“How do you do, Doctor Franklin,” said Israel.
“Ah! I smell Indian corn,” said the doctor… A countryman, sit down, my good Sir. Well? What news? Special?”
From Israel Potter — His Fifty Years of Exile by Herman Melville
Thus Benjamin Franklin welcomes the American soldier Israel Potter into his Parisian apartment in Chapter 8 Which Has Something to Say about Dr. Franklin and the Latin Quarter. Clearly one cannot count on Melville to recreate with any accuracy the speech of either Franklin or Potter and to expect this of him is to miss his point. In this novel, Herman (if my obsessive reading of him allows me this familiarity) writes dialog that could only be spoken in the Latin Quarter of his narrative.
Perhaps more than any writer (at least that I can think of right now) Melville proves that speech in a novel must be true to the imaginative world presented and that if it bears little resemblance to our daily exchanges, it roots the willing reader all the more firmly in that meta realm we call fiction. This subtle but clearly marked departure from the world we know (or think we know) towards one where, as in the amusing example above, a Benjamin Franklin might identify a fellow American as reeking of “Indian corn”, allows Melville’s imaginative universe to exist apart from, yet connected to our own.
At a reading he gave at The Village Voice bookstore, novelist Juno Diaz remarked that though he had successfully captured the lingo of his Hispanic community in his Pulitzer-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, this argot was, as he spoke, already morphing and changing so rapidly as to make the language in his novel soon sound out-dated. At such a rate, one might conclude, his book was zooming towards an expiration date and thank God he won that Pulitzer right in the wake of its publication. Diaz was also quoted in The Authors Guild Bulletin as exhorting young writers not to waste time reading Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s grand opera of the sea. I cannot say I was surprised given his remark about the obsolescence of language and hence, by extension, literature itself – ma foi! –, but I found it disappointing that such an excellent writer would sell himself short. If Diaz had only wasted some time with that extraordinary book he might have learnt something he didn’t seem to know about his own. Namely, that though his ear is acutely attuned to the slang, rhythms and Spanglish of his Dominican Republic community, every word he puts on the page is an act of creation that bears his mark, or rather the mark of his invented world.
The fiction writer does not transcribe what he thinks he hears on the street; he invents a language that shapes and colors in his characters within the framework and sound logic of the novel. The pool of raw materials he draws from might be the speech patterns familiar to him, but the finished product should sound like nothing we’ve heard before. Fortunately for Diaz and all concerned, his wonderful book will not be made obsolete quite so quickly and even five years after its publication we can still enjoy his sassy, unconventional shifts of register and his terrifying footnote-tale of Trujillo’s dictatorship.
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of taking a stroll through Belleville with a man who, without particularly trying to, influenced me greatly as a writer: my former French literature professor at Mills College, Christian Marouby, also the author of L’Economie de la Nature (Editions du Seuil). Christian had us reading our way through The Enlightenment: Rousseau and Diderot immediately became my literary heroes and even though I struggled through La Nouvelle Héloise and cursed Jean-Jacques for so much exasperating pining, I loved Confessions and am rereading it now in honor of the Year of Rousseau (more about this in upcoming posts…). Obviously an introduction to these writers does not in itself guarantee such devotion; it was Christian, whose intellectual intensity matched the masters’, who made reading their works feel like an urgent, exegetical mission that had meaning for our lives, perhaps precisely because the concerns — aesthetic, narrative, philosophical – of the authors seemed, on the face of it, so different from our own. What we discovered proved just the contrary.
If I am fortunate, I get the chance to see Christian once a year when he returns to Paris to visit his family. We met at the Place Ste. Marthe where I showed him Martha’s Place, the headquarters of the arts program I direct, and from there we headed toward the Parc de Belleville, perambulating in the style of Jean-Jacques. “This is so much better than sitting down to a meal, isn’t it?” Christian remarked. I had to admit it was; there is nothing so pleasant as a conversational stroll. It is not unlike reading J.J.’s Confessions. At one point Christian said a few words about my novel Remedy. “ You do everything wrong,” he said, “you purposely do just what you are not supposed to do, your narrators comment on their comments, they tell more than they show – what nonsense that show-don’t-tell rule — and this is why your book is good.”
What can I say to that but, thank you, my dear teacher. Perhaps I will entitle my next novel The Scent of Indian Corn or The Secret History of American Girls on Study-Abroad. Let us just say that I am currently struggling with the narrative rudder to keep it from becoming a modern sequel to Fanny Hill.