Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Modernism and Codeine


I recently had surgery, and now I’m supposed to be recovering. (Actually, I’m feeling a lot better today). Since I hadn’t had surgery before, I assumed recovery meant “lay on the couch and edit.” And then, I discovered that codeine befuddles my brain and exhaustion makes me fall asleep. Even writing coherent emails was hard. One of my minions would look over my shoulder and say, “Uh, I don’t think you mean what you typed.” And the minion was right. It’s a bad thing to write and forget words, especially words like “not.”

So editing is on hold for the next few days. But my experience got me to thinking about modernist literature. You know, stuff by James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, et al. Now I finally understand those works of fiction. The authors were all under the influence of codeine when they wrote them. It’s not that Joyce was making some kind philosophical statement when he used pronouns without antecedents. It’s just that under the influence of codeine, he forgot. It’s not by eschewing dialogue tags that modernists hoped to explore fragmentation. It’s that they deleted the tags by accident.

Aren’t you glad that it all makes sense now? I am. Armed with my newly acquired insight, maybe I can read Six Characters in Search of an Author and have it make sense. Or not.

7 comments:

  1. I totally understand him now. I just thought he was trying to be witty! Well, I'm glad you're doing well and recovering. I can't type well and I'm not on codeine.

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  2. I hope you feel better soon! Recovering is tough!

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  3. After back surgery I was on Codeine and working on ghost writing a non-fiction book. After I got off the codeine and looked at my writing I couldn't believe how many obvious errors I made in my writing!

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  4. LOL. You're fantastic! I'm glad you're feeling a little better today. I hope you keep getting better and better super fast :)

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  5. I've sort of wondered about the history of Alice in Wondeland/Through the Looking Glass. Haven't read it, but I keep hearing Lewis Carrol was doing drugs when he wrote it.

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  6. lol! Hope you feel better soon - although it sounds like the sudden codeine-induced understanding of intricate existential works could be fun!

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