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Mar. 16th, 2006 01:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuI've been reading (yes, for the first time) Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels. One thing's been gnawing at me, and in Busman's Honeymoon she makes it sufficiently explicit that I can finally put my finger on it.
I don't know enough to appreciate her books properly, and never will. It's not just that the characters will switch into French, Latin, or Greek, or explicitly cite or reference some Great Work that shows what an Oxford education will teach you.
What Wimsey, Vane, and Sayers's omniscient (!) narrator do is express a thought by using a phrase which indirectly comments on the action or situation. The words, without quote marks or anything else to distinguish them, are an apt minor quote from some other work. If the turn of phrase rings a bell in the reader's mind, one realizes that a supercomment has been made; if one doesn't pick up on the allusion, one is unaware that one has missed anything.
This isn't like reading Foucault's Pendulum by Eco, where the only person who actually understands all of it is Eco. The author intended for most of Foucault's Pendulum to go over the reader's head. Sayers, on the other hand, was writing on two levels, the higher one accessible to those readers with a solid education in the classics, and I'm stuck on the lower level. It's quite frustrating.
(Which is not to say that I regret reading these very clever books. They were mostly very enjoyable, although I could do without much of the ethnic stereotyping.)
I don't know enough to appreciate her books properly, and never will. It's not just that the characters will switch into French, Latin, or Greek, or explicitly cite or reference some Great Work that shows what an Oxford education will teach you.
What Wimsey, Vane, and Sayers's omniscient (!) narrator do is express a thought by using a phrase which indirectly comments on the action or situation. The words, without quote marks or anything else to distinguish them, are an apt minor quote from some other work. If the turn of phrase rings a bell in the reader's mind, one realizes that a supercomment has been made; if one doesn't pick up on the allusion, one is unaware that one has missed anything.
This isn't like reading Foucault's Pendulum by Eco, where the only person who actually understands all of it is Eco. The author intended for most of Foucault's Pendulum to go over the reader's head. Sayers, on the other hand, was writing on two levels, the higher one accessible to those readers with a solid education in the classics, and I'm stuck on the lower level. It's quite frustrating.
(Which is not to say that I regret reading these very clever books. They were mostly very enjoyable, although I could do without much of the ethnic stereotyping.)