Mrs ERJ belongs to a "Book Club". They are all "ladies" in the finest sense of the word.
This month's book was written about 100 years ago and Mrs ERJ commented that the text is much richer in adjectives than "modern" novels.
Having a short window of time, I looked into the matter.
A Master's student in North Macedonia wrote a thesis on the topic. He determined that the text of the book that the fine ladies of Eaton Rapids are studying is only 6% adjectives which is LOWER than most modern fiction (which runs between 6% and 12% of text).
Where the 100 year-old book differs from modern writing is that 57% of the adjectives are unique and only used once in the book and a disproportionate share of them are "compound adjectives".
Instead of choosing to describe a vehicle as "a yellow car" the author chose to write "It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns."
There are also dances of adjectives and adverbs that paint scenes in great detail "...fading lamp light slanting across the fluttering muscles in the fair maiden's arms..." kind of thing.
The descriptive language in the old novel is not the stylized, formulistic, and boringly repetitive bridges between action-scenes ala Marvel comic books. Those action-bridges are as invisible to the reader and as forgettable as "...he said..." in dialogue. The descriptive language in the 100 year-old novel is more like a series of meticulously composed sets in a movie where Chekhov's Gun guides the reader as he anticipates future events.
Survivor bias
There was a lot of dreck written in that era. The "nickel" cowboy novels are examples of that. Writers who had never been west of the Hudson river churned out vast numbers of novels that have since been forgotten. The few examples of that genre that are still available were written by authors who had actually been cowboys or who had spent time "out west" as hunters.
Stepping back a few paces, I have to wonder if our current style of frenetic action will look dated to future readers. Fashions change. The pendulum swings.
"Stepping back a few paces, I have to wonder if our current style of frenetic action will look dated to future readers. Fashions change. The pendulum swings." Yes, yes it will. Likely the greats of, say, science fiction and fantasy 100 years from now will remain the greats because they are great writers and write beyond their era. The rest, who write for their era, will vanish to musty online repositories or used book stores (if such things exist then).
ReplyDeleteWhen Mrs. ERJ's club finishes 'The Great Gatsby', tell them to read 'Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero' written by Henryk Sienkiewicz about 30 years earlier. Same kind of social tension, but in ancient Rome with strong religious overtones.
ReplyDeleteTimes change, tech changes, people change. We look back a couple centuries at blood letting, Amputations without benefit of anesthesia and a host of other primitive "medical" practices. What will they think of how we practice the art now in a couple centuries. Will they recoil in horror and cry "they deliberately exposed the ill to ionizing radiation". Or that we actually use blades to cut skin open. Who knows.
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