{"id":432542,"date":"2020-06-03T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2020-06-03T16:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=432542"},"modified":"2020-06-05T17:11:43","modified_gmt":"2020-06-05T21:11:43","slug":"the-erotics-of-restraint-essays-on-literary-form-by-douglas-glover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/06\/03\/the-erotics-of-restraint-essays-on-literary-form-by-douglas-glover\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form” by Douglas Glover"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/em><\/p>\n

The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form by <\/em>Douglas Glover
\n<\/strong>203 pgs. | pb | 9781771962919 | $21.95
\nBiblioasis<\/a>
\nReview by Brendan Riley<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Erotics of Restraint <\/em>is an excellent companion\u2014with a no less provocative title\u2014to Mr. Glover\u2019s previous collection, Attack of the Copula Spiders<\/em>, published in 2013.<\/em><\/p>\n

Glover\u2019s essays are models of clarity, each offering a precise, finely articulated exegesis, and highly accessible, practical examinations of structure and rhetorical intention. With robust attention to detail, Glover illuminates how the living structure of powerful, effective writing draws readers to outstanding books and stories and makes other writers, both aspiring and accomplished, strive to compose them.<\/p>\n

The title essay, one of nine, examines the dramatic social configurations of Jane Austen\u2019s Mansfield Park<\/em>, which Glover declares \u201ca brilliant book, a great book, breathtaking in its invention and orchestration.\u201d In 10 laser-focused sections, this essay explores how the morally steadfast Fanny Price becomes the apophatic pearl of great price by not yielding to the superficial temptations of courtship, young love, and family pressure.<\/p>\n

Glover\u2019s admitted obsession with Mansfield Park\u2014<\/em>an unflagging, and equally steadfast, concern with the structural nuances of literary craft and meaning\u2014also drives the other essays in this collection. These pieces are engineering symposia, and Glover takes stories and sentences down practically to the atomic level, not showing how<\/em> to write a story, (not, as I mentioned in my review of Attack of the Copula Spiders<\/em>, any rote, write-by-the-numbers instruction), but rather through careful analysis showing the results of the sometimes slippery, unquantifiable X-factor that imbues carefully composed, deeply accomplished writing. His studies reveal the life of detailed, complex prose and his cogent descriptions of plot mechanics, such as \u201cpatterns of inflection by antithesis,\u201d always serve the structural analysis.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Style of Alice Munro,\u201d Glover points out how Munro \u201cforges her style in the furnace of opposition\u201d\u2014showing how statement provokes counter statement or counter construction, subversion or complication; how Munro\u2019s contrarian, counterpunching stories \u201cadvance by the accumulation of contravention.\u201d His character study of her story \u201cLives of Girls and Women\u201d notes the \u201cmotivational consistency, expanding symbols, tie backs, and memory rehearsals\u201d of her novels.\u00a0Examining Munro\u2019s story \u201cBaptizing,\u201d Glover quotes a short sentence and then offers a typically impressive . . . breakdown? Might we call it a translation<\/em>?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Munro:<\/strong> \u201cHer agnosticism and sociability were often in conflict in Jubilee, where social and religious life were apt to be one and the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Glover:<\/strong> \u201cThis sentence is constructed with the balanced antithesis of an aphorism (\u201cconflict\u201d vs. \u201cone and the same\u201d; \u201cagnosticism and sociability\u201d v \u201csocial and religious life\u201d), and part of the reason for her compositional elegance is Munro\u2019s habit of composing in opposed doubles. But the larger point is that much of any Alice Munro text will be taken up with a precise delineation of differences. Her style is to mark the differences.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cAnatomy of the Short Story,\u201d the collection\u2019s longest essay, offers deep structural explorations of three stories Glover cites as exemplars of the craft: \u201cShiloh\u201d by Bobbie Ann Mason; \u201cThe Point\u201d by Charles D\u2019Ambrosio, Jr.; and \u201cBrokeback Mountain\u201d by E. Annie Proulx, minutely examining each in terms of plot, image patterns, thematic passages, and backfill.<\/p>\n

Glover sees a story as \u201ca composite text orchestrated around a dramatic plot,\u201d and defines plot, which he calls, \u201cthe sonogram of the heart,\u201d as \u201cthe backbone of a story, the first element of its architecture . . . a desire conflicting with a resistance over and over.\u201d And his explanations blossom into greater complexity and sophistication\u2014\u201cThe energy of plot is revelatory, illuminating character like ultrasound waves projected into the human body, exposing the inner workings beneath the surface\u201d\u2014which he renders as this basic formula:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cPlot = (d\/r) + (d\/r) + (d\/r) time>>><\/sup><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

and then delineates specific examples of this structural formula as it operates in each of these three echo-logical compositions.<\/p>\n

This chapter is an exegetical tour-de-force, and should enhance the way any reader or writer approaches fiction. Without bending any pieces to a single theory or perspective\u2014analysis and theory often carve up stories and novels to oblige certain parameters\u2014Glover\u2019s microscopic analysis reveals fascinating structural undercurrents. Methodical, penetrating, and brilliant, this herculean essay is wonderfully lucid, perfectly poised, sharply focused\u2014a classic.<\/p>\n

Another valuable study, \u201cThe Art of Necessity: Time Control in Narrative Prose,\u201d focuses on how plot is overwhelmingly time oriented: \u201cnarrative is a temporal art; time control is its essence, and good authors spend a surprising portion of their texts watching the clock.\u201d In addition to exploring \u201cTime, Consciousness, and Verisimilitude,\u201d Glover explains time indicators, time shifts, time segments (which he calls \u201cglobs\u201d), and \u201cthought points,\u201d and identifies a \u201cshort list\u201d of\u00a0no-less-than eight different \u201ctime switches [that] serve as relational and transitional devices.\u201d He shows how narrative time is not chronological time, how authors create focus, emphasis, and transport by rearranging, managing, and curating time in their stories, and offers demonstrative dissections of passages from Proust\u2019s Swann<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Way<\/em>, and essays by Annie Dillard (\u201cSeeing\u201d) and Ted Kooser (\u201cSmall Rooms in Time\u201d).<\/p>\n

In \u201cBuilding Sentences,\u201d Glover offers a personal epiphany experienced when reading Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s essay \u201cOn Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature\u201d:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[Stevenson]was talking about sentences, but instead of repeating the platitudes he showed how to construct sentences on the basis of conflict. Instead of just announcing a single thesis, a sentence begins by setting out two or more contrasting ideas; the sentence develops a conflict, intensifying toward a climax, a \u201cknot\u201d Stevenson calls it, and then, after a moment of suspension, slides easily toward a close. Suddenly, I understood both how to write those lovely, lengthy compound-complex sentences and also how to write paragraphs that had nothing to do with topic sentence-body-conclusion patterns (because I could construct a paragraph the way Stevenson constructs his long sentences).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

More than just standard explication, Glover\u2019s close analysis of prose structure is really a kind of translation, laying bare the mechanics in order to show how the direct, denotative meaning of prose is created; again, not as illustrative of theory or school of thought, but how writers shape their illusions, how they successfully transmit stories and ideas.<\/p>\n

Regarding translation per se, Glover offers plenty to interest both readers of literature in translation as well as translators themselves, most notably in the essay \u201cMaking Friends with a Stranger: Albert Camus\u2019 L\u2019Etranger.<\/em>\u201d Glover traces and retranslates his relationship to The Stranger, <\/em>from what he first recalls of it\u2014a casual impressionistic, attitudinal, hormonal relationship\u2014to a deeper structural one; reading is, intrinsically, an act of translation, and Glover\u2019s concern, as mentioned above, is to read better.<\/p>\n

Glover mentions making the novel\u2019s acquaintance in French in 1967 while simultaneously reading an English translation of it\u2014probably Stuart Gilbert\u2019s 1962 translation (The Stranger<\/em>), the standard English version until Joseph Laredo\u2019s 1982\u00a0 translation, The Outsider<\/em>; Glover notes the latter as the one he has most recently revisited. Since then, L\u2019Etranger<\/em> has also been translated into English by Matthew Ward (1989), and Sandra Smith (2012).<\/p>\n

Glover discusses how Camus \u201cborrowed\u201d\u2014(translated?)\u2014The Stranger<\/em>\u2019s elliptical point-of-view structure from the American novel, specifically, and for the sake of practicality not preference, from Hemingway\u2019s The Sun Also Rises<\/em>, and quotes from Camus\u2019 reply to interviewer Jeanine Delpech, who claimed to note a resemblance between The Stranger<\/em> and \u201ccertain works by Faulkner and Steinbeck\u201d: \u201cI would give a hundred Hemingways for one Stendhal or one Benjamin Constant. And I regret the influence of this literature on many young writers.\u201d (from Lyrical and Critical Essays, <\/em>trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy).<\/p>\n

Camus was more taken with Melville and Faulkner, whose discursive styles and twilight tones feel palpably present in The Plague<\/em>, Camus\u2019 longest novel. In his essay on Melville and Moby-Dick<\/em>, (which, editor Philip Thody notes, Camus probably read in the French translation by Lucien Jacques, Joan Smith, and Jean Giono, published by Gallimard in 1941), Camus has this to say:<\/p>\n

\u201c. . . Melville never wrote anything but the same book, which he began again and again. This single book is the story of a voyage, inspired first of all solely by the joyful curiosity of youth (Typee<\/em>, Omoo<\/em>, etc.) then later inhabited by an increasingly wild and burning anguish. Mardi<\/em> is the first magnificent story in which Melville begins the quest that nothing can appease, and in which, finally, \u201cpursuers and pursued fly across a boundless ocean.\u201d It is in this work that Melville becomes aware of the fascinating call that forever echoes in him: \u201cI have undertaken a journey without maps.\u201d And again: \u201cI am the restless hunter, the one who has no home.\u201d Moby-Dick<\/em> simply carries the great themes of Mardi<\/em> to perfection. But since artistic perfection is also inadequate to quench the kind of thirst with which we are confronted here, Melville will start once again, in Pierre: or the Ambiguities<\/em>, that unsuccessful masterpiece, to depict the quest of genius and misfortune whose sneering failure he will consecrate in the course of a long journey on the Mississippi that forms the theme of The Confidence Man<\/em>. (Camus, \u201cHerman Melville,\u201d Lyrical and Critical Essays<\/em>, 291)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

And in his 1957 \u201cForeword to Requiem for a Nun,\u201d Camus offers these thoughts on translation:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Goal of this foreword is not to present Faulkner to the French public. Malraux undertook that task brilliantly twenty years ago, and thanks to him, Faulkner gained a reputation with us that his own country has not yet accorded him. Nor is it a question of praising Maurice Coindreau\u2019s translation. French readers know that contemporary American literature has no better nor more effective ambassador among us. One need only imagine Faulkner betrayed as Dostoevski was by his first adapter to measure the role Monsieur Coindreau has played. A writer knows what he owes to his translators, when they are of this quality.\u201d Lyrical and Critical Essays<\/em>, 311).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Glover himself subtly raises the specter of betrayal with this question about Laredo\u2019s translation of L\u2019Etranger<\/em>: \u201cWhy is the climatic murder scene so gorgeously oneiric with its crescendo of heat and glare as Meursault approaches the spring (la source<\/em> in French\u2014my goodness, what gets lost in translation)?\u201d A firm nod to the translation blues\u2014familiar imputations of linguistic neglect, betrayal, loss, or debt\u2014in response to a novel deeply concerned with those problems on a social scale.<\/p>\n

Some insights from scholar and translator Karen Emmerich may help to gather these seemingly disparate threads:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cA work, once it enters the world, is subject to the textual condition, one of variance, difference, proliferation, and iterative growth, including growth in new linguistic contexts. Negotiating the tension between work and text, in and between languages . . . thus involves the underlying question of the relationship of the one to the many: how different can two texts be before we cease to see them as iterations of the same work? How much of Moby Dick<\/em> can we sacrifice to the abridger\u2019s scalpel, saw, or scimitar? Is Moby-Dick<\/em> still Moby-Dick<\/em> in Urdu?\u201d (Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (Literatures, Cultures, Translation<\/em>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Glover\u2019s essays, especially the aforementioned forays into style and structure, may certainly be read as \u201citerative growths\u201d\u2014translated iterations, iterated translations, of the source texts. Not interlingual translations, of course; the task Glover has undertaken here, is to elucidate, to reveal, to illuminate, and his readings, fired by fascination, render good service to these works, perhaps nowhere better than in his essay on Witold Gombrowicz\u2019s Cosmos<\/em>, \u201cConsciousness and Masturbation,\u201d which translates this novel, (whose first English-language translation came from the French and German translations from the original Polish text) into meaning, showing the deep concerns of a work that can seem, upon a first reading, trivial, superficial, or inconclusive, (admittedly, my own experience), revealing the novel\u2019s concern with the dominance of form in human existence, how the inherent limitations of form and structure are overbearing, even monstrous\u2014certainly human structures often approach this reality.<\/p>\n

This is one of the major, underlying concerns in Jorge Luis Borges\u2019s story \u201cThe Immortal,\u201d another work about obsessions with textual variants and iterations. The endlessly symmetrical dungeon and its counterpart, the vast, cataclysmic City of the Immortals, (a mashup of every known architectural form, a sort of demiurgic Winchester Mystery House) through which the narrator wanders for years, are both nearly inescapable perfections of the hideous replication of forms\u2014only through limitless time and chance does one trapped within stumble on a way out. One needs cosmic access to elude form which, as ineluctably as gravity, perpetually defeats us.<\/p>\n

Glover also shows how Cosmos<\/em>, for example, exemplifies the need for translation: \u201cGombrowicz hates form but loves form; he can\u2019t escape form because that would look mad (schizophrenic), and, besides, he also loves to play with form\u201d (194). So do translators. Gombrowicz\u2019s worrying of form affirms the need for translation, for form to be pitted against form, meaning that translation is neither intrusion, incursion, theft, betrayal, sales ploy, or simply shabby simulacrum; it is an organic response, a psychological need; a reader\u2019s encounter with an incomprehensible text, not a Finnegans Wake<\/em> but a coherent text, in a language unknown to the reader which stimulates a need to make sense of it, to impose some comprehensible order on it, and that begets itself, iteratively. Thus that desire, the desire to imitate, to replicate is a kind of necessary madness; the urge to translate is a temporary escape, refuge within a simulacra of which the translator momentarily, and only momentarily, senses ownership before the bramble traps them by growing, cascading, whirling into a prison beyond control and overwhelms again. This may or may not be liberation; Glover points out that Gombrowicz does not so much redefine the novel as seek escape from it. Yet it is by means of patterning and pattern recognition that Gombrowicz performs his apophenic legerdemain.<\/p>\n

In the essay\u2019s final statement, Glover claims that \u201cIn this sense, all beautiful texts, insofar as they practice this kind of elaborated structure of repetition, are uncanny, horrifying; rhyme is mechanical and inhuman, structure destroys reason.\u201d And yet rhythm, as astrophysicists, musicians, physicians, and children alike all know, is organic\u2014it impels us to build sensible empowering structures of sound: drumbeat, dance, melody, nonsense, to and from which we then seek, endlessly, return and flight and return again.<\/p>\n

Much of the satisfaction found in Glover\u2019s essays lies within the reader\u2019s encounter with his meticulous, patient demonstration of the results of thoughtful, intelligent writing\u2014not apophenia but his eye for deliberate detail and, especially, a superior ability to explicate its importance.<\/p>\n

To wit, the chapter \u201cThe Arsonist\u2019s Revenge\u201d provides an alluring structural study of linguistic patterning in David Helwig\u2019s novella The Stand-In, <\/em>while the \u201cThe Literature of Extinction\u201d presents three brief, dizzying sections (\u201cNostalgia (the Death of God)\u201d; \u201cCynicism (Lifting the Veil)\u201d; and \u201cThe Return of the Repressed, or the Aesthetics of Extinction\u201d) that touch on Cervantes, Kundera, Rabelais, Nietzsche, Saussure, Plato, Kenny Goldsmith, zombies, Heidegger, Surrealism, Duchamp, Oulipo, and Ccru writing.<\/p>\n

Among the many approaches and techniques identified in \u201cBuilding Sentences,\u201d Glover also shows an interest in writing lists, and mentions notable\u00a0list stories: Steven Millhauser\u2019s \u201cThe Barnum Museum\u201d and Leonard Michael\u2019s \u201cIn the Fifties.\u201d In terms of lists, this dazzling, kaleidoscopic collection sadly lacks\u2014and fully deserves\u2014a proper index in order to help readers explore its wealth of knowledge. In lieu of one, and in addition to the many authors, stories, and subjects already mentioned, here is a partial list of other subjects mentioned or discussed in The Erotics of Restraint<\/em>:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \n
  • Absurdism<\/li>\n
  • Christa Wolf\u2019s novel The Quest for Christa T, <\/em>\u00a0and her essay \u201cThe Conditions of Narrative\u201d<\/li>\n
  • Constance Garnett, translator<\/li>\n
  • Descartes<\/li>\n
  • Derrida<\/li>\n
  • Dostoyevsky\u2019s The Idiot<\/em><\/li>\n
  • E.M. Cioran<\/li>\n
  • Edmund Husserl<\/li>\n
  • Edward Topsall\u2019s Historie of Serpent<\/em>s<\/li>\n
  • Existentialism<\/li>\n
  • Forrest Gump<\/li>\n
  • French noir: Francis Carco, Georges Simenon<\/li>\n
  • Gertrude Stein<\/li>\n
  • Glover\u2019s own short stories \u201cFire Drill\u201d; \u201cThe Obituary Writer\u201d; \u201cPender\u2019s Visions\u201d; \u201cHeartsick\u201d; \u201cTristiana\u201d; \u201cBad News of the Heart\u201d<\/li>\n
  • Hans-Georg Gadamer<\/li>\n
  • James M. Cain\u2019s The Postman Always Rings Twice<\/em><\/li>\n
  • Lawrence Durrell\u2019s The Alexandria Quartet<\/em><\/li>\n
  • Leon Surmelian\u2019s Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness<\/em><\/li>\n
  • Mark Anthony Jarman\u2019s \u201cBurned Man on a Texas Porch\u201d<\/li>\n
  • Modernism<\/li>\n
  • Montaigne<\/li>\n
  • Nietzche<\/li>\n
  • Nabokov\u2019s Pale Fire<\/em><\/li>\n
  • Pico della Mirandola<\/li>\n
  • Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel<\/em><\/li>\n
  • Sartre\u2019s essay for The Atlantic Monthly – \u201cAmerican Novelists in French Eyes.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • Spanish novelist Germ\u00e1n Sierra<\/li>\n
  • Ted Kooser: \u201cSmall Rooms in Time\u201d<\/li>\n
  • The New Yorker<\/em><\/li>\n
  • Theodor Adorno<\/li>\n
  • The St. Crispin\u2019s Day speech from Henry V<\/em><\/li>\n
  • Thomas Bernhard\u2019s novel The Loser<\/em><\/li>\n
  • Thomas Wyatt: \u201cThey Flee from Me\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

     <\/p>\n

    In sum, The Erotics of Restraint<\/em> is a superlative collection\u2014smart, judicious, clear, interesting, sharp, expertly crafted, infectious as the metonymic impulse\u2014an education in and of itself, a brilliant primer on how to understand, and possibly emulate, modern and postmodern literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form by Douglas Glover 203 pgs. | pb | 9781771962919 | $21.95 Biblioasis Review by Brendan Riley   The Erotics of Restraint is an excellent companion\u2014with a no less provocative title\u2014to Mr. Glover\u2019s previous collection, Attack of the Copula Spiders, published in 2013. Glover\u2019s essays are models of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[14406,50626,38596,11926,71032],"class_list":["post-432542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-biblioasis","tag-brendan-riley","tag-douglas-glover","tag-essays","tag-the-erotics-of-restraint"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432542"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432782,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432542\/revisions\/432782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}