> Would your uncle really use the simile "like an interminable
> waterway?" Is there a more bureaucratic way to put it? Would he say
> "in the offing?" or "sea-reach?" Would he say "red clusters of
> canvas sharply peaked?"
>
> For me the problem with this is that it doesn't sound like a human
> voice at all. It sounds like a jangle of clashing conventions. It
> sounds like someone trying to sound literary.
I see your point. And of course it _is_ literary. He's not in fact trying to reproduce the cadences or diction of informal speech. For one thing the characters with whom he's dealing at this point are not characters who would have spoken in a demotic register. But also, and more interesting to me anyway, is how he _suggests_ an actual human voice through the medium of highly literary language.
It's like certain kinds of music -- I think of Couperin, for example -- which are quite formal and artificial and highly structured but manage to convey a quality of simple or even folkish song. (For Conrad, maybe Brahms is a better analogy.) Or painters like Poussin -- I'm revealing my cultural epicenter here, I guess -- who can convey a moment of intense drama in a very still, carefully balanced, quiet arrangement of forms and subdued, even dull colors.
"In the offing" and "sea-reach" are technical terms, by the way, quite appropriate to the context. They might have been more familiar to people in a society that did more traveling by ship than we do.
You take exception to
> The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us
> like the beginning of an interminable waterway.
Now I like that. Because ordinarily you'd think of the sea-reach of a river as the *end* of a waterway (the Thames in this case), and waterways by definition aren't interminable -- they extend from point A to point B. So what this conveys to me is an image of the open sea as a continuation of the waterway -- a connection between points rather than a void separating them. It's striking to me, and original, and makes me see things in ways that I ordinarily don't. But yes, it's all conveyed in a very muted brown-and-dull-green palette with only the occasional highlight.
(Yeah, I like the red cluster of sails sharply peaked too.)
Maybe we should work up some kind of multiphasic profiling test -- have everybody on lbo-talk rate a bunch of composers and writers and painters from -10 to +10, and answer some political questions as well, and see if any patterns emerge. Who knows, a fondness for Tchaikovsky might turn out to be an infallible diagnostic indicator of incipient Stalinism. Doug could be the official statistician for the project, and marshal a fleet of chi-squares and regressions and Student's t-tests.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com