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Thursday, February 05, 2004
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OF HUMAN ODDITY
Saul Bellow uses the word “odd” about thirty times in his rather short novel, Ravelstein. Early in Re-Joyce, Anthony Burgess's wonderful book about Bellow's literary precursor, this paragraph appears: "It is the lack, not merely of the cliche, but of the rhythm that suggests a cliche, that makes both [Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce] odd. Yet this oddness springs from nature: English is never abused, never given exotic flavouring... . Both writers build, not on the accumulations of the centuries, but on the freshly uncovered roots of English. This, then, makes them look odd. ...Oddness is more easily excused in a poet than in a novelist. The poet's trade is with words, an odd trade anyway, and he has to arrange them oddly to draw attention to the mystery of language." Henry James’s The Ambassadors relies just as heavily on variants of the word: oddness, oddly, oddity all over the place. Bellow, Burgess, and James aren’t the only ones. We’re all odd birds, odd bodies, and the best writers intuit forms of human oddness that resonate and clarify. These writers make language odd too - as Burgess suggests - so that it can carry the impress of human oddity. To be odd is to display the nuanced individual markings of your biography and your vulnerability. Chad’s shabby Paris apartment is to Strether part of his “small sublime indifferences and independences, [expressing] an odd and engaging dignity.” A nihilistically inclined poet like Philip Larkin will throw up his hands and say that since our oddities are hopelessly contingent to each of us, there’s little of interest to be said about them: And what’s the profit? Only that, in time, We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home. But to confess, On that green evening when our death begins, Just what it was, is hardly sastisfying, Since it applied only to one man once, And that one dying. But writers who deal in the odd epiphany (Joyce, DeLillo) argue something else: that the most painstaking elaboration of human oddness tends, paradoxically, to reveal a deep-lying commonality. Queer or odd? What do you prefer? Queer Theory (now known cynically as Career Theory; or sometimes Drear Theory) offers a secret society identity - it’s like being a Straussian. There’s an implicit affirmation of superiority to unhip unenlightened bourgeois people. Queer Theory takes odd and colonizes it for one group. As of May 17, gay people can get married in Massachusetts. The State Supreme Court ruled in favor of it today. A vote for odd over queer. |