Current Entries

Hiatus

The hiatus caught up with me in the spring, when the world was waking up but seemed to me to be falling asleep. A world in hiatus is a world without qualities: things register with decreasing effect, with the synesthetic result that all of the qualities of the world take on shades of grey.

It has been some since this site was updated; now that I think of it, in fact, this note, which was to have been merely an excuse, is the update that I have failed to make for so long: once you read it, you will begin thinking of the site as having been recently updated and no longer neglected, and my immediate task will be done.

See you soon!
— S. O.

My aunt teaches physics

The Death of Narrative

Consider the following passage, taken from page 204 of the Canadian Oxford Guide to Writing:

My aunt teaches physics. She is tall and thin and forty-five. She has a happy personality.

This passage is dull, even boring. But it makes plain narrative sense, and the lonely transitive verb (“teaches”) offers at least a gesture of life: narrative power, however muted, can still be detected.

Now consider the revisions of this passage offered on the same page of the Oxford Guide:

1. A teacher of physics, tall, thin, forty-five, my aunt has a happy personality.
2. A teacher of physics with a happy personality, my aunt is tall, thin, and forty-five.
3. My aunt is a teacher of physics-tall, thin, and forty-five, she has a happy personality.

These revisions are barely sentences at all; they are instead a tangle of adverb-like constructions that are not grammatical (no speaker of the language freely utters sentences of these types). The single transitive verb has been effaced: all narrative energy has been eliminated.

The death of narrative is marked by the disappearance of verbs, and the smuggling in of “facts” by way of clauses pretending to modify subjects and predicates: narration is replaced by enumeration.

(The authors of the Canadian Oxford Guide are identified on the cover as a “former professor of English” and a “university president.”)

When the twilights got long

(How the first person works in narrative)
A passage from Joan Didion, taken almost at random:

When the twilights got long in June I forced myself to eat dinner in the living room, where the light was. After John died I had begun eating by myself in the kitchen (the dining room was too big and the table in the living room was where he had died), but when the long twilights came I had a strong sense that he would want me to see the light. As the twilights began to shorten I retreated again to the kitchen. I began spending more evenings alone at home. I was working, I would say. By the time August came I was in fact working, or trying to work, but I also wanted not to be out, exposed. One night I found myself taking from the cupboard not one of the plates I normally used but a crackled and worn Spode plate, from a set mostly broken or chipped, in a pattern no longer made, “Wickerdale.” This had been a set of dishes, cream with a garland of small rose and blue flowers and ecru leaves, that John’s mother had given him for the apartment he rented on East Seventy-third Street before we were married. John’s mother was dead. John was dead. And I still had, of the “Wickerdale” Spode, four dinner plates, five salad plates, three butter plates, a single coffee cup, and nine saucers. I came to prefer these dishes to all others. By the end of the summer I was running the dishwasher a quarter full just to make sure that at least one of the four “Wickerdale” dinner plates would be clean when I needed it.
 —Joan Didion, A Year of Magical Thinking, p. 163

The protoplasm of yodelling

The following remarks on yodelling are taken from the conclusion to “Psychological and Ethnological Studies on Music,” a dissertation submitted in 1881 by George Simmel for a philosophy degree at the University of Berlin, and rejected by his examiners: “We will be doing him a greater service if we do not encourage him in this direction,” one of them wrote (Simmel was nevertheless awarded a doctorate, for another essay on Kant’s monadology). As part of his research into yodelling, Simmel devised a questionnaire which he published in the Jahrbuch des Schweizer Alpenclub, Jahrgang 1879. The questionnaire is available at this link in a pdf. Other works by George Simmel are available at George Simmel Online.

Yodelling consists in a rather short series of tones, which are produced without verbal connection, on the bases of only single letters which are almost exclusively vowels. Characteristically there is a continuous interchange between the chest and head register while omitting the falsetto. Each so-called breaking of the speaking voice, which may be the result of emotional strain or other strenuous exertions, illustrates the protoplasm of yodelling. If now one considers that a relatively loud speaking or shouting voice is almost continuously required for the purposes of communication in mountainous regions, then yodelling might originally have been nothing more than a shout which is shifted into the head register. In particular the exertion of the lungs from the continuous rise in altitude seems to dispose the voice to this abrupt shift. Both conditions are found together exclusively in higher mountain regions where yodelling, too, is almost exclusively observed. The frequent recurrence of yodelling may have been the cause for its development into an artistic style. Additional support for the hypothesis concerning the analogous relationship between yodelling and shouting is to be found in the fact that frequently yodelling is added at the conclusion of a song where other people add more or less articulated shouts.

According to Jaeger, yodelling is the origin of song; it is stimulated by the sexual drive, and becomes the vehicle for its fulfillment. I do not wish to deny that his shifting of the vocal registers might possibly occur when the sexual drive is expressed through shouting. However, there is no foundation for a causal nexus between the latter and the former. Moreover, yodelling is observed only among Alpine populations, and is employed with preference in the age group of eight to fourteen years, when one can hardly speak of sexual fulfillment. A final observation should be added. Yodelling indeed is not the characteristic means of communication between boys and girls. Most of the replies to my questionnaire emphatically deny any such relationship. Only a single reply from St. Gailen mentions that yodelling is employed as a means of communication between an Alpine male and his girl. It is added, however, that this form of yodelling is not differentiated from that used for other purposes. Even though it is employed as means of communication between the two, it has many more general characteristics than would be found in a form which is only dictated by the sexual drive.

Even though all these observations would seem to render Jaeger’s views rather improbable, it must further be considered that yodelling would have to include other important elements for the progression to song if it were to be its origin. However, this is not the case. Among the primitive stages of development there is no vocal music without words. But the exclusion of words is precisely the characteristic mark of yodelling.

It is mentioned in one of the replies to my questionnaire that “the more lonely the inhabitants of Alpine regions are, the less artistic is their yodelling and the less does it approximate the vocal song.” We also have to add that several of the emotions which we discovered as important empirical sources of music, such as the mystic-religious emotion, do not permit their expression through yodelling.

Adapted from a translation by J. Peter Ekzhorn published in George Simmel: The Conflict in Culture and Other Essays (Teachers College Press, 1968).