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🦋 Binary thinking

Edmond Caldwell responds with some very thoughtful commentary to my post on Baroque fiction. I was happy, and a little surprised, to see that what I have in mind and am venturing to express as "Baroque" is broadly similar to what he was thinking about when he used the term last month.

The only place where I might depart from you've written is in the idea that this entails a canceling out individual "free-will" (if I'm even correct that that is what you're saying; forgive me if I've got it wrong), because I think that's still looking at the situation through the old humanist lens (in which it's an either/or question, one either has self-originating "free will" or one is subject to iron determinism, like a puppet). I think the baroque sentence is more dialectical than this; that human agency is deeply or even thoroughly conditioned means perhaps not that it doesn't exist but that it is more collective than we thought.

This is a good point and makes me realize that I wasn't thinking clearly this morning when I tried writing about the fatalism in Of Love and Other Demons. Of course there is not a binary distinction between "human actors possessed of free will" on the one hand and "pre-programmed robots" on the other -- there is a pretty broad spectrum of how self-directed a character's actions can seem. (And of course I am getting uncomfortable talking on and on about characters with or without free choice, without acknowldeging that there is an author behind them making the decisions...) I really liked Mr. Caldwell's idea (if I'm understanding him right) that the individual characters in this type of novel can be seen as being subsumed in a kind of collective consciousness which is directing their actions.

posted evening of Saturday, January 24th, 2009
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A little more on the 'baroque sentence' -- I had been thinking of the sentences themselves, their form and content, but after our exchange yesterday I started thinking more about their impact on the reader (a moment of "Reader Response"-style criticism, I guess), and what occurred to me still jives with the general ideas we've been considering so far.

Specifically, due to its length and possibly also its structure if it features for instance a lot of subordinate clauses, asides, digressions, parenthetical constructions, etc., the baroque sentence is a type of sentence which cannot be encompassed in the reader's consciousness all at one time. The reader can't "contain" it all at once, as a single cohesive unit, in his or her mind. (I forget the exact number, but the cognitive-psych researchers have long since demonstrated that we can only hold a sequence of, say, seven or eight discrete items - words or numbers - in our minds at one time.) The reader's mind does not contain the baroque sentence; on the contrary, such a sentence has swallowed our hypothetical reader's consciousness like a boa constrictor with a small deer inside of it. The very experience of reading the baroque sentence is the experience of being subsumed by language, or at least borne on its current. We have a sense of something coming before, and of something coming after; we're no longer so integral, we're more porous and must resign a little of our sense of mastery....

Just an additional line of inquiry -- and please call me Edmond instead of Mr. Caldwell, which makes me feel too old!

posted evening of January 25th, 2009 by Edmond Caldwell

The very experience of reading the baroque sentence is the experience of being subsumed by language, or at least borne on its current

This sounds plausible. When I was reading Saramago's The Cave I rhapsodized about "the way each sentence moves through phases: building, droning, falling, building, and the sudden surprising punch of the period" -- my response to one of the long sentences was comparable to how I might respond to a short story or to a song.

posted evening of January 25th, 2009 by Jeremy

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