William Gass Lecture, 'Baroque Prose'
William Gass lectured tonight at 6:15 in the Schapiro Center of Columbia University. About 40 people attended the lecture. Nicholas Dames briefly introduced the black-suited, black-polo-ed Gass, and before I knew it, Gass had begun. He remembered staying at Fernell Hall of Columbia as a Navy midshipman, sneaking out at night across Morningside Park to swoon at Lena Horne in the Cotton Club.
The lecture was a reading from his work-in-progress, On a Few Lines of Jeremy Taylor's. I could hardly believe it—Gass on Taylor, finally, as if a dream. The book is to be on baroque prose in general, and Taylor’s in specific. The reading tonight focused on the culture, context, and method of the sermons of John Donne and Jeremy Taylor. Some snippets:
“The sermon should create its own conceptual space.”
“Next to the theatre, this is the best show in town.”
Baroque prose lives in the ears, not in print.
Puritans treated baroque churches with “smug, destructive rage”.
If you strip a religion of ceremony & trinkets, you have something shallow and silly left.
Walton described Donne’s method of sermon composition and polishing for publication.
Even Erasmus complained of Sententious Sermonists.
The Anglican Church was still ceremonious even after it cut ties to Rome
6,000 at St. Paul’s Cross church. Hecklers about delivery and content.
Donne delivered a sermon on April 22nd, 1622 (today is the 22nd)
Baroque Prose: like a libretto competing with music.
If the listener of baroque prose can’t understand one analogy, another will come along and foster comprehension.
Repetition = elaboration through different syntactic contexts.
Preachers of Donne’s era were critics, explainers of the text, as well as almost blasphemous in worshipping their own words.
Both the reactionary saxon-ist prose looking to the past, and the scientific, clarity-minded prose looking to the future, had a common enemy in baroque prose; but when science and saxon prose met, they muddied each other.
Baroque prose loves the parenthetical and the after-thought because they stave off death.
Browne: unequalled in the depths and heights of his prose.
Hobbes: should be sounded slowly.
Claredon: like Browne, Hobbes, Brown, and Burton, as well as like Donne in his prose, has faded away in popularity because he did not write fiction, and his subjects are now unpopular.
Taylor: not as troubled as Donne. Liberal. Labelled with ‘the loose style’, but just how loose is it?
“I am interested in bringing rhetoric back as an organizing principle.”
“I have an awful memory. But I know pages of Finnegan’s Wake by heart.” [because they are pure music]
[enjoys the sound of] “Alabama”
Another property of baroque prose: lists. List are nominal, particular, not Platonic in category.
Gass is planning to take on “stuffshirts” Eliot and Arnold in their assessments of baroque prose.
“Narration for me is the ordering of words.”
“I’ll read a page of Beckett tonight.” [this comment after discussing how Beckett is musical without being Baroque. Beckett needs to be performed, particularly the pauses.]
American Ministers, like Edwards, used different structures than their English counterparts. Gass hasn’t come to them yet in the book, but will.
Burton, in his list-making, is more disheveled than Browne in his.
Under the Volcano: Lowry was a different, more experienced writer by the time he finished, and couldn’t really save early parts of the novel from failure, in spite of his efforts.
“I love opposition. I love having enemies. I mean imaginary enemies.”
He’s gone soft, likes Trollope now.
His main enemy is the act of not taking prose seriously. Dreiser.
Aesthetic structure can give your work immortality when no one cares about he subject.
Aristotle’s Physics is great, even though wrong.
“The truth is very important, but it can be a drag.”
Grimm’s fairy tales are written badly, but are still great, because of their jokey, story form. But you can’t have a novel be written badly and still be great.
“I want to disassociate the work from its so-called subject.”
“I was looking at some of the Hudson River School today, which I used to think was terrible.” Now, he’s enjoying that it’s not about anything.
-I asked him ‘How do you understand reconciling the importance of irregularity (the curt style, the avoidance of blank verse…) with an appreciation of symmetry and harmony on the grand or a smaller scale?’ He replied, “Well, not everyone should write baroque prose. There are so many ways to be good. But my ultimate goal, when you have all that diversity, can you have a unified aesthetic experience? and I think only formalist principles can do that.”
-I went up to Gass after the reading and told him how much I enjoyed his lecture, and that I was considering writing a dissertation on Taylor. I asked him if he was familiar with the book “The Rhetoric of Jeremy Taylor’s Prose”, written by a nun, Sister Antoine. He said yes, and he has it on order. I asked him why he thought Eliot didn’t write more on Taylor, that it seemed to be an strange omission, and he didn’t really know. I thanked him again, introduced myself, and shook his hand. A great evening for a serious Gass fan.
The lecture was a reading from his work-in-progress, On a Few Lines of Jeremy Taylor's. I could hardly believe it—Gass on Taylor, finally, as if a dream. The book is to be on baroque prose in general, and Taylor’s in specific. The reading tonight focused on the culture, context, and method of the sermons of John Donne and Jeremy Taylor. Some snippets:
“The sermon should create its own conceptual space.”
“Next to the theatre, this is the best show in town.”
Baroque prose lives in the ears, not in print.
Puritans treated baroque churches with “smug, destructive rage”.
If you strip a religion of ceremony & trinkets, you have something shallow and silly left.
Walton described Donne’s method of sermon composition and polishing for publication.
Even Erasmus complained of Sententious Sermonists.
The Anglican Church was still ceremonious even after it cut ties to Rome
6,000 at St. Paul’s Cross church. Hecklers about delivery and content.
Donne delivered a sermon on April 22nd, 1622 (today is the 22nd)
Baroque Prose: like a libretto competing with music.
If the listener of baroque prose can’t understand one analogy, another will come along and foster comprehension.
Repetition = elaboration through different syntactic contexts.
Preachers of Donne’s era were critics, explainers of the text, as well as almost blasphemous in worshipping their own words.
Both the reactionary saxon-ist prose looking to the past, and the scientific, clarity-minded prose looking to the future, had a common enemy in baroque prose; but when science and saxon prose met, they muddied each other.
Baroque prose loves the parenthetical and the after-thought because they stave off death.
Browne: unequalled in the depths and heights of his prose.
Hobbes: should be sounded slowly.
Claredon: like Browne, Hobbes, Brown, and Burton, as well as like Donne in his prose, has faded away in popularity because he did not write fiction, and his subjects are now unpopular.
Taylor: not as troubled as Donne. Liberal. Labelled with ‘the loose style’, but just how loose is it?
“I am interested in bringing rhetoric back as an organizing principle.”
“I have an awful memory. But I know pages of Finnegan’s Wake by heart.” [because they are pure music]
[enjoys the sound of] “Alabama”
Another property of baroque prose: lists. List are nominal, particular, not Platonic in category.
Gass is planning to take on “stuffshirts” Eliot and Arnold in their assessments of baroque prose.
“Narration for me is the ordering of words.”
“I’ll read a page of Beckett tonight.” [this comment after discussing how Beckett is musical without being Baroque. Beckett needs to be performed, particularly the pauses.]
American Ministers, like Edwards, used different structures than their English counterparts. Gass hasn’t come to them yet in the book, but will.
Burton, in his list-making, is more disheveled than Browne in his.
Under the Volcano: Lowry was a different, more experienced writer by the time he finished, and couldn’t really save early parts of the novel from failure, in spite of his efforts.
“I love opposition. I love having enemies. I mean imaginary enemies.”
He’s gone soft, likes Trollope now.
His main enemy is the act of not taking prose seriously. Dreiser.
Aesthetic structure can give your work immortality when no one cares about he subject.
Aristotle’s Physics is great, even though wrong.
“The truth is very important, but it can be a drag.”
Grimm’s fairy tales are written badly, but are still great, because of their jokey, story form. But you can’t have a novel be written badly and still be great.
“I want to disassociate the work from its so-called subject.”
“I was looking at some of the Hudson River School today, which I used to think was terrible.” Now, he’s enjoying that it’s not about anything.
-I asked him ‘How do you understand reconciling the importance of irregularity (the curt style, the avoidance of blank verse…) with an appreciation of symmetry and harmony on the grand or a smaller scale?’ He replied, “Well, not everyone should write baroque prose. There are so many ways to be good. But my ultimate goal, when you have all that diversity, can you have a unified aesthetic experience? and I think only formalist principles can do that.”
-I went up to Gass after the reading and told him how much I enjoyed his lecture, and that I was considering writing a dissertation on Taylor. I asked him if he was familiar with the book “The Rhetoric of Jeremy Taylor’s Prose”, written by a nun, Sister Antoine. He said yes, and he has it on order. I asked him why he thought Eliot didn’t write more on Taylor, that it seemed to be an strange omission, and he didn’t really know. I thanked him again, introduced myself, and shook his hand. A great evening for a serious Gass fan.
posted by Raul de Saldanha at
9:09 PM
4 Comments:
Thanks for the write-up. I've added a link to it at the Gass-related website I run: http://tunneling.squarespace.com/nods.
Hi Raul,
Did you record this lecture? Is it possible to post it? or secure a copy somehow?
Thanks,
John
Thanks so much for those tasty bits from Gass' lecture. I've read a fair amount of his criticism. It's a real joy, every page alive with ideas, sly wit,and a voice.
One striking thing about his prose is how easily it mingles abstract, philosophical vocabulary with American idiomatic speech. Well, there are a number of pleasures in his prose.
He has written before on Sir Thomas Browne and the baroque boys, but I can't wait until this new book comes out. Any idea when it will hit the stores?
Hi Stuart: I have no idea when the book will come out.
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