Tuesday, April 6, 2010

I felt like I was there and that if I would have actually been there I would have noticed and experienced the same emotions and feelings of Defoe. The details that were provided didn’t steer my eyes away to the story line but brought me in closer. The dimensions of the pit, description of the poor man, the imagery of the pit, the madness induced suicides; all the detail made the story more enthralling. The interview that Defoe had with the poor man made me think of a newscaster interviewing a citizen after a disaster.
That “the journal of a plague year” was so short aided in that it was not a cumbersome amount of detail. In books by Tom Clancy detail becomes too much and I can skip 4 pages and just be getting out of the description of the SKS, and there are well over 300 pages of this. Defoe’s use of detail was perfect, giving me a clear view of the emotions and even relationships that existed between affected households and unaffected spouses. I could imagine myself in any situation that was presented in the story and that to me is the right amount of detail without being weighed down.
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1 comment:

  1. AndyApril 6, 2010 at 10:56 AM

    As much as stuff like this has become a cultural joke with stuff like Monty Python or even Ring Around the Rosies, it's hard to not take it seriously. It's incredibly ghastly stuff, made all the more gruesome by by Defoe's writing. Of all the approaches to take to describing something like this, Defoe's journalistic tone lends a greater authenticity to his descriptions, and steers it away from exploitative and straight toward documentary-like.

    Stuff in books like The Road or anything similarly post-apocalyptic (and yes, I'll equate writings about the plague to post-apocalyptic) is gruesome in a different way, and writers like McCarthy or, to a lesser extent, Vonnegut, use imagery like that to make poetry, gorgeous descriptions of morbid things. But Defoe's not interested in that. Which approach is better or worse isn't really a point I'm trying to make (nor is it one that really needs making), but writing like Defoe's is a nice change, at least for me. He focuses on what's happening and doesn't flower up the language. More Steinbeck, less Faulkner.

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