are used to watching characters in action and hearing a
voice dubbed in over the action that lets us hear what is in the character’s mind
while he or she is doing whatever is being done. Actually, the voice-over is an
adaptation of narrative technique, and it can be used in stage drama as well.
duet. An opera highlight sung by two people.
dumb show is an interlude of pantomime within a spoken drama. See also
masque and noh play.
eiron. A member of the dramatis personae of a play who is the dissembling
confidante of the protagonist.
emoting. Overacting, as in a melodrama.
ending. The conclusion of a play, which may be either closed, with all loose
ends tied up, or open, that is, ending ambiguously. The latter sorts of endings are
generally to be found in the modern period. See intrusion.
engénue. A young female character, innocent and inexperienced. See
melodrama.
ensemble. Musicians, singers, dancers, or actors performing in a group. See
opera.
entr’acte. The entr’acte is the period of time separating the acts of a play, or it is
a divertissement—like a ballet or other interlude such as a plampede, a
harlequinade (a clown drama), or a pantomime, which are short plays, generally
satiric or comic in nature, performed between the acts of a longer play, often a
tragedy.
epic theatre. The theory of Bertolt Brecht in the 1920s, derived from Aristotle,
which argued for a higher level of political relevance in drama. See A-effect.
episode. One scene or action in a related series, as for instance one incident in a
plot. See melodrama.
epitasis is the classical Greek term for rising action.
establishing shot. See camera angles.
expanded cinema. A multi-media performance in which actors on stage interact
with a projected film.
extra. The least members of the cast of a motion picture are the extras who are
used to fill out a crowd scene.
extravaganza. An entertainment or performance that relies on spectacle, music,
and elaborate display. See musical.
f/x. Special effects in cinema and television.
fade, fade-in, fade-out. A gradual lightening or dimming of the scene in cinema
and television. See film editing.
farce is light, broad comedy that depends upon a fast-paced and intricate plot,
stereotyped characters, even slapstick—collisions, chases, prat-falls and physical
assault, as in the puppet plays called Punch and Judy shows in which the puppets
slap each other with paddles, which is the origin of the term, “slapstick.”
fast film. A type of film that does not require much light. See film speed.
fate worse than death. What may happen to the heroine if she is caught in the
clutches of the villain of the piece. See melodrama.
feature film. A cinema drama of at least 34 minutes in length (films of shorter
duration were known as shorts or short subjects), usually with at least one star
performer in a lead role. During the days of the double feature shown in theaters,
there would be a main feature and a B-feature, or cheaper production with lesserknown actors in the lead roles, plus one or two shorts such as a newsreel, a
cartoon, or a serial drama shown in segments from week to week, such as The
Perils of Pauline (see cliff-hanger). Subsequently, the B-movie designated a
second-rate production featuring, probably, B-movie actors ¾ performers, such
as Ronald Reagan, known to be cast in such roles and unlikely to be cast in
better productions.
feature television script. A major teleplay.
feelie. A science-fiction concept fielded by Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave
New World which depicted a movie which an audience might not merely see and
hear, but experience through the senses of touch, smell, and emotion.
film editing. Cuts are transitions within a film between scenes or shots. A rough
cut is the first stage in editing a film. It is made by choosing one version of every
shot and putting them into a series that narrates the story and maintains
continuity. A straight cut is the immediate transition from one scene or shot to
another, with nothing intervening, corresponding to a blackout in the theater,
which is more rapid than the “lights down and out” direction. In the dissolve one
scene fades into the succeeding scene, whereas in the fade (fade-in or -out) the
screen (the television screen or the “big screen”) wanes to black before the next
scene waxes to full. With the rapid expansion of special effects, all sorts of
fades, dissolves, blackouts, and more innovative transitions are possible,
including old effects like the wipe, in which one scene takes over the screen from
the left or right as the old scene is wiped off it, and the iris, which appears as a
central insert on the screen and expands until it has forced the last scene out of
the edges of the picture. A virtual cornucopia of transitions without names could
be seen in the 1994–1995 season of the television sitcom Home Improvement.
When a film or videotape has been developed or processed, edited, and put in the
can (all its reels into containers), it is ready for duplication and distribution to
theaters.
film noir. American cinema of 1940–1960 featuring actors playing gangsters
and other demimonde types, desolation of spirit and place, cynicism, dim
illumination including true night shots on location, deliberately framing shots
contrasting light and shadow : see Expressionism
film projection speed. The rapidity at which a reel of film is played. See
camera techniques.
film speed. The relative ability of film to require amounts of light. Fast film
requires little light to take an image, but slow speed requires more. Generally,
fast film is for indoor shots, and slower film is for outdoor photography.
filmscript. The scenario or text for a screenplay.
flick. A slang term for a film or movie.
flies. The flies is an area located above the stage of a theater where various
equipment is located including overhead lights, equipment for the raising and
lowering of backdrops, sets and specialized gear such as is required to introduce
the deus ex machina onto the stage, as for instance when Peter Pan flies onstage.
In brief, the overhead stage space of a theater.
floodlight. Intense lighting, such as is used in cinema and television
photography.
foil. A foil is a straight man, often called the second banana, who stands
opposite the comedian in a stage act and is the brunt of, or helps set up the jokes.
George Burns was Gracie Allen’s straight man. For an entire book written as a
dialogue between the Author and his foil, “Fred Foyle,” see The Book of
Dialogue.
folk play. A folk play is any play of unknown origin, generally performed
annually, or at any rate regularly, as a ritual tradition, but occasionally, like the
medieval French Play of Daniel, discovered through archival research, or
reconstructed, as in the case of The Book of Job which has been restored in the
twentieth century as a Greek tragedy. See also liturgical drama.
footlights. The illuminations that line the lip of a stage. See lighting.
foreshadowing. A hint of things to come; see movement.
forward. Anything that helps a plot to advance; see movement.
fourth wall. The front of a box set facing the audience.
frame, freeze, freeze frame. A frame (still) is a single photograph in a film. See
camera angles and film editing.
furniture. The props that are used in a set.
gag, gagline, gagman, gagster. A gag is a joke; a gagline is a humorous bit of
dialogue; a gagman is a writer who supplies jokes to a gagster—a comedian or
“stand-up comic”—or to cinema, stage, or radio productions. For a complete
disquisition on the subject of dialogue, see The Book of Dialogue.
Gaiety Girl. A chorus member at the Old Gaiety Theatre in the Strand, London,
and in subsequent productions at the New Gaiety Theatre.
genre. Type, or kind, of literature. Drama is a literary genre; subgenres of drama
include tragedy, comedy, liturgical drama, and so forth.
hamartia is the classical Greek term for the tragic flaw.
hanging ending. An ambiguous conclusion of a story or drama. See ending.
harlequinade. A comic stage performance in which the clown Harlequin is the
leading character or, in general, a clown drama or entr’acte. See also mummery,
pantomime.
heroic drama. The heroic drama of the English Restoration was overblown,
having to do with larger-than-life protagonists, members of the nobility or
royalty, who performed superhuman deeds in the name of honor and love.
high-angle shot. A photograph from a high camera angle.
high comedy includes plays in which the airs, morals and snobbery of the upper
classes is satirized as in the comedy of manners; or plays in which there is much
banter among the personae (repartee) and witty one-liners (the bon mot), but
little action, as in the comedy of wit of the Restoration theater that followed the
return of the monarchy in England in the seventeenth century. Such a play set in
the single scene of the drawing room is called a drawing room comedy.
history play is a synonym for chronicle play. In the English Renaissance, a play
derived from Holinshed’s Chronicles or other histories.
horse opera. A cowboy movie or serial; see oater and melodrama.
improvisational theater. Off-the-cuff theatrical entertainments, generally of the
comic variety; spontaneous comedies.
incidental music. Music composed to accompany certain scenes or acts in a
play that does not otherwise use music as an integral part of the performance, as
for instance is the case with cinema scores.
infomercial. A portmanteau word combining “information” and “commercial”
to depict a television program that is in fact a long commercial message. See also
infotainment.
infotainment. A neologism referring to learning or education presented as
entertainment, as often on the History or Learning channels in the twenty-first
century.
in medias res. Beginning a story “in the center of the action”; see point of
attack.
intellectual drama. A theater piece in which theme is of more importance than
plot, character, or action. An idea-play, such as those written by Henrik Ibsen
and George Bernard Shaw, The Wild Duck, being an example by the former and
Major Barbara by the latter. See problem play.
interlocutor. The questioner in an interview. Also, the emcee or master-ofceremonies of a minstrel show or black-face revue who stands between the two
end-men of the chorus with whom he exchanges quips and jokes.
interlude. A short performance such as a ballet, a pantomime, a tableau, or an
entr’acte that is staged between the acts of a longer drama.
interview. A conversation between two people, one of whom is the subject, and
the other the questioner or interlocutor.
intrusion is something forcing its way into the play that shatters the stasis and
changes everything from that point forward—it can be something physical, or it
can be a recognition of something, such as the nature of the situation, or of one’s
own character. Opposing forces renew the conflict until stasis is reestablished at
the conclusion of the play if it has a resolution, but if it does not, then the ending
will hang ambiguously, it will be open-ended rather than closed.
invidia is the classical Greek term for envy.
iris. Is a film editing technique in which a succeeding scene appears as a central
insert on the screen and expands until it has forced the previous scene out of the
edges of the picture.
jester. A comic character, such as Harlequin, in a clown drama.
joke line. A line of humorous dialogue in a theatrical performance. For a
complete disquisition on the subject of dialogue, see The Book of Dialogue.
kabuki play. A Japanese drama similar to the noh play. However, it is less
formal and ritualized, more eclectic in its use of narrative, dance, acrobatics and
music from various sources, many of them traditional.
karaoke bar. See amateur night.
kinescope. In early television, a film made of a live transmission. It was
replaced by videotape.
lazzi. Jokes, “material,” stage business. See comedies.
leading lady, leading man. The female or male lead in a dramatic performance;
see dramatis personae.
legitimate theater is a term used to distinguish drama enacted live before a live
audience in a theater from non-live presentations as in cinema or on television,
or from lesser theatrical productions.
libretto. The text for a musical play of some sort, such as an opera or operetta;
for an example, see “The Fog,” above.
lighting. The illumination of a stage. The footlights are the illuminations that
line the lip of the proscenium, but there are various other kinds of lights in the
modern theater including spotlights which are at times directed to illuminate
specific actors, backlights, which illuminate actors from behind so as to throw
them into silhouette, sometimes against a scrim.
light opera (comic opera, opéra bouffe, opera buffa, operetta) is, as the terms
suggest, humorous or satirical opera which contains all the elements of opera
except, sometimes, recitativ.
lip. The front edge of a stage separating it from the orchestra.
little theater. The “little theater” can be located nearly anywhere, in any city or
village. It is noncommercial in character, and it often is experimental.
liturgical drama. Forms of liturgical drama, that is, plays written to be
performed in the church or as part of a religious ritual, include the morality play,
which is a Medieval verse or compound mode allegory in dramatic form. It
rehearses the pilgrimage of man’s progress toward death and his hope of
salvation from sin through repentance and submission to God’s mercy. Other
than the pilgrimage, the elements are the psychomachia, or strife of the Seven
Deadly Sins aided by the Vices with the Four Cardinal and Three Theological
Virtues over possession of Everyman’s soul; and the totentanz or Dance of
Death. Besides Death, other personified abstractions are Conscience, Conviction
of Sin, and Repentance. Three other Medieval liturgical plays are the miracle
play, which depicts Bible stories or the lives of the saints; the mystery play,
which is based upon the Biblical story of humanity’s Creation, Fall, and
Redemption, and the passion play which deals with the events in the life of
Christ before the Resurrection—between the Last Supper and the Crucifixion.
See also “liturgical poetry” in The Book of Forms.
lobby. The room or hall that serves as the entranceway to a theater.
long shot. A distant camera angle.
low-angle shot. A camera angle from below the subject.
low comedy. Vulgar comedies.
lyric tragedy was a form of opera popular during the reign of Louis XIV (1638–
1715) which mixed song and spectacle (special effects). A modern version is La
Voix Humane of Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), in which the special effects were
provided by the recent technical innovation, the telephone. A mock-lyric tragedy
is William Schuman’s (1910–1992) The Mighty Casey.
main action. The primary conflict in a drama; see point of attack.
main feature. That play or other dramatic production which is the featured
attraction of the performance, which may include shorter productions such as a
curtain raiser, plampede or entr’acte.
manly hero. The protagonist of a melodrama.
mask, masque. The mask or masque, which dates from the Renaissance, is a
relatively short verse or compound mode drama performed by masked figures. It
includes song, speeches, dance, mime (pantomime, mummery), tableau (freezescene) and spectacle (lavish display) and was a forerunner of opera.
Contemporary masques are largely literary rather than dramatic (see closet
drama). E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) wrote masques, among them one titled
“Santa Claus,” and Robert Frost (1874–1963) wrote some as well.
Ben Jonson in the seventeenth century wrote many masques and antimasques
which were largely choreographed dances by mummers, that is, professional
actors, dressed in hideous and repulsive masks and costumes. These grotesques
were subdued and banished by the courtly amateur players for whom the
production was mounted. See disguisings.
material is another word for the jokes or gags of a comedian; see lazzi.
matinee. The daytime showing of a cinematic or theatrical production.
matinee idol. The matinee idol is usually a male star who in romantic
productions is able to draw the adult female audience into the theaters. See
comedies and comedy of humours.
medium shot. A camera angle that shows a subject in its surroundings, not
close-up or at a considerable distance.
melodrama is any stage production, movie, radio play or television drama (soap
opera, sitcom—situation comedy, or “oater, ” i.e., western “horse opera”) that
uses stereotypes: characters who are two-dimensional and representative not of
individual personalities so much as classes or kinds of people as for instance the
villain or the evil antagonist, the ingenue or innocent maiden, the boyish or
manly hero, who often rescues the maiden from the clutches of the villain.
Melodramas also typically employ the depiction of exaggerated emotions
(emoting) and of overblown conflicts, and often they depict middle-class
characters and situations, in which case they are examples of bourgeois drama.
Serial melodramas, such as those that were once shown in movie theaters, were
called cliffhangers because each episode ended with the hero or heroine poised
to be dashed over a cliff or about to meet some other perilous end; the
succeeding episode would begin at that turning point (plot point) and would end
the suspense by showing how the protagonist had been saved from a fate (that
was sometimes) worse than death.
metadrama. Drama about drama, such as Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search
of an Author, discussed in the introductory essay of this chapter. (See metapoem
in The Book of Forms).
mezzanine. The lower balcony of a theater, or the first row or two of a balcony.
midpoint. The halfway mark of a screenplay.
Mimographer. One who writes farces.
miles gloriosus. A character in a comedy of humours.
mime. Originally, the portrayal on stage of well-known situations and characters
by means of farce, mockery, coarse dialogue, and mummery. In the modern
sense, mime is acting without words, in gestures and actions only, pantomime.
minstrel show. The American minstrel show was, during the nineteenth century,
a burlesque in blackface: White men (not women) were made up to look like
caricatures of people of color. Al Jolson carried the tradition into the twentieth
century. For some of the personnel of the minstrel show, see interlocutor.
miracle play. A liturgical drama that depicts Bible stories or the lives of the
saint.
mise en scéne. The setting or set of a play, including the arrangement of all
actors and props.
mock-lyric tragedy. A take-off on a lyric tragedy.
monolog, monologue. A passage spoken by a lone actor on a stage. See also
soliloquy. For an example of a story (or a play) written entirely as a monologue
(though there are two characters present on stage), see “Savants” in The Book of
Dialogue.
morality play. A liturgical drama that rehearses the pilgrimage of man’s
progress toward death and his hope of salvation from sin through repentance and
submission to God’s mercy.
motion pictures. Movies, the cinema.
mounting. Producing a play.
mouthpiece. A character in a play who speaks for the author; see dramatis
personae. For an example of an entire book written using a mouthpiece, see The
Book of Dialogue.
movement denotes the pace of the action of the play. A forward is anything at all
that moves the plot ahead, whether an action performed by a character, a
foreshadowing or hint of things to come, or a setup of some kind, as for instance
a character picking up an object and handling it seemingly at random, but
drawing attention to it thereby; then, when later on it becomes important, the
audience will remember its significance.
movies, motion pictures, moving pictures. See cinema.
mummer. A comic actor wearing a mask. See mummery and masque.
mummery. Comic or satirical performances by actors wearing masks.
musical, musical comedy. The term “musical”” is nowadays applied to the
American or British musical plays sometimes referred to as Broadway musicals.
These productions are often extravaganzas and nearly always humorous except
in such crossbreeds as Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.
musical play, musical theater. Any theatrical performance that requires song
and dance, but not including plays that have only incidental music, such as the
Broadway musical, light opera, lyric tragedy, opera, and vaudeville.
mystery play. A liturgical drama based upon the Biblical story of humanity’s
Creation, Fall, and Redemption.
narrator. One who tells a story. See film editing, and interview. For much more
information on this subject, see The Book of Dialogue.
New Wave. New Wave (nouvelle vague), an early 1960s film style similar to
cinema verité, utilized various techniques that gave the viewer both a sense of
the chaotic nature of existence and of the personality of the auteur.
noh play. A classical Japanese compound mode drama, somewhat similar to the
masque and to tragedy. It is allusive and impressionistic. It uses traditional
subjects, masked figures, a chorus, pantomime or dumb show, music, and
choreographed movement. The Modernist Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote
plays that were influenced by the noh.
nouvelle vague is the French for New Wave.
nuntius. A nuntius is the messenger to the protagonist of a classical tragedy who
recognizes in the message his impending doom.
oater. A western; see melodrama also.
obligatory scene. An obligatory scene, also called a scène à faire, is one that is
so obviously called for by the plot of a well-made play that the playwright is
obliged to write it.
off-Broadway. Off-Broadway theater is nearly as good as Broadway, at least so
far as prestige goes, though the theaters in Greenwich Village or Soho are
generally smaller houses.
offstage. The areas of a theater including backstage, which is the area of the
theater behind the stage, and the wings, the areas offstage to the right and left.
one-liner. A joke told in a single breath: “Women are wonderful—take my wife.
Please!”
open-ended. An inconclusive or ambiguous ending of a story or drama.
opera is classical musical theater consisting of recitative, which is dialogue
declaimed, half-sung; arias, which are solos; duets, trios, quartets, and so forth;
choruses, and various groupings of singers up to and including the entire cast in
ensemble performance.
opéra bouffe (French), opera buffa, (Italian),
operetta (English). See light opera.
opposition. That which stands against a protagonist. See dramatic situation.
opsis is the classical Greek term for spectacle.
orchestra. The area below the lip of a proscenium stage where the musicians are
situated, or that portion of the auditorium closest to the musicians.
outline. The scenario of a stage or film story.
pan. A bad review of a dramatic production. See also camera angles.
pantomime. Acting with silent gestures. See masque and noh play.
pantomimist. One who writes pantomimes.
parabasis is the classical Greek term for the aside.
paradigm. The model of something, in particular, in this context, a screenplay.
passion play. A liturgical drama that deals with the events in the life of Christ
before the Resurrection—between the Last Supper and the Crucifixion.
pastoral drama was a sort of expanded dramatic eclogue. Practitioners in
England were Samuel Daniel (1562?-1619), John Fletcher (1579–1625), and
Ben Jonson. Set in the countryside, they featured rural characters such as
shepherds and shepherdesses, idyllic scenes, and simple themes.
pathos is the classical Greek term for pity or sympathy.
patter song. A particular feature of English light opera is the patter song, which
is witty, clever, and delivered at high speed, “trippingly on the tongue,” as in the
operettas of W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900).
peripeteia is the classical Greek term for peripety meaning a sudden reversal of
fortune.
personified abstractions. Allegorical representations of ideas or qualities, as for
instance evil represented by a type of human being or demon, or love
represented by a naked infant or cherub. See liturgical drama and “Livevil: A
Mask,” above.
picture-frame stage. A proscenium stage.
pièce à thèse. The French term for problem play.
pièce bien faite. The French term for well-made play.
pilot. A television production made on speculation as a test vehicle for a
projected teevee series.
pit. The area beneath the lip of the proscenium stage where the musicians are
located. For another definition, see theater.
plampede. A theatrical diversion or entr’acte.
platform. The main area of a proscenium stage. See theater.
play to the pit. In theater, to aim at reaching the lowest common denominator of
the audience. See theater.
playwright. The author of a play.
plot. The series of related rising actions leading to the climax in a written or
theatrical narrative; the thread of associated incidents that makes a story,
including its beginning, middle, and end.
plot point. A turning point in the plot of a screenplay.
point of attack is that instant in a play when the main action of the plot begins,
often in medias res, in the middle of the main action.
praxis is the classical Greek term for action.
pratfall. A deliberate comic error by an actor in a comedy or farce; slapstick.
problem play. The problem play or thesis play (pièce à thèse), such as was
written by Henrik Ibsen or George Bernard Shaw, was an intellectual drama that
posed a contemporary problem and then explored, largely through dialogue
rather than action, the various possible solutions to the problem. Such a play
would correspond in theater with the thematic story of fiction, for character, plot,
and atmosphere are subordinated to the manipulation of ideas. Its predecessor
was the French drame, a disquisitory drama written to display the interaction of
ideas through dialogue. Often such a play is better read than enacted, as for
instance the section of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman titled “Don
Juan in Hell.”
producer. The producer of a play or film is that person who finds the money to
back the production and supervises it financially.
production. See backstage and property.
prompter. Someone located in a prompter’s corner or in a prompt box who uses
a promptabook to whisper a cue (the next word or phrase) of a line forgotten by a
performer on stage. A promptabook is a copy of the play that has been marked
with notes and directions for performance. A prompt box is an area below the
stage hidden from the audience but visible to actors on stage where a prompter is
located. In theaters with no prompt box there will be a prompter’s corner in the
wings to one side or the other; the prompt side is that side of the stage where the
promptser’s corner is located, generally the side of the stage to the right of an
actor facing the audience.
An autocue is an apparatus that takes the place of a prompter by displaying
the full text to the actor or speaker on stage or before the television cameras—in
the latter case the autocue is called a teleprompter and it is usually located just
below the camera the performer is facing.
property. A play or other dramatic production which is owned by or optioned to
a producer. See also stage properties.
props. Stage properties; see set and setting.
proscenia. The plural of proscenium. In Greek classic theater “proscenia”
denoted the buildings in back of the stage.
proscenium. That portion of the stage located between the curtain and the
orchestra.
proscenium arch. The frame of a proscenium or “picture frame” stage from
which the curtain depends.
protagonist. The main character of a story; see dramatic situation, dramatis
personae and tragedy.
psychomachia. The strife of the Seven Deadly Sins aided by the Vices with the
Four Cardinal and Three Theological Virtues over possession of Everyman’s
soul; see liturgical drama.
Punch and Judy show. A traditional kind of puppet play starring these two
characters who hit each other with bats; see farce and slapstick.
puppet play. A farce or other children’s entertainment featuring movable dolls
manipulated by a puppeteer behind the scenes.
put-in-the-can. Finish a cinema; see film editing.
quartet. A four-part song; see opera.
radio. An aural broadcast medium.
radio play. A drama written to be performed on radio. A radio play is a play to
be heard only, not seen (see the closet drama). For an example of a radio play,
see The Book of Dialogue.
raisonneur. A “chorus character,” one who performs the function of a Greek
chorus in that he or she comments on the action of the play, sometimes speaking
as a surrogate (stand-in, mouthpiece) for the author and acting like the
omniscient or ironical narrator of a Victorian novel.
recitative. Speech in an opera that is not quite song.
recognition, recognition scene. That point in a tragedy or other play when the
protagonist for the first time understands the consequences of his or her past
actions or present situation. See intrusion.
reel. A spool of film.
regional theater mixes amateur casts headed at times by one or two professional
leading actors.
repartee. Rapid, witty dialogue in which one speaker attempts to outdo the
other. See high comedy.
repertoire. The stock of plays kept current by a repertory theater.
repertory theater. Repertory theater keeps a backlist of plays that can be called
to active production periodically; this stock is called its repertoire, a word that
also signifies the plays or musical productions an actor or singer has committed
to memory.
resolution. The wrapping up of the plot of a story or drama; see denouement and
intrusion.
Restoration theater. The revival of the proscribed drama in Great Britain after
the Puritan interregnum and during the restored monarchy in 1660. See high
comedy.
revenge tragedy. The Elizabethan revenge tragedy contained elements similar
to those of the chronicle play and usually concerned itself with the protagonist’s
pursuit of vengeance for the loss of a loved one.
revue. A musical entertainment made up of skits, songs, and dances, sometimes
related thematically, but often not, containing elements of satire, extravaganza
and spectacle.
rogue comedy. A satirical play that has as its protagonist a lovable rascal, like
Ben Jonson’s “Alchemist,” is called a rogue comedy.
rôle. A dramatic character part assigned to an actor or actress who is a member
of the cast (dramatis personae) of a play.
roll. A continuous film sequence; see camera techniques.
romantic comedy is a modern play that is similar to the New Comedy of
Menander, discussed above. An example of romantic comedy would be
Shakespeare’s as As You Like It, which is set in the Utopia of the Forest of Arden
in which the young lovers meet with many a mishap before they are united.
romantic tragedy is any non-classical form of tragedy; the genre of domestic
tragedy is the invention of such twentieth-century playwrights as Arthur Miller
(b. 1915), Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953), and Tennessee Williams (1911–1983)
whose plays show the “tragedy” inherent in the everyday lives of ordinary
people.
satyr play. An ancient Greek dramatic performance that was ribald, satirical,
and slapstick. It was performed after every third tragedy enacted in a
competition in order to provide relief for the tensions that had been building up
in the audience throughout the performances.
school play is a synonym for academic drama.
scapegoat or “sacrificial lamb,” someone who is blamed for the offenses of
others. It has been argued that the hero of a tragedy is in fact the scapegoat or
“ritual victim” which a society demands as a sacrifice for its own sins.
scenario. The broad outline of the plot of a play or story, giving general
descriptions of characters and events, but not containing details. An outline
summarizes the proposed narrative in five to fifteen pages, whereas a treatment
is from fifteen to thirty pages in length, and it contains more detail, including
illustrations of dialogue. Or the term may denote a completed filmscript or
screenplay for cinema or teleplay for television.
scene. A scene is a lesser unit of the drama than an act; either it specifies a locale
or time different from the previous or succeeding locale or setting, or it signifies
a particular group of actors and actresses on the stage. In this latter sense, if there
is even a partial change of cast (see dramatis personae), a new scene takes place.
A third meaning of “scene” is nearly synonymous with setting or set, as in the
term scenery, which depicts the arrangement of the properties (“props” for short)
on the stage, including such things as backdrops, lighting and other stage effects
and items of stage business and stagecraft.
scène à faire. is the French form of obligatory scene.
scene drop. A kind of curtain. A scene drop, located behind the main curtain, is
a drape that falls to indicate a scene shift or a new act.
screenplay. A drama written for cinema or television. See scenario. The
paradigm of the screenplay is generally three acts long, with a beginning, a
middle, and an end. Act one is the beginning (about thirty minutes), and it opens
with the setup (exposition). At the end of the first act there is the first plot point,
a turning point in the plot which aims the audience toward the second act. Act
two is the middle of the screenplay, and it is twice as long as the first or third act
(sixty minutes); it is broken into two halves at the center of which is the
midpoint or crisis. The first half rises to the midpoint, and the second half falls
through the black moment, when all looks lost for the protagonist in his or her
attempt to achieve the goal, to the second plot point (climax) at the end of act
two, which aims the audience toward the third act. Act three (thirty minutes or
less) is the resolution of the screenplay. For more information about the
screenplay, consult The Book of Dialogue.
scrim is a fabric curtain or backdrop or backcloth that is either transparent or
opaque, depending on the direction of the lighting: if the lighting is from the
front, it is opaque.
script. Any written drama, filmscript, radio play, screenplay, or teleplay. For
more information about all these types of scripts, consult The Book of Dialogue.
second banana. The foil or straight man of a comedian.
senex, senex iratus. A member of the dramatis personae of a comedy of
humours.
serial melodrama. A melodrama performed or filmed in episodes.
set. A set is the physical layout of the stage, including all props and backdrops. A
box set is the stage laid out so as to depict a room with three walls, two at the
sides and one at the rear, the fourth wall being a cutaway—either imagined as
separating the audience from the play, or with a net of scrim (loosely woven
fabric) through which the audience can see if and when the lighting permits.
set piece. A set piece is an artistically formal scene or play, or it is a formula
play.
setting. The place where a scene takes place.
setup. Something earlier in a play that prepares the audience for a succeeding
action or situation. See movement and screenplay.
shot. A photograph; see camera techniques.
showboat. A floating theater.
silver screen. The surface on which a moving picture is shown; also a synonym
for cinema itself.
sitcom. A television situation comedy.
situation comedy. Generally a half-hour teleplay. See melodrama and
television.
slapstick. Crude physical humor; the bat used by Punch and Judy; see puppet
show and farce.
slasher movie, splatter movie. A horror film featuring claws, knives chain saws
¾ anything that can cut and slice and cause the loss of a lot of blood, frequently
featuring teen-agers who always choose to walk into the waiting arms of the
slasher.
slomo. “Slow motion”; see camera techniques.
slow film. A photographic surface that requires much light; see camera
techniques.
slow motion. Running developed motion picture film at a speed slower than that
at which the pictures were taken; see camera techniques.
small screen. Television, in contrast to the big or silver screen, which is cinema.
snuff flick. A pornographic underground film featuring the real violent death of
an unsuspecting person, generally either a woman or a child. These films are
rumored to have existed since the 1960s, but none has been verified, although
faux snuff films have been circulated commercially.
soap opera. A synonym for melodrama.
socks. Part of the wardrobe of the classical Greek actor; see buskins.
soft focus. A slightly out of focus shot, or one taken through a filter; see camera
angles.
soliloquy. A passage spoken by a lone actor on stage. It differs from the
monologue, which assumes an audience, in that it is the character’s private
thoughts verbalized and spoken aloud.
spear-bearer. In opera a spear-bearer is a minor non-speaking character such as
a guard at the palace door. Often such people are members of the chorus.
special effects. Camera, digital, electronic, and mechanical techniques that
simulate scenes and actions. See spectacle.
spectacle. Stage effects of all sorts. See lyric tragedy and masque.
spotlight. Pinpoint lighting on a stage that picks out a particular actor or object.
S.R.O. A theater lobby sign meaning “Standing Room Only.”
stage. An area reserved for public performance of drama. The stage proper is the
area between the curtain and the rear wall of a proscenium.
stage business. An action onstage by a member of the cast to fill in a pause in
the dialogue, to fill in a detail of the story, or to set up a later scene or action. See
also comedies and scene.
stagecraft. Theatrical skill. See scene.
stage effect. Something created on stage that makes a particular impression, as
for instance the ringing of a bell or a mist. See scene, special effects, and
spectacle.
stage left, stage right. The areas of the stage to the left and right respectively as
the actors face the audience.
stage manager. The stage manager is in charge of props, lighting, and the
technical aspects of the drama being produced, See props.
stage properties. “Props.” See scene.
stalls. The seats closest to the stage, nearest the orchestra pit. See theater.
stand-in. A character in a play who speaks for the author; see dramatis personae
and mouthpiece.
star. The most famous member of the cast of a play or moving picture is the
star, male or female, whose reputation and drawing power—in and of
themselves, regardless of the strength of the production—are sufficient to bring
an audience into the theater.
starlet. A starlet is a rising female actress in her first few featured roles.
stasis is that point at which there is no movement, when opposing forces strike a
balance and tension and suspense build.
still. One frame in a moving picture; a single photograph; see camera angles and
film editing.
straight cut. An abrupt transition from one scene to another in a moving picture.
See film editing.
straight man. The foil or second banana of a comedian.
strong curtain. A strong curtain is a particularly effective ending for a play or a
single act.
stylized character. A traditional role in a particular type of play; a stereotype,
historical or mythological figure. See dramatis personae and typecasting.
subtitles. Dialogue printed at the bottom of the screen in silent films, or in
foreign language films in order to translate the dialogue into English.
summer theater is located in regions where tourism thrives, and it frequently
does the same.
surrogate. A character in a play who speaks for the author, a mouthpiece or
stand-in. See dramatis personae.
suspense. Tension in a story or drama. See melodrama and stasis.
tableau. A “freeze-scene” executed by real people who depict on stage what
amounts to a living sculpture; see masque.
teaser. A curtain or flat over the stage that hides the flies and may be raised or
lowered to mask the upper portion of a set, such as the second story of a house.
Taken together with the tormentors it forms a part of the stage frame opening
behind the proscenium.
technofantasy. Science fiction or fantasy cinema that relies upon special effects.
teevee. Shorthand for television; also, TV and, in England, telly.
teleplay. A screenplay written for television. The paradigm of the two-hour
feature television script will be somewhat different, although it, too, will have a
beginning, a middle, and an end; these, however, will be broken into seven acts,
each from about eight to fourteen minutes in length to accommodate commercial
messages, but none to end exactly on the half-hour. Each act should end at a plot
point of some kind to aim the audience forward into the next act over the
commercials. The comedy script should be ninety-five to 115 pages in length, the
dramatic script, 105 to 125 pages long, one page being approximately equivalent
to one minute. The one-hour script will be about sixty pages in length and
consist of four acts, each approximately a quarter-hour long. For more
information about the teleplay, consult The Book of Dialogue.
teleprompter. See prompter.
television. A visual broadcast medium.
television script. A teleplay. For more information about the television script,
consult The Book of Dialogue.
telly. British equivalent of teevee or TV; that is, television.
tension. The equilibrium established in a play when opposing forces are of equal
strength; see stasis.
theater, theatre. The staging of a play is occasionally in an arena theater,
sometimes called “theater in the round,” which has no proscenium but is
surrounded by the audience through which the actors must walk to reach the
cleared area or platform where the play is being enacted. Other sorts of theatrical
spaces include the amphitheater, in which the seats for the audience rise in tiers
above the playing area; the auditorium, a large, generalized building or room in a
public building; the showboat, which caters for the river towns and contains a
theater; and the dinner theater which is a restaurant equipped to present a
theatrical entertainment after the meal.
The bottom floor of a theatre which contains more than one level for the
audience is called the orchestra, and the seats closest to the stage, nearest the
orchestra pit, are called the stalls; confusingly, the British call the area beyond
the stalls the pit which, in Shakespeare’s time, commanded the cheapest ticket
prices and thus attracted the least prepossessing theatergoers. It was necessary
for playwrights to play to the pit or suffer the displeasure of the mob. The level
above the orchestra is the mezzanine which is often flanked by the private boxes,
and the level above these is the balcony. If all seats are filled for a performance,
a sign in the lobby of the theater near the box office will usually proclaim that
there is “S.R.O.” which indicates “Standing Room Only.”
theatre district. The area of London where most of the theaters are located.
theatergoers. Playgoers; the audience for plays.
theater-in-the-round. Arena theater.
theatre of cruelty. The theory of French director, actor, and writer Antonin
Artaud (1896–1948) as proposed in his book The Theatre and Its Double (1938).
Like the Expressionists, Artaud wished to expose his audiences to those elements
of humanity that are suppressed by civilization and manners. He influenced Jean
Genet, Joe Orton and especially Peter Weiss in his play Marat/Sade.
theatre of fact. Historical drama; see docudrama. The neologism “faction” is a
portmanteau word combining “fiction” and “fact” applied to novels, films, and
plays that mingle real events and people with fictive characters as in much of the
work of E. L. Doctorow in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
thesis play. A synonym for problem play.
thespian. An actor or actress; from Thespis, the inventor of the Greek tragedy.
tilt shot. A photograph from above or below. See camera angles.
tormentors. Curtains or flats to either side of the stage that screen the wings
from the audience. Taken together with the teaser the tormentors form a part of
the stage frame opening behind the proscenium.
totentanz. The dance of death in a morality play.
tracking shot. A moving picture photograph that follows a moving object; see
camera angles.
tragicomedy. A relatively short verse or compound mode (verse and prose)
drama combining tragedy and comedy, usually in a complication (plot-subplot)
relationship. Good is rewarded and vice punished.
translation. The rendering of a literary work written in one language into
another language.
translator. One who makes translations; in theater, a dramaturge.
traveling shot. A synonym for tracking shot. See camera angles.
treatment. A scenario that contains more information than an outline, but less
than a full script.
trio. A three-part song in an opera.
tritagonist. The third most important character in a tragedy; see dramatis
personae.
turning point. That point at which the plot veers in another direction. See
melodrama and screenplay.
TV. Television, teevee, telly.
typecasting. To cast an actor in a role to which he or she appears to be suited by
personality or appearance, or to cast an actor in the same kind of role over and
over again. See dramatis personae.
understudy. To prepare to replace another actor or actress; a person who does
so.
upstage. For one actor to deliberately overshadow another. Also, upstage is that
portion of the stage farthest from the audience, and in fact was at one time the
highest portion of the stage, which was tilted downward for easier viewing.
vaudeville. Musical theatre that consists of skits, revues, stand-up comedy
routines, song-and-dance acts, and so forth; a melange of brief acts.
videotape. The magnetic medium on which television programs are directly
recorded and films are transcribed for home viewing, replacing the kinescope.
See film editing.
villain. The antagonist of a melodrama.
voice-over. See dubbing. For an example, see The Book of Dialogue.
vox populi. The voice of the people, represented in a tragedy by the chorus. See
dramatis personae.
walk-ons. Minor characters generally without lines, who on occasion may
however have a line or two, as for instance the butler who enters the library of
the mansion and announces that “Dinner is served.”
well-made play. The well-made play (pièce bien faite) displays the same
qualities as the well-made story.
window stage. Traditionally, plays are performed on a window stage or pictureframe stage which is separate from and raised above the audience, and has a
proscenium.
wings. The wings are the offstage areas to the right and left of the stage.
wipe. A film transition in which one scene takes over the screen from the left or
right as the old scene is wiped off it. See film editing.
zoom shot. A photograph made while moving the camera either away from or
toward the object on which it is focuses. See camera angles.
The Genres of Nonfiction
“Nonfiction” is a catch-all term encompassing many sub-genres. The formal
essay is a scholarly disquisition upon a particular subject, whereas the informal
essay is a discussion of some topic in a less rigorous vein. Criticism, including
the short form called the review or critique, is commentary on art, music,
literature, drama, dance, and other forms of creative endeavor; history is writing
on the past, and speculation is writing about the possibilities of the future.
Professional writing is a category encompassing such subgenres as technical
writing (manuals, articles on medical techniques), business writing (letters,
merchandising and manufacturing reports), and report writing of other kinds, as
for instance a report from a field office to the home office regarding personnel
matters.
Biography is the story of someone else’s life. The profile, an essay-length
biographical character study; autobiography, the story of one’s own life; the
memoir, a reminiscent essay, and the personal essay is a discussion of some
subject from the author’s particular viewpoint—if the topic is a literary one, and
the style chatty and informal, it is a causerie.
The journal is a daily record of one’s life, to be distinguished from
journalism, which is reportage of current events—it is one of the mass media
(singular, medium) that include newspapers, radio and television. Many terms
from journalism are covered in entries below in the Chapter Glossary.
A Socratic dialogue is a didactic work that follows the Platonic form of a
conversation between teacher and student, such as Socrates is said to have
conducted in the “Groves of Academe.” For a contemporary book written
entirely in the form of a Socratic dialogue, see The Book of Dialogue, one of the
two companion volumes of The Book of Literary Terms, the other being The
Book of Forms, which contains a great deal of information about “Dramatic
Poetry.”
Letters are correspondence, messages sent to other people, to be distinguished
from belles-lettres, which means writing considered as an art form, pleasing to
read in and of itself, like the work of Charles Lamb (1775–1834) in his Essays of
Elia. For information about epistolary poetry (poetry in the form of letters), see
The Book of Forms.
The writer of the familiar essay, which is written from, but not necessarily
entirely about, one’s own life, treats the reader as a confidante. The discussion is
of a personal, visionary, or confessional nature, and it may move inward (via
negativa), as in The Confessions of Saint Augustine, or outward (via affirmativa),
as in The Moon’s a Balloon by David Niven.
Other genres of literature, including fiction, drama, and poetry, are sometimes
called the genres of “creative writing” or writing arts, but of recent years the
term creative nonfiction has been deployed to indicate that certain nonfiction
subgenres utilize many of the same “creative writing” techniques, as for instance
in the case of parafiction, which is written as though it were a novel or short
story, like the novel-cum-biography of Truman Capote (1924–1984), In Cold
Blood, or as in the case of metanonfiction, which is nonfiction about nonfiction.
This article is itself an example of metanonfiction.
The reader who has been following this line of reasoning so far will have
noticed two things: the speaker or narrator is conducting an argument; therefore,
this is an essay. The essayist uses the language as a bearer of argument or
information, for there is a point to be proven or conveyed to the reader.
Kinds of Argument
There are two major kinds of logical argument. The first is a priori, beginning
with a theory or general principal and proceeding to a specific conclusion in
keeping with the premises which have been postulated: “Since all mortals die,
and I am a mortal, I must die.” The syllogism is a form of deductive reasoning
that consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion, as in “Grass
is green,” the major premise; “Bluegrass is grass,” the minor premise,
“Therefore, bluegrass is green,” the conclusion. If the minor premise does not
follow logically, then neither does the conclusion: “Bluegrass is blue; bluegrass
is grass; therefore, grass is blue.” A categorical syllogism addresses an entire
classification (taxonomy) of things and is distinguished by the use of the words
“every” or “all” in the major premise: “All men are unfeeling.” Differentia are
the distinguishing features existing between constituents of the same category:
“Some men are unfeeling, but many are emotional to a fault.” The hypothetical
syllogism is conjectural, and it contains words such as “should,” “if,”
“supposing,” and so forth: “If dogs were the only animals that had fangs and
wagging tails, and if Joe had fangs and a wagging tail, then Joe would be a dog.”
A disjunctive syllogism has to do with contradictions and oppositions, typified by
the use of words such as “neither,” “nor,” “either,” and “or”: “Either men are
unfeeling, or they are not; if they are not, then they are not men.” An enthymeme
is a syllogism that lacks or skips the minor premise: “All grass is green;
therefore, bluegrass is green.” Tautology is circular reasoning, vacuous
repetition, or redundancy: “If it’s going to rain tomorrow, then it’s going to rain,
and there’s nothing one can do about it.”
The second type of logical argument is inductive reasoning which works in
the opposite direction, deriving general principles from specific facts or
examples: “These animals are no longer living, though once they were; they are
mortal. Since these animals have died, as have others I have seen, it is likely that
all animals are mortal and must die at last.” Empiricism is the belief that only the
experience of the senses can provide knowledge: “Seeing is believing” is an
empirical adage, that is, a proverb or old saw). The scientific method is based
upon empiricism. Textual support is the body of proofs cited and adduced in
defense of an argument. Validity has to do with judging the accuracy or truth of a
well-reasoned argument.
Deduction and induction are arguments from reason or logos, but other types
of artistic proofs are by appeals to ethos, the good character and credibility of
the speaker; pathos, the emotions, and example (exemplum; plural, exempla), the
citation of an illustration of the argument. Inartistic proofs, which Aristotle said
the rhetorician could also use to prove the argument are laws, witnesses,
contracts, oaths, and tortures. All of these except the last continue to be used in
courts of law.
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of effective persuasion. Unfortunately, the term in modern
times has fallen into disrepute. It has come to be used primarily in a pejorative
sense to refer to bombastic language and pompous delivery, but rhetoric is a
necessary and very useful tool in the modern world, just as it was in the ancient
and medieval worlds. The debasement of the term appears to be the result of a
modern Platonism, for Plato distrusted rhetoric on the grounds that, in his
opinion, persuasion ought to take place directly and plainly, without artifice,
through live dialogue. This view, which is itself a self-limiting rhetorical
doctrine, was refuted by Aristotle, and the art of rhetoric was taught for centuries
as an important element of a learned person’s education, part of the trivium
which was the lower division of the seven liberal arts: grammar the science of
language systems; logic (specifically, dialectic), the science of rational argument
through discourse, and rhetoric, the art of elocution and discourse. The upper
division was the quadrivium, consisting of geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and
music.
Rhetoric is concerned with creating effects in the listener or reader,
particularly in the sense of convincing him or her of the veracity of an argument
(logos). Aristotle identified three types of rhetoric: deliberative, judicial, and
epideictic. Deliberative or political rhetoric urges the audience to action; judicial
or forensic rhetoric is an attack on or a defense of someone, and epideictic or
ceremonial rhetoric praises or blames, as in a funeral eulogy.
The classical rhetorician believed that there were five considerations in the
building of a discourse, three of them having to do with composition, and two
with performance: invention or heuresis, the search for and discovery of
arguments and proofs; disposition or taxis, the way in which such materials were
arranged and presented; style or elocution, the manner in which the argument
was conducted; memory or mneme, the mental retention of subject matter, words,
and arrangement, and delivery or hypocrisis, the art of graceful and forceful
public delivery.
Invention
The four basic elements of expository writing are the subject being examined,
the thesis or statement of the point which the author is trying to prove, the
argument or backing for the thesis which consists of data and facts to serve as
proof for the thesis, and the conclusion or restatement of the proved thesis. There
are two types of subject, according to Aristotle: thesis, or general question, such
as, “Ought all people to be kind to one another?” and hypothesis, or specific
question: “Ought Elmer to be kind to his enemy Elmo?” One may be aided in the
proper formation of a thesis by asking the questions an sit, “Does it exist?”; quid
sit, “What is it?”; and quale sit, “What kind is it?”
Arrangement
The subject, or topic of discussion, which may be a word or a phrase, may be
given as a lemma in the title; i.e., “An Essay on Criticism” by Alexander Pope.
Topics may be either special (idioi topoi) or common (koinoi topoi). Division
separates elements of the topic into categories for clarity (explanation) and
definition: “Our topic today is ‘cats,’ but we won’t be speaking of the great cats,
or even of wild cats, but of the common house cat.” The exordium is the
statement of the subject being examined and an introduction to the author’s
topic; it contains the proposition or thesis sentence (partition) of the discussion.
It differs from the subject in that it must be expressed in a complete statement,
that is to say, in an independent clause, not merely a phrase or dependent clause.
Here is the first sentence of Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism.”
’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill;
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ offence
To tire our patience, than mislead our sense.
[It is hard to say whether greater lack of skill
Appears in poor writing or in poor critical judgment;
But, of the two possibilities, the lesser offense
Is to tire the reader’s patience rather than be obscure.]
The exordium is followed by the narration, which contains the exposition or
necessary background information and the definition of terms The argument
proper is the amplification or proof which may be conducted in various ways.
The proof has two parts, the first of which is the confirmation): the list of facts
or data backing the thesis, usually arranged in the order of weakest argument to
strongest (climactic). The second part of the argument is the refutation, the
rebuttal of all possible arguments to the contrary, usually arranged in the order of
strongest argument to weakest (anticlimactic). The conclusion consists, first, of a
summation of the positive arguments and, second, of the peroration, which is an
appeal to emotion as well as to logic, and the restatement of the proved thesis.
Style
The elements of style are four in number: correctness or accuracy, clarity or
precision of discussion, appropriateness, that is, the choice of style to suit the
audience, and ornament or graceful embellishment of the discussion through the
use of figures of speech such as metaphors and similes.
The essayist’s techniques are primarily (though not absolutely) those of
persuasion. Many people believe that, because the essayist is a “factual” writer,
the argument will be based upon ratiocination or rational deduction, but this is
not necessarily the case. In fact, argument may have as much to do with opinion
as with observation, and an essayist may use as much passion as data—facts and
figures—to support the argument. People may be as readily persuaded, if not
more so, by such techniques as by coherence (intelligibility) and reason—it was
this aspect of rhetoric that Plato objected to—see rhetorical fallacies in the
Chapter Glossary below.
However, if such is the situation—and it is, modern advertising, political
campaigning and propaganda being the worst offenders—the essayist must be
prepared to answer in kind and to choose those techniques of logic and of
rhetoric that will best enable him or her to win the argument, and the argument is
won only when the reader is persuaded to the writer’s view. The best essayists
understand that, given the same argument written by two different writers, that
argument which is best written will generally be most persuasive. Another
way of saying this same thing is, “Style has as much to do with persuasion as
anything else.” Many stylists—graceful or forceful writers—who are poor
logicians have won their arguments, and many a clear thinker has lost the battle.
George Puttenham (1529–1590, putative author of The Arte of English
Poesie, 1589) said the ancients set down six points which graceful writing ought
to observe: 1) “decent proportion in writings and speech”; 2) “sonority and
musicality”; 3) “neither overlengthiness nor underlengthiness, but proportionate
to the purpose,” called syntomia or proportion; 4) “orderly and good
construction,” called synthesis (see schemes); 5) “sound, proper, and natural
speech,” called ciriologia or grace of style, and 6) “liveliness,” “appeal to the
senses,” called tropus (see tropes; also, The Book of Forms).
Rhetoricians distinguish among high style, meaning a grandiloquent manner
of speaking; mean style, meaning a balanced manner of speaking, and base or
plain style, meaning a vulgar manner of speaking. The modern critic Northrop
Frye distinguished only between demotic style, a manner of speaking consistent
with ordinary speech, and heiratic style, a self-consciously literary manner of
speaking. For more information about style, see The Book of Dialogue.
Chapter Glossary
abecedarius. An abecedarius is a composition in prose or verse in which either
each word of a stanza or sentence, beginning with ay, proceeds through the
alphabet in order, like Geoffrey Chaucer’s “A B C,” or all the words in each
stanza or paragraph, from ay through zed (zee), begin with the same letter; see
alphabestiary, didactics and primer; also, see our companion volume, The Book
of Forms.
abstraction. Something that is incapable of conventional (not personal)
definition; something that exists only if one believes it does. See apostrophe.
accismus means to refuse something in a dissembling manner hoping that the
offer will be made again insistently: “I am unworthy of such an honor.” It is a
form of irony.
acronym is a word made up of the first letters of words in a phrase: “snafu” =
“situation normal, all f——ed up.”
ad. Short form of “advertisement.” The British say, “advert.”
adage. An old saw or wise saying; see didactics, parimia, and sententia.
ad hominem. Verbal personal attack. See rhetorical fallacies.
adjunctio or adjunction is the addition of one thing to another, as for instance a
syllable to a word, as in proparalepsis, or one term to another—“You, sir, are a
gentleman and a scholar . . . and a good judge of cigars.”
advertising. Drawing the attention of the buying public to a product.
advertorial. An advertisement which at first appears to be an editorial; similar
to a plugmentary.
agony aunt or uncle. A columnist who gives advice to the lovelorn or to the
Suffering Susie in an agony column or on a television program. A back-fence
gossip translated to the media. In the United States this is called a sob sister.
aisle sitter. A critic who sits on the aisle so that he or she can make a quick
getaway in order to escape a bad production or to beat other critics to filing a
review.
allegorical allusion. See rhetorical fallacies.
allegory. The discussion of abstractions in terms of actions, events, and
personae, as in Aesop’s fable about “The Fox and the Grapes.” This term is
considered at some length in The Book of Forms.
allusion is indirect reference to something extraneous to the argument being
conducted: “My opponent believes that he is the reincarnation of Julius Caesar.
He’d better keep an eye out for his ‘friend’ Brutus.”
alphabestiary. See abecedarius. See also bestiary and primer in our companion
volume, The Book of Forms.
ambage. An ambage is an ambiguous riddle or puzzle of some sort, a pun.
amphisbaenia turns a word backward to make another word, as in “He mined
ore dressed in denim jeans.”
amplification. Epenthis, proparalepsis, paragoge, and prothesis are
orthographical (that is, spelling) methods of expansion or proof of an argument.
anachinosis refers the reader, in an argument, to his own opinion: “If you don’t
believe me, figure it out for yourself.”
anacoluthon is a shift of grammatical construction in midsentence that leaves
the beginning unfinished (“You may remember the night—listen! The dog is
barking at the door”).
anadiplosis is the linking of two consecutive clauses by a repetition of words: “I
saw her hair, her dark hair windblown.
anagram. A word made by rearranging the letters of another word, as for
instance “stunted” instead of “student.” See metathesis.
anantapodaton is a synonym for anacoluthon.
anaphora is the parallel repetition of an initial word in more than one sentence:
“Love is many things. Love may be a many-splendored thing. Love on a cellar
door, however, may be a many-splintered thing, as well.”
anathema is ritual imprecation directed by a religious body against a heretic.
anastrophe is the inversion of normal syntax (“go I shall” for “I shall go”).
anecdote. Now and then the essayist may tell an anecdote, a little story or
allegory to illustrate a point.
angle. The slant that a writer takes on a story. See journalism.
annomination is wordplay, as in the pun, the quibble, or calembour. A synonym
is paronomasia.
antanaclasis is the witty repetition of a word in an amplified or changed sense—
a pun. “What is the difference between an animal doctor and a former member of
Hitler’s army? One is a veterinarian, and the other is a veteran Aryan.”
antenagoge makes a statement and then softens it by adding a mitigating or less
harsh alternative: “I wish that you’d fall over dead—well, maybe just fall down
and knock your brains out.”
anthimeria substitutes one part of speech for another; for instance, a noun for a
verb as in “The clock’s chime belfries above the city.”
anticlimax. Working from the strongest to the weakest; its synonym is meiosis.
antimetabole is the repetition of two beginning words, in reverse order, later in
a sentence: “To kiss her is to love her kiss.”
antiphrasis is derision by means of simple contrasts; for instance, calling a fat
person “skinny” or a thin one “fatso.”
antipophora is asking a question and then answering it oneself, as when a
scarecrow asks the pumpkins in the field around him, “You worship me? a pole
for a spine, a timber for my extended bone, fingers of hay stolen by wrens?” and
then answers himself, “I bleach and shake, I shudder in the moon’s dark.
Pumpkins, crowd of orange globes, I whistle in the wind.”
antisthecon changes the sound of a word; for instance, “stoont” for student.
antistrophe is the repetition of a single word throughout a written work.
antitheton is the term describing the techniques of “the devil’s advocate” in
argument: taking any position and defending it simply in joy of the fight, or in
order to bring out some point that might otherwise remain unexamined, perhaps.
antonomasia or pronominatio substitutes for a noun a phrase describing the
noun. The descriptive phrase (or epithet) is derived from some quality associated
with the noun; for instance, instead of saying “Queen Elizabeth I,” one might
(and often does) say, “The Virgin Queen.”
antonym. A word that is opposite in meaning from another, as hatred is the
antonym of love, and down is the antonym of up. See antithetical parallelism
elsewhere in these pages and constructional schemes and paradiastole.
aphaeresis is a technique of overt elision which drops the initial unstressed
syllable, usually a vowel, of a word; i.e., “’til” for until, “’tis” for it is, and
“let’s” for let us.
aphorism. A brief wise saying; an adage.
apocope. Apocope is a form of elision that drops syllables from the end of a
word: “morn” for morning.
apologue. An animal fable with a moral point.
apologia. A literary apology. See metanoia and parisia.
apophasis is the rhetorical technique of denying one’s intention to speak of a
particular point, at the same time that one mentions it; i.e., “I don’t intend to
mention the fact that Mr. So-And-So was convicted of larceny.”
aporia expresses doubt or uncertainty, “if, in fact, one may ever be certain of
anything.”
aposiopesis deletes letters, a syllables, a words, or passages, and substitutes
some other symbol or symbols to take its place, as in the example of the
acronym.
apostrophe is direct address, speaking to an absent human being, or to a
(usually) personified object or abstraction. “Hello, Mr. Tree, how are you this
morning?”
apothegm. A pithy, didactic saying, an adage; see didactics and sententia.
appeal to authority, to force, to humor, to ignorance, to pity, to tradition.
See rhetorical fallacies.
apposition, appositive. An equivalent noun inserted into a sentence to explain
or expand upon another noun: “My brother, Gene, is five years younger than I
am.” See epitheton.
ara. An ara is a protracted ritual curse. See imprecation.
argument. An argument is a discussion between people representing two sides
of an issue. It is often conducted orally, and a formal oral argument is a debate.
article. The article is magazine journalism. See magazine.
articulation (articulus) is the clear sounding of each element of a unit of
speech, such as each syllable in a word: “I do not for an in-stant expect there to
be a di-mi-nu-tion of ig-no-rance in my op-po-nent, so I will speak clear-ly in order that he may un-der-stand.”
asteismus is simple jesting, without rancor: “Did Samson Agonistes have the
strength of twenty bulls at cowtime in the spring?”
asyndeton the opposite of polysyndeton, eliminates articles, conjunctions, and
sometimes prepositions and pronouns from normal sentences (“I chased [the]
wind, [the] wind chased me”).
audience. The vertical audience is that group of potential readers which exists at
any given moment. Newspapers and newsmagazines are directed at this
audience, which is vast. But the horizontal audience, which is that group of
potential readers existing from any given moment forward into time, is even
more vast. Thus, a poem may be printed in a little magazine today and be read
by a vertical audience of only 1000 people. But if that poem is reprinted, first in
a collection of the author’s work, and then in anthologies of poetry and literature
and in textbooks used in school and university classes, as was the case with T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land, then the total number of readers of that poem will
eventually greatly exceed the number of readers of any particular issue of Time
magazine, a mass circulation weekly periodical. Reporters know they are writing
for the readers of the moment; poets hope they are writing for the ages.
authorial intrusion takes place when the reader becomes aware, suddenly, of
the author as a presence in the story. It may be a form of irony.
axiom. An adage or old saw; a wise saying of received opinion. See didactics.
backgrounder. Journalese (journalism slang) for a briefing offered journalists
by politicians or government officials.
bagatelle. A witty or clever piece that utilizes such techniques as simple jesting
is called a jeu d’esprit or a bagatelle.
balance. See comparison, grammatical parallelism, and parallel structure.
bandwagon fallacy. See rhetorical fallacies.
banter. Verbal jopusting. See charientismus.
beat. A term from journalism, meaning the area of a reporter’s expertise, as for
instance “the police beat.” See editor and reporter.
bestiary. A book of medieval fables concerning animals, both natural and
mythical, used as allegories of human nature; the alphabestiary, a neologism
coined by John Ciardi, signifyies a modern alphabetical bestiary for children.
See didactics.
bias. A leaning or prejudice that impairs objective judgement. See rhetorical
fallacies.
bombast is verbal bullying or bomphiologia.
bomphiologia: see the preceding entry.
brachiologa is the technique of separating words by pauses, usually indicated by
means of punctuation (commas in particular), but sometimes typographically by
means of spaces: “I said, hello!—but he didn’t reply.”
brevitas is rapid discussion.
brevity. Succinctness of expression. See ellipsis.
cacosintheton is anastrophe misused, as in an artificial poetic diction.
category. A class or distinction, a differentiation between divisions. See
definition.
cause. A necessary cause is required to produce the effect; a sufficient cause or
precipitating cause might possibly have produced the effect; the immediate
cause is that which is closest to the effect produced, the remote cause is that
which is farthest removed from the effect. See etiologia.
charientismus is light banter which is meant to soothe rancor, as for instance, in
trying to avoid a fight with a bully one might say, “I’m sure you’re too much of a
gentleman to want to pick a fight with a coward wearing glasses.”
chiasmus is a technique of parallel structure, cross-parallelism: “I vied with the
wind, she fought the air, and as she lost, I was victorious.” Note that in the first
half of this sentence “I” is first, “she” is second, but in the second half of the
sentence “she” and “I” are reversed.
chronicle. A chronological record in verse or in prose of events purported to
have happened over a long period of time. See also journalism.
circuito. A roundabout argument or manner of speaking. See circumlocution and
periphrasis.
circulation. The distribution of a periodical. See journalism.
circumlocution. Round-about manner of speaking. See periphrasis and enigma.
city desk. The province of the city or local editor of a newspaper. See editor and
journalism.
city editor. The editor whose responsibility is the local metropolitan area. See
editor and journalism.
classical discourse. The classical discourse is structured as described in detail in
the introductory essay of this chapter, but here is a simplified recapitulation:
I. The subject of the discourse is given in the title, or in a subtitle.
II. Second, the thesis is introduced.
A. In the first paragraph the exordium is the statement of the subject
being examined and an introduction to the author’s argument.
B. The thesis sentence differs from the subject in that it is a complete
statement, usually given in one independent clause or sentence. In the
essay below the proposition “that higher education isn’t changing fast
enough to keep up with society” is going to be examined and attacked.
III. The third part of the classical discourse is the argument itself.
This portion of the essay is in three parts:
A. The narratio or narration is the exposition of necessary background
information concerning subject and thesis.
B. The confirmatio or confirmation is the list of arguments, proofs, and
facts backing the thesis. It is usually arranged in the order of weakest
argument to strongest (auxetic or climactic).
C. The refutatio or refutation is the rebuttal of all possible arguments
to the contrary. It is usually arranged in the order of strongest argument to
weakest (meiotic or anticlimactic).
IV. The last part of the essay is the conclusion in which there is the
A. peroratio or peroration, which is an appeal to emotion as well as to
logic, and the
B. restatement or recapitulation of the proved thesis, and the
resolution of the argument.
Here is a classical discourse in the form of a chant royal (for more
information about this form, see The Book of Forms).
The Old Professor
Each day he drags his scholar’s armament
Along these limb-hung walks toward an old
Stone building, every ancient nerve intent
Upon the threadbare lecture he has told
Since time was wound. His faculties impaled
By blunting years of teaching: cured and nailed
To walls of hoarded knowledge none have seen
Him lately scale, he trudges to the clean,
Bland faces waiting in his daily void.
He owns but one idea that’s pristine:
At least the old professor is employed.
That hour has long grown moss when discontent
Could nip his heels along the trails he’s strolled
Spring, fall and winter. The ennoblement
Of education was a manna sold
For fodder: feasts too rich had been curtailed
Because his fresh young banquets all had staled,
Unsavored, on his desk. Now the routine
Is constant, undisturbed. And the cuisine
He offers is cold statement unalloyed
With sweetmeats that might activate the spleen.
At least the old professor is employed.
A poverty of mind seemed evident
Among his pupils: most were of a mold.
He’d searched in vain for signs of argument;
He’d flattered, bantered, battered and cajoled
When moons were blue. But nothing had availed.
Those freshman bastions could not be assailed.
His foes reclined behind their walls, serene.
They would not rally arms to fog the scene
With sorties into knowledge. Thus, devoid
Of wars, the warrior turned Nazarene—
At least the old professor is employed.
Oh, he’d unburied some intelligent
Young bodies then and now, but few were bold
Enough, and some were even reverent!
The best of these had thumbed and pigeonholed
His words for hoary use. He had regaled
No one with tales of beauties lying veiled
In halls of thought wherein a libertine
Of wisdom might disport himself unseen
And lip the cider Eve swore never cloyed.
Though none had truly broached his bright demesne,
At least the old professor is employed.
Then has his coin of manhood been misspent
Because he’s been unable to uphold
Antique ideals to any fond extent?
And has the campus chapel belfry tolled
The streaming hordes of moments he’s been gaoled
In mental pillories; been flayed and flailed
By apathy? Have all his sometime keen
Abilities been dulled, transformed to mean
Synaptic grooves? Can be become annoyed
No longer? Is he just a figurine . . . ?
At least the old professor is employed.
l’envoi.
There lies an ancient harvesting machine
Deprived of acreage that once was green,
But withered now by hoarfrosts that destroyed
The twig that never nurtured nectarine.
At least the old professor is employed.
classified ad. A short advertisement in a section of the newspaper reserved for
such items in various categories, as for instance “personals,” “employment
opportunities,” and “lawn sales.” See journalism.
column, columnist. One of several vertical portions of printed lines positioned
on a page beside, but separated from, one another. A writer of local or syndicated
newspaper feature articles columns. See journalism.
comics, comic strip. The cartoons section of a newspaper. See journalism.
communications medium, media (pl.). Newspapers, radio, television, internet
(“The World-Wide Web”). See journalism.
compar, or comparison, is the balance of statements, opposites, sentences.
complexio, or complexus, is repetition.
conclusion is syllogistic summation—see syllogism in the introductory essay of
this chapter.
conduplication is repetition.
conjunction joins items, as in “One loves to look at water, and one loves to
swim.” See disjunction.
constructional schemes are syntactical strategies for building sentences. They
include grammatical parallelism (synonymia, synthesis, anthithesis, auxesis, and
meiosis), which is covered elsewhere in these pages; anacoluthon, anastrophe,
cacosintheton, chiasmus, epitheton, hendiadys, hypallage, hysteron proteron,
parenthesis, parison, syneciosis, and zeugma.
contention is opposition in debate.
continuation is a series of closing statements. See summary.
contrast. The comparison of differences; see antiphrasis.
conversation. A discussion between or among people. See argument.
conversion is a synonym for repetition.
copy. Written material. Camera-ready copy is text, usually computer-generated
by a phototypesetter, that is supplied to the printer ready for pasting up and
photographing for the photo-offset printing process. See printing and off-set
press.
copywriter. A writer of text, especially for advertising. See screever.
correction, is replacing the erroneous with the accurate: “I do not speak of what
is “meat”—that is, of the flesh, of carnal appetite, but of what is meet or
seemly.”
correspondent. A letter-writing partner. See foreign correspondent.
cosmic irony. See irony.
cross examination. Hostile examination of a witness, or treatment of a witness
as hostile. The term has been misused for many years to mean merely, “now it’s
your turn to examine this witness.” See interrogation.
cub reporter. See reporter.
curse. See anathema and imprecation.
debate. See argument.
declamatio, declamation. See oration.
decorum. The suitability of a component of a work, such as style or tone, to its
specific situation or to the writing as a whole.
definiendum. See definitio.
definitio, or definition, is denotation, giving the meaning of a definiendum or
word to be defined, as has just been done. The essential definition is the most
fundamental denotation of a term or concept, placing it in a category (genus) and
distinguishing it from other members of that category, perhaps answering the
question quid sit or “What is its essence?” A stipulative definition is required
when a word has more than one denotation and the writer must differentiate
between them to specify what it is that is being discussed. See also orismus.
denominatio. See metonymy.
devil’s advocate, devil’s disciple. The devil’s advocate is one who takes the
opposite viewpoint in an argument just so that both sides of an issue may be
discussed. See antitheton and rhetorical fallacies.
diaeresis concerns the pronunciation of two contiguous vowels in suddenly
different ways, as in “cooperation,” “neologism,” unlike the diphthong which is
a gliding from one vowel to another within the same syllable, as in “toil” or
“bait.”
dialectic (“dialect”) changes the spelling of a word, but not its meaning; for
instance, “You sweet thang,” for thing, or “Let’s go foah a walk in the pahk” for
“Let’s go for a walk in the park.” See also The Book of Dialogue.
dialisis sets up the propositions of an argument, but these propositions appear to
be a dilemma (divisio), in that they seem to be mutually exclusive. It must be one
or the other proposition, but which is it? Perhaps it is neither, or both—dialisis
disposes of both propositions without paradox: “You say Jack loves to live, that
brother Jules / Lives to love? Then I say both are fools: / One must be alive to
love at any cost—/ Then live to live, love love, or all is lost.”
diatribe. See argument.
didactics. Didactic forms are teaching forms. See abecedarius, alphabestiary,
apologue, bestiary, enigma, epistle, example, exemplum, fable, fabliau, gnome,
primer, riddle, and sententia.
digression. See parecnasis.
dilemma. See dialisis.
discourse. A discourse is a conversation, or at least one side of an argument.
disjunctio, or disjunction, disconnects items, as in “One loves to look at water
but one hates to swim.” See conjunction.
dissolutio, dissolution. See asyndeton.
dit. A dit is a synonym for “example,” a little story or anecdote illustrating a
point.
diverb. An antithetical cross-parallel as in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of
Melancholy: “England is a paradise for women, and hell for horses; Italy a
paradise of horses, hell for women.” See antithetical parallel and cross-parallel.
divisio. See dialisis.
double intendre. See irony.
dubiety, dubitatio, or dubitation is the ploy of feigned hesitation, as in the
example given under dialisis if one had said, “perhaps so, but on the other hand,
perhaps both are fools.”
echphonesis is exclamation or outcry: “Alas! I am undone!”
ecphrasis is unadorned statement or interpretation.
editor. One who revises and corrects written material prior to its publication.
The editor-in-chief of a periodical is responsible for the overall operation and
implementation of the policies of a journal, and the managing editor is in charge
of its daily operation. Various other editors make up the editorial staff, including
the city editor who sits at the city desk and is responsible for local news and
coverage assignments or, in Britain, is in charge of financial and commercial
news; the international editor, who handles overseas news and materials
submitted by the foreign correspondents who are stationed abroad; the sports
editor; the features editor, the rewrite editor who handles material phoned in by
stringers (see journalism.).
editorial. See journalism.
editorial staff. See editor and journalism.
editor-in-chief. See editor and journalism.
either/or fallacy. See rhetorical fallacies.
elision drops syllables from words.
ellipsis, a form of brevity, leaves words—generally articles, prepositions or
modifiers—out of clauses and phrases, thereby causing sentences to read in a
starker manner than normal: “My love was a faded rose,” rather than “My
darling love was but a faded rose.” See asyndeton.
elliptical syllepsis. See syllepsis.
emphasis was discussed in the essays above. It is a range of techniques for
stressing a word or a phrase, as for instance by repetition, (“He was dumb,
dumb, dumb.”), by using a different typeface (“He was dumb.”); by building a
series of synonyms (“He was dumb—I mean, he was ignorant, stupid, and
otherwise thick.”), and so forth.
enallage, a rare construction in English, changes the tense, gender, or number of
some part of speech (“God is in her heaven; all’s right with the world”).
enigma. See didactics.
epanalepsis is the repetition of a word, for clarity or for emphasis, after the
intervention of a word, phrase, or clause. “It is the duty of every citizen, the
duty, I say, to vote.”
epanodis, like prolepsis, expands upon a general statement, but in addition it
repeats terms contained in the general statement, as for instance in a prose piece
that begins—“In the kitchen the dishwasher is eating the dishes. The Inhabitant
listens to the current of digestion—porcelain being ground, silver wearing thin,
the hum and bite of the machine.”—and ends several paragraphs later, “It is as
though, the Inhabitant reflects, the women are spinning. It is as though, while he
waits, they weave bindings among the rooms; as though the strands of tune were
elements of a sisterhood of dishes, the ladies, the spider in the cabinet, even of
the dishwasher, done now with its grinding, which contributes a new sound—a
continuo of satiety—to the gray motet the kitchen is singing.”
epenthis adds syllables in the center of a word; i.e., “disenfigure” for disfigure.
ephemerist. A journal-keeper or diarist.
epiphora is the repetition of end-words or end-phrases, as in the poem form
called the sestina.
epistle. A letter used for an informative purpose, such as Lord Philip Dormer
Chesterfield’s book of Letters to his son born out of wedlock, the younger Philip
Dormer Stanhope, which purported to be admonitory, but which in fact was
revelatory of the Lord’s own lack of character.
epimone. The use of repeated phrases, clauses, or lines used at intervals in
writing.
epitheton is an inserted, synonymous modification of a sentence element, such
as a subject (“John Jones, my good friend, is a poet”).
epitropis is used when the speaker believes he has said enough and refers the
reader to something else in order to complete the thought: “I’ve said enough.
Time for another martini. You take these definitions on from here.”
epizeuxis repeats words without any pause between them: “Beat, beat, beat, oh
drums!”
equivocation. See rhetorical fallacies.
erotema is the rhetorical question, a question for which no answer is given or
expected because, in context, the answer is obvious: “Am I my brother’s
keeper?” The understood Biblical answer is “Yes.”
essay. See magazine.
essential definition. See definition.
etiologia is the argumentative technique of assigning a cause or reason for an
action or circumstance: “I wish to speak of worms on Mars, because no one has
done so before.”
euphemism. See periphrasis.
example. See exemplum.
ex cathedra. See rhetorical fallacies.
exclamatio, exclamation is a cry of protest. See also ecphonesis.
exclusive schemes are strategies for building sentences by leaving things out of
them. See asyndeton, aposiopesis, ellipsis, and syllepsis.
exemplum. The exemplum—a parable or fable, perhaps—is a brief story told to
make a moral point, often in a sermon or a homily.
expedience, expeditio, or expedition is doing whatever is necessary to move the
argument forward, including leaving unimportant things out.
explication is a synonym for exposition; an explanation, discussed in the lead
essay of this chapter.
expolitio. See repetition.
exposé. See journalism.
fable. The fable or apologue is a didactic allegory in which the adventures of an
animal teach a moral lesson.
fabliau. See our companion volume, The Book of Forms.
faulty cause. See rhetorical fallacies.
faulty hidden generalization. See generalization and rhetorical fallacies.
feature, features editor. See editor and journalism.
features journalism. See magazine journalism.
figurae verborum, figures of speech. See rhetorical tropes.
Fleet-Streetese. See journalese.
flyting. A formal harangue or rant (invective, diatribe) is a flyting; a debate
between poets which can become bitter. See our companion volume, The Book of
Forms.
foreign correspondent. A reporter who is stationed abroad. See journalism.
frankness is candor, the opposite of parrhesia.
generalization. The generalization is a statement so broad as to be meaningless:
“Poor people deserve to be poor, for they are born lazy.” See rhetorical fallacies.
genus. See definition.
gnome. The gnome is an apothegm or truism, sometimes in rhyming form. Some
“Gnomic Verses” may be found in The Book of Forms, under the heading of
englyn cyrch.
gofer. See reporter.
gradatio, gradation. See repetition.
harangue. A harangue is a diatribe, a furious attack on someone or something;
invective. or rant
hendiadys is a construction that treats a double subject or object as though it
were singular, not plural, in order to express a thought that is operating on more
than one level (“My lust and her adamance is Hell”).
heteronym. One of two or more homographs that have different pronunciations
and definitions.
homily. See didactics.
homograph, homomorph, a word that is spelled like another word with a
totally different meaning, such as bore: “to drill” and bore: “a dull person.”
horizontal audience. See audience.
house organ. See magazine.
human interest story. See journalism.
hypallage is an exchange of words in phrases or clauses. The technique is used
in the first two lines of E. E. Cummings’ poem “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How
Town”—“anyone lived in a pretty how town / with up so floating many bells
down.”
hyperbaton is a term that covers the various kinds of dislocation or inversion of
grammatic syntax, including anastrophe, cacosintheton, and hypallage.
hyperbole or superlatio, the opposite of litotes which is studied understatement,
is calculated exaggeration, overstatement: “Her eyes were as large as two
cratered moons.”
hyperrhythm. See diaeresis.
hyphaeresis is a technique of overt elision that drops a consonant rather than a
vowel from the center of a word in order to telescope two syllables and make
them one, as in “whene’er” for whenever.
hypozeugma. See zeugma.
hypozeuxis is the repetition of words in parallel constructions. The repeated
words govern the sense of the clause or clauses of which they are a part: “Up to
the door I’ll go, and at the door I’ll rap.”
hysteron proteron is the reversal of chronological events for purposes of
intensification or stress (“Let us break our necks and jump” rather than “Let us
jump and break our necks”).
illustration. See magazine.
immediate cause. See cause.
implied aposiopesis—see aposiopesis—substitutes another letter, syllable,
word, or passage for the dropped material: “You are an as-phyxiating person.”
imprecation. Curse. See anathema.
inclusive schemes are strategies for building sentences by including items. See
enallage and irmus, merismus, and prolepsis.
inserts. See journalism.
insufficient sampling. An unrepresentative or insufficient sampling is one that
provides insufficient data from too small a pool of specimens.
intellectio. See synechdoche.
interlocutor. One who questions. See irony and interrogatory.
international editor. See editor and journalism.
interpretatio, interpretation. See reiteration.
interrogatio, interrogatory is summary challenge, as in cross examination.
invective is language that is abusive or vituperative, as in the curse, an
execration or profane utterance; in profanity, irreverent language, or in
desecration, a violation of the sacred, sacrilege. See argument.
investigative reporting. See journalism.
ipse dixit. See rhetorical fallacies.
irmus is suspended sense. Not until the end of a passage does the reader fully
understand what is being spoken of (“Soft as goosedown, smooth as velvet,
round as a bowl, as full of love as it is of satisfaction, is my kitten’s belly”).
ironia. See irony.
ironical allusion. Ironical or allegorical allusion is called permutation: “Ah,
beware the didies (instead of the ides) of March,” “didies,” of course, being
diapers or nappies.
irony is witty mockery, usually effected by saying the opposite of what is
actually meant: “I’d love to go with you into the tar pit, but unfortunately I find
myself involved in a rather sticky situation of my own.” Socratic irony is the
feigning of ignorance and a willingness to be enlightened by an interlocutor, a
teacher or questioner. For an entire book illustrating this rhetorical trope see The
Book of Dialogue.
Double entendre is speaking with a two-fold meaning, one of which—the
secondary or implied meaning—is generally off-color or salacious. An entire
work that sustains a double meaning is said to contain structural irony, as in the
allegory in the chapter “The Genres of Fiction”; see also didactics. Cosmic irony
has to do with the gods toying with human beings, teasing and tormenting and
then destroying them, perhaps, as though they were of no consequence.
Romantic irony is a form of metaliterature, in which the narrator from time to
time commits what has elsewhere been called authorial intrusion by taking the
reader into her or his confidence and pointing out that the fiction is really
nothing but verbal manipulation, not real life. See also dramatic irony,
metafiction, metadrama, metapoetry, and paradiastole.
jeremiad. A speech or writing prophecying doom, or a lamentation filled with
bitterness. See Philippic.
jest. A joke. See asteismus.
jeu d’esprit. A synonym for bagatelle—a clever or witty piece of humor.
journalese. The jargon of journalism, the equivalent of the British FleetStreetese.
journalism. Chronicles published on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis are
newspaper journalism: a record of the events of the day, as displayed in news
items, or reports of daily occurrences on the local, area, national, and
international scenes, including sports and weather; news of record, including
births, deaths, obituaries, property sales and tax notices; political material
including voting information; columns (written by columnists) expressing the
obiter dicta or passing views of the writer who may be either a local columnist
or a syndicated columnist whose work appears in several newspapers
simultaneously; editorials, or comments appearing on the op-ed [opinioneditorial] page by the editors and publisher of the publication on news of
interest; letters to the editor; features, including everything from human interest
material to comic strips, women’s pages, and even fiction and poetry in inserts
such as Sunday supplements. Most newspapers are supported by advertising,
including classified and personal ads, and advertisers are interested in the
circulation of the journal, including newsstand sales, but particularly
subscription sales.
There are various types of journalism. Yellow journalism is sensational
reporting or scandalmongering, in such papers as scandal sheets and tabloids. A
muckraker is one who searches out misfeasance, malfeasance, and corruption
among public officials using the techniques of investigative journalism and
writes about them in the exposé. A slant is a subtly biased news article; an angle
is an unusual viewpoint, a “peg” on which to hang a story that will be different
from the treatment given it by any other public communications medium (plural,
media).
Print journalism is the oldest of the media which now include radio and
television journalism, and the “communications highway” internet (web) of the
modem-equipped PC (personal computer).
latinitas means correctness or accuracy.
letter. A written message sent to a correspondent; an epistle. See didactics.
letters to the editor. Communications sent by readers to the editor of a
periodical, responding to something printed in that journal. See journalism.
lipogram. A literary work that shuns all words that contain a particular letter of
the alphabet.
litotes is deliberate understatement, as for instance, “Adolf Hitler was a naughty
man.”
little magazine. A literary periodical with a limited circulation. See magazine.
logical fallacy. A failure in reasoning, or an incorrect argument. See rhetorical
fallacies.
logogram. A symbol representing a whole word.
logographer. A speech writer. See ghost writer.
logogriph. A puzzle in which a word and its anagrams, and other words made
from some of its letters, are to be guessed from synonyms of those words written
out in verse.
magazine, magazine journalism. Magazine journalism is features journalism,
often intended for specific audiences: women, sports enthusiasts, hobbies,
collecting, and so forth. A magazine is therefore a collection of articles, essays,
features, illustrations (artwork) and photographs appealing to a segment of the
reading public. The staffs of such periodicals will be similar to those of
newspapers, except that there will generally not be such a wide range of
editorships, except of course in newsmagazines. There are many types of
magazines ranging from trade journals which appeal to plumbers, carpenters,
electricians, and so forth; through house organs, which are newsletters
distributed to the employees of a particular industry, organization, business, or
corporation; to academic or scientific quarterlies and little magazines which
publish poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and other creative materials for very limited
audiences.
malediction. Calling upon the gods to visit evil upon someone, or a slander. See
anathema, curse, and imprecation.
managing editor. The editor of a journal who is in charge of daily operations.
See editor and journalism.
mass circulation. Large-scale distribution of a journal. See audience and
circulation.
material fallacies. See rhetorical fallacies.
maxim. An adage or wise saying. See didactics.
media. Shorthand for “communications media”; the Latin plural for medium,
meaning “method” or “means.” See journalism.
medium. See the preceding entry.
meiosis. Anticlimax. Ending at the weakest point, the nadir, rather than at the
strongest point, the apex.
member, or membrum, is an identifiable part of the whole, as for instance a
clause or a phrase in a sentence.
merismus expands upon a subject by particularizing each element of it.
mesozeugma. See zeugma.
metalepsis substitutes for a word a synonym that is essentially metaphorical, in
that the equation between the word and its synonym is not obvious. For instance,
at one time a sailor’s trousers had a front flap that was secured with thirteen
buttons, and one might have said, “I met Ray just as he first thumbed the last of
thirteen buttons,” instead of, “I met Ray on the day he enlisted in the Navy.”
metaliterature. Literature about literature. See irony; see other chapters also for
metafiction, metadrama, and metapoetry, and see the opening essay of this
chapter for metanonfiction.
metanoia makes a statement, then retracts it by substituting something else:
“They tell me that your head is filled with rocks. I don’t believe it . . . but maybe
solid bone.”
metanonfiction. Nonfiction about nonfiction. See metaliterature and the
opening essay of this chapter.
metastasis is the technique of flitting from one argument to another quickly,
much as a boxer bobs and weaves so that his opponent can’t get a good shot at
him.
metathesis transposes the letters of a word as in the anagram, which is a word,
phrase, or sentence constructed by rearranging the letters of another word,
phrase, or sentence: “live” = vile, “stunted” = student.
metonymy or denominatio is a way of describing by using a word related to a
word, rather than the original word itself (“The heart will find a way” rather than
“Love will find a way”).
micterismus is verbal sneering, as in, “The old professor knows that books are
safe. He knows he’s really Samson on the make, too smart to lose his hair.”
morgue. The clippings library of a newspaper.
morgue clerk. The person in charge of a newspaper “morgue.” See reporter.
muckraker. A reporter concerned with muckraking. See the next entry.
muckraking. Journalism concerned with digging up political scandal and public
corruption. See journalism.
name calling. Slander. See rhetorical fallacies.
necessary cause. See cause.
news item. An article in a journal. See journalism.
newsletter. The journal of an organization or business of some kind. See
magazine.
newsmagazine. A newspaper in magazine format. See magazine.
news of record. News items having to do with births, deaths, tax information,
public meetings, and so forth. See journalism.
newspaper, newspaper journalism. See journalism.
newsman, newsperson, newswoman. See reporter.
newsstand. A kiosk or store that sells newspapers. See journalism.
noema is an ironic way (see irony.) of speaking by saying one thing on the
surface, but meaning something quite different: “You say Fred lives his life
without a taint? You’re right. I wish to God he were a saint.” Meaning, on the
surface level, that the speaker agrees with the appraisal of Fred, but meaning in
fact that the speaker wishes Fred were dead, as only the dead can be saints.
non-metaphoric figures. Figures of speech other than descriptions, similes, and
metaphors. See rhetorical tropes.
non sequitur. An argument that does not proceed from its premise. See
rhetorical fallacies.
notices. News of record regarding public deadlines and meetings. See
journalism.
obiter dicta. Personal opinions or remarks. See journalism.
obituary. A death notice. See journalism.
objective reporting, objectivity. The ability to observe and report situations
without bias. See rhetorical fallacies.
op-ed. “Opinion-editorial.” See journalism, obiter dicta.
oration. An oration is a speech delivered in a formal manner, a declamation.
orismus gives a definition that is different from someone else’s definition of a
word or phrase: “The school’s a madhouse? I doubt it, but a group therapy
program, maybe.”
orthographical schemes (or schemas) have to do with the forms of words and
syllables, with spelling. See schemes and orthography. Orthographical schemes
include amphisbaenia, anagram, antisthecon, aphaeresis, apocope, diaeresis,
dialectic, homograph, homonym, epenthis, hyphaeresis, metathesis, palindrome,
proparalepsis, prosthesis, syncope, synalepha, and tmesis.
orthography means “correct spelling.”
overt elision. Skipping a syllable, as in “don’t.” See elision.
palindrome. A word, phrase, clause or larger unit that reads the same backwards
as forward: “radar” = “radar”; “Able was I ere I saw Elba” = Able was I ere I
saw Elba.
paradiastole substitutes for a word an antonym rather than a synonym, to ironic
effect (see irony), as for instance, if one were speaking of a cheapskate one
might say, “Skinflint is generous to a fault,” or, of a coward, “He bravely rose in
battle and ran away.”
parison is sentence construction by parallel clauses of equal weight, as in
Caesar’s statement, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
paronomasia is a synonym for annomination.
parrhesia is frankness, the opposite of periphrasis.
paradox is a metaphor or statement that combines terms which seem mutually
exclusive, but which in fact are not: “Freedom is the prison of rebellion,” or
“Winter is the Spring of contemplation”; or it is a statement that contradicts a
commonly held belief: “The earth is not round, it is egg-shaped.” See also
dialisis.
paragoge adds a sound or sounds to the end of a word, as in “Rosie” for Rose or
“boughten” for bought. Tmesis is the breaking up of a compound word, usually
by insertion of a related word; for instance, “When you ever go” instead of
whenever you go.
paragon is the argumentative technique of quickly summing up and rejecting all
reasons for making a particular point, except the one reason which the arguer
believes to be valid.
paraphrase. Repeating something in different words. See reiteration and
synonymous parallelism elsewhere in these pages.
parecnasis is the technique of digression—leaving one’s main argument for a
time to talk of other things which, for the moment, may not seem pertinent, but
which in fact bolster the main point when one returns to it.
parenthesis is the insertion of material that interrupts the thought (“I was going
—or have I told you this?—to go away”).
paralepsis makes a little thing of something by passing over it lightly, or
denying it is of importance and thereby emphasizing its actual importance
through understatement: “Well, here’s our All American boy. What’s there to say
of him? He has a pretty wife, and he keeps his hair neatly cut.”
paramalogia admits arguments to the contrary, so as to undercut the opponent’s
case, as in the example for noema.
parimia is the trope of speaking by means of proverbs: “‘An apple a day keeps
the doctor away.’ That’s no doubt true, for he expects to be paid with money.”
parisia is an apologia (that is, an apology) or explanation by the writer of
scurrilous or licentious material which justifies his or her having done so:
“Forgive me for being somewhat off-color, but you know what it’s like when
you’re being osculated.” Or the apology may be for one’s life, as in the case of
Cardinal Newman, who wrote an Apologia pro Vita Sua, or for anything else,
such as the Apologie for Poetry by Philip Sidney (1554–1586). A poem form of
the apology is the palinode—see our companion volume, The Book of Forms.
particula pendens. See anacoluthon.
patent outsides. Newspapers printed on one side only containing national news
and supplied to rural publications which fill the blank side with local news, thus
reducing production costs. Primarily an old UK phenomenon, they are also
called “white sheets.”
pc. Personal computer. If it is capitalized—PC—it means “politically correct.”
(It may also mean “Professional Corporation,” which would be, at a minimum, a
“pair o’ dox.”) See also journalism.
periphrasis. Beating about the bush. Saying something in words other than
those that are most to the point. It is often a way of saying something in a more
grandiloquent or roundabout way than is usual (“She was taken unto the bosom
of her forebears,” rather than “She died”). A euphemism is a nicer word or
phrase substituted for another that is likely to offend; its opposite is parrhesia,
which is frankness. See didactics.
permission is yielding: “Ah, yes, without a doubt I think you’re right It’s better
to love one’s sweetheart than to fight.” A synonym is concession.
permutation. See ironical allusion.
personal ad. An advertisement placed by an individual or group in the
“personals” column of the classified ads section of a journal. See journalism.
personification. Treating an inanimate object or an abstraction as though it were
a human being: “As the airplane climbed, the cloud enveloped us as though it
were a lover.”
Philippic. A Philippic is a vicious written or spoken indictment or something or
someone.
photojournalism News reporting in which photography is the primary carrier of
the news with written copy merely supplementing the visual material. See
journalism.
ploce is the repetition of words or phrases at irregular intervals.
polemics. Debating techniques such as are to be found in the classical discourse
and in other types of argument. See rhetorical tropes.
polyptoton is the repetition of words derived from the same root: “He ran, will
run, and is running now.”
polysyndeton, the opposite of asyndeton, and to be distinguished from
anaphora, is the repetition of conjunctions.
post hoc ergo propter hoc. “After this, therefore before this.” See rhetorical
fallacies.
præcisio is an uncompleted sentence.
præteritio, or preterition, is the act of passing over fleetly: “Healing is what is
important (though of course there was a wound), and we must focus on getting
well rather than upon incidental matters.”
precipitating cause. See cause.
pressman. In Britain pressman is a synonym for reporter, but in the United
States and elsewhere it means the operator of the printing presses of a
newspaper.
primer. A book used to teach the alphabet, often written in primer couplet as in
The New England Primer. See also abecedarius and didactics.
primer couplet. For a description, see our companion volume, The Book of
Forms.
print journalism. News publication that uses the printing press. See journalism.
procatalepsis pre-empts opposing arguments by anticipating the argument
before the opponent can articulate it: “Oh, yes, it’s true; the world’s a sack of
worms, but if we’re robins we can come to terms.”
prolepsis expands upon a general statement, particularizing it and giving further
information regarding it.
pronomination. A synonym for antonomasia.
proparalepsis adds syllables at the end of a word; i.e., “figuration” for figure.
proportion. Pleasing or sufficient relationships of the elements constituting a
whole; symmetry and balance, as in parallel construction.
prosonomasia is a way of nicknaming someone by substituting a letter or letters
in that person’s name to describe him or her by some personal characteristic; as
for instance, if a very thin person were named “Jones,” one might substitute a B
for the J and call her or him Bones.
prothesis adds syllables at the beginning of a word; i.e. “configuration” for
figuration, both of which mean figure or image; or as in, “The cock’s on the
midden a-blowing his horn.”
proverb. A wise traditional saying; see adage, didactics, and parimia.
prozeugma. See zeugma.
psychological fallacies. See rhetorical fallacies.
publisher. The publisher is the owner of a book publishing concern or of a
periodical, or the agent of the owner, whose responsibility it is to oversee its
publication. See journalism.
pun. A joke that relies on ambiguity and irony: “When did your sands of Yuma
desert you?” See annominationn.
quarterly. See magazine.
quid sit. See definition.
ratiocinatio, or ratiocination, is self-questioning: “If I were a fleeing criminal,
where would I go?”
rant. See argument.
reason. See etiologia.
red herring. See rhetorical fallacies.
reductio ad absurdum. See rhetorical fallacies.
reiteration, repetitio, repetition. The word “repetition” itself denotes initial
repetition, as for instance, “Who am I, who are you, and who shall we be
together?” Gradatio or gradation is linking repetition: “Who am I? I am he who
comes to see you.” Conversio, or conversion, is end repetition as is required in
the verse form called the sestina, which will be found in the Appendix on
Traditional Forms, and complexio or complexus is the combination of repetition
and conversion.
Traductio, traduction (not traducement), expolitio, and commoratio are
iteration (and reiteration), as is conduplicatio (conduplication), but interpretatio (interpretation) is iteration by paraphrase. See the synonymous parallel
elsewhere in these pages.
remote cause. See cause.
repetitional schemes are strategies for building sentences that contain repeated
elements. See anadiplosis, anaphora, antanaclasis, antimetabole, antistrophe,
emphasis, epanalepsis, epanodis, epimone, epizeuxis, hypozeuxis, ploce,
polyptoton, reiteration, and symploce.
reporter, reporting. Reporters and stringers (freelance or part-time reporters)
who are in the field covering beats—such as the police beat—and stories. A cub
reporter is an apprentice newsperson who sometimes acts as a gofer (messenger
or menial) and perhaps doubles as a morgue clerk or clipping files librarian.
retraction. See metanoia.
rewrite editor. See editor and journalism.
rhetorical fallacies. Logical fallacies are those that stem from faulty reasoning;
material fallacies are errors that are caused by flaws in the subject matter;
psychological fallacies appeal to the biases and emotions of the audience.
Argumentative fallacies include the ad hominem, which attempts to transfer the
burden of the argument away from the issue in question to an attack on the
person opposing the speaker or writer: “It’s all very well for Newt Gingrich to
espouse ‘family values,’ but wasn’t he raised by a single mother? Didn’t he
divorce his wife when she became ill? And why does he deplore the Lesbian life
style—is it not his sister’s?” In the appeal to authority (a church authority
proclaiming a doctrine does so ex cathedra, “from the pulpit”), the essayist cites
a person with an impressive reputation in the field; ipse dixit is a forceful
assertion that an authority has said a particular thing and that it is therefore so,
without offering proof. The appeal to force threatens the audience with dire
consequences. The appeal to humor is a diversionary tactic that directs the
attention away from the question in hand. The appeal to ignorance avers that the
argument must be true because the opponent cannot prove it is false. The appeal
to pity attempts to enlist the sympathy of the audience at the expense of reason:
“Yes, it is true that this young woman at the age of fourteen bludgeoned her
mother to death with a hammer, but though she is still young, she has paid her
debt to society and deserves an education. Why did Harvard revoke her
application when it discovered she had committed matricide?”
The pathetic fallacy is absurd or overstated personification (prosopopœia);
that is, the endowment of objects or animals with human qualities
(anthropomorphism), often through cues (“motherhood,” “Old Glory,” “apple
pie”) which are meant to induce automatic sentimental responses in the reader.
The appeal to tradition plays to conservative feelings. The bandwagon
fallacy is the argument that the audience ought to do as others have done. The
either / or fallacy is a reductio ad absurdum, reducing a complicated thesis to
only two choices: “Either all women are feeling creatures, or they are not. If they
are not, they are not women.” Equivocation utilizes the same term in two
different ways: “Walter is the lover of Jennifer, but Jennifer is a lover of
clothes.”
The faulty cause is the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy—“after this,
therefore because of this”: “In the twelve years since Mario Cuomo took office
as Governor of New York State the ability of students to read has plummeted
throughout the nation.” The faulty hidden generalization has a false missing
premise in the enthymeme: “He displays the American flag, so he must be
patriotic.”
Name calling uses cues and stereotypes to impugn an opponent. A non
sequitur is a conclusion that does not follow from the premise or proposition on
which an argument is based, as in the catachretic syllogism discussed above. The
red herring is a deliberate and irrelevant distraction from the true subject or
argument. The rigged question is a verbal trap that requires a conclusion of guilt
no matter how it is answered: “Do you beat your wife, or do you merely abuse
her by shouting at her?” A straw man is a setup, something erected so as to be
easily destroyed, such as an argument so preposterous as to be refuted seemingly
without effort: “My opponent believes that all people are created equal, which is
an easy thing for a person born into wealth to argue. What about those of us who
are born into poverty?”
rhetorical question. See erotema.
rhetorical tropes. Certain figures of speech may be called “rhetorical tropes”
(figurae verborum) because they are concerned with making their effects
through non-metaphoric figures of speech.
riddle. The riddle or enigma is a guessing game in which the ambage or
ambiguous circumlocution (roundabout manner of speaking, see periphrasis) is
used. See didactics. For examples, see our companion volume, The Book of
Forms.
rigged question. See rhetorical fallacies.
romantic irony. See irony.
scandalmongering, scandal sheets. “Yellow” journalism. See journalism. See
rhetorical fallacies.
schemas, or schemes, are strategies that have to do with changes in normal
syntax, word order, or with changes in parts of words. There are several types.
Constructional schemes have to do with the construction of balanced sentences.
Look elsewhere in these pages under grammatical parallelism. Exclusive
schemes are strategies for leaving things out of sentences, whereas inclusive
schemes insert words or other elements. Orthographical schemes change, add, or
delete syllables in particular words. Substitutive schemes exchange sentence
elements, and Repetitional schemes reiterate them.
screever. A writer of false or exaggerated accounts of privations and afflictions;
a professional writer of appeals for money, goods, or services. An advertising
copywriter.
segue. See transition.
selective citation is the citing of materials in such a way as to support one’s own
argument while avoiding details that would tend to undercut it. See rhetorical
fallacies.
sententia are common or received wisdom, often in the form of maxims or “old
saws, sometimes rhymed”; adages, aphorisms, axioms, proverbs, or truisms.
sermon, sermonicatio. Direct discourse is a sermon.
sesquipedalian. An unnecessarily long word, or the overuse of long words, as
for instance saying “psychoproboscularanalizationist” instead of “brown nose.”
setup. See rhetorical fallacies.
similitude, similitudo. Similarity of two or more objects. See comparison.
slant. The slant is the bias of the conductor of an argument; see journalism and
rhetorical fallacies.
sob sister. See agony aunt.
Socratic irony. See irony.
speech. See argument.
spoonerism. A spoonerism transposes the initial sounds of two words in a
clause, as in one of the most famous slips of the tongue of the Rev. William
Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), “Young man, you’ve tasted the whole worm!”
(instead of, “You’ve wasted the whole term!).
sports editor. See editor and journalism.
stasis is the technique of dwelling at length upon one’s strongest argument.
stereotype. The stereotype is a superficial characterization: “My opponent has
never had to work a day in his life. What does he know about the working man’s
situation?”
stipulative definition. See definition.
straw man. See rhetorical fallacies.
stringer. A part-time reporter. See editor and reporter.
structural irony. See irony.
subscription. See journalism.
substitution. See metanoia and substitutive schemas.
substitutive schemes replace sentence elements with other, dissimilar, elements.
See anaphora, antanaclasis, anthimeria, antonomasia, hyperbole, implied
aposiopesis, litotes, metalepsis, metonymy, paradiastole, periphrasis,
prosonomasia, and synechdoche.
sufficient cause. See cause.
summary. See continuation.
Sunday supplement, supplement. See journalism.
superlatio. See hyperbole.
syllepsis. There are two kinds of syllepsis: is a grammatic construction in which
one part of speech controls two other elements, agreeing with only one of them
(“She kisses me, and I [kiss] her”), and zeugmatic syllepsis which has a part of
speech correctly controlling two other elements, but controlling them in different
ways (“He waited with mind and dagger sharp”).
symploce is a combination of anaphora or antistophe and epiphora.
synalepha is a technique of overt elision by means of which one of two adjacent
unaccented vowels is suppressed in order to achieve the effect of only one
unaccented syllable, as in “Th’ art of poetic diction.
syncope is a technique of overt elision that drops a syllable from the center of a
word: “suff ’ring” for suffering.
synecdoche or intellectio describes by substituting a part for the whole, as in
“He was the King’s legs” rather than, “He was the King’s messenger.”
syneciosis cross-couples antonyms in such a way as to make them agree, as in,
“We are ourselves victim and victor. In killing you we murder an emblem of
what we strive to be,: not men, but Man.”
synonym. A word of similar meaning, as for instance creep is a synonym for
crawl, and fly is a synonym for soar. See constructional schemes and
synonymous parallelism.
tabloid. A reference not only to the smaller size of a newspaper, but to the kind
of sensational journalism published in such periodicals. See journalism.
tact. The suitability of the approach of an argument to the sensibility of the
reader or audience.
tapinosis is saying too little of a subject; undersaying, not litotes, which is
understatement, nor anticlimax.
tasis is musicality in language.
tmesis. The breaking up of a compound word, usually by insertion of a related
word, as in “When you ever go” instead of whenever you go.
trade magazine. See magazine.
traductio, traduction. See repetition.
transgressio, transgression. See hyperbaton.
transitio, transition, is the passage from one topic to another, segue.
truism. See didactics.
undersaying. See tapinosis.
understatement. See litotes.
unrepresentative sampling. See insufficient sampling.
vertical audience. See audience.
white sheets. See patent outsides.
wordplay. See annomination.
yellow journalism. Reportage that specializes in the sensational and the
scandalous. See journalism.
zeugma, to be distinguished from zeugmatic syllepsis, is a yoking or binding
together of two sentence elements by means of another element, which would
otherwise have had to be repeated elsewhere in the sentence. Three kinds of
zeugma have been distinguished: prozeugma, in which the binding element
precedes the parts it binds (“Everyone wishes to come, and [everyone] will do
so, regardless”); mesozeugma, in which the binding element is between the
yoked parts (“This is the place he loved, and the woman [he loved]”), and
hypozeugma, in which the binding element follows the yoked parts, (“Neither
life [need be feared], nor death itself need be feared”).
zeugmatic syllepsis. See syllepsis.
The Genres of Literary Criticism and
Scholarship
Criticism is the written analysis and evaluation of works of art, including the
artifices of literature, and all criticism operates on the level of convention, a
mode of procedure mutually agreeable to members of a society; specifically, to a
writer and his or her audience. In the case of poetry, for example, inasmuch as all
prosodies are basically arbitrary, versewriting would be impossible without
conventions. Revolutionary change in literature is usually, if not always, caused
by the attempts of a writer or group of writers to impose new conventions upon
an audience, and one of the major purposes of criticism is to explain these
changes to the audience which may or may not accept them. Often it is a seminal
work of great originality and influence that changes the course of literary
development, such as the compendious Anatomy of Melancholy of Robert
Burton (1577–1640) which gathered together all the known literature and
information on the subject which moderns call “depression” and was therefore,
in effect, the first psychological treatise in English at the same time that it was an
insight into the daily life and the mental condition of Renaissance Britain. It is in
this sense that Burton used the word anatomy, which means “dissection,” for he
conducted a forensic dissection of the subject of melancholy in his book.
Seminal critical works in the field of poetry are very often the product of the
poets themselves. An agonist is a poet, like Coleridge or Wallace Stevens, who
spends a great deal of time proselytizing for a particular theory of poetry. The
amateur poet also proselytizes for a viewpoint, but it usually has nothing to do
with theories of poetry; rather, like the American poets Denise Levertov (1923–
1997) and Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), for example, the poetry that amateurs write
generally supports a social cause of some sort: Anti-war, Ban the Bomb, Save
the Whales. A critic who believes that poetry has value for such extrinsic reasons
is called a Platonic critic. The professional poet is one who, simply, devotes a
lifetime to the practice of poetry, language art, and a critic who believes that
poetry has value for such intrinsic reasons may be thought of as an Aristotelian
critic. The terms “amateur” and “professional,” in this sense, have nothing to do
with the ability of a writer to make a living at writing, nor do they raise issues of
quality, for both amateur and professional poets are capable of writing poor
poetry or good. An exemplar is that practicing poet whose work represents the
embodiment of a poetic theory, as Walt Whitman’s work represents the
transcendental/romantic theory of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Criticism has always depended upon the climate of opinion that prevails in a
particular culture during a specific historical period, the ambience (or ambiance),
the prevailing mood of the literati who are concerned with criticism. Thus, in the
Romantic period in England, despite the fact that the American colonies had not
long before broken away from the Empire, and this revolution had inspired the
French revolution, many members of the British literary intelligentsia were at
first inclined to support Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). The climate of
opinion in intellectual circles supported revolutionary ideas and created the
milieu in which Romanticism could flourish. The ethos of a period has to do with
its moral tone and ethical values; a synonym is zeitgeist. The ethos of a time or
society may or may not be in conformity with the climate of opinion.
Textual criticism includes such disciplines as research, collation (comparison
of texts, editions, printings, or versions), exegesis or close reading of a text
(contextualism, the French “explication de texte” or textual analysis).
Another type of textual analysis is hermeneutics (which is the theory, not the
practice, of interpretation, particularly of the Bible). There are four types of
hermeneutics that have been distinguished traditionally: literal, allegorical,
moral, and anagogical. Two techniques of hermeneutical exegesis are the
interlinear or marginal gloss, or scholium (a note in an ancient text), and the
expositio, a discussion or commentary, either marginal or freestanding. In Bible
study a typos (type) or figura (figure) is an Old Testament character, occurrence,
or object that prefigures analogous New Testament characters, occurrences, or
objects (see Neoplatonism). A vulgate is a generally accepted text of a work; if
the Bible, the word begins with a capital letter, Vulgate. The uncapitalized term
can also mean vernacular. The higher criticism is a term signifying the scholarly
attempt to isolate such aspects of a biblical text as its author, provenance (date,
place and proof of origin or derivation), authorial intention, and historicity
(historical authenticity). Lower criticism refers to the scholarly attempt to
establish an accurate form of the text itself.
Judicial or evaluative criticism approaches the text objectively, analyzing it
technically and applying to it standards of literary excellence.
Critical Theory
There have been many critical theories, both creative and learned, over the
centuries. Aristotelian mimesis (mimetic criticism) is the reproduction in
literature and art of the actual world as it is apprehended by the human senses,
and of human actions in the world. It is the theory that art must be truer to life
than life. Mimetic art must induce in the audience what Wordsworth called a
“willing suspension of disbelief” (see convention) so that the artifice of form
does not obtrude, but rather supports the illusion that what occurs in the artifice
is a true mirror of nature, or reality (see unities, imitation). Pragmatic or
practical criticism views all art as being affective—that is, intending to produce
in the reader or audience a particular effect or set of effects, and the purpose of
this type of criticism is to analyze how the artist, through his or her writing
techniques, managed to cause the reader or audience to respond as desired. It is
this sort of art, created through rhetorical tropes, that Plato disliked but that
Aristotle studied. Rhetorical criticism is a later simile.
Plato was suspicious of, if not hostile to, the idea of “literature“ first, because
discourse is the preferred method of learning, for it is interactive, not static,
which is perhaps the primary reason why he chose the method of the literary
Socratic dialogue (see The Book of Dialogue) in which to write his treatises so
as to approximate speech; second, because mimesis is merely an imitation of
reality, not reality itself, and it appeals to the emotions primarily, not the
intellect.
Aristotle opposed this view of his teacher, arguing that mimetic art can and
should be profoundly intellectual. He distinguished between forms of drama,
insisting that tragedy has a high moral purpose, not merely an emotive appeal
like comedy, which displays base or ethically imperfect personalities.
Furthermore, of all creatures on earth, mankind is the most imitative, learning
nearly everything by mimicry from which we derive pleasure.
The Roman odist and satirist Horace (65–8 BC) agreed that dulce et utile
(pleasure and usefulness) were the sole ends of poetry. However, following Plato
rather than Aristotle, St. Augustine (354–430) condemned secular literature, in
particular poetry and drama which, being fictive and therefore fabrications, he
called fabula, fables. He was apparently unaware of the fact, or unwilling to
entertain the idea, that everything written, including theology (“mythology” or
“superstition” to a non-believer), is fictive. For the next millenium, Augustine’s
view of writing was widely held. Nevertheless, he is given credit for founding
the science of symbolic signification (signa), semiology, which would evolve
into the twentieth century’s semiotics.
Augustine believed that one’s experience of God, the ultimate reality of
existence and the logos, the Word made flesh, was bound up with language
which, though an imperfect and ambiguous vehicle, gave mankind at least hints
of the will and the nature of the Creator. He discussed both natural signs and
conventional signs; an example of the former (unintentional signs) would be
footprints in the mud, and of the latter (intentional signs) would be words or
hieroglyphics—pictures representing words, pictographs. Scriptural signs
belonged in the second category, and these were further subdivided into signa
propria, literal signs, or signa translata. The former were to be taken literally,
the latter symbolically, needing to be analyzed hermeneutically. Likewise
philology, an understanding of languages (linguarium notitia) could be brought
to bear upon the former, and science—both social and hard rerum notitia)—
could be utilized to understand the latter.
In his manuscript De Dialectica Augustine held that the ambiguities of
language were not the fault of the words themselves, but owing to the various
purposes of the users of the words. In De Trinitate he likens his epistemology—
that branch of philosophy which investigates the characteristics of
understanding, its elements, assumptions, cogency and boundaries—to the
rhetorical trope aenigma (enigma), which combines riddle and simile, for
through an investigation of enigmas (aenigmata) one may also glean hints and
glimmers of the attributes of the Creator. Augustine urged a twofold approach to
the theory of signs: lectio (reading) and praedicatio (preaching), that is,
hermeneutics and rhetoric.
The basis of Medieval critical theory was translatio studii, examining and
commenting upon literary texts in the light of classical precepts derived from
ancient wisdom. Four classes of criticism existed: Neoplatonism, which
developed from the hermeneutics of the fathers of early Christianity;
Neoaristotelianism, which derived from principles of logic and scientific
analysis; Horatian, which rested on a heritage of prosodics and poetics, and
grammatical, based upon classical stylistics. The basic method of all these
overlapping schools was enarratio poetarum or “exposition of the poets,” that is,
analysis of and commentary upon literary texts and linguistic scrutiny.
The Neoplatonists, including the founder of the school, Plotinus (AD 205–
270), and his disciple Porphyry, believed that the human soul aspired to
transcendent experience and that the material world was therefore to be
interpreted through poetry which would illuminate the design that underlay
apparent chaos. Macrobius (ca. 400) distinguished two types of fictions:
pastimes (social poetry) and fables (narratio fabulosa) which had the serious
purpose of illustrating ideas. Even pagan myth might thus be examined to
discover Christian truths, according to Fulgentius (ca. 500–600) and Boethius
(480–524). Neoplatonists also believed in the concept of the “Great Poet,” such
as the Roman Virgil (70–19 BC) whose work had much to recommend it as an
illuminator of many sorts of truth. The term integumentum or “veil” came to
replace “fabula” as referring to the cloak of fiction that hides the core of truth
inherent in myth from the eye of the unsophisticated reader. This word was not a
synonym of allegoria (allegory) which applies to the several levels of
interpretation that may be investigated in the Holy Scriptures. Both terms would
bolster the multivalent reading (many-layered meanings) of a text.
In Britain the Venerable Bede (673–735) wrote a treatise, Concerning Figures
and Tropes, which attempted to settle the questions regarding the difference
between allegory as literary metaphor and as Christian occurrence, inventing the
terms allegoria in verbis for the former and allegoria in factis for the latter
which reads various significations in the events of Biblical “history.” Language
theory during this time and after studied utterance (spoken sounds), ideation
(intellectation), written expression (sounds and ideas as represented by
alphabetical letters), and denotative anchors (the objective referents of written
signs).
Various Arabic scholars, one of the earliest of whom was Al-Farabi (ca. 870–
950), added Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics to the Organon, the categorical
Arabic encyclopedia of Aristotle’s texts on logic. This revised compendium put
the emphasis upon the intellectual and technical side of rhetoric and poetry at the
expense of content. Poetry thus was a division of logic, in the view of the later
Arab scholar Averroes (1120–1198), the art of epideictic, that is, speeches of
laudation or condemnation. The scholarship of these Arabs was highly
influential in the West.
The father of modern literary criticism was Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) who
managed to make a vernacular language, Italian, bear the weight that the
classical languages had hitherto borne. Furthermore, he brought criticism to bear
not only upon the work of his contemporaries, but upon his own writings as well
in order to justify them to the literate community for whom he wrote—whenever
a writer stoops to criticism, it is for this purpose primarily. The poems of his Vita
Nuova were written in verse and later glossed in prose in the exegetical manner
of the divisio textus so as to expose the underlying meanings of the verses. The
fragmentary Convivio, which Dante called a comento (commentary), had been
planned as a sort of accessus ad auctores (introduction to authors) or allegorical
interpretation of fourteen of his own canzoni (see canzone in The Book of
Forms). These techniques themselves were methods the Medieval biblical
exegete applied as often as not in prefaces or introductions to the works of
classical poets in the form of the prologue paradigm (syllabus, outline)
discussing such topics as the biography and intentions of the poet, the
bibliography, chronology, and quality of the work.
By Dante’s time the form of such prologues was this: 1) title of the work; 2)
author; 3) author’s intention; 4) content (materia); 5) method of treatment
(modus tractandi); usefulness of the treatise (utilitas), and 6) the category of the
liberal arts and sciences under which the treatise fell (cui parti philosophiae
supponitur). This form was supplanted by the Aristotelian prologue, the
headings of which were efficient cause (author), material cause (subject and
treatment), formal cause (forma tractandi or literary form), and ultimate cause
(purpose, intention, usefulness).
Chaucer’s French contemporary poet Eustache Deschamps (ca. 1346–1406)
did a redaction in 1392 of the liberal arts quadrivium and trivium in his L’Art de
Dictier et de fere chançons. The category of “music“ he subdivided in two parts,
artificial music, meaning instrumental or vocal musical sounds, and natural
music, meaning poetry (poiesis), which he further classified as to poetic formes
fixes (traditional verse forms), a service that George Puttenham (1530?-1590)
would perform for the British in 1589 in his Arte of English Poesie.
The first British poet-critic was Philip Sidney (1554–1586), author of the
Apologie for Poetrie (1595) which esteemed praxis, the practical utilization of
knowledge, over gnosis, esoteric erudition. However, in Britain prior to the
eighteenth century Ben Jonson (ca. 1572–1637) stood as exemplar of the
classical Aristotelian virtues by championing the mimetic nature of literature, its
proportionate construction, and its emotional restraint. At this time literature was
perceived as being written for a privileged educated public, and what criticism
existed was aimed at that audience, but by the time that Joseph Addison (1672–
1719) and Richard Steele (1672–1729) founded the literary periodical The Tatler
(1709–1711), literacy was much more widespread, and the editors chose to try to
promote the values of a civilized society among a heterogeneous readership. The
mission of their second magazine, The Spectator (1711–1712) was expanded to
include arbitration of the differences between the values of the burgeoning
middle classes and those of the gentry, explaining notions of privilege and
station to the former, and of respectability and probity to the latter.
Alexander Pope (1688–1744), in his “Essay on Criticism,” was less interested
in establishing the perimeters of criticism than in explaining the function of the
discipline as a tool for the inculcation of proper morals and civilized behavior.
Value theory or axiology has four branches: ethics, the moral good; politics, the
social good; aesthetics, the beautiful, and pragmatics, the useful. Samuel
Johnson (1709–1784) believed that “the end of writing is to instruct; the end of
poetry is to instruct by pleasing,” which is the feature that distinguishes belles
lettres from other kinds of writing.
As the century wore on these aspects of the function of criticism began to
fade, and Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) formulated the Augustan normative
or perfectionist theory of mimetic art by once more mixing Platonism with
Aristotelianism, postulating that an artist imitated no specific objects in Nature,
but central forms which were eidolons or ideal forms of the types to be found in
Nature and generalized therefrom by the genius, or exceptional creative power,
of the individual artist. Genius is to be distinguished from talent, which is native
ability: extraordinary natural aptitude for a given pursuit. A writer may have a
talent, a gift, for words, but without genius, that writer will not rise to the level of
greatness, to Olympian heights, the sphere of the gods. Such critical theory later
came to be called “pre-Romantic.”
Expressive criticism views literature as the personal expression of the artist,
and nineteenth-century Romantic theory postulated that poetry was the product
of the genius or Great Poet who was possessed of greater imagination and
insight than ordinary people because his (and, presumably, her) moral character
and perception were superior. John Henry Newman (1785–1859) claimed that
the great poet’s intuition of “the archetypes of the beautiful” was essential to his
genius. The Great Poets of the past were Homer (ca. 850 BC), Dante Alighieri,
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), and John Milton (1608–1674), and, in the
Romantic period itself, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who rejected
Reynolds’ system, postulating in its stead the view that nature ought to be
interpreted realistically in poetry and art.
Poetry was capable of being studied and analyzed because it was as sensible
as science; nevertheless, neither Romantic poets or critics were interested in
exploring the subject of form which would be determined by the action of the
poet’s imagination through imagery and metered language (verse). The style of a
poem would be determined by the ethical nature of the poet.
Poetry was considered to be the greatest of the arts, and its object was the
discovery and enunciation of truth whose perceptible sign was beauty, as
enunciated by John Keats (1795–1821): “‘Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,’—that is
all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn.”)
Poetry must express great ideas and must have as its ultimate object the
expression of a moral viewpoint, whatever its immediate point might be, and its
material is the actual world—the real and the factual, the corporeal and the
spiritual. The subject matter of poetry may be anything at all, so long as it is
treated with originality and sincerity.
The third strain of Romantic critical theory after Perfectionism and Realism
was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Idealism which, while it, too, rejected
Perfectionism, nevertheless maintained that the individualities expressed in
poetry must also be representative of a class. A theory that took an even more
Aristotelian viewpoint was concrete idealism, the foremost proponent of which
was John Ruskin (1819–1900). It looked to nature for its inspiration and
duplicated it in language art. The truths of nature being universal truths—a term
eventually replaced by characteristic truth—that poetry which best reproduces
those truths is the greatest poetry.
Aubrey de Vere (1814–1902) categorized the kinds of poetic truth as the truth
of nature, of character, of sentiment, of passion, of style, of diction, of
observation, and of “keeping” which included the architectonics of the poem
together with the unity of the poet’s moral and intellectual character.
Many poets and critics in the nineteenth century, including Wordsworth and
Coleridge, attempted to make distinctions between various related terms
including imagination, fancy, and wit. The “imagination” was the ability to think
on a highly creative plane, conjuring images that made the world more
intelligible or perceptible to the intelligence, whereas “fancy” was farther
removed from reality, was more whimsical or playful or decorative. The
esemplastic, according to Coleridge, is that imaginative ability of the poet to
make an architectonic whole out of various and disparate elements. “Wit” was
the ability to imagine or perceive incongruous connections between disparate
things, as in the pun or the bon mot; it was the expression of the quick and
humorously clever mind, but it was essentially superficial. If the pun is, as has
often been claimed, “the lowest form of humor,” what does that make William
Shakespeare? For he is the punster without peer in all of English literature. It is
difficult to see how our greatest writer can also be our worst, but the Romantic
and most of the Victorian poets and critics were nothing if not Transcendental
philosophically—that is to say, Kantian and post-Kantian idealists, and
exceedingly earnest.
The Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was the most influential
American literary critic of the nineteenth century, borrowed three elements of
British Romantic theory on which to construct his program regarding organic
poetry: Coleridge’s argument from Biographia Literaria (1817) regarding the
“Imagination”; Wordsworth’s discussion in the “Preface” to the 1800 edition of
Lyrical Ballads regarding the aesthetics of “Nature,” and the thoughts of Thomas
Carlyle (1795–1881) from Sartor Resartus (1832–1833) regarding “Natural
Supernaturalism.” Briefly, American literature, particularly poetry, was not to
rely upon traditional literary forms and techniques, especially not those of the
British, but upon intuition. The poem would choose its own form, like the shell
being created by an unwitting snail, or like the poems being created by
Emerson’s exemplar, Walt Whitman. Forgetting, perhaps, that he himself was
writing criticism, Emerson claimed in his essay “The Poet,” “Criticism is
infested with a cant of materialism which assumes that manual skill and activity
is the first merit of all men and disparages, such as say and do not, overlooking
the fact that some men, namely poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to
the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action
but to quit it to imitate the sayers.” In other words, poets are born and not made.
Whitman believed in Personalism, what the Cold War of the twentieth
century would have called “the cult of personality,” but it was his considered
opinion that he was large enough of soul to stand not merely for the common
man, but for all men everywhere. Neither he nor Emerson (nor anyone else,
apparently) claimed to stand for the common woman.
The second most important American critic of the nineteenth century after
Emerson was Edgar Allan Poe who influenced the French Symbolists. Mystery
remained an important element in poetry, but that mystery was to be achieved
using the discrete symbol, through overtone. The poet was to attempt thereby to
achieve a glimpse of supernal beauty which, though it sounded Transcendental,
was not, for the most beautiful thing in the world was the death of a lovely
woman. Poe was, in fact, an Aristotelian and a firm believer in poetic technique
as he showed in his essay, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), wherein he
explained how he composed his poem “The Raven.” It was his opinion that any
poem over 100 lines in length was “a flat contradiction in terms,” for lyric
intensity could not be sustained that long. He was also at pains to dismiss the
“heresy of the didactic“ in poetry. Poe and Emerson were nearly diamectrical
opposites in their literary views.
A late nineteenth-century French movement was Aestheticism which in effect
meant “art for art’s sake” (“l’art pour l’art”) and not for any moral or didactic
sake (see aesthetics). This view eventually led to what has been called
decadence, an art that grew out of weltschmerz, a German term meaning “worldsickness,” that is to say, jadedness and ennui such as that expressed vividly in T.
S. Eliot’s long Modernist poem, “The Waste Land,” and the shorter “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Another term associated with Aestheticism is the
French fin de siècle or “end of the (nineteenth) century” which, in Victorian
times, had denoted a time of human progress on all fronts, but which came to
imply the motif of “the death of God,” which is expressed very well in W. B.
Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming” in which the Millennium—or cycle of a
thousand years—is at hand and a new “savior” is to be born. This poem is filled
with quotable lines describing “the end of the cycle,” including, “Things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold,” “The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” “And
what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be
born?” It is a form of eschatological poetry which is concerned with the end of
the world, the Second Coming, judgment, resurrection, and the new world to
come.
Late nineteenth-century Freudian critical theory postulated that literary
works betray the unconscious cravings of the authors. Such theory applied to an
author’s work was intended to produce a psychobiography, but often produced
only psychobabble, a term invented to describe the argot of psychiatry. Freudian
dream analysis, part of the method of psychoanalysis, was in fact a form of
literary criticism rather than the analysis of the unconscious mind because the
psychoanalyst could not become part of the mind of the dreamer so as to
experience the dreams at first hand; instead, all that could be analyzed was the
narrative of the dream as related by the conscious dreamer who could not be
expected to remember the dream perfectly in its original form. The dreamer
would thus be forced to select those dream events which were apprehensible, to
put them into words, to arrange them in a more or less coherent order, and to
convey them to the psychoanalyst at second hand. Another way of looking at it
is this: writers were the original psychiatrists.
Modernist theory was primarily the work of Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T.
S. Eliot (1988–1965). It was the former who ranked types of criticism in a
hierarchy of ascending importance: criticism by discussion included everything
from fugitive reviewing to writing theoretical treatises; criticism by translation
was the composition in one’s own language of modern versions of ancient and
foreign literature; criticism by exercise in the style of a given period was the
reproduction in original works of the literary practices of historical periods;
criticism via music was the exercise of melopoiea (lyricism) in original works,
and, finally, criticism in new composition, literary experimentation—it was
Pound who sounded the Modernist watchword: “Make it new!” Clearly, Pound’s
ideal critic was a poet primarily, not a professional exegete or scholar.
T. S. Eliot’s primary contribution to modernist theory was his linkage of
Modernist poetry with the poetry of the past which, one would otherwise have
thought, was exactly what high Modernists would want to eschew. Although it is
true that the immediate effect of the Modernist revolt was to distance twentiethcentury literature from that of the nineteenth century, particularly the Victorian
era, Eliot made a case for a connection between his own work and the work of
John Donne and the Metaphysical poets of the English Renaissance. His poem
The Waste Land was the first major example of poetry written primarily, or very
largely, in what has been called abstract syntax by Donald Davie (1922–1995), a
path that would be more fully explored by Wallace Stevens, but this feature of
Eliot’s poem was in fact brought to the fore by Pound’s extensive revision of the
original manuscript.
Aesthetics is the study of “beauty” in and of itself, separate from other
considerations, such as ethics, morality, and so forth. A number of critics,
writers, and littérateurs including T. S. Eliot among the moderns and Aristotle
among the ancients, have maintained that the creative nature is comprised of two
elements, emotion and intellect. If in the creator of art there is a cleavage
between the two, and a too heavy emphasis placed upon one or the other, a
dissociation of sensibility takes place, Eliot maintained, and poetic imbalance
occurs. Verse too much of the mind is verse essay, not poetry, and verse too
much of the emotions is mere confession or effusion: Wordsworth, attempting to
strike a balance between these views, had believed that poetry is “emotion
recollected in tranquility,” and Keats invented the term negative capability to
express something like the same thing: the ability of the poet to assume a mask
in order to see with another’s eyes, not one’s own.
Aesthetic distance—a term adopted by the neo-Aristotelian, objective,
practical criticism of The Chicago School and The New Criticism which
flourished from the 1920s through World War II and into the mid-century (a
synonym is psychic distance)—means the severance of oneself from the object
being evaluated so as to be able to consider it objectively, without bias and
without prior assumptions, as in the commission of the intentional fallacy, which
is the critical error of attempting to understand a literary work by accepting at
face value an author’s statement of what he or she intended to accomplish in it,
or by inferring the author’s intention from the work itself or from some other
source, such as the life of the author. The biographical fallacy is the error of
judging something by referring it to the author’s life story, for works of literature
may or may not be “about” an author’s experiences. Likewise, the historical
fallacy attempts to read into a work of literature something of the times during
which it was written, which may or may not have anything to do with the case.
The affective fallacy is a New Critical term meaning the error of judging a
work of literature by the emotional effect it has upon the reader. The egopoetic
fallacy, of which Whitman was guilty, is the belief, on the part of a writer, that
his or her autobiographical experiences have universal significance in and of
themselves, and the resultant hyper-romantic dissociation of sensibility and
diminution of aesthetic distance between the writer, his or her artifice, and the
audience.
On the other hand, all of these “fallacies” are also critical “systems.” Eneas
Sweetland Dallas in his 1852 “Poetics: An Essay on Poetry,” called for a
comparative criticism: The comparison required is threefold; the first, which
most persons would regard as in a peculiar sense critical, a comparison of all the
arts one with another, as they appear together and in succession; the next,
psychological, a comparison of these in their different phases with the nature of
the mind, its intellectual bias and its ethical needs as revealed in the latest
analysis; the third, historical, a comparison of the results thus obtained with the
facts of history, the influence of race, of religion, of climate, in one word, with
the story of human development.
Biographical criticism studies a writer’s work in relation to his or her life;
historical criticism (including antiquarianism and chronologism) judges the
work in its historical context (see new historicism); subjective criticism
(impressionistic criticism) approaches the work from the viewpoint of the critic’s
personal impressions—a contemporary school is called reader response
criticism. Comparative criticism compares and contrasts different works or
different authors. Heuristics is a course of investigation undertaken by some
particular means leading to discovery; for instance, searching for archetypes in a
genre such as matriarchal literature.
The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) coined the term
structuralism and argued the ambiguity of language signs which he divided into
the signifier, the word itself, and the signified, the concept behind the word. He
maintained that any word could stand for any object or concept and had meaning
only through social convention, a position which is inarguable, as anyone who
has tried to learn a foreign language will testify, although of course every
signifier will have a history often stretching back into dim antiquity, and its
etymology can usually be traced, together with its changes or transformations,
which is what the science of linguistics examines. Thus, each signifier defines
itself by its difference from every other signifier, and the same is true of every
signified within the field of the language in question, and not through any
connection with the thing or concept it purports to represent. The field of
linguistics is split between the majority who believe in hypotaxis, the theory that
language is subsumed by the science of language, or in parataxis, the theory
which posits that language and its science are separate entities.
Postmodernism is a term that means at least two things: a reaction by writers
against the principles of Modernism and a turning away from radical literary
experimentation toward the reintroduction of traditional standards and devices
or, contrarily, an attempt to carry to extremes the principles of Modernism.
Postmodernism also shows a propensity by critics and scholars to turn away
from literature toward criticism itself, specifically critical theory, and to treat
critical texts as more important than, or at least as important as, the literary texts
that criticism traditionally had existed to explicate and examine. To this end,
certain critical schools have attempted to deconstruct the literary text so that it
becomes a meaningless object. Unfortunately, in doing so critics have assured
their own self-destruction or at least marginalization, since the only readers of
such texts are other critics who enjoy the manipulation of their abstruse argot.
The term Poststructuralism stands in relation to Structuralism as the term
Postmodernism stands to Modernism; that is to say, it refers to those critical
theories which follow Structuralism and either oppose or extend its premises.
Deconstruction, a term coined by the French critic Jacques Derrida (1930–
2004) during the 1960s, is a theory of literary criticism, based upon the
“difference“ postulated by Saussure, that disputes the critical assumption that
language can carry meaning in and of itself. Words have reference only to other
words and not to objects or ideas: “In deconstruction, the critic claims there is no
meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually
irreconcilable, ‘virtual texts’ constructed by readers in their search for meaning,”
according to Rebecca Goldstein. One of the techniques used by such critics to
prove that words undermine one another is the identification of binary
oppositions within a text to show, first, that there is a hierarchy of terminology
(“John saw the world in terms of black and white”); second, the inversion of the
hierarchy in order to reverse the meaning of the original terms (“John saw the
world in terms of white and black”), and, third, the neutralization of both terms
nonhierarchically (“John saw the world in terms of whack”). In this case, the
neutralization is a portmanteau word.
J. Douglas Kneale declares that “Reading is an act that critics perform vis-àvis texts but also something that texts perform on themselves in those moments
when they declare and at the same time dispute their status as language.” But
this statement—if one understands its meaning—is like Emerson’s regarding the
ability of the poem to choose its own form, for “texts” cannot perform anything
“on” themselves because they are not sentient. Everything “in” a text occurs not
in the text but in the mind of the reader. A mind duplicates, or attempts to
duplicate, what occurred in the mind of a writer as it is reflected in a text.
Furthermore, if a text deconstructs itself and therefore has no meaning, then
there is no point in reading literature, or in writing criticism, for it is
meaningless, like all other texts, like this text.
Reader-response theory (reader theory, response theory) posits that the reader
is actively involved with the text, which in and of itself is not a self-contained
whole. The reader may in fact be a character in the text, like the narrator, but a
narratee or receiver of the narration who may be addressed by the narrator, as in
Victorian novels: “Dear Reader, bear with me as we begin this tale of adventure
and woe, for in the end you may be both surprised and mollified.” Furthermore,
the reader will actively fill in hiatuses and elipses in the narration and make
particular assumptions about meanings and situations that will not be shared by
any other reader, and the author will be deliberately manipulating the reactions
and responses of the reader by means of various devices. Much of the story takes
place not on the page, but in the mind of the reader who will, in any case, bring a
particular perspective to bear upon the text and will read it in terms of that
perspective; i.e., the perspective of a Christian, of a prude, of a sadist, and so on
and so forth. In each case, the effect of the text upon the reader will be different,
though everyone will read the “same” story.
Liberation criticism is an umbrella term that covers those critical theories that
have arisen from the counterculture movements of the 1960s. These approaches
include gay criticism (“queer theory“), ecological (or Gaia) theory, anti-war and
ban-the-bomb, black and Hispanic, Marxist-Leninist, and feminist (including
Lesbian) criticism. These and later theories, such as post-colonialist and
multiculturalist criticism, during the 1990s were assembled under the rubric of
“politically correct” theory.
Feminist theory, which began in consciousness-raising confrontation
sessions, is too wide and diverse to summaries adequately in a short space. Some
of the issues that are of literary importance have to do with the discovery and
publication of neglected women writers of the past in order to provide a context
of literary and role models, canonicity, and viewpoint; the establishment of
women’s studies or feminology in a paternalist society, and the encouragement
and development of new women writers. Like all other schools of twentieth
century critical theory, feminists have formed alliances with and experienced the
permutations of other critical systems including Marxists, structuralists,
deconstructionists, poststructuralists, Gaia theorists, and so on. The critics who
have emerged from these circumstances have been dubbed gynocritics by Elaine
Showalter. Finally, The New Historicism maintains that each individual event,
including the written text, takes place not in vacuo, but in a cultural and
historical environment, and that no event or text, therefore, may be studied apart
from its interactive context.
Chapter Glossary
abbreviation. A shortening of a commonly understood word or phrase, as for
instance “etc.” for the Latin et cetera, or it is a symbol that stands for a word or
phrase, as for instance ampersand (&) for “and.”
abbreviations. Some common abbreviations used in literary works are aet. or
aetat. (for aetatis suae) meaning “aged,” as in “He died aetat. thirty-five.” Ibid.
(ibidem), means, “This quotation is to be found in the same work as the last
quotation noted,” as in a second or later reference to the same work in a series of
footnotes. A term that is sometimes confused with ibid. is idem, which is not an
abbreviation; it means, “This has been cited previously.” Op. cit. (opere citato)
means, “in the work cited,” as in a second quotation chosen from a work
previously cited. Ca. or simply the letter c. means circa, Latin for “around” or
“thereabouts,” as in “John Doe was born ca. 1910.”
abecedarium. See primer.
abridgement. A shortening or condensation of a literary work, as distinguished
from an unabridged work published as written by the original author. See editor.
abstract. A summary of the most significant points of a text.
abstraction. A word or verbal construct that represents an idea rather than a
thing; the opposite of concretion. See reification and symbol.
abstract noun. A word that signifies an idea rather than a thing.
academic, academic press. See publishing and scholar
academician. A member of the faculty of a school, college, or university. See
scholar.
acyron. Use of words inappropriate to the thing being described; mixed
metaphor. See catachresis.
ad, advertisement. See propaganda.
alias. See pseudonym.
allegorical interpretation. The symbolic level of any text. See senses of
interpretation.
allegory. See senses of interpretation.
allonym. See pseudonym.
almanac. An almanac is a yearly publication containing all sorts of agricultural
information including such things as the phases of the moon, weather forecasts,
riddles, games—things that farmers can use in their work and during the winter
months when, traditionally, there is little to do on a farm. Modern almanacs are
often miniature encyclopedias.
alternative press. See publishing.
ambiguity or plurisignation—that is, multiple or polysemous meaning—is the
allowance of overtone and connotation by context. William Empson has
identified “seven types of ambiguity” [italics have been added]: 1) “First type
ambiguities arise when a detail is effective in several ways at once, e.g., by
comparisons with several points of likeness, antitheses with several points of
difference, ‘comparative’ adjectives, subdued metaphors, and extra meanings
suggested by rhythm.” 2) “. . . two or more alternative meanings are fully
resolved into one.” 3) “. . . two apparently unconnected meanings are given
simultaneously.” 4) “. . . the alternative meanings combine to make clear a
complicated state of mind in the author.” 5) “. . . a fortunate confusion, as when
the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing . . . or not holding it all at
once.” 6) “. . . what is said is contradictory or irrelevant and the reader is forced
to invent interpretations.” 7) “. . . full contradiction, marking a division in the
author’s mind.” See also energia.
amphibology, amphiboly is a remark that can be taken in two ways; double
entendre. See ambiguity.
ana, An ana is a collection of odds and ends, curiosities and intelligence, gossip
and anecdote having to do with a particular subject. It is most often to be
encountered as a suffix, as in “Johnsoniana,” a collection of materials having to
do with Samuel Johnson.
anagoge. See senses of interpretation.
anagogical interpretation. The spiritual level of any text. See senses of
interpretation.
analect. Selected portions of a work of literature or set of works. Analects
(analecta) are gleanings or extracts from the work of an author. See ana and
anthology.
anchored abstraction. The equation of an abstract noun with a concrete noun,
thus defining the abstraction, as for instance, “Love is a puppy.” See symbol.
angst is a feeling of trepidation or dread often accompanied by despondency.
Although it is derived from an old German word, it is a term that is associated
with Freudian psychology, existential philosophy and theater of the absurd.
annal. Annals are yearly records, like the proceedings of a scholarly or
professional group or The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
annotated bibliography. See notes.
annual An annual is a book of any type that is published yearly, such as a
college yearbook.
anopisthograph. See printing.
anthologist. The editor of an anthology.
anthology. An anthology is a collection of stories, poems, or nonfiction pieces
by more than one author, a miscellany, omnium-gatherum, or compendium.
aperçu. An aperçu is a synopsis of a work. For a second meaning, see epiphany.
apocalyptic literature. Literature that is prophetic of the end of the world.
apocrypha are books of the Bible that are not accepted as canonical, but in a
broader sense, they are works attributed to a writer without final proof of
authorship.
appendix. An appendix is supplemental material added to the end of a volume,
sometimes an excursus, a formal digression or detailed discussion of an ancillary
(secondary) point made in the body of the book. See journal and notes.
architectonics. The overall structure of a literary work.
artifice, artificial. See tautologia.
artistic merit. See bibliophilia and taste.
audience. The vertical audience is that group of readers which exists at a
particular moment in history; the horizontal audience is that group of readers
which exists from a particular moment in history forward through time; the
contemporary audience is that group of readers which exists at the same time as
a particular writer.
Aufklärung is a critical synonym for the “Enlightenment,” borrowed from the
German. See literary periods in the first chapter on The Discipline of Literature.
author. The creator of written material.
autograph. The signature of an author on a copy of a book by that author. See
holograph and printing.
autotelic, a term from the New Criticism, means a work of art that is selfreferential, needing no external reason for being other than itself. It is the
opposite of didactic.
Baconian theory. See bardolatry.
bard. A Medieval Celtic—Welsh, Irish, Cornish, Scottish or Manx—poet of
Britain who wrote in various syllabic prosodies (see The Book of Forms). Some
of the strictures imposed upon them by the Celtic Bardic tradition were
tremendously complex: There were twenty-four “official” Welsh meters, and the
Irish bards also were expected to master particular syllabic forms if they were to
be admitted to the hierarchy of poets.
As H. Idris Bell and David Bell point out in the introduction to their book
(see Bibliography), “The two higher classes into which the bards were divided,
known respectively as pencerdd and bardd teulu, were, under the native princes,
public officials and subject to strict regulation, both by the Welsh laws and by
the rules of the bardic order itself. The pencerddiaid, whose work alone would
seem to have been preserved, were limited to a very narrow range of themes,
chiefly elegies and eulogies on the members of the princely houses and religious
poems, and even their treatment of these was regulated by minute prescriptions.”
This would seem to be a prison, but the Bells also point out, “It is, though, a
curious paradox in literature that often the most binding tradition and form are
an incentive to spontaneity of expression rather than a hindrance.”
bardd teulu. See bard.
bardolatry is the worship of poets; specifically, of Shakespeare. Those who
cannot bear the thought that a paideia, an outlander of little education, could
have written so well and so prolifically resort to Baconian theory—the idea that
Francis Bacon, the great essayist and thinker of the Renaissance in England, was
the actual author of the plays and poems. A recent development along these lines
is the contemporary society known as The Tremblestick League which argues
that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by Bill Tremblestick, a
janitor of the Globe Theatre. This organization has called for a fifty-year
moratorium on all things Shakespearian, including productions, all sorts of
scholarship including niggling pedantry, criticism, conjecture, and so forth, so
that the matter may be studied without distraction. During the interim the plays
of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including Thomas Kyd (1558–1594),
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), and Ben Jonson may be performed.
baroque. See tautologia.
Bible. See bibliophilia and apocrypha. See also heuristics in the essay section of
this chapter.
biblioclasm, biblioclast. A biblioclast is one who destroys books; a biblioclasm
is a book-burning.
bibliofilm. See microfilm.
bibliognost. A pedantic expert on a particlar book.
bibliography. See notes.
biblioklept. One who steals books.
bibliokleptomaniac. One who cannot help stealing books.
bibliolatry is the worship of books.
Bibliomancy is a form of divination whereby one allows a Bible to fall open to a
serendipitous passage which will guide one in a particular situation or that will
foretell the future.
bibliomane. One who obsessively collects books.
bibliomania is an obsession with the collecting of books.
bibliomaniac, bibliomanian. One who is afflicted with an insanity over books.
bibliopegist, bibliopegy. An artistic bookbinder; fine bookbinding.
bibliophagist. One who devours books.
bibliophagy. Omnivorous reading.
bibliophile. A lover of books.
bibliophilia means “love of books.”
bibliophobe. One who fears books.
bibliophobia is a fear of books.
bibliopoesy. Bookmaking.
bibliopole. A bookdealer.
bibliotaph. A hoarder of books.
bibliothecal. Belonging in a book collection or library.
bibliothecary. A curator of books, a librarian.
bibliothéque. A book collection or library.
bibliotherapy, bibliotherapist. Bibliotherapy is the use of literature (stories,
poems, plays) as a type of treatment for psychological disorders, and a
bibliotherapist is a specialist in this sort of approach.
bill. A legislative document to be considered for enactment.
binding. See bookbinding.
biography. See books. See also the chapter “The Genres of Nonfiction.”
black letter, black letter book. See printing.
bleed, bleed off, bleed page. See printing.
block book. See printing.
blurb. See notes.
body. See books.
book. A group of pages or leaves bound together as a unit. See book-binding,
publishing, and script.
bookbinding. The same materials that were used as writing surfaces were often
used for bookbinding: a full binding is one that is made completely of some sort
of leather; a quarter-binding, of leather with paper corners; half-binding, of
leather with paper corners and spine. The spine of a book is the bound edge of
the pages; the fore-edge is the opposite unbound edge of the book, and the other
edges are called simply top edge and bottom edge. All edges might be gilt. The
covers, front and back, complete the binding; they might be made of stiff, limp,
or plush material.
Endpapers are double-width pages glued to the inside front or back covers of
a book, and attached to the first or last pages. The flyleaf is a blank initial or final
page of the book. The front or right-hand side of a page (the odd page) is the
recto, and the back or left-hand side (the even page) is the verso.
book-burning. See biblioclasm.
book design. See printing.
book of hours. See breviary.
book review. See secondary source.
bottom edge. See bookbinding.
boustrophedon. Text written alternately from left to right and then from right to
left, as an ox plows its rows.
Bowdlerization. See condensation.
breviary. A breviary is a book that contains the offices, prayers and hymns for
the canonical hours; a book of hours.
brief. A compressed document or series of documents, a condensation.
broadsheet, broadside, broadside ballad. A broadside or broadsheet is a single
sheet of paper ordinarily printed on one side only. Broadside ballads were song
lyrics or verses printed on single sheets, originally sold in in the streets and
usually illustrated by woodcuts.
brochure. See books.
bull, bulletin. A bull is an official document that is issued stating a doctrine or
credo; a paper of less weight is a bulletin.
calligraphy. Fine lettering. See documentation.
caption. See books.
cast type. See printing.
catachresis is a term that implies misuse of tropes, as in the mixed metaphor.
See also acyron.
catechism. A catechism is a short book containing a summary, in pregunta
(requesta—question and respuesta—answer) form, of the doctrine of the
Christian church.
censor, censorship. Biblioclasm and iconoclasm are only one step removed
from censorship, the repression or banning of books or other written documents
containing material someone objects to for one arbitrary reason or another, such
as a judgment that the work is pornography: sexually explicit writing that is
deemed by the censors to have no artistic merit. See also condensation.
chapbook, chapman. A chapbook (“cheap book”) is the original paperback: a
pamphlet or brochure containing a few pages of poetry, fiction, or other
materials, such as religious tracts, bound usually only in wrappers—stiffer paper
or cardboard and originally sold by street hawkers called chapmen.
chapter, chapter heading. A section of a book is a chapter, and its heading or
title is a rubric or caption.
chrestomathy. A chrestomathy is either an anthology of literary pieces used in
learning a language, or it is a collection of pieces by a single author.
chronicle. See ana.
close reading. Literary analysis. See exegesis.
codex, codices. See documentation.
coffee-table book. A coffee-table book is a modern illustrated text, often printed
on extra-large pages, designed to be seen lying on a table in a home as part of the
décor.
cognitive meaning. See reification.
collaboration. See pseudonym.
collation. A scholarly comparison of the various editions of a text, or of an
author’s works, with an eye to the publication of a definitive edition or recension
of that text or that author’s oeuvre. See secondary source.
colophon. See printing.
commentator. See documentation.
commonplace book. See journal.
compendium, compilation. A gathering of various written materials. See
anthology, compiler, and editor.
compiler. An anthologist or editor. See documentation.
computer, computerscript. See printing and script.
concretion, A word or verbal construct that represents a thing rather than an
idea; the opposite of abstraction. See reification and symbol.
concrete noun. A word that signifies a thing rather than an idea.
condensation. A conspectus is an overall survey of a subject, whereas an
epitome is a summary of the essence of a piece, like the précis which is a concise
summation of a text that retains something of the flavor of the original. A
redaction is an edited version of a work; a synopsis is an overview or outline of a
work, and a résumé is the summary of a work or case. A digest is a collection of
previously published materials that have been edited and condensed. A
Bowdlerization (after Thomas Bowdler, 1754–1825) is an expurgation, that is, a
prudishly edited (Bowdlerized) or censored version of a work. See also brief.
connotation. A secondary definition of a word. Overtone. See energia.
conspectus. See condensation.
contemporary audience. See audience.
context. The immediate environment of a word in a phrase, clause, sentence,
paragraph, and so forth. See energia.
conventional definition. The definition of a word that has been generally agreed
upon; see denotation.
copy, See carbon copy, documentation, and photocopy.
copy-edit. See script.
copyist. See documentation and scribe.
copyright. See printing.
corrigenda. Things needing to be corrected; errata, typographical errors.
Singular, corrigendum.
courtesy book. A courtesy book was a medieval volume, generally written in
dialogue, explaining the rules of chivalry governing knights, as in the Courts of
Love.
cover. See bookbinding.
credo. See books.
cs, CS, css. See script.
date of publication. See printing.
deckled edge. See printing.
decorum is the suitability of an element of a literary work, such as tone or style,
to its specific environment or to the work as a whole, its architectonics.
definitive edition. See collation.
degree of artifice. See tautologia.
denotation. The primary definition of a word.
desktop publication. See publishing.
diary. See journal.
didactic. Instructive, teaching morality.
digest. See condensation.
digression. See appendix.
dissertation. See document.
divine force. See instress.
doctrine. See books.
document, documentation. A document is any written material that can be used
to provide evidence; documentation is the providing of evidence in a treatise or
other formal scholarly essay, such as a monograph or dissertation: a book-length
essay on a particular subject.
A primary source is the original place from which scholarship is derived,
such as the original manuscript or typescript of a novel, or the first printing of a
poem in a periodical. A secondary source is any document or other material that
is once removed from the primary source, such as an account by a later writer of
a manuscript or publication.
A handwritten book or other text is a manuscript (often given in abbreviated
form as MS or ms.; plural mss., and sometimes called a codex; plural, codices),
either a holograph manuscript by the author, or a copy made by a copyist, such
as a scribe (a master of calligraphy—beautiful handwriting or script), a public
clerk or scrivener. A text-hand is large cursive writing used in the body of a
manuscript as distinguished from the smaller note-hand used in writing
footnotes.
Other kinds of “authors” are the compiler, which we would now call an
editor, and the commentator, like the rabbi who studies and writes about the
Torah and Jewish law.
dramatic propriety is a judgment as to whether a speech or an action in a
literary work is appropriate, not to the real world, but to the situation that exists
within the work itself.
duodecimo. See printing.
dust jacket. The protective outer covering of a book. A slipcover, or slip-case is
a heavier shield, often a box with the fore-edge open so that the volume may be
slipped inside.
edition. See printing.
editor. One who works with and emends the writings of authors.
edge. See bookbinding.
eisegesis is a form of empathy, in effect reading one’s own voice into a text.
emblem. See symbol.
emblem book. An emblem book is a collection of mottos, each of which is
preceded by a brief poem illustrative of the motto.
emotive meaning. The emotional effect of a word or a text as distinguished
from its intellectual or rational effect. See reification and cue.
emendation. The correction of faulty written materials. See editor.
encomium. See festschrift.
encyclopedia. See books.
endpaper. See bookbinding.
energia has to do with the meanings or the sense of literature (see senses of
interpretation). Every text must make “sense”; not necessarily logical sense, but,
in context, poetic sense. If a metaphor or other trope makes no sense of any kind,
as for instance where the context does not block out enough connotations and
there is confusion about what a word means (it may mean too many things, at
which point ambiguity becomes obscurity), then the trope is catachretic or
acyron is present (see catachresis).
epigraph. See notes.
epiphany. In literature, the sudden revelation of the meaning of something, an
aperçu; epiphanous stories, such as those having to do with growing up into the
adult world, deal with the revelatory nature of what it means to be no longer a
child or an innocent.
epitome. See condensation.
eponym. See pseudonym.
errata. Typographical errors; singular, errata. An errata slip is a sheet inserted
into a book with corrected errors discovered after the volume was printed.
etiquette book. An etiquette book is a Renaissance handbook covering the rules
of polite conduct in upper class society. Modern etiquette books do the same for
middle class society.
euhemerism. The theory that myth may be elucidated through historical study or
by an examination of its objectives or motivations. See also archetype.
exargasia has to do with polish, smoothness of surface and intricacy of language
texture.
exclusion. The deletion of multiple meanings. See obscurity.
excursus. See appendix.
exegesis is another term for explication of a text through close reading and
literary analysis of the forms and meanings of language.
explication. See exegesis.
expurgation. See condensation.
face. See printing.
facsimile, fax. A copy of a text transmitted by telephone line. See also printing.
festschrift. A festschrift is an anthology of pieces by various authors published
as an encomium to a writer or to an honored scholar.
figment. See idolum.
figure of speech. A description, analogy, metaphor, or rhetorical trope. See
tropes in The Book of Forms.
first edition, first printing. See documentation and printing.
flat-bed press. See printing.
flyleaf. See bookbinding.
folio. See printing.
font, font style. See printing.
footnote. See notes.
fore-edge. See bookbinding.
foreword. See introduction.
format. See printing.
foul copy, foul proof. See script.
full binding. See bookbinding.
georgics. See handbook.
ghost writer. See pseudonym.
gift book. The gift-book was, especially in the nineteenth century, a very fancy
edition of some sort, often with plush or limp covers, gilt edges, a ribbon
bookmark and an inscription page. See bookbinding.
gilt. See bookbinding and manuscript.
gloss, glossary. See notes.
Grangerise. To add things pertaining to a book, such as photographs, reviews,
letters and so forth, to a copy of the book itself, as was the habit of the Rev.
James Granger (1723–1776).
hagiography. A hagiography is the biography of a saint.
half-binding. See bookbinding.
half-title. See printing.
handbook. A handbook is a handy reference work dealing with a particular
subject, like georgics, versified handbooks in the trades and crafts, and like the
volume currently in your hand.
handwriting. Script, calligraphy. See documentation.
heading. See chapter heading.
headnote. See notes.
hectograph. See printing.
holograph. The handwriting of the author of a text. See documentation.
horizontal audience. See audience.
hornbook. See primer.
iconoclast. A relative of the biblioclast is the iconoclast, who was originally one
who destroyed religious images, but in modern times the word means merely
one who attacks and attempts to destroy ideas, particularly popular ones.
ideation. Thought, intellectuation, ratiocination, or rationalization.
idolum, idola (pl.) is a figment of the imagination; a mental image.
illuminated manuscript. See manuscript.
image. See figure of speech, idolum, trope, and symbol.
imprimatur. An imprimatur is a nihil obstat (no objection) license to print
issued by a church official.
imprint. See printing.
inclusion. The presence of multiple meanings. See ambiguity and energia.
incunable, incunabula, incunabulum. See printing.
index. An index (plural, indices) is a full list of terms, names, or other important
items in the body of the book, and it is to be found at the end of the book.
Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The official list of Roman Catholic banned
books.
initials. See manuscript.
inscape, a term invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is the inherent nature of a
thing, as perceived by the writer and expressed in words.
inscription. A personal message or dedication written in a volume or on a gift
card by an author or the donor of a gift.
instress, another Hopkins term, is the divine force which creates the inscape and
enables the writer to perceive it.
introduction. An introduction may be a foreword—a prefatory note or
preamble, or a full preface, a prolegomenon (plural, prolegomena).
issue. See books.
jestbook, jokebook. A jestbook is a volume full of jokes, humorous anecdotes,
ribaldries, and so forth; since the nineteenth century, called a jokebook.
jottings. See journal.
journal. A diary is a personal journal in which the occurrences of one’s life are
entered at regular intervals, to be distinguished from a commonplace book,
which is a notebook containing jottings of one sort or another: ideas, memoranda
(singular, memorandum; shorthand, memo), or reminders, quotations from
reading sources, and so on.
juvenilia are the earliest writings of an author.
lacuna. See manuscript.
layout. See printing.
leaf. See printing.
lemma. A caption or motto attached to a picture is a lemma.
lettering. See printing.
letterpress. See printing.
limited edition. See printing.
linotype. See printing.
literal interpretation. The surface or narrative level of a text. See senses of
interpretation.
literary analysis. See exegesis.
literary quarterly. See periodicals.
little magazine. See periodicals.
logical sense. See energia.
logolatry. Overfondness for words or for knowledge; from logos.
logomania, logomaniac, logomanic. Extreme logolatry; one whose logolatry is
obsessive; exhibiting logomania.
magazine. See books.
manuscript. An illuminated manuscript is a book that has been copied, often by
a monk in a medieval monastery, and ornamented with colored initials (the
initial letters of sentences or paragraphs) and other illustrations and adornments,
often in gilt or gold leaf. A lacuna is a portion of a manuscript that is missing
owing to a lost page or series of pages, a tear, or a blot, or some other problem. A
reconstruction is a scholarly restoration of the material lost in the lacuna. See
documentation.
margin, marginalia. See notes.
memo, memoranda, memorandum. See journal.
microfiche, microfilm. Reduced photocopies of texts and documents stored on
film or on cards that can be enlarged and scanned by reading machines.
Bibliofilm is a type of microfilm material that is used to photograph and preserve
the pages of books and other written or drawn works.
mimeograph. See printing.
miscellany. See anthology.
mixed metaphor. See acyron, catachresis, and energia.
monograph. See document.
motto. See caption and lemma.
movable type. See printing.
nihil obstat. See imprimatur.
nom-de-plume. See pseudonym.
notations. See notes. Also see notation in our companion volume, The Book of
Forms.
notebook. See journal.
notes. A gloss is a note of explanation; a collection of such notes is called a
glossary. Other sorts of notes include marginalia or scholia, notations written by
a scholiast in the margin, the blank border surrounding a text; the headnote—an
epigraph or a texte (quotation from an appropriate source) or other preceding
explanation, and the footnote, a notation at the bottom of the page.
A blurb or puff is a quotation by someone lauding a book, printed on the dust
jacket of that book. A bibliography is a list of books on a particular subject, and
an annotated bibliography is a list that has been glossed.
numbering. See printing.
obscuranto. A neologism from the example of the invented language Esperanto,
meaning the language of critics or of any group intent on keeping outsiders at
bay by means of cant or jargon.
obscurity. Blocked meaning. Exclusiveness of sense, in that the ordinary sense
of a text has been excluded. See energia.
octavo. See printing.
oeuvre. The complete works of an author.
offset press. See printing.
omnium-gatherum. See anthology.
paideia. An unworthy person or writer.
palimpsest. See writing surfaces.
pamphlet. See books.
paper. See writing surfaces.
paperback. See books.
papyrus. See writing surfaces.
paradigm. The model for something, or it is a list of the inflections of a word
which stands as a model for the category of declensions or conjugations of its
type.
paradox is a metaphor or statement that combines terms which seem mutually
exclusive, but which in fact are not: “Freedom is the prison of rebellion,” or
“Winter is the spring of contemplation”; or it is a statement that contradicts a
commonly held belief: “The earth is not round, it is egg-shaped.” Such locutions
often exhibit plurisignation, simultaneous meanings.
paragon is an example without peer, as in, “Keats’ ode is a paragon of the poetic
art.” See paradigm.
parchment. See writing surfaces.
pedantry. A show of erudition, niggling scholarship.
pencerdd, pencerddiad. See bard.
pen-name. See pseudonym.
periodicals. A slick is a periodical with a glossy cover, usually issued monthly; a
pulp is a magazine printed on the cheapest possible paper (manufactured from
pulpwood), generally matched by the contents. A little magazine, on the other
hand, is one that publishes fiction and poetry, generally; despite limited
circulations, often under 1000 copies in a run, some little magazines have been
responsible for bringing to light many of the major talents of the literary world
both in Britain and the United States. Literary quarterlies are noted for
publishing creative writing, but also for nonfiction, scholarship and criticism;
many of these are affiliated with academic institutions. See books.
photocopy. A copy of a text made by photography. See also microfiche and
microfilm.
pictograph. A picture that is representative of something. See symbol.
pirated edition. See printing.
plagiarism is literary theft, the use of another writer’s material without giving
written credit for such use at least in some sort of note and, in the case of
copyrighted material, without applying for and receiving permission to use it.
plurisignation. Multiple meanings of a single word.
poetic passage. A poetic passage is a portion of a prose work such as a novel or
short story where the narrative stops and the author begins to use the language to
build a word picture, as in that portion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story
“Rapaccini’s Daughter” where the poisonous garden is described in poetic prose.
Such a passage overdone is a purple patch (see purple prose).
poetic prose. See poetic passage.
poetic sense. See energia.
polysemous meaning. See ambiguity and plurisignation.
pornography. See censorship.
preamble. See introduction.
précis. See condensation.
preface, prefatory note. See introduction.
pregunta. See catachism.
press run. See printing.
primary source. See documentation.
primer. A primer is the first schoolbook, an abecedarium. A hornbook is a
primer on paper or vellum covered with a sheet of transparent horn to protect it
from wear and grime.
printing. An anopisthograph or block-book is a book printed from engraved
blocks of wood, a method of publication that preceded the invention of cast type
by Johannes Gutenberg (1400?–1468?) in or about the year 1455. An
incunabulum (incunable, plural, incunabula) is a book printed from movable
type before the year 1501. Black letter refers to a type of heavy, angular Gothic
font style in which early printed books were often produced, and a black letter
book means, in effect, such a volume. A font is one complete set of type of a
single size and face.
A leaf is a sheet of paper, and a folio is a leaf folded once at the center making
a signature or gathering of four pages of a book or manuscript, each page
generally about fifteen inches tall. A quarto is such a sheet of paper folded twice
in order to make a signature of four leaves or eight pages; an octavo is a sheet
folded into a signature of eight leaves or sixteen pages; a duodecimo (twelvemo
or 12mo) is twelve leaves, twenty-four pages. There are also signatures of
sixteenmo (16mo), thirty-twomo (32mo) and sixty-fourmo (64mo). Such pages
are printed first, then folded, then trimmed before binding; that is, the folded
edges are cut so that they may be opened. A book that has been bound without
being trimmed is said to be uncut or unopened. Books printed on handmade
paper whose uneven upper or lower edges have not been trimmed are said to
have deckled edges. If a book is trimmed in such a way as to cut off part of an
illustration, or so as to leave no margin between the illustration and the edge of
the page, the illustration bleeds off, and the page is a bleed page.
An edition of a book is all copies printed from a single typesetting. A limited
edition is a press run of a particular number of copies, each copy numbered or
lettered and perhaps autographed by the author, usually printed on either a flatbed press or a letterpress, that is, on a press utilizing type set by hand rather than
by linotype or computer, as distinguished from other types of presses, such as
rotary, rotogravure, offset, mimeograph, hectograph, and so forth. A subsequent
run from the same type is called a second (third, fourth) printing, but only the
first printing is considered a “first edition.” A facsimile is a later edition that is a
perfect reproduction of the original edition—see microfiche and microfim.
An imprint is the printed name of the publisher of a book and its date of
publication. This information usually appears at the bottom of the title page of
the book, and on the verso will appear the notice of copyright, or right of legal
publication and reproduction. A pirated edition is one that is illegally published,
violating the copyright. Such an edition will generally have a blank verso. The
only printed page that precedes the title is the half-title, which has the title of the
book but not its author. A colophon is an annotation on the last page of some
books that gives information regarding the printing, the typeface, the type of
paper (see writing surfaces), and the designer of the book. The layout is the plan
for the format of a book including its size, shape, binding. Its design includes all
of these items.
prolegomenon. See books.
propaganda. The methodical dissemination of information or disinformation
regarding a tenet or cause espoused by a group that wishes to convince an
audience of its veracity through advertisement and blare rather than discourse.
One vehicle of religious propaganda is the tract.
pseudonym. A pseudonym, pen-name, or nom de plume is a literary alias. An
allonym is the real name of a person assumed by an author, but not the author’s
real name. Sometimes an allonym masks a collaboration among several writers,
as in the case of G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) and Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953)
who used the pseudonym “Chesterbelloc” in their Roman Catholic-viewpoint
books opposing the socialism of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. A ghost
writer is an author hired by someone to write a text which will be published
under the name of the hirer rather than the actual writer. An eponym is the name
of a person that has come to be a synonym for some term or other, as for instance
“Elizabethan” for the English Renaissance.
publishing. A trade publisher issues books in a wide variety of categories for
general circulation, whereas the alternative press, like the little magazines, caters
for a literary, sometimes avant garde audience. The academic press is devoted
primarily to scholarly publication, though by the end of the twentieth century a
number of these publishers had also invested heavily in literary books, including
fiction and poetry. The vanity press publishes books on a subsidized basis,
authors paying not only for the printing of their books, but also for the overhead
of the publisher. Few authors of any note have come out of the vanity press, but
A. R. Ammons is an exception, for his first book, Ommateum, was a vanity press
book. Self-publication, while it is often frowned upon, is not quite the same as
vanity publishing, although it is not much more academically respectable;
essentially, the author is simply hiring a printer. Many authors, including E. E.
Cummings and William Carlos Williams, published their first books this way.
Desktop publication is computer self-publishing.
puff. See notes.
pulp. See periodicals.
pure poetry. A synonym for lyric poetry. See our companion volume, The Book
of Forms.
purple patch. See poetic passage.
purple prose. Overwritten prose. See poetic passage.
quarter-binding. See bookbinding.
quarto. See printing.
quotation, quote. See journal and notes.
recension. See collation.
reconstruction. See manuscript.
recto. See bookbinding.
redaction. See condensation.
reification. To reify an abstraction is to treat it as a concretion; for instance, to
approach the subject of deity as though it were tangible is the purpose of
divinity, and all “theology” is an act of reification. The term “God” is an abstract
noun (see abstraction) that is not capable of conventional definition, but it has
emotive meaning: an overtone that carries a weight of approbation with many
people, especially those who are religious—see the discussion of cues elsewhere
in these pages. It has no cognitive meaning—that is, a meaning that is capable of
empirical proof; it cannot be perceived, either with the senses, or by means of
experimentation. Some critics argue that poetry (at least “pure poetry,” that is,
lyric poetry, as distinguished from narrative and dramatic poetry) has no
cognitive meaning, only emotive meaning, since its purposes are not ideational
but emotional. See our companion volume, The Book of Forms.
requesta, respuesta. See catechism.
résumé. See condensation.
rotary press, rotogravure. See printing.
rubric. See chapter heading.
run. See periodicals and printing.
scholar. An academician or other learned person who is the student of a
particular discipline; a loresman.
scholarly essay. See document.
scholia. See notes.
scholiast. A medieval scholar who annotated the classical authors.
schoolbook. See books.
scribe. A copyist. See documentation.
script. Handwriting—see manuscript. A book or text written on a typewriter is a
typescript (TS or ts.; plural, tss.). A carbon copy is a copy of a work made using
carbon paper, now generally an obsolete process. A computer-script (CS, cs.;
css) is a draft of a computer-generated or word-processed hard copy of a work.
Foul copy is a manuscript or typescript that has been used by a printer to set
the type for the book. It has been copy-edited and contains all sorts of marks
intended to instruct the typesetter, and it also contains editorial notes and queries
to and from the author and the printer in the margins, and so forth. A foul proof
is a corrected printer’s proof that has been submitted to the editor and the author
for proof-reading before the first printing of the literary work. An uncorrected
proof is one that has not yet been marked up. See also documentation.
scrivener. A public copyist. See documentation and scribe.
scroll. See writing surfaces.
secondary source. Second-hand information about a subject, such as a
contemporary book review of a novel, or a collation of published versions of a
text. See documentation and microfilm.
self-publication. See publishing.
sensable. Appealing to the senses, as for instance a concrete trope.
senses of interpretation. There are four senses of interpretation of any literary
writing: the literal (surface or narrative), the allegorical (symbolic), the
tropological (moral), and the anagogical (spiritual), in which allusions to
Paradise or the life hereafter are discovered.
serials, series. See bookbinding.
set. See books.
sixteenmo, 16mo,
sixty-fourmo, 64mo. See printing.
size. See printing.
slick. See periodicals.
slipcase, slipcover. See dust jacket.
spine. See bookbinding.
stemma. See variorum.
Sturm und Drang, that is, “storm and stress,” has reference to an eighteenthcentury German literary movement, but the term has stuck in a quasipsychological context to mean the personal turmoil of the author or the author’s
invented characters, or both.
summary, summation. See condensation.
superscription. The name and title of a person, his or her address and full
information written on an envelope of a letter to be delivered.
symbol. A concrete trope (figure of speech) or a pictograph (a picture) that
represents an abstraction; i.e., in some context a great white whale might be
symbolic of the insensibility of nature. An emblem is a conventional symbol—a
bald eagle is emblematic of the United States of America.
synesthesia. The trope of talking about one of the senses in terms of another
—“Monday morning smells blue (scent-sight), “I could taste her sweet
whispers” (taste-hearing); “He touched me with his mind” (thought-touch). See
symbol. See also the chapter “The Genres of Nonfiction.”
synopsis. See condensation.
table of contents. A table of contents is a list of chapter headings preceding the
body of the book.
tact is the sense of proportion or fitness required when dealing with an audience.
taste. See bibliophilia and tautologia.
tautologia is the overuse of sonic devices, as in a sentence containing too many
alliterated words, or as perhaps in the fourth line of “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard
Manley Hopkins (1844–1889; see The Book of Forms).
Such a style is sometimes castigated as being baroque or artificial, meaning
overwrought, like the Euphuistic style (see Euphues elsewhere), though of
course all writing of every kind is artificial in the sense that it is artifice. What
critics mean, then, when they use such a word has to do with degree of artifice.
The touchstone would no doubt be what seems, to a particular critic, to be too
highly wrought, too self-conscious or “literary”; that is, “artsy.” In other words,
the critic’s taste is what is important, at least to the critic, if not to the audience
the critic is trying to convert to his or her way of thinking. See our companion
volume, The Book of Forms.
text. See documentation.
texte. See notes.
texture. The texture of a work has to do with its style and overlapping meanings,
its sounds, figures of speech, ambiguities; its surfaces and depths.
thirty-twomo, 32mo. See printing.
title, title page. See books and printing.
top-edge. See bookbinding.
tome. A tome is a ponderous volume.
touchstone. A line or passage or whole work used as a criterion of excellence.
tract. A brief text of some sort, usually a pamphlet or leaflet, focusing on a
single topic, generally religious. See books and propaganda.
trade publisher. See publishing.
treatise. See document.
Tremblestick League. See bardolatry.
trim. See printing.
trope. A word picture or figure of speech. Some tropes are inherently inclusive,
as for instance synesthesia.
tropological interpretation. The moral level of any text. See senses of
interpretation.
ts, TS, tss. See script.
twelvemo, 12mo. See printing.
type, typeface, typesetting. See printing.
typescript. See documentation and script.
typographical errors. See corrigenda and errata.
uncorrected proof. See script.
uncut, unopened. See printing.
vade mecum. A vade mecum is any indispensable book such as one would take
along on a trip or journey, or if one were going to be marooned on a desert isle.
vanity press. See publishing.
variorum. An edition comparing several different printings of an author’s work
according to a stemma (tree of textual descent), or an edition of an author’s
works annotated by various scholars.
vellum. See writing surfaces.
verbatim transcript. A word-for-word copy of a spoken text.
version. See secondary source.
verso. See bookbinding.
vertical audience. See audience.
volume. A volume, when it is not simply a synonym for “book,” means one book
in a set of books or a year’s worth of issues in a series of periodicals or
magazines (serials).
word-processing. See script.
wrappers. See books.
writing surfaces in the western world have included stone, clay, wood, animal
skins, and bark. The forerunner of paper—originally manufactured from rags—
was papyrus, an ancient, thin, flat sheet made from the pith of the Egyptian
sedge of the same name; it was rolled into scrolls long before volumes were
invented. Before printing, volume manuscripts were written on parchment—the
skin of a sheep or a goat prepared as a writing surface, or vellum, a fine
parchment made from calf, lamb, or kid. A palimpsest is a writing surface of
some kind that that has been used more than one time as material for a
manuscript.
yearbook. An annual publication. See books.
acknowledgments and bibliography
All material not specifically attributed to another writer (excepting the anagram
pen-name “Wesli Court”) including essays, plays, stories, and translations, is the
work and property of Lewis Turco. Some of this matter has appeared as essays,
or portions of essays, in various periodicals and texts, to whose editors and
publishers the author is indebted for first publication. Other material, including
short stories, has appeared in those books which have been marked with an
asterisk in the sources consulted below, and it is protected by prior copyright.
Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms, Third Edition. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1971.
Baldwin, Charles Sears. Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic. Gloucester: Peter Smith,
1959.
Ball, David. Backwards and Forwards. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1983.
Bell, H. Idris, and David Bell, eds. Dafydd ap Gwilym: Fifty Poems. London:
The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1942.
Barnet, Sylvan, Morton Berman, and William Burto. A Dictionary of Literary,
Dramatic, and Cinematic Terms. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.
Colwell, C. Carter. A Student’s Guide to Literature. New York: Washington
Square Press, 1968.
Davie, Donald. Articulate Energy. New York: Harcourt, 1958.
Dietrich, R. F., William E. Carpenter, and Kevin Kerraine. The Art of Drama.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.
Eliot, T. S. The Three Voices of Poetry. Cambridge: National Book League at the
University Press, 1955.
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions, 1955.
Field, Syd. Four Screenplays. New York: Dell Publishing, 1994.
Grebanier, Bernard. Playwriting. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961.
Greene, David H., ed. Anthology of Irish Literature. New York: New York
University, 1971.
Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to
Literary Theory & Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1994.
Hall, Lawrence Sargent. A Grammar of Literary Criticism. New York:
Macmillan, 1965.
Holman, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature. Third Edition, Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1972.
Horner, Winifred Bryan. Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition. New York: St.
Martin’s, 1988.
Kaiser, Rolf, ed. Medieval English. Berlin: Rolf Kaiser, 1961.
Mackay, Charles. The Lost Beauties of the English Language. New York: J. W.
Bouton, 1874.
Minot, Stephen. Three Genres. Third edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1982.
Pei, Mario, and Frank Gaynor. A Dictionary of Linguistics. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1954.
[Puttenham, George]. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Edward Arber. Kent: Kent
State University, 1970.
Shaw, Harry. Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1972.
Turco, Lewis. The Book of Dialogue: How to Write Effective Conversation in
Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry. Hanover: University Press of New
England, 2004.*
———. The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. New York: E. P. Dutton,
1968.*
———. The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Third Edition. University
Press of New England, 2000.*
———. Creative Writing in Poetry. Albany: State University of New York,
1970.*
———. Dialogue: A Socratic Dialogue on the Art of Writing Dialogue in
Fiction, Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1989 & 1991; British edition,
Robinson Publishing, 1989.*
———. Freshman Composition and Literature. Albany: State University of
New York, 1974.*
———. Il Dialogo. Trans. Sylvia Biasi. Milan: Casa Editrice Nord, 1992.*
———. The Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories. Scottsdale: Star
Cloud Press, 2008.*
———. The New Book of Forms. Hanover: University Press of New England,
1986.*
———. Poetry: An Introduction through Writing. Reston: Reston Publishing,
1973.*
———. The Public Poet: Five Lectures on the Art and Craft of Poetry. Ashland:
Ashland Poetry Press, 1991.*
———. Visions and Revisions of American Poetry. Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 1986.*
Turco, Lewis, Ansen Dibell, and Orson Scott Card. How to Write a Mi££ion.
London: Robinson Publishing, 1995.*
Waggoner, Hyatt H. American Poets from the Puritans to the Present. Boston:
Houghton, 1968. Rev. ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1984.
Warren, Alba H., Jr. English Poetic Theory 1825–1865. New York: Octagon
Books, 1976.
Watson, George. The Discipline of English. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979.
Wolf, Jurgen, and Kerry Cox. Successful Scriptwriting, Cincinnati: Writer’s
Digest Books, 1988.
author and title index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please
use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that
appear in the print index are listed below.
“A B C” (Chaucer)
Addison, Joseph
“Adults Only” (Stafford)
Æ (George William Russell)
Aesop’s Fables
“Alchemist” (Jonson)
Alcott, Amos Bronson
Alexander, William
Allen, Gracie
Alsop, Richard
Amis, Kingsley
Ammons, A. R.
Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton)
Andronicus, Livius
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
“Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town” (Cummings)
Apologia pro Vita Sua (Newman)
Apologie for Poetrie (Sidney)
Arbuthnot, John
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Organon
Poetics
Rhetoric
on rhetoric and
argument
Arp, Jean
Artaud, Antonin
L’Art de Dictier et de fere chançons (Deschamps)
Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham)
As You Like It (Shakespeare)
Auden, W. H.
Augustine (saint)
The Confessions of Saint Augustine
De Dialectica
De Trinitate
Austen, Jane
Averroes
Baraka, Amiri
Barlow, Joel
Barrie, J. M.
Barth, John
Baudelaire, Charles
Beadle, Erastus Flavel
Bede (saint)
The Beggar’s Opera (Gay)
Bell, David
Bell, H. Idris
Bellamy, Edward
Belloc, Hilaire
Benchley, Robert
Beowulf
Bernstein, Leonard
Berryman, John
Bible
Biographia Literaria (Coleridge)
“The Birds” (Aristophanes)
Blake, William
“Creation”
“A Little Girl Lost”
Bleak House (Dickens)
Bly, Robert
Boethius
The Book of Job (folk play)
“The Bo’sun’s Story” (Turco)
Boswell, James
Bowdler, Thomas
Braine, John
Brave New World (Huxley)
Brecht, Bertolt
Browne, William
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Robert
Bryant, William Cullen
Buddenbrooks (Mann)
Burke, Edmund
Burns, George
Burns, Robert
Burton, Robert
Butler, Samuel
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film)
Campbell, Joseph
The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)
The Cantos (Pound)
Capote, Truman: “A Diamond Guitar”
In Cold Blood
Carew, Thomas
Carlyle, Thomas
Carroll, Lewis
The Castle of Otranto (Walpole)
Catch-22 (Heller)
Caxton, Thomas
Cervantes, Miguel de
Channing, William Ellery
Chaucer, Geoffrey
“A B C”
The Canterbury Tales
Cheever, John
Chesterfield, Philip Dormer
Chesterton, G. K.
Christie, Agatha
Ciardi, John
Cicero, Marcus Tullius
“City of the Dead” (Turco)
Clare, John
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Complete Poems (Whitman)
Concerning Figures and Tropes (Bede)
Confessio Amantis (Gower)
The Confessions of Saint Augustine (Augustine)
Congreve, William
Conrad, Joseph
Cooper, James Fenimore
Court, Wesli (pseud. of Turco)
Crane, Stephen
Crawford, Cheryl
“Creation” (Blake)
A Cuckoo in the Nest (Travers)
Cummings, E. E.
“Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town”
“Santa Claus”
Dallas, Eneas Sweetland
Daniel, Samuel
Dante Alighieri
Davidson, Donald
Davie, Donald
Davies, John
De Dialectica (Augustine)
Defoe, Daniel
“The Demon in the Tree” (Turco)
Derrida, Jacques
Deschamps, Eustache
De Trinitate (Augustine)
De Vere, Aubrey
“A Diamond Guitar” (Capote)
Dickens, Charles
Bleak House
Great Expectations
Dickinson, Emily
A Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson)
“A Dill Pickle” (Mansfield)
Dionysus
Doctorow, E. L.
Donne, John
Doolittle, Hilda
Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Doyle, Arthur Conan
Dracula (Stoker)
Drake, Joseph Rodman
Dreigroschenoper (Weill)
Drummond, William
Dryden, John
Dunbar, William
Dwight, Theodore
Dwight, Timothy
“Elegy in a Country Churchyard” (Gray)
Eliot, George
Eliot, T. S.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
The Waste Land
Ellis, Bret Easton
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Empson, William
“An Essay on Criticism” (Pope)
“Essay on Man” (Pope)
Essays of Elia (Lamb)
An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning (Temple)
Euphues (Lyly)
Falconer (Cheever)
Al-Farabi
Farrell, James T.
Faulkner, William: “A Rose for Emily”
The Sound and the Fury
Febre, Raoul le
Finnegan’s Wake (Joyce)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Flaubert, Gustave
Fletcher, Giles
Fletcher, John
Fletcher, Phineas
“The Fog” (Turco)
Forster, E. M.
“The Four Ages of Poetry” (Peacock)
“The Fox and the Grapes” (fable)
Frankenstein (Shelley, M.)
Frazer, James George
Freud, Sigmund
Freytag, Gustav
Frost, Robert
Frye, Northrop
Fuller, Margaret
Gaia (Lovelock)
Gammer Gurton’s Needle (anonymous)
“The Gawain Poet” (Langland)
Gay, John
Genet, Jean
Gilbert, W. S.
“God’s Grandeur” (Hopkins, G.)
Golding, William
Goldsmith, Oliver
Goldstein, Rebecca
Góngora y Argote, Luis de
Gordon, George
Gower, John
Granger, James
Gray, Thomas Great Expectations (Dickens)
Greene, Robert
Gregory Persse, Isabella Augusta
“Groves of Academe” (Socrates)
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift)
Gutenberg, Johannes
The Hairy Ape (O’Neill)
Halleck, Fitzgreene
Hardy, Thomas
Harris, Joel Chandler
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hazlitt, William
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Hekster, Walter
Heller, Joseph
Henryson, Robert
Herbert, George
Hercule Poirot (fictional character)
Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell)
Herrick, Robert
Hesiod
Hitchcock, Alfred
Hoccleve, Thomas
“Hold Hard, These Ancient Minutes in the Cuckoo’s Month” (Hopkins, G.)
Holinshed’s Chronicles
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
“Home Improvement” (TV show)
Homer
Hopkins, Gerard Manley: “God’s Grandeur”
“Hold Hard, These Ancient Minutes in the Cuckoo’s Month”
“Hurrahing in Harvest”
Hopkins, Lemuel
Horace
Howard, Henry
“How the Rabbit Grew Long Ears” (fable)
Hudibras (Butler)
Humphreys, David
Hunt, Leigh
“Hurrahing in Harvest” (Hopkins, G.)
Huxley, Aldous
“Hymn to the Supreme Being” (Smart)
Ibsen, Henrik
“I Hear America Singing” (Whitman)
Iliad (Homer)
In Cold Blood (Capote)
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
Irene (Johnson)
Irving, Washington
Isocrates
Jackson, Shirley
James, Henry
Johnson, Samuel
A Dictionary of the English Language
Irene
Lives of the Poets
“Johnsoniana” (collection)
Jolson, Al
Jonson, Ben
Joyce, James
Finnegan’s Wake
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
Jung, Karl
Just-So Stories (Kipling)
Kafka, Franz
Kazan, Elia
Keats, John
King, Stephen
Kington, Miles
Kipling, Rudyard
Kneale, J. Douglas
Kreymborg, Alfred
Kyd, Thomas
Lamb, Charles
“Lament for the Poets” (Dunbar)
Langland, William: “The Gawain Poet”
The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman
“The Laughter” (Turco)
Lawrence, D. H.
Less Than Zero (Ellis)
Letters (Chesterfield)
Levertov, Denise
Lewis, C. S.
Lewis, Robert
“A Little Girl Lost” (Blake)
Lives of the Poets (Johnson)
“Livevil: A Mask” (Turco)
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Looking Backward (Bellamy)
Lorca, Federico Garcia
Lord of the Flies (Golding)
The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
“Lost in the Funhouse” (Barth)
“The Lottery” (Jackson)
Lovelace, Richard
Lovelock, James
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Pru-frock” (Eliot, T.)
Lowell, Amy
Lowell, James Russell
Lydgate, John
Lyly, John
Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth)
Macrobius
Major Barbara (Shaw)
Mallarmé, Stéphane
Malory, Thomas
Man and Superman (Shaw)
Mann, Thomas
Mansfield, Katherine
Marat/Sade (Weiss)
Marino, Giambattista
Marlowe, Christopher
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia
Marvell, Andrew
Masters, Edgar Lee
McCullers, Carson
Menander
Mencken, H. L.
Michener, James
The Mighty Casey (Schuman)
Miller, Arthur
Milton, John
Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin)
Moll Flanders (Defoe)
The Moon’s a Balloon (Niven)
Moore, Merrill
More, Thomas
Le Morte d’Arthur (Malory)
Morton, Thomas
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Poe)
“Murgatroyd and Mabel” (Turco as Wesli Court)
Murray, James
Nash, Thomas
Nemerov, Howard
Newman, Henry
The New Yorker Book of Poems
1984 (Orwell)
Niven, David
Norris, Frank
“Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” (Stevens)
“Nun Snow” (Kreymborg)
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (Wordsworth)
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats)
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
“Old Man Goes South Again Alone” (Berryman)
“The Old Professor” (Turco)
Olson, Charles
Ommateum (Ammons)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez)
O’Neill, Eugene
“One Sunday Morning” (Turco)
Organon (Aristotle)
Orton, Joe
Orwell, George
Osborne, John
“Our Town” (Wilder)
Parker, Dorothy
Pater, Walter
Peacock, Thomas Love
Peele, George
“The Philosophy of Composition” (Poe)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde)
Pirandello, Luigi
Plato
Plautus Play of Daniel (folk play)
Plotinus
Poe, Edgar Allan
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
“The Philosophy of Composition”
“The Raven”
“The Poet” (Emerson)
Poetics (Aristotle)
“Poetics: An Essay on Poetry” (Dallas)
Pope, Alexander
“An Essay on Criticism”
“Essay on Man”
Poquelin, Jean Baptiste (Molière)
Porphyry
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
Poulenc, Francis
Pound, Ezra
Pour un nouveau roman (Robbe-Grillet)
“Preface” in Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth)
Primer of the Daily Round (Nemerov)
Puttenham, George
Ralph Roister Doister (Udall)
Ransom, John Crowe
“Rapaccini’s Daughter” (Hawthorne)
“The Raven” (Poe)
The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (Febre)
Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (Wotton)
The Republic (Plato)
Reynolds, Joshua
Rhetoric (Aristotle)
Rich, Adrienne
Riding, Laura
Rimbaud, Arthur
Ripley, George
The Rivals (Sheridan)
Robbe-Grillet, Alain
The Robe (film)
“Robin and Makyn” (Henryson)
Roethke, Theodore
“A Rose for Emily” (Faulkner)
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
Ruskin, John
Russell, George William (Æ)
Saint John, Henry
“Santa Claus” (Cummings)
Sartor Resartus (Carlyle)
Saussure, Ferdinand de
“Savants” (Turco)
Saxe, John Godfrey
Schuman, William
“Scot on the Rocks” (Turco)
“The Second Coming” (Yeats)
Shakespeare, William
Shaw, George Bernard
Major Barbara
Man and Superman
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley
Sherlock Holmes (fictional character)
Showalter, Elaine
Sidney, Philip
Sillitoe, Alan
Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello)
Skelton, John
Smart, Christopher
Smith, Elihu Hubbard
Socrates
Sophocles
The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
Southey, Robert
The Spectator (magazine)
Speed the Plough (Morton)
Spenser, Edmund
Spooner, William Archibald
Spoon River (Masters)
Stafford, William
Steel, Danielle
Steele, Richard
Stein, Gertrude
Stevens, Wallace
Stewart, William A.
Stoker, Bram
Strachey, Lytton
Strasberg, Lee
Studs Lonigan (Farrell)
Suckling, John
Sullivan, Arthur
Swift, Jonathan
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
Synge, John Millington
Tartuffe (Molière)
Tate, Allen
The Tatler (magazine)
Temple, William
The Temple of Glass (Lydgate)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy)
Thackeray, William Makepeace
The Theatre and Its Double (Artaud)
Thespis
Thomas, Dylan
Thoreau, Henry David
Threepenny Opera (Weill)
Tolkien, J. R. R.
“Tontine” (Turco)
Travers, Ben
Tremblestick, Bill
Trumbull, John
Tupper, Martin Farquhar
Turco, Lewis: “The Bo’sun’s Story”
“City of the Dead”
“The Demon in the Tree”
“The Fog”
“The Laughter”
“Livevil: A Mask”
“Murgatroyd and Mabel” (as Wesli Court)
“The Old Professor”
“One Sunday Morning”
“Savants”
“Scot on the Rocks”
“Tontine”
“Vincent”
Twain, Mark
Udall, Nicholas
“The Ugly Duckling” (fable)
Ulysses (Joyce)
Uncle Remus (fictional character)
Vaughan, Henry
Venerable Bede
Verlaine, Paul
“Vincent” (Turco)
The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman (Langland)
“The Visitant” (Roethke)
Vita Nuova (Dante)
La Voix Humane (Poulenc)
Waller, Fred
Warren, Robert Penn
The Waste Land (Eliot, T.)
The Waves (Woolf)
Weill, Kurt: Dreigroschenoper
Threepenny Opera
Weiss, Peter
Wells, H. G.
West Side Story (musical)
“What’s the Matter?” (Auden)
Whitman, Walt
Complete Poems
“I Hear America Singing”
Whittier, John Greenleaf
The Wild Duck (Ibsen)
Wilde, Oscar
Wilder, Thornton
Williams, Charles
Williams, Tennessee
Williams, William Carlos
Wither, George
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Woolf, Virginia
Woollcott, Alexander
Wordsworth, William
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
“Preface” (in Lyrical Ballads)
Wotton, William
Wyatt, Thomas
Yeats, William Butler
general index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please
use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that
appear in the print index are listed below.
abbreviations
abecedarium
abecedarius
abridgement
abstract (summary)
abstraction
anchored
defining
personified
abstract nouns
academic drama
academician
academic poetry
access (in narration)
accismus
acronym
action
characterization through
dramatic, parts of
falling
initiating
main
in medias res and
in plays
rising
rubrics
unity of
action fiction genre
actors: amateur players
cameo
character
leading lady/man
oneman show
understudy
upstaging other actors. See also dramatis personae
Actors’ Studio
acts: in plays
in teleplays
acyron
adage
adaptations
ad card
ad hominem
adjective
adjunctio/adjunction
ads/advertisements
classified
personal
propaganda
adverb
advertorial
A-effect (alienation-effect)
aesthetic distance
Aestheticism
affective fallacy
Age of Chaucer
Age of Decadence
Age of Sensibility
agon
agonist
agony aunt/uncle
Agrarians
agroikos
aisle sitter
alazon (braggart)
Aldwych farce
Alexandrian period
Algonquin round table
alias, literary
alienation-effect (A-effect)
allegorical allusion
allegorical interpretation
allegory
alliteration
allonym
allophone
allusion: defining
ironical or allegorical
almanac
alphabestiary
alphabet
amateur night
amateur players
ambage
ambience
ambiguity
amphibology/amphiboly
amphisbaenia
amphitheater
amplification
ana
anachinosis
anacoluthon/anantapodaton
anadiplosis
anagnorisis
anagogical interpretation
anagram
analect
anaphora
anastrophe
anathema
anatomy (in criticism)
anchored abstraction
anecdote
angel (investors)
angle: camera
in journalism
in narration
Anglo-Norman period
Anglo-Saxon England
Angry Young Men
angst
annal
annomination
annuals
anopisthograph book
antagonist
blocking character
defining
examples
protagonist conflict with
tragedy
antanaclasis
antenagoge
anthimeria
anthologies: defining
poetry, “war of”
types of
anthologist
anticlimax
antihero
antimasque
antimetabole
antinovel
antiphrasis
antiplay
antipophora
antirealism
antisthecon
antistrophe
antithetical parallelism
antitheton
antonomasia
antonyms
aperçu
aphaeresis
aphorism
apocalyptic literature
apocope
apocrypha
apologia
apologue
apophasis
aporia
aposiopesis
apostrophe
apothegm
“appeals to”
appendix
apposition/appositive
apron
ara
archaism
archetype/archetypal. See also symbols/symbolism
architectonics
arena theater
argot
argument
example in
kinds of
non sequitur and
paragon in
paramalogia in
premise of
proofs
rebuttal
rhetorical fallacies in
syllogisms
aria
Aristotelian style/theory: critical theories and
on nonfiction
poetry and poets
tragedy and
arrangement (of nonfiction)
article
articulation/articulus
artifice/artificial
asides
asteismus
asyndeton
atmosphere: defining
story, example
in theatre of the absurd
audience: “appeals to”
asides for
as character
contemporary
journalism
plays approach to
protagonist connection for
screenplays approach to
suspension of disbelief for
tragedy
vertical and horizontal
auditorium
Aufklärung
Augustan period
Augustinian theories
aura
aural
auteur
author
biographical fallacy and
juvenilia of
oeuvre of
orientation
schools and movements
viewpoint from
authorial intrusion
autobiography
autocue
autograph
autotelic
avant-garde
axiom
backdrop/backcloth
background
backgrounder (in journalism)
backlight
backstage
backwoods boast
Baconian theory
bagatelle
balance. See also parallelism
balcony
ballad opera
bandwagon fallacy
banter
barbarism
bard
bardolatry
baroque
basilect
bathos
beat (in journalism)
Beat Generation
belles lettres/belles-lettrist
bestiary
bias
Bible
biblical criticism
bibliobibuli
biblioclasm/biblioclast
bibliofilm
bibliognost
bibliography
biblioklept/kleptomaniac
bibliolatry
Bibliomancy
bibliomane/mania/maniac
bibliopegist/bibliopegy
bibliophagist/bibliophagy
bibliophile/philia
bibliophobe/phobia
bibliopoesy
bibliopole
bibliotaph
bibliothecary
bibliothéque
bibliotherapy/therapist
big screen
Bildungsroman
bill, legislative
biographical fallacy
biography: auto
psycho
of saint
biopic
bit player
bits
blackface
black humor and comedy
black letter book
black moment
Black Mountain poets
blackout
block book
blocking
blocking character
Bloomsbury Group
blooper
boast, backwoods
bomb (failure)
bombast
bomolochos (clown)
bomphiologia
bon mot
book: annual
anopisthograph or block
binding types
coffee-table
courtesy
dust jacket
editions
emblem
etiquette
gift
jest/joke
printing
scripts
signatures
table of contents
volume. See also publishing
bourgeois drama
boustrophedon
Bowdlerization
box, theater
box office
box set
boyish hero
brachiologa
brag
braggart (alazon)
breviary
brevitas
brevity
brief
broadsheet/broadside
Broadway theater
bull/bulletin
burlesque
burletta
business writing
buskins
buzzword
cacosintheton
cacozelia
caesurae
calligraphy
cameo/cameo actor
camera angles
camera techniques
canon
carbon copy
Caroline Poets
cast
cast type
catachresis
catalog
catastasis
catastrophe
catechism
category
catharsis
cause
Cavalier Poets
Celtic Bardic tradition
Celtic languages
Celtic Renaissance
censorship
chamber opera
chapbook/chapman
chapter and chapter heading
character
blocking
defining
motivation
orientation
personality traits
reader/audience as
story, example
types
character, moral
character actor
characterization: metaphor in
methods of
by nomenclature
in theatre of the absurd
character roles
charientismus
chiasmus
Chicago School
children’s literature: example
forms
choragos
choral ode
choreographed movement
chorus
masque, example
in tragedy, role of
chrestomathy
chronicle (in journalism)
chronicle play
Ciceronian style
cinema/film: auteur
camera angles
camera techniques
expanded
Expressionist
extra in
fast
film editing for
film reel in
film roll in
horror
put-in-the-can in
sound
cinema novo
cinema verité
cinerama
circuito
circulation (in journalism)
circumlocution
city desk
city editor
classical discourse: about
example of
Classical period
classified ad
clauses
cliffhanger
climactic parallelism
climate of opinion
climax
closed ending
close reading (exegesis)
closet drama
close-up (camera angle)
clown (bomolochosor)
clown drama
Cockney School
codex
coffee-table book
cognitive meaning
coinage/coined words
coincidences
collation
colloquialism
colloquy. See dialogue
colophon
column/columnist
comedy
black
classical, forms of
court
critical
low
material
musical
plays, history of
rogue
tragicomedy
comedy of errors
comedy of humours
comedy of morals
comedy of wit
comic opera
comic relief
comic script
comic strip
commedia dell’arte
commentator
commercial message
Commonwealth Period
communications medium/media
comparative criticism
compar/comparison
compendium
compilation
compiler
complexio/complexus
complication
complication story
compound mode drama
computer fiction
computerscript
conceit
conclusion: in fiction
in nonfiction
concrete noun
concretion
condensation
conduplication
confessional literature
confidant
conflict
dramatic situation and
without enmity
of generations
in narrative structure
conjunction
Connecticut Wits
connotation
conspectus
constructional schemes
contention
context
continuation
contrasts
convention
conventional definition
conversation
conversion
copy
copy-edit
copyist
copywriter
correction
correspondent
corrigenda
cosmic irony
costume/costumier
counterplayers
coup de théâtre
court comedy
courtesy book
courtly love
creature-feature
crisis
critical comedy
critical theories: Aestheticism and
Aristotelian
Augustinian
of Dante
Deconstructionist
feminist
Freudian
on genius
Medieval
mimesis and
Modernist
Neoplatonist
New Criticism
Perfectionism
Postmodernist
reader-response
structuralist
value theory and
of Whitman
criticism/critics: biblical
comparative
defining
expressive
forms and types of
hermeneutics
history of
liberation, types of
multivalent reading of
poetry and poets
pragmatic
critique
cross examination
crowd scene
cues
cultural signs
curtain
curtain raiser
cut (camera technique)
cutaway
Dadaism
dance
Deconstructionism
decorum
definitio/definition
conventional
denotation
Deism
denotation
denouement
descort
desire (of protagonist)
desktop publication
Determinism
deus ex machina
deuteragonist
devil’s advocate
diaeresis
dialect/dialectic
dialisis
dialogue: summary
dialogue (colloquy)
characterization through
defining
in plays
Socratic
types of
dianoia
diction
about
artificial
levels of
poetic
dictionary
didactics
differentia
digest
digression
dilettante
dime novels
dinner theater
Dionysian poetry
diphthong
direct cinema
director
disaster film
disbelief, suspension of
discourse
classical
considerations in building
direct
disguisings
disjunctio/disjunction
disquisitory drama
dissertation
dissolve (camera technique)
dit
dittology
diverb
divertissement
docudrama
documentary
documentary theatre
document/documentation
doggerelist
dolosus servus
domestic tragedy
double entendre
downstage
drama genre. See cinema; comedy; plays; radio play; television; theater; tragedy
dramatic illusion
dramatic irony
dramatic propriety
dramatic situation
dramatis personae: in comedy of humours
defining
in satyr play
in tragedy
dramaturge
drame
drawing room comedy
dream analysis
dubbing
dubiety/dubitatio
duet
dumb show
duodecimo
dust jacket
Ebonics
echphonesis
ecphrasis
editor (in journalism)
editor (in publishing)
editorializing
Edwardian period
egopoetic fallacy
eiron
eisegesis
elision
Elizabethan Age
ellipsis
emblem
emblematic parallelism
emblem book
emendation
emoting
emotive meaning
empathy
emphasis techniques
enallage
ending (in fiction)
ending (in plays)
energia
engénue
English language, history
enigma
Enlightenment
ensemble
enthymeme
entr’acte
envy
epanalepsis
epanodis
epenthis
ephemerist
epics
epic theatre
epigones
epigraph
epimone
epiphany
epiphora
episode
epistemology
epistles (letters)
epistolary novel/poetry
epitasis
epithet
epitheton
epitome
epitropis
epizeuxis
eponym
equivocation
erotema
errata
escape literature
eschatological poetry
essays: narration in
types
establishing shot
ethos
etiologia
etiquette book
etymology
euhemerism
euphuism/Euphuistic style
example (in argument)
exargasia
exclamatio/exclamation
exclusion
exclusive schemes
excursus
exegesis (close reading)
exegete
exemplar
exemplum
Existentialism
exode
exordium
expanded cinema
expedience/expeditio
experimentalism
explication
exposition
defining
examples of
in theatre of the absurd
types of
expository writing
Expressionism
expressive criticism
expurgation
extra (in film)
extravaganza
fable
facsimile/fax
fades (camera technique)
fairy tale
fallacies: New Criticism on
rhetorical
fancy
fantasy fiction
farce
fast film
fate worse than death
faulty cause or generalization
feature film
feature television script
feelie
feminist criticism
feminist fiction
festschrift
fiction: conclusion in
defining
elements of
formula for traditional
mainstream
orientation in
subject in
virtual
voice in. See also specific topics
figures of speech. See also tropes/tropic
film. See cinema/film film editing
film noir
film projection speed
filmscript
film speed
first edition/printing
five-act drama
flick
flies (in theater)
floodlight
flyting
foil
folklore/folktales
folk play
font
footlights
footnotes
force (in narrative structure)
foreign correspondent
foreshadowing
formal speech
formula story
forward
foul copy/proof
fourth wall
frame/freeze frame
frame narrative
framework story
franglais
frankness
free verse
French language derivatives
Freudian theory
Fugitives school
furniture
f/x
gag/gagman
Gaia fiction
Gaia theory
Gaiety Girl
gay criticism
generalization
genius
genre
genre fiction
genteel tradition
Georgian era
ghost story
ghost writer
gift book
gloss
gnome
Golden Age
Gongorism
Gothic fiction
grammar
grammatical criticism
grammatical parallelism
Grangerise
Graveyard School
Great Poets
Grub Street hack
Grundyism
gynocritics
hagiography
hamartia
handbook
handwriting
hanging ending
harangue
harlequinade
harmony
hendiadys
hermeneutics
hero/heroine
heroic drama
heteronym
heuristics
hieroglyphics
high-angle shot
high comedy
historical novel
history genre
history play
holograph
homograph/homomorph
Horatian critical theory
horror film
horse opera (oater)
hubris
Hudibrastic
humor. See comedy
hypallage
hyperbaton
hyperbole
hyphaeresis
hypotactic style
hypozeuxis
hysteron proteron
iconoclast
Idealism
ideation/ideational
idiolect
idiomatic expressions
idolum/idola
illusion, dramatic
illustration
imagination
Imagism
Impressionism
imprimatur
improvisational theater
incidental music
inclusion
index
indited sign
infomercial
infotainment
ingenue
inklings
in medias res
inscape
inscription
instress
insufficient sampling
integumentum
intellectual drama
interactive fiction
interior monologue
interlocutor
interlude
Internet publishing
interpretations: allegorical/symbolic
anagogical/spiritual
textual analysis
tropological/moral
interrogatio/interrogatory
interview
introduction
intrusion
intrusion, authorial
invective language
invention
inversion, syntactical
investors (angels)
invidia
invocation
ipse dixit
iris (film editing)
irmus
ironical allusion
irony: cosmic
dramatic
forms of
romantic
Socratic
Jacobean period
jargon
jeremiad
jest
jestbook/jokebook
jester
jeu d’esprit
joke line
jokes
book
one-liner
journal
journalism: angle in
audience
chronicle in
defining
photo
print
roles in
terms
yellow
judicial criticism
Jungian psychology
just-so story
juvenile fiction
juvenilia
kabuki play
Kailyard school
karaoke bars
kenning
kinescope
Knickerbocker School
Künstlerroman
lacuna
Lake Poets
language: Celtic
elevated
English, history of
foreign derivatives in
form of
heightened
invective
lexicon/lexicography
linguistics approach to
metered
prosodies
sound
street talk
types of
vulgar
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets
latinitas
lazzi
leading lady/man
legislative bill
legitimate theater
leitmotif
lemma
letters (epistles)
letters to the editor
lexicon/lexicography
liberation criticism
libretto
lighting (in plays)
light opera
linguistics
lip (of stage)
lipogram
literal interpretation
Literary Club
literary criticism. See criticism/critics
literary movements and schools
literary quarterlies
literature
apocalyptic
children’s
confessional
escape
metaliterature
of sensibility
litotes
littérateur
little magazine
little theater
liturgical drama
lobby
localism
logical fallacy
logical sense
logogram
logographer
logogriph
logolatry/logomania
logos
London theatre district
long shot (camera angle)
low-angle shot
low comedy
lyric tragedy
macaronic verse
magazines
magic realism
main action
main feature
mainstream fiction
malapropism
malediction
manly hero
mannerisms
manuscripts
märchen
Marinism
Marxist theories
mask/masque: about
example
mass circulation
material, comedy
material fallacies
matinee and matinee idol
maxim
medium/media
medium shot
meiosis
melodramas
member/membrum
merismus
metadrama
metafiction
metalepsis
metaliterature
metanoia
metanonfiction
metaphorical synonyms
metaphors: characterization through
conceit as extended
Imagists on
mixed
setting with
Metaphysical poets
metapoetry
metastasis
metathesis
metered language
The Method (acting technique)
metonymy
mezzanine
microfiche/microfilm
micterismus
Middle Ages
Middle English
midpoint (in screenplays)
miles gloriosus
mime
mimetic/mimesis
Mimographer
Minimalism
minstrel show
miracle play
miscellany
mise en scéne
mock-lyric tragedy
mock tragedy
Modernism
monodrama
monograph
monologue
defining
interior
soliloquy
mood
moral character
moral interpretation
morality play
moralization
moral viewpoint
morgue/morgue clerk (in journalism)
morphology
motif
motion pictures. See cinema/film
motivation
mounting (in plays)
mouthpiece
movement (in plays)
movements and schools, literary
movies. See cinema/film
muckraking
multivalent reading
mummer/mummery
musical comedy
musical theater
mystery play
myth/mythology
mythopoesis
name calling
narration/narrator
access in
angle in
approach examples
aspects of
double or frame
in nonfiction/essays
person of
perspective of
in plays
narrative structure
conflict in
example of
force role in
person in viewpoints of
viewpoints in
narratology
Naturalism
nemesan
Neoaristotelianism
Neoclassical period and style
neoformalism
neologism
Neoplatonists
New Criticism
New Historicism
news items/news of record
newsletter
newsmagazine
New Wave
nickname
nihil obstat
noema
noh play
nom de plume
nomenclature
nonce words
nonfiction: conclusion in
defining
elements of
metanonfiction
subject in
types of. See also argument; specific topics
non-metaphoric figures
non sequitur
notes/notation
notices
nouns
nouvelle roman
nouvelle vague
novelization
novel/novella/novelette
novel of manners
nuntius
nursery rhymes
oater (horse opera)
obiter dicta
obituary
objective access
objective reporting
obligatory scene (scène à faire)
obscuranto
obscurity
oeuvre
off-Broadway
offstage
Old English
omniscient viewpoint
omnium-gatherum
one-liner
one-man show
op-ed
open-ended
opera: ballad
defining
horse
light/comic
lyric tragedy
melodramas and
trio in
opéra bouffe/buffa/operetta
opposition
opsis
oraismus
oration
orchestra
orientation
orismus
orthographical schemes
orthography
outline
overt elision
overtone
oxymoron
paideia
palimpsest
palindrome
pan (review type)
pangrammatist
pantomime/pantomimist
papyrus
parabasis
paradiastole
paradigm
parados
paradox
parafiction
paragoge
paragon
paragraph
paralepsis
parallelism
antithetical
chiasmus and
climactic
emblematic
grammatical
semantic and structural
synonymous
synthetic
paramalogia
paraphrase
parchment
parecnasis
parenthesis
parimia
parisia
parison
paronomasia
parrhesia
particula pendens. See anacoluthon/anantapodaton
passion play
pastoral drama
patent outsides
pathetic fallacy
pathos
patter song
pc or PC
pedantry
penny dreadful
Perfectionism
periergia
periodicals
peripeteia/peripety
perissologia
permutation
peroration
person (in narration)
persona
personal ad
Personalism
personification
personified abstractions
perspective (of narration)
Philippic
philology
phonemes
photocopy
photojournalism
phrases
picaresque novel
pictograph
picture-frame stage
pièce à thèse
pièce bien faite (well-made play)
pilot
pit
plagiarism
plampede
platform
Platonic critic
Platonism and Neoplatonism
plays: academic/school
action in
acts in
audience, approach to
chronicle
comedy, history of
compound mode drama
cues in
cycles in
dialogue in
ending in
five-act drama form
folk
historical background for
history
kabuki
lighting types
mask/masque
miracle
morality
mounting
musical
mystery
narration/narrator in
noh
passion
problem/thesis
props
puppet
radio
satyr
set
socks in
well-made
play to the pit
playwrights
ploce
plot
defining
double and sub
point
resolution
story, about
story, example of
in theatre of the absurd
plurisignation
POD. See publishing on demand
poetaster
poetic diction
poetic passage
poetic sense
poetic truth
poetry and poets: academic
amateur
anthologies “war”
Aristotelian
criticism/critics and
Dionysian
epistolary
eschatological
exemplar
free verse
Georgian
Great Poets
invocation in
Metaphysical
metapoetry
moral viewpoint of
Muses of
Platonic
professional
prologues for
prose
pure
sacred
schools and movements
sensory level in
social
social cause
stock epithets in
subject of
point of attack
polemics
polyptoton
polysyndeton
portmanteau word
post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy
Postmodernism
Poststructuralism
potboilers
præcisio/præteritio
pragmatic criticism
pratfall
praxis
précis
preface
premise (of argument)
prequel
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
pressman
primary source
primer
Primitivism
printing
print journalism
proaireitic
problem novel
problem play
procatalepsis
producer
professional writing
prolepsis
proletarian novel
prologue
prologue paradigm
prompter
proofs: in argument
foul and uncorrected
propaganda
proparalepsis
property (props)
proportion
props
proscenium arch
proscenium/proscenia
prose poems
prosodies
prosonomasia
protagonist
antagonist conflict with
audience connection to
defining
desire of
empathy for
examples
hero/heroine
multiple and composite;
tragedy
tragic flaw of
prothesis
provenance
proverbs
pseudonym
psychobiography
psychological fallacies
psychomachia
publisher
publishing: bookbinding types in
desktop
editor in
Internet
overview
periodical
self
terms
publishing on demand (POD)
puff
pulp
pulp fiction
pun
Punch and Judy show
puppet play
pure poetry
purple prose/patch
put-in-the-can (in cinema)
quartet
radio
radio play
raisonneur
ratiocination
reader-response theories
readers. See audience Realism
realism, magic
reason
rebuttal
recit
recitative
recognition/recognition scene
redaction
reel, film
refutation
regional theater
reification
reiteration
Renaissance era and style
repartee
repertoire
repertory theater
repetition and repetitional schemes
reporter
report writing
resolution, plot
Restoration Poets
Restoration theater
revenge tragedy
review
revue
rhetoric
rhetorical fallacies
rhetorical question
rhetorical tropes
rhyme
riddle
rising actions
rogue comedy
rôle
roll, film
roman à clef
romance fiction
romantic irony
Romanticism
romantic tragedy
sacred poetry
saga
samisdat
San Francisco School
satire
satyr play
scandalmongering
scapegoat
scenario
scène à faire (obligatory scene)
scene drop
scenes
schemas/schemes: constructional
defining
exclusive
inclusive
orthographical
repetitional
substitutive
scholar
scholarly essay
scholiast
School of Spenser
school play
Schoolroom Poets
schools, literary
science fiction
screenplay: defining
midpoint in
screever
scribe
Scriblerus Club
scrim
scripts (drama)
comic
film-script
radio play
screenplay
teleplay. See also plays
scripts (manuscripts)
scrivener
scrolls
secondary source
second banana
selective citation
semantic parallelism
semantics
semiotics
senex/senex iratus
sensable
senses of interpretation
sensory level
sentence structure
sententia
sequel
serial melodrama
serial/serialization
sermon
sesquipedalian
set (in plays)
set piece
setting
setup
sexisms
shot (film): defining
types
showboat
sidekick
sigmatism
signatures (book)
significatio
signifiers
signs
Augustinian theory of
rubrics/codes of. See also symbols/symbolism
silver screen. See also cinema/film
simile
similitude
sitcom/situation comedy
skit
slander
slang
slant
slapstick
slasher movie
slave narrative
slick
slomo
slow film
slow motion
small screen
snuff flick
soap opera
social poetry
socks (in plays)
Socratic dialogue
soft focus
soliloquy
sound/sonic techniques
articulation
in film
language
manipulation of
Southern Gothic
spear-bearer
special effects
spectacle
speculation
speech: dialect/dialectic
formal
forms and parts of. See also dialogue
diction
speech, figures of. See also tropes/tropic
spelling, study of
spiritual interpretation
splatter movie
spoonerism
spotlight
S.R.O. See Standing Room Only stage: action
areas
business
defining
directions
effect
manager
picture-frame
property/props
set
window
stagecraft
stage properties. See props
stalls
stance, narrator
stand-in
Standing Room Only (S.R.O.)
star/starlet
stasimon
stasis
stemma
stereotypes
stichomythia
still (in film editing)
straight cut (in film editing)
straight man
stream-of-consciousness
street talk
stringer
strong curtain
strophe
structuralism
structural parallelism
Sturm und Drang
style (in nonfiction)
stylists
stylized characters
subject: in fiction
in nonfiction
in poetry
subjective access
substantives
substitutive schemes
subtitles
summary
summary dialogue
summer theater
supernatural fiction
superscription
Surrealism
surrogate
suspense
suspension of disbelief
syllabary
syllabic prosody
syllepsis
syllogism
Symbolists
symbols/symbolism
allegorical interpretations and
defining
examples
sympathy
symploce
synalepha
syncope
synecdoche
syneciosis
synesthesia
synonymous parallelism
synonyms
synopsis
syntax
abstract
inversion in
of narrative viewpoints
synthetic parallelism
tableau
table of contents
tabloid
tact
tag lines
tall tale
tapinosis
tasis
tautologia
teaser
technical writing
technofantasy
teleplay
teleprompter
television
tension
texte
textual criticism
texture
theatergoers
theater-in-the-round
theater of the absurd
theater/theatre: amphitheater
angels/investors in
arena
box
Broadway
dinner
documentary
epic
flies in
legitimate
little
musical
overview
regional
repertory
Restoration
summer. See also plays
theatre district (London)
theatre of cruelty
theatre of fact
theme: defining
story, example of
in theatre of the absurd
thesis
thesis play
thespian
think piece
thought (in tragedy)
tilt shot
title/title page
tmesis
tome
tone, narrator
tormentors
totentanz
touchstone
tour de force
tracking shot
tract
tragedy
antagonist
Aristotelian
audience
chorus role in
domestic
dramatis personae
elements of
history of
justice in
lyric
mock
mock-lyric
protagonist
revenge
romantic
structure
unities in
tragic flaw
tragicomedy
Transcendental Club
Transcendental theory
translation/translator
traveling shot
treatise
treatment
Tremblestick League
Tribe of Ben
trilogy
trio (in opera)
triple-decker
tritagonist
tropes/tropic: concrete
defining
misuse of
rhetorical
types of
tropological interpretation
true histories
truism
truths, universal
turning point
typecasting
typeface
typescript
typographical errors
understatement
understudy
unities
universal truths
University Wits
upstage
Utopian novel
vade mecum
value theory
vanity press
variorum
vatic poets
vaudeville
veil
vellum
verb
verbatim transcript
verisimilitude
vernacular
verse drama
verse essay
versifier
verso
Victorian era and style
videotape
viewpoints, narrative
authorial
considerations for
moral
omniscient
person in
syntax of
vignette
villain
virtual fiction
vocabulary
voice (in fiction)
voice-over
volume
vox populi
vulgar language
vulgate
walk-ons
well-built story
well-made play (pièce bien faite)
Westerns
window stage
wings, stage
wipe (in film editing)
wit
wordplay
words
adopted
coined
foreign
nonce;
portmanteau
study of
wrappers
writing, hand
writing surfaces
writing types
yarn
yearbook
yellow journalism
zeitgeist
zeugma and zeugmatic syllepsis
zoom shot