INVISIBLE FORMS
A Guide To Literary Curiosities
by Kevin Jackson
310 pp., including index
St. Martin's Press, New York
ISBN O-312-26606-5
$23.95 Cloth
This original book, nicely balanced between erudition and wit, is about
the "invisible" literary necessities that we generally fail to notice each
time we leaf through a book. These are the paratextuals - the Dedications,
Titles, Epigraphs, Blurbs, Footnotes, Prefaces, Afterwards, Heteronyms and
Indexes which are the support structures of most books, yet which are
largely unexamined - even unseen - except on those occasions when
specialized reading brings them into concious use.
As remarked in The Independent, "The first reaction of many people in the
literary world on first picking up Invisible Forms will be a muffled
curse. It's such a good, simple idea, carried out with such aplomb; yet,
nobody thought of it before."
It's a happy thing that Kevin Jackson was the person who thought of it. He
possesses, along with his gift for scholarship, a lively sense of humor,
and it is the amalgam of these attributes that makes this book such a
delight to read. One cannot get more than a few pages into it without
making this discovery, for his Dedication is to Queen Elizabeth II, which
while not exactly a Tower offense, "must unfortunately be considered a
somewhat illegitimate example of the form."
To illustrate the points Jackson wants to make about these various forms,
he calls on a large array of sources, both famous and forgotten, from
Shakespeare to, say, F. J. Furnivall. Lavish with his quotes, his comments
on them are always pertinent, usually witty and sometimes hilarious.
I found his chapter, First Lines, to be particularly interesting. It has
to do, of course, with a book's opening words. They can be brief, as
"London." which opens Dicken's Bleak House or, as in Sterne's Tristam
Shandy, explaining his birth, '...a densely rambled sentence evoking his
accidental conception - a sentence about primal beginnings that threatens
never to end."
Jackson assigns two categories for these openers: a), the plain, simple
opener, seemingly that which could be written by any school child, but one
over which authors have been know to agonize in their efforts to achieve a
bland balance. This was the opener favored by Henry James, as in The
Portrait of a Lady: "Under certain circumstances there are few hours in
life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as
afternoon tea."
Opener b) is the zinger, the mot, the stunt, the shock As an example of
the stunt-opener, Jackson gives Anthony Burgess' famous one in Earthly
Powers. "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in
bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to
see me."
And there is the author's personal nomination for the ne plus ultra of the
category b) opener: "Bang! Bang! Bang!, three shots to the groin and I was
off on the greatest adventure of my life."
What is particularly interesting in the chapter, Footnotes, is Jackson's
placement of them in the literary context - in their relation to the rest
of the work. We all know that commonly, a footnote stands as a buttress to
a phrase or sentence in the body of the text. But going further, Jackson
explains their function as that of a writer having "...something analogous
with counterpoint: a way of speaking in two voices at once, or of
ballasting or modifying or even bombarding with exceptions his own
discourse without interrupting it. It is a step in the direction of
discontinuity: of organising blocks of discourse simultaneously in space
rather than consecutively in time."
Blurbs are familiar to anyone who is able to read. They are on book
jackets, CD liner notes, tomato cans and just about anything else which
its producers want hyped. In literary circles they can be written by
publicity people or the publisher, sometimes with results that will
surprise the author. Or they can be by a (generally successful) writer
friend of the author or the author himself. They range from reticent
modesty to hysterical overpraise; from terse one-liners to a page or more
of gush. In this chapter, Jackson gives some clues to decipher what is
really being said, bearing in mind that the real purpose is not
necessarily to produce facts but book sales.
The information given in the blurb is often in the form of half-truths at
best, romanticizing the mundane. A quote from Tom Lubbock makes the point.
"The author has worked as a bartender, a raspberry picker, a night
security guard and a labourer on a building site. (The author went to
university and took some odd jobs in the vacations.)"
In Epigraphs, Jackson has small regard for their use for what he calls a
display of raw swank - the literary counterpart to name-dropping. He gives
short shrift or, in this case, rather long shrift to Edgar Allen Poe's
obsessive epigraphizing, more, I feel, because of its bogus erudition and
fraudulence in both wordage and attribution than anything else.
He gives a epigraph attributed to the Marquis of Halifax which was new to
me and which I find worthy of re-quoting: "The struggle for knowledge hath
a pleasure in it, like that of wrestling with a fine woman."
He didn't include my favorite epigraph of all. One by Sophia Loren.
"Everything you see I owe to spaghetti." He has included an author's note
about his own background, but I'm afraid to quote it.