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I don’t know sheet about bedspreads and my credentials include failing miserably on just about every level of my life (most notably, I might add, as a teacher of Standard American English [SAE], after which stint I’ve been pretty much banned from the public educational system in Virginia) and then I also recognize that this long-ass-winded pedantic sounding linguistic narrative will likely come off sounding like what my kick ass black students from the ghetto used to call bullshit, but nonethe-happy-less the five paragraphs starting on p.37 apparently bother some folks in the way the dialect seems to flirt in weird ways with a kind of textbook mixture of AAE, Bayou Creole, and some sort of voice from a culture that is entirely oral.** Here’s a couple more useless sentences to throw into the blender already whirrrring or toss to the compost as you see fit:
(1) It may be safe to say Clenette does not communicate from a typographic consciousness. It may be safe to say she doesn’t live in a world surrounded by printed words. She’s an oral speaker with an oral consciousness. It may even be safe to say that she’s never seen a printed word (and if you say she’s probably been to school I might say yeah, so?) which among other things means—if you append a nickel’s worth of sense to Walter Ong—that she does not have quite the same sense of past-present-future that you and I have living here, as we do, in the literary/typographic world. I mean to say the same sense that you and I have living in our everyday typographic worlds outside the world of Infinite Jest wherein time is an absolute oddity. Actually, time is such an oddity in IJ it’s almost shaping up to be one of those LIKE major thematic issues of the Tome that probably ought to be considered alongside or perhaps through the oral-temporal world of, say, Clenette.
AND BUT SO Clenette seems to exist almost entirely in the present tense, as exhibited by almost every verb she utters, which gives the frantic typographic reader the sense that everything is happening at once in a kind of misspoken dialect.
Of course there is some rudimentary movement through time in a sort of bare verb way, but these movements are awkward and ambiguous because, it may be safe to say, Clenette’s oral underpinnings simply don’t allow for sophisticated movement through time. So she is left to construct, say, future progressive actions between Reg and RT using bare, present tense verbs (with liberal help from the inflected GO).
(2) So anyway. There's that. It may be safe to say that what causes more problems, after the basics of dropping any verbs that can be contracted and hanging out in the eternal present, for writers/speakers of SAE attempting to, say, write in some weird variation of AAE, or perhaps read a kick ass ivory tower honky writing in some kick ass variation of AAE, is what is called in linguistic swamps the “habitual be.” In SAE if I write the sentence, Joe is sad, the sentence can be interpreted to mean Joe is sad at the moment or Joe is generally sad. Joe is sad is, habitually speaking, ambiguous. I can make this distinction less ambiguous in SAE only by lexical means. By adding words. So: Joe is generally sad or Joe is always sad will clarify the sense, in SAE, from Joe is sad right now. In AAE this distinction is often made syntactically with the uninflected BE referring to habitual action. (Not always, which makes it even slipperier.) So when I write Joe be happy, I might say in SAE that Joe is always happy. If I write Wardine be cry, there may be the sense in SAE that Wardine is always crying, almost like she is living (forever in this eternal present tense, perhaps, to Clenette, of course) in a state of cry. Which to me is a kind of magical turn of phrase, a lexical prism, as it were, possible only through Clenette.
So neverthemindless I love the rhythm and feel and energy of this section. But I’m also the kind of person who lives in a seedy section of town in an old house that leans and leaks in the rain with the timeless words of Calvin, the first-grade philosopher, taped below my screen: “Verbing weirds language.”
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** By AAE here, I mean, of course, African American English, referring to a group of closely related dialects AKA African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Black English (BE), Inner City English (ICE), and Ebonics. I know I’m beating a dead horse here but these dialects of North American English are spoken by large numbers of African Americans who live in urban areas euphemistically called the inner city and traditionally referred to as ghettos. There are many many sub-dialects within the dialects. And despite the care that we ought probably give if and when identifying someone’s race upon hearing that unseen someone speak, I don’t think TransistorRhythm is off base in inferring that the speaker of DFW’s p.37’s AAE/creole/oral mix is black. She probably is.
Last edited by jfs on Mon Jul 06, 2009 4:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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