The Ways of the Word by Garrett Stewart;

Author:Garrett Stewart;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Schooled by the Spool: Prose Montage

There is, to be sure, an internal build across these five chapters—not just a parceling out of emphasis. Language on the literary page, in the passage from eye to the “paging” of an inner ear; literary speech on stage—so far so good: the start of a rough verbal anatomy in a survey of the word’s audiovisual ways, subvocal against intoned. And now a third facet of the question, its perspective falling somewhere between alternate common definitions of the term “screened”: sheltered, hidden, camouflaged, on the one hand; broadcast, projected, put out for display, on the other. On the lookout for prose cinematography when taking one’s seat in front of a novelistic page, how exactly, in yet a further sense, does one “screen” for such features? In this comparative exploration, the work of screening is a sifting, a filtering. So this is a chapter about literary language—scanned and sorted, winnowed—for motion picture analogues. And vice versa, as inclination dictates: movies rerun in imagination in order to grasp some machinated equivalents (and rough models) in screen pacing for literary prose. With the result that, in a certain laboratory (or classroom) version of this chapter’s considerations, movies can be tightly surveyed—again screened, sieved—for “discursive” parallels. These intuited analogues in lexical or syntactic maneuver are formal counterparts best understood within a broad constellation of structuring increments and transitions in the shared narrative work of prose and motion pictures—complete with “grammatical” compounding and subordination, with modifiers and amplifiers, appositions and antitheses, inertial sequence and reversal—rather than narrowly construed according to the nonlinguistic codes of the editing shears per se.

One question above all drives these final two chapters: What is a cinematic sentence? No answer need be settled on in order eventually to have set a number of things straight—or at least to have set them going in an experimental mode of response. To begin with, the question of a cinematic prose soon devolves, productively enough, into discriminations—within the very idea of image—between the verbal metaphor and the photographic picture. And beyond that, the linguistic question is more pointedly syntactic. So—even with some likely contenders on record already—one keeps asking whether there is something not just discernible, but generalizable, that one could call cinematic in sentence structure, which is to say in its montage of words? Not a question about some mode of filmic syntax organizing a narrative moment on screen: that’s indisputable. But a cinematographic articulation in language alone? What balance of focus and velocity, of angle and frame, even of aspect ratios perhaps, may be experimented with by the pacing of prose that might call up the dynamics of our long-dominant narrative medium? Aside from the vistas wedged open by metaphor, what is it about the gait of grammar, its starts (either sense) and arrests, its ambivalent overlays and reloads, that keeps us going forward, even when its own motion may in certain narrative instances seem rotary, even ironically circular? What analogous relation, in short, does the word as

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