Word: syntax
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Root of Rage. The new Manheim translation makes more accessible to U.S. readers the astonishing virtuosity of Céline's style, which broke out of the formal gavotte of French grammar and syntax-and used all the resources of thieves' argot, slum slang, and the shoptalk of pimps, prostitutes, bums, and pickpockets-to demonstrate the power and quality of his love of life and hatred for those who must live it. Coprological images-excrement, pus, gangrene, all the humiliating ironies of bodily decay-crowded this doctor's mind. Still, his language no longer shocks; today...
...Your Essay "Right You Are if You Say You Are-Obscurely" [Dec. 30] was merely an acute masochistic reaction formation to your own hostile-aggressive syntax, which itself derives from an inadequate ego-syntonic defense system with paranoiac overtones...
...Ulysses. The few letters from Joyce's rakehell father have all the style and fresh idiom of Simon Dedalus in the book. And Molly Bloom's long, affirmative soliloquy comes to life in the letters of his wife, Nora-artless, rambling and totally innocent of punctuation, syntax or correct spelling...
Poetry Editor D.S. Ament has two poems here, one an untitled experiment in anti-syntax ("deep as death's yet pools are/her eyes") which has some interest but some impossible tin-ear cacaphony ("and then more than ever i know of"). His other effort, "The Deed," is doggeral. The rhythm of its short rimed phrases suggests Bob Dylan's fine song "Like a Rolling Stone," but comparison insults Dylan. Ament's phrases are all empty rime-tags...
...Donald Justice," perhaps the best, is infinitely deeper and wholly more ambitious than early Grenier poems, which tended to be terse conversational fragments of point-blank incorporations of the physical environment, piece by piece. It presents motion without the encumbrances of consecutive common-sense description, and uses syntax without bowing to it. "First Settlement and After" is a brilliantly integrated "topical" piece, just as cinematic as the other...