John Crowley's LJ (RSS Feed)
02-09-2008, 12:56 PM
Well one day I will stump you guys for more than a few minutes. Not only did http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif (http://nineweaving.livejournal.com/profile)nineweaving (http://nineweaving.livejournal.com/) provide a good answer in about a minute, several others did almost as well. None is perfect, but hey. And then others right off guessed the source. Yes it's Henry James, the preface to The Ambassadors, and maybe I would have got it too though very likely not.
The whole sentence:
"If the motive of "The Wings of the Dove," as I have noted, was to worry me at moments by a sealing-up of its face -- though without prejudice to its again, of a sudden, fairly grimacing with expression -- so in this other business [i.e. the motive of the AMbassadors] I had absolute conviction," etc., etc., for some lines further.
I myself stumbled over that "of a sudden" meaning "all of a sudden" and expected the sentence to continue "of a sudden re-occurrence" or similar, which grammatically didn't make sense. Maybe if I'd cut the phrase off after "sudden" you'd have fallen into the same trap.
These prefaces contain some of the hardest and at the same time most vaporous sentences I have ever read. Even when I know the book (I'm hardly a Jamesian) I often have no idea what he's on about. Actually I 'm not a Jamesian at all. Actually I hate James. There.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/78933.html)
The whole sentence:
"If the motive of "The Wings of the Dove," as I have noted, was to worry me at moments by a sealing-up of its face -- though without prejudice to its again, of a sudden, fairly grimacing with expression -- so in this other business [i.e. the motive of the AMbassadors] I had absolute conviction," etc., etc., for some lines further.
I myself stumbled over that "of a sudden" meaning "all of a sudden" and expected the sentence to continue "of a sudden re-occurrence" or similar, which grammatically didn't make sense. Maybe if I'd cut the phrase off after "sudden" you'd have fallen into the same trap.
These prefaces contain some of the hardest and at the same time most vaporous sentences I have ever read. Even when I know the book (I'm hardly a Jamesian) I often have no idea what he's on about. Actually I 'm not a Jamesian at all. Actually I hate James. There.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/78933.html)