Baroque Prose of the Day

Nemonymous

Nemonymous

Grimscribe
EDITED (11 Aug 08) to change subject title from 'Purple Patch of the Day'.
==============================

I define 'Purple Patch' as an item of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose, one that does not stick out like a sore thumb but gains a foothold by enhancing or infecting or enlightening or darkening its surroundings of Prose in a positively Textured way.

We want no lean or hungry prose in this thread (like Hemingway!) but Proustian or Ligottian with a meaningful (or even meaningless!) richness that tentacularly or insidiously or gorgeously or obliquely haunts you or eats away...

My first choice is a random one from an Elizabeth Bowen short story where the word 'conversationally' is basically what the passage is about.

Please provide your own Purple Patches here (even if you don't know exactly what I'm going on about which I don't really, either). :-)
===========================

Thomas proceeded conversationally like the impeccable dentist with an infinitesimally fine instrument, choosing his area, tapping within it nearer and nearer, withdrawing at a suggestion before there had been time for a wince. He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily-married couple; adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality. An indifference to, an apparent unconsciousness of, life in some aspects armoured him against embarrassments. As Janet said, he would follow one into one's bedroom without noticing. Yet the too obvious 'tact', she said, was the literal word for his quality. Thomas was all finger-tips.
From 'Foothold' 1929 by Elizabeth Bowen
 
Last edited:
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

But it was, and not only still here but poetically immortal; and, better still, it had comicalities which his eye had noted – out of the cliff, for instance, out of the vagaries and traceries of the limestone did look a clown’s face, ferns for eyebrows, loony eye-hollows, neb awry, fallen-open mouth where the cave yawned; and the clown did seem to be swallowing terrified gold fish as light-spangles went darting under the rock.
From Chapter Four of ‘A World of Love’ 1954 (a novel by Elizabeth Bowen)
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

"I heal patients abandoned by charlatans to sickness or death, restore youth to the aged with marvelous elixirs. And by our Lord I would this gleaming pate might fend off gnats as well as I fend off academic sophistry. Hah! What good is a shining coat-of-mail and buckler? Why gag on stinking panaceas falsely concocted by apothecaries in sculleries? Dizzards! Graziers! Chymists swarming through filthy basements! Vermin begot to brew up foul broth! Dung-prophets! Quack-salvers! None can equal Paracelsus. I am wiser by seventy than all such cod-merchants. Thisselwarps! Whifflers! Daubers! Puffers that coagulate, sublimate and distill -- tending bubbling apparatus toward what? I would sooner tabulate every butterfly in Holland. I am the most puissant and numinous doctor on earth, ruled not by the motionless fabric of constellations but incessant study. There be a more pregnant sense to my doctrine than their wits construe."

-- Evan S. Connell, Alchymic Journals
​
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Thanks, gv. That looks like a much better example of a Purple Patch than any of my choices so far.
Breath-taking.
des
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’ (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. “That’s how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. “All the same,” he said to himself, “I shouldn’t like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers.” He repeated to himself: “Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: “It’s nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked.” A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there – those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only – if then! – to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable. They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

--Marcel Proust
PS: More of a yellow patch of the day!
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

"From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that -- a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wisteria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust."

-- William Faulkner, first paragraph of Absalom, Absalom!
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

gveranon said:
"From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that -- a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wisteria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust."

-- William Faulkner, first paragraph of Absalom, Absalom!
Click to expand...
This, I believe, is commonly known as the "narrative hook." :eek:
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard
Are sweeter,

said Stephanie. Clever Gillian commented that the word desolate was the centre of the poem, almost allowing one to be taken out of it, like the word forlorn in the Nightingale. They talked about beauty is truth, truth beauty. They talked, as Stephanie had meant them to, about a verbal thing, made of words so sensual and words not sensual at all, like beauuty and truth. She talked about what it could mean, that the urn should “tease us out of thought As doth eternity." It is a funeral urn, said Zelda. That is not enough to say, said Susan, staring at Stephanie.

Things moved in the classroom, amongst eight closed minds, one urn, eight urns, nine urns, half realised, unreal, white figures whose faces and limbs could be sensed but not precisely described, bright white, the dark, the words, moving, in ones, in groups, in clusters, in and out of whatever cells held their separate and communal visual, aural or intellectual memories. Stephanie talked them out of the vocabulary she was supposed to be teaching them and left them with none, darkling. Gillian, who was enjoying the process, reflected that words could be quickly enough snatched back, when the occasion required it. Stephanie reflected that this poem was the poem she most cared for, saying ambivalently that you could not do, and need not attempt, what it required you to do, see the unseen, realise the unreal, speak what was not, and that yet it did it so that unheard melodies seemed infinitely preferable to any one might ever hope to hear. Human beings, she had thought, even as a very small child faced with The Lady of Shalott, might so easily never have hit on the accidental idea of making unreal verbal forms, they might have just lived, and dreamed, and tried to tell the truth. [...] why did he write it, and the answers had been so many and so voluble and so irrelevant to the central problem, that she closed her mind to them, even whilst effortlessly committing them to memory for future use, as Gillian now must and would.

The bell rang. They came out blinking, like owls into the bright daylight. Stephanie, gathering her books, allowed herself to wonder whether the irrelevant flying foam she had seen had come from the Nightingale, or from her own intellect, making Freudian association all too tidily between marble maidens, the Venus and the subconscious knowledge she had of the nature of that foam. It was not very nice foam.

-- A.S. Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden)
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Two today;


[SIZE=+0]"Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy and imbued with strong individualism, gave a most unfavourable impression by inverting accepted aesthetic-literary theories and by mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for a variety of reasons and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. Thus his premature eclipse was received with a secret sigh of relief."
from 'The Area' by Stefan Grabinski

"My pictures are visionary and symbolical, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. [...] I am thus entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique(if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus identified me with them, and made me feel mildly important."
FROM "RAVISSANTE" BY ROBERT AICKMAN
[/SIZE]
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Nemonymous said:
PS: More of a yellow patch of the day!
Click to expand...

I live in Delft. There are always many French tourists here, all thanks to Proust, I think! Re Vermeer's famous 'View' - he clearly played around with the lighting on that painting. The foreground is dark, there are shadows which suggest the sun is above your head, while at the same time some roofs to the north are as bright as anything. Vermeer uses clouds literally to 'obscure' this impossibility...;)
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Hi, Johan. I'm so pleased that I am now privileged to know someone who lives in Delft. That 'Yellow Patch' passage above is my favourite passage from literature of all time.
des
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Hello, Des. Well, it is a great passage, certainly, containing also one of the greatest acts of advertising ever committed to paper, for Delft and Johannes Vermeer! And I must say that being in the heart of Delft on a violet summer evening, with the shadows gradually steeping the canals and the churches in darkness, constitutes a very real Purple Patch of the Day!
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Steerpike, when he had reached the spine of the roof, sat astride it and regained his breath for the second time. He was surrounded by lakes of fading daylight.

He could see how the ridge on which he sat led in a wide curve to where in the west it was broken by the first of four towers. Beyond them the sweep of roof continued to complete a half circle far to his right. This was ended by a high lateral wall. Stone steps led from the ridge to the top of the wall, from which might be approached, along a cat-walk, an area the size of a field, surrounding which, though at a lower level, were the heavy, rotting structures of adjacent roofs and towers, and between these could be seen other roofs far away, and other towers.

Steerpike's eyes, following the rooftops, came at last to the parapet surrounding this area. He could not, of course, from where he was guess at the stone sky-field itself, lying as it did a league away and well above his eye level, but as the main massing of Gormenghast arose to the west, he began to crawl in that direction along the sweep of the ridge.

--Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan​
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Parrhasius, a painter of Athens, amongst those Olynthian captives Philip of Macedon brought home to sell, bought one very old man; and when he had him at Athens, put him to extreme torture and torment, the better by his example to express the pains and passions of his Prometheus, whom he was then about to paint. I need not be so barbarous, inhuman, curious, or cruel for this purpose to torture any poor melancholy man; their symptoms are plain, obvious and familiar, there needs no such accurate observation or far-fetched object, they delineate themselves, they voluntarily bewray themselves, they are too frequent in all places, I meet them still as I go, they cannot conceal it, their grievances are too well known, I need not seek far to describe them.

-- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy​
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

The skeleton clock, in daylight, was threatening to a degree its oddness could not explain. Looking through the glass at its wheels, cogs, springs and tensions, and at its upraised striker, awaiting with a sensible quiver the finish of the hour that was in force, Clara tried to tell herself that it was, only, shocking to see the anatomy of time. The clock was without a face, its twelve numerals being welded on to a just visible wire ring. As she watched, the minute hand against its background of nothing made one, then another, spectral advance. [...]
‘I’ll tell you something, Clara. Have you ever SEEN a minute? Have you actually had one wriggling inside your hand? Did you know if you keep your finger inside a clock for a minute, you can pick out that very minute and take it home for your own?’ So it is Paul who stealthily lifts the dome off. It is Paul who selects the finger of Clara’s that is to be guided, shrinking, then forced wincing into the works, to be wedged in them, bruised in them, bitten into and eaten up by the cogs. ‘No you have got to keep it there, or you will lose the minute. I am doing the counting – the counting up to sixty.’ . . . But there is to be no sixty. The ticking stops.
From ‘The Inherited Clock’ by Elizabeth Bowen 1944
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

You are fast becoming a very persuasive advocate of Elizabeth Bowen's work, Des! I have known her name for decades without ever having felt the urge to read her before...
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

The set of temple bells had not yet been struck for dinner, so Portia sat down near her chest of drawers and looked hard at the pastel-portrait of Anna. She did not know what she looked for in the pastel – confirmation that the most unlikely people suffer, or that everybody who suffers is the same age?
]But that little suffering Anna – so much out of drawing that she looked like a cripple between her cascades of hair – that urgent soul astray in a bad portrait, only came alive by electric light. Even by day, though, the unlike likeness disturbs one more than it should: what is it unlike? Or is it unlike at all – is it the face discovered? The portrait, however feeble, transfixes something passive that stays behind the knowing and living look. No drawing from life just fails: it establishes something more; it admits the unadmitted. All Mrs Heccomb had brought to her loving task, besides pastels, had been feeling. She was, to put it politely, a negative artist. But such artists seem to receive a sort of cloudy guidance. Any face, house, landscape seen in a picture, however bad, remains subtly but strongly modified in so-called real life – and the worse the picture, the stronger this is. Mrs Heccomb’s experiment in pastels had altered Anna for ever. By daylight, the thing was a human map, scored over with strawy marks of the chalks. But when electric light struck those shadeless triangles – hair, the face, the kitten, those looking eyes – the thing took on a misguided authority. As this face had entered Portia’s first dreams here, it continued to enter her waking mind. She saw the kitten hugged to the breast in a contraction of unknowing sorrow.
From Part II (6) ‘The Death of the Heart’ 1938 by Elizabeth Bowen
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

I would like to go meta on this thread by quoting a couple of paragraphs from a George Steiner essay on Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. In addition to discussing Durrell's tetralogy, Steiner has this to say about "baroque prose" in general:

"But this does not mean that this jeweled and coruscated style springs full-armed from Durrell's personal gift. He stands in a great tradition of baroque prose. In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne built sentences into lofty arches and made words ring like sonorous bells. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, used the same principal device as Durrell: richness through accumulation, the marshaling of nouns and epithets into great catalogues among which the eye roves in antiquarian delight. The feverish, clarion-sounding prose of De Quincey is a direct ancestor to that of Justine. And more recently, there is the example of Conrad. In the later parts of Lord Jim and throughout The Rescue, Conrad uses words with the sumptuous exuberance of a jeweler showing off his rarest stones. Here also, language falls upon the reader's senses like brocade.

"This baroque ideal of narrative style is, at present, in disfavor. The modern ear has been trained to the harsh, impoverished cadence and vocabulary of Hemingway. Reacting against the excesses of Victorian manner, the modern writer has made a cult of simplicity. He refines common speech but preserves its essential drabness. When comparing a page from the Alexandria novels to the practice of Hemingway or C. P. Snow or Graham Greene, one is setting a gold-spun and jeweled Byzantine mosaic next to a black-and-white photograph. One cannot judge the one by the other. But that does not signify that Durrell is a decadent show-off or that his conception of English prose is erroneous. We may be grateful that Hemingway and his innumerable imitators have made the language colder and more astringent and that they have brought back into fiction the virtue of plain force. But they have done so at a price. Contemporary English usage is incredibly thin and unimaginative. The style of politics and factual communication verges on the illiterate. Having far fewer words at our reach than had the educated man of the seventeenth and even of the late nineteenth century, we say less or say it with a blurred vagueness. Indeed, the twentieth century has seen a great retreat from the power of the word. The main energies of the mind seem directed toward other modes of 'language,' toward the notation of music and the symbol-world of mathematics. Whether in its advertisements, its comic-books, or its television, our culture lives by the picture rather than the word. Hence a writer like Durrell, with his Shakespearean and Joycean delight in the sheer abundance and sensuous variety of speech, may strike one as mannered or precious. But the fault lies with our impoverished sensibility."

-- George Steiner, "Lawrence Durrell I: The Baroque Novel" (from Critical Essays on Lawrence Durrell)
 
Last edited:
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Beautiful stuff, gv. Not come across these passages before. Glad I started this thread just for that! Long been a fan of Lawrence Durrell. In fact, I think he became part of my brain in the Sixties.
BAROQUE PROSE - much better than 'Purple Patch'. Ah well. :-)

Avignon Quincunx (by LD) thread here:
The Avignon Quincunx - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top