Category: Anaphora

All Those Times

How Anne Carson employs examples of Time to describe other human afflictions in “Red Doc>”.

fabrizio-verrecchia https://unsplash.com/search/photos/time?photo=Ai7sV3SSMIQ

Time is a lot of things. It’s precious, it’s money, it’s irreversible. It measures change and is defined by change. And, as I was proud of deducing early on (when I still thought of the world as consisting of either-or pieces), time is easy to measure: you’ve got an eternity ahead of you, until you have not a moment more.

Now here’s how Anne Carson thinks about Time at the beginning of a chapter in her verse-novel Red Doc>.  (I discuss the book’s unusual structure in my previous post, The Not-So-Mild Hallucinations of a Musk-Ox).

Quote:
Time passes time
does not pass. Time all
but passes. Time usually
passes. Time passing and
gazing. Time has no gaze.

Sense or senseless? Let’s see, Time by Time in the Quote:

  • The first is a paradox. (Time is elusive)
  • The second is a quibble, a bridge between the two extremes, as is the third. (Time is finicky)
  • The fourth introduces a new theme of gazing, as we’d gaze from a car in passing. (Time is aloof)
  • The fifth denies the gaze. (Time is blind to our differences)

But that’s just the beginning. This chapter is fifty-one lines long, and she goes on to give another twenty-four instances of Time, most of which follow this pattern of starting a sentence with the same word—an example of the figure of speech called anaphora.

What makes the chapter special beyond the hammering of a repetitive element, however, is how Carson employs examples of Time to describe other human afflictions.

I’ve chosen to showcase some of her best ones (I quote her lines verbatim in italics, but I’ve left out the formatting). My interpretation is in square brackets.

Continue reading “All Those Times”

Murder Gradations

Figures of speech at the heart of Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk murder myster, Altered Carbon.

"[Géographie. La Terre à vol d'oiseau ... Troisième édition illustrée de 176 gravures sur bois.]" Author: RECLUS, Onésime.
Mass murder of trees, also known as deforestation

Quote: The only problem [the lawyers] had, as they cruised sharkishly back and forth across the cool marble floor of the court, was in drawing the fine differences between war (mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own), justifiable loss (mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains) and criminal negligence (mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit).

There you have former UN elite soldier Takeshi Kovacs assessing a group of military lawyers in Richard Morgan’s debut novel Altered Carbon. It’s a hardboiled cyberpunk murder mystery (and a mouthful if you say it like that). Before anyone points out that the Quote is either philosophically inaccurate or unpalatably blunt, let me repeat what I said: hardboiled, cyberpunk, murder mystery.

It’s fiction.

It’s also set in the 25th century. We have colonised other planets, and consciousness can be downloaded into a cortical stack, stored, and plugged into another body (also called a sleeve) as many times as the owner can afford it. Despite coming that close to immortality, mankind still fights wars, perpetuates crime&cruelty, and strives — ineffectually — to crush the depravity of the human condition.

It makes for a fine book, if you care for the genre. The strong, well-developed first person narrative of the anti-hero Kovacs and the deep, detailed world-building carry the reader along like a turgid river a tiny raft.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Gradation of similar phrases and parenthetical delivery.

Continue reading “Murder Gradations”