Novelist as scientist

Jane Smiley

When Jane Smiley argues, as she does in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, that a novelist is like a scientist, who is more likely to be offended. the novelist or the scientist?

On the surface, a novelist and a scientist are very different people. If you ever got a college degree, it was probably either a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science degree. A novelist does art. A scientist does, well, science. There have most likely been novelists who did science and scientists who have written novels, but for the most part they think differently. They do different kinds of things.

Still, Smiley may have a point.

A scientist works with a hypothesis. "A novel is a hypothesis," she writes.

Both a novelist and a scientist are observers. They both ask "what if" questions. A chemist may wonder what happens if a little of this chemical is added to a certain chemical compound. A novelist may wonder what happens if a major character dies in the second chapter.

And so there are similarities, as Smiley observes. Even so, scientific results are supposed to be reproducible. What one scientist discovers upon doing an experiment, another scientist is supposed to be able to find when doing the same experiment. Novelists, however, are expected to discover something entirely different each time. Or else we wouldn't pay any attention to them.

Garbage words

Remember that what you're likely noticing and reacting to is the word's frequency, not its grammaticality.

Anne Curzan, Says Who?

When people talk, unlike when they write, their sentences often contain useless words and sounds. The most common are "like" and "you know." Others say "right" or "um" or favorite vulgar words. When we are talking and trying to think of what we want to say next, we insert these things to hold our place or to fill in the blanks.

And there are those who are overly fond of certain cliches. "At the end of the day" seems popular these days.

It is these pointless words and expressions that Anne Curzan is talking about in the line quoted above from her book Says Who? Usually, as she observes, it is the frequency of their use that bothers listeners, not the words themselves or how they are used in the sentence. She's right.

If someone said "you know" once every 10 sentences we might not even notice. But there are some people who can put two or three "you knows"  in a single sentence. Not only do we notice, but many of us get downright annoyed. Sometimes when I hear someone talking, I ignore what they are saying and just count the "you knows." Yet speakers probably doesn't even notice how often they are using the phrase.

It's natural that our speech should be different from our writing. When you are writing something, even a simple text, you have extra time to think, and you also don't want to take the extra time to write "like" and "you know" every few words. Speech, however, gives us little time to think, and if we pause too long, our speech may get interrupted by someone else, as so often happens in conversation.  And so we put in those garbage words and sounds to hold our place. We may not even notice, but if we do it often enough it is certain that other people will.

More about the octopus

In The Soul of the Octopus, Sy Montgomery told us amazing things about this eight-legged, nine-brained sea creature. Now in Secrets of the Octopus, she tells us more — and shows us lots of pictures besides.

Montgomery is a skilled nature writer who, in her long career has written about many different animals, including cheetahs, tigers, hummingbirds, pigs, apes and hawks. Yet none of them amazed her the way the octopus has. Even after two books (actually three, for she also wrote a children's book), one wonders if she is through talking about them.

There are so many incredible things about octopuses. Though they lack bones, they can walk bipedally. They can change color in an instant to blend in with their surroundings. Some can take the form of various fish and other sea creatures to fool predators. Many of them are cannibals, usually the female eating the male after mating. They can solve puzzles, open jars and escape through impossibly small holes. Not only do they have personalities, but each of their legs may have a different personality.

They are incredibly smart. And they live brief lives, some of them less than a year. And so, not only can they in some ways rival human intelligence, they can do so in less time than it takes a human child to learn to talk.

Octopuses come in many different breeds and many different colors. Most live solitary lives, unusual for intelligent creatures, yet other breeds live in communities. Some octopuses are smaller than a human hand, while others are larger than a human being. Usually the bigger they are, the longer they live.

This is a National Geographic book, so you know the photographs are of high quality. It is a relatively short book, even with so many pages of photos, but it is loaded with information about one of nature's most unusual creatures.

Language debates

Debates about language are almost always about something more than language.

Anne Curzan, Says Who?

Anne Curzan

What linguist Anne Curzan says about language debates being about something more than language seems profound to me. 

It could be geography, for example. What do you call a sandwich in a long bun? Is it a sub, a hoagie, a grinder, a hero or something else? It depends upon where you are from. Not too many people argue about sandwiches, but there other words or speech patterns or accents that can cause anger — or ridicule that leads to anger.

British people and American people make fun of each other, or insult each other, because of how they say or spell English words. Is it theater or theatre? Is it a trunk or a boot? 

The debate can be generational. When we were in school we learned one thing. Now they are saying something else. What's wrong with people today? Why are they ruining our language?

Or the debate can be political. We even have the term "political correctness." We are pressured to say something in a certain way, even though we are really thinking, and most everyone else is thinking, something else. 

When Democrats use the word democracy they clearly do not mean the same thing Republicans do when they use the same word. The same goes for fascism and many other words.

In YouTube videos, I hear the f-word all the time. Yet people often are not allowed to say the word rape. They must say grape instead. They say corn instead of porn.

There is the continuing debate about pronouns. We are pressured to accept certain euphemisms. Some words can be said by some people but not by others. Some words, like retarded, cannot be said at all.

Someone, it seems, is always trying to control what you say and how you say it. And it is only partly about language.

Conversations with a killer

The titles of some novels are revealing. Others not so much. The title of Georges Simenon mystery Maigret and the Killer (1969) made me stop. Heroes in detective novels normally catch killers, but this title suggests a relationship. There must be something going on between Inspector Maigret of the Paris police and the killer he is looking for.

Simenon cleverly resolves both the mystery of the murder and the mystery of the title.

Maigret and his wife are enjoying an evening with his doctor friend when the doctor is called to help the victim of a stabbing on a nearby sidewalk. It immediately becomes Maigret's business, too, especially when the victim dies.

The young murder victim always carried a tape recorder and had recorded conversations he overheard in public places. Is this the motive for the murder? Did he record something someone didn't want recorded? But then why wasn't the recorder taken by the murderer?

Maigret solves mysteries in mysterious ways, one reason for the lasting appeal of Simenon's novels. This time he knows what the killer looks like before he knows his name, yet he hesitates to publish the photograph. He believes the killer will ultimately come to him.

And so it happens. The killer calls repeatedly to talk with the police inspector, who becomes something of a counselor.  All this ends in a low-key, yet still exciting way that Simenon was known for.

Making a choice

In the 2017 novel The Boat Runner, Devin Murphy tells about a Dutch boy, Jacob Koopman, who comes of age during World War II. Jacob, the first-person narrator, faces the question many Europeans must have faced during the war: Which side should he take?

Before the war, for business reasons, Jacob's father sends him and his brother to a Hitler Youth Camp. His father runs a light bulb factory, and he thinks this will help him win a contract with Volkswagen. And so the boy has early sympathies for the Nazis, strengthened when he later blames the Allies for the death of both his brother and his mother. Yet his father apparently died running from the Germans.

Martin, his uncle, has Jacob help him when he kills Nazi soldiers he is transporting on his boat and when he sinks a German submarine. Jacob eventually joins the German navy and even singlehandedly sinks a British ship, becoming a hero. But when he witnesses the extermination of large numbers of Jews, he thinks differently yet again.

Many of us who read this fine novel may think we, in similar circumstances, would have immediately made the right choice and fought the Nazis. That's easy to think now. At the time it could not have always been that easy. Chances are we, in similar circumstances, would have asked the same kind of questions: How can I best survive? Who is most likely to win? And who is responsible for the deaths of those I loved?

Breaking the shackles of time

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan

Just days after writing my post about trying to define what a book is ("What is a book?" July 20), I came upon the definition offered by scientist Carl Sagan on his famous TV series Cosmos.

He calls it "a flat object made from a tree." That's two things I didn't find in the dictionary definition: a "flat object" and "made from a tree." In general, those words describe what we usually think of as a book. Of course, a book doesn't necessary have to be flat, such as a scroll, or made of paper (Clay tablets? A Kindle?). Even so, his words ring true most of the time.

And then he adds, "on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles." If you are illiterate, of course, funny dark squiggles are what you see when you open a book. The same is true when you open a book written in some language you cannot read.

Then Sagan goes on, "But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you."

Of course, for this to happen, words must be more than squiggles. One must be able to read and understand those squiggles.

Further, he says, "Writing is perhaps the greatest human invention, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

I like that a man of science, speaking on a show about science, was able to recognize the importance of language, reading, writing and books that made that science, and so much else, possible.