For Browsers and Specialists Alike
SIMON, JOHN
For Browsers and Specialists Alike A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory By J. A. Cuddon Blackwell. 1,051pp. $44.95. Reviewed by John Simon Tms book is not for everyone. But...
...It is believed that only 25 of these poems survive, all of the 13thc...
...The first American edition, published by Doubleday in 1977, comprised over 2,000 entries on 745 pages, and promptly became one of my bedside...
...go on for several tightly-packed pages...
...is a figure of speech called hendiadys...
...There are a great many new entries, and some of the old ones are enlarged and improved...
...a sublime quotation from Beaumarchais' famous barber, "Je me presse de rire de tout, depeurd'??treoblig?© d'enpleurer" (I hasten to laugh about everything for fear I might have to cry about it...
...See also proeepsis...
...as this dictionary should become known, the way people metonymically call an ordinary dictionary a Webster...
...When I was doing a language column for Esquire, I received several reader letters objecting to a form of expression I had used...
...Certainly you will be more appreciative of and conversant with the wonders of literature...
...In the entry discourse, Cuddon tries valiantly to provide a definition: "It may be a poem, a philosophical essay, a biblical commentary, a speech on the hustings, a funeral address, apolemic, a dialogue or an exercise in deconstructive criticism...
...amentionof the songs of Tom Lehrer...
...exchange') Also known as transferred epithet...
...Alas, they will never know the joys of curling up with Cuddon...
...Simeon himself was no piker at oneupmanship, as when he declared, "This won't do, Cuddon...
...These epistolarists would not have made asses of themselves had they read the following typical shorter entry by Cuddon on hypallage: "(Gr...
...Yet how cleverly Cuddon can encapsulate a bit of literary history in fewer than a dozen Unes, as under the rubric Satanic school...
...This may, of course, be a typo, as may be, in the excellent 41-page entry on novel, "Nathaniel" for Nathanael West...
...So the Dictionary grew and grew...
...volumes...
...There are some puzzling omissions...
...Such a book is not written overnight...
...Do not fail to catch the irony in that "discourses," a term favored by Barthes and his pack...
...True, the authentic native spelling of the famous Malayan verse form ispantun, but Cuddon should at least adduce the spelling pantoum, used in the West...
...native songs') A form of Korean folksong composed of four, eight, or 10 lines divided into two stanzas...
...It began modestly in 1968 under the editorship of Nicolas Bentley (remembered also as the delightful illustrator of T. S. Eliot'sPracticalCats...
...Dissociation of sensibility, as I hastened to ascertain, remains uncontested...
...Can we not, from such universality, postulate a pendant to Nietzsche, the rise of comedy from the spirit of upward mobility...
...But if you care for dictionaries of a refined sort...
...Again, having mentioned kleftic songs in the entry on cpyllion, Cuddon might have given us an entry about those Greek folk songs, especially as he tells us in the Independent article about a reader who wrote to him concerning the relationship between them and "the narodnepesme of the South Slavs," the subject of an extensive and excellent entry...
...Now along comes the third, vastly expanded and revised edition of the Dictionary, this time encompassing 1,051 pages...
...Such mistakes or misprints will be corrected...
...And again, though there is a useful entry on noncewords, words invented for one specific occasion only, there is nothing about hapax legomena, words that appear only once in all the surviving records of a dead language, making us wonder whether they, too, might not be nonce-words...
...that the middle term is omitted from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' name is less important than that his Les Liaisons dangereuses is included in the entry on high comedy, where only the shrewdest judgment would have placed it...
...Now, I admit that this information is not something you will need often, however literate, indeed literary, a person you may be...
...a happy day.' It is a very common poetic device, as in these Unes fromPartOneofT.S.Eliot's The Waste Land: 'Winter kept us warm, covering/ Earth in forgetful snow, feeding/A little life with dried tubers.' Clearly, the snow is not 'forgetful,' but rather conceals, muffles, 'shrouds' the earth, so that for a time we forget what the earth looks like...
...Cuddon tells us: "Having long funked matters of structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and associated jargon, I had to engage with the 'lone scholars' (often sniping at each other [I would have preferred "one another"] from the walls of learned periodicals) and unravel scores of discourses, many in opaque prose...
...Imagine an enchanting ride in a theme park whose theme is literature, where you learn amid wonder and purring pleasure (hypallage...
...So Eliot's probably most famous contribution to criticism is not really his own...
...After browsing through J. A. Cuddon's treasure trove of tropes, genres, esoteric lore, literaryjargon, and whatnot, you may actually want to try your hand at writing, say, verse, and offer your family and friends, and not least yourself, some innocent pleasure...
...I have long been aware of a type of Japanese comic drama, kyogen...
...and good counsel for further reading, Hugh Haughton's anthology The Chatto Book of Nonsense Verse...
...The number of syllables in each line varies from four to 15...
...Having a name for it, we can denounce its demagogic overuse more effectively...
...or, at any rate, deskside...
...the condemned cell...
...Then, in 1972, it swelled into "something much more ambitious under the guidance of Simeon Potter," not to be confused with Steven of that name, the father of "oneupmanship...
...if you are, as I am, a sucker for literary terms, forms, concepts in remote civilizations and rarefied scholarlyminds...
...One senses in that last sentence a touch of despairing humor...
...Or to find in the same entry a graffito from a Belfast lavatory, "Is there a life before death...
...1840 and subsequently revived and made famous by T. S. Eliot...
...From it, for example, I learned that the Mozarabic lyricofthe 11thand 12thcenturies "may have been the forerunner of the Proven?§al lyric," and, God knows, the troubadour lyrics were the beginning of modern love poetry...
...Right across from hypallage you find hyangga: "(K...
...It is good to find here a quotation from G. K. Chesterton that runs in part, "Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook...
...William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, too, turns inadvertently into The Naked Lunch...
...Still, what may be this simultaneously intoxicating and enlightening volume's most daring achievement is the author's forays into the arcana we have long wished someone intrepid and levelheaded would explore and explain to us...
...Common examples are: 'a sleepless night...
...Similarly, whether or not you agree, in the entry on nouveau roman, that Michel Butor's La Modification is an "outstanding novel," it is nice to have opinions in the Dictionary, not simply listings...
...Immersing oneself in Cuddon is to enter a maze of delights...
...I can personally vouch for the sustaining power of Partridge's missives...
...if it thrills you to learn that a figure of speech you knew but did not have a name for is, in fact, called antipophora, this is your sort of book...
...Some entries in Cuddon...
...Besides that of the famed philologist, Cuddon received the guidance of the "incomparable Eric Partridge," the lexicographer who "often sustained my spirits with his famous postcards...
...In the previous edition, objective correlative was introduced as "A now famous term used by T. S. Eliot in an essay on Hamlet (1919...
...But not until Cuddon called my attention to it did it strike me that one of its main themes has its analogues in low comedy and commedia dell'arte: the smart, opportunist servant who outwits his blockhead master...
...Forth with we are on to prolepsis, gleaning further useful information, one thing leading merrily to another...
...How satisfying to learn that the modern politician's obnoxious tic of waxing emphatic by redundantly yoking two synonyms or near-synonyms...
...e.g., "hope and trust," "fear and dread," etc...
...Let me give you examples of how the book has been improved...
...what can scarcely be improved on in future editions is something like the entry on nonsense, now enlarged from three to seven pages...
...if you are fascinated by the ways and byways of literature and literary criticism...
...About the DictionaryofLiterary Terms, though, I can say seriously and positively that it may be any number of things to any number of readers, all of them good...
...It contains enough q.v.s to keep you on the qui vive about a subject of particular importance for Americans, who, as a rule, have no feeling for or understanding of irony, and so miss out on many of the finer things in literature and life...
...It covers many literatures in historic progression, and offers challenging quotations, useful references and q.v.'s pointing to related subjects...
...In Cuddon's Third, the entry begins, "A term first used apparently by the American painter Washington Allstonc...
...Small oversights are of little consequence...
...In all too short an article in thelndependent of London, the author sketched in the genesis of his lexicon...
...But the Dictionary is not limited to things Western...
...Surely you could learn enough Greek in three weeks to know this...
...A figure of speech in which the epithet is transferred from the appropriate noun to modify another to which it does not really belong...
...Yes, I realize that literature is not everybody's dish, that there are people in this world whose vestigial need for it is satisfied by newsprint and television, people on whom the muses have turned their backs (amusisch is the elegant German epithet for them...
...It is exactly right as well that the entry on mimesis now directs the reader to Erich Auerbach's magisterial Mimesis, even if Erich is misspelled as "Eric...
...And unravel he does...
...Short or long, new or old, expanded or merely reprinted, no entry in the Dictionary is unrewarding, and many boast the author's savory imprint, bringing smiles to the mouth along with erudition to the mind...
...How comforting, though, to know you are in possession of a dictionary that lists something of which there are only 25 specimens, and in Korea at that...
...It may be any number of things...
...In one of the relatively rare cases where a dust jacket does not throw dust in your eyes, it was described as "a valuable reference book and pure entertainment...
...Your conversation could take on a new sparkle, and perhaps turn you into the life of the literary kind of party...
...The one on irony, for instance, is five stimulating pages long...
...How helpful it is to find an entry on Cleanth Brooks' heresy of paraphrase...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
