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.
