Literary Oddities

Literature is not only about voyages in the English language. It is also about some quirks and oddities that we find in the works of some authors. They are well-known. When we see mavericks in every field, why not in literature? There are and always will be some who become defiant when faced with limits and refuse to be to tied down by man-made rules. They are the pioneers who blaze new trails, which some may find thorny. Such scorners of tradition are to be found in every generation.

Tristram Shandy is a capricious novel by Laurence Sterne. It sets out in conversational style to tell the life story of the narrator. He tells a good deal about his not-so-normal family. In fact it is only in the third of the ten volumes that his conception is even mentioned. His association of ideas’ style is absorbing and such that in a sense he even gets to speak with the reader in asides. As he rambles on and on, he finds that he has no time to live his own life. So he quickly writes the ‘finis’ to the novel, duping its readers by a’ cock and bull story’, as a reviewer termed it. This unique novel has survived in spite of the prediction of Dr. Samuel Johnson that “nothing odd will do long”. Some are of the opinion that Tristram Shandy is the fore runner of stream of consciousness’ fiction.

Stream of Consciousness’ is an unconventional form of writing i.e., without indents, punctuation marks or paragraphs. In Ulysses, James Joyce has written about forty pages in the end, which are just an unpunctuated, non-stop flow of the inner experiences of the character. Sentences are reduced to bits and pieces and are practically shorn of syntax.

Some like a style which gives a jolt. Even headlines reflect proper or improper usage. Sir Donald Bradman, the greatest Cricketer ever according to many, was a prolific scorer with a 99-run career average. He is referred to as the Babe Ruth of Cricket to make it easier for Americans to know and adjudge his hallowed place in the English game. When, on one of those rare occasions , he got out’ for a duck’, two dailies commented thus: One titled the feature : Donald Duck’, alluding to the popular cartoon character and Bradman’s first name. Another daily was even more succint. It just said dOn’, the zero/duck in the middle was in big, bold capitals, flanked by d’ and n’ in lower case . These, of course, do not fall under the category of literature but they are clever.

GADSBY, is a novel by Ernest Wright, having fifty thousand words and none of them had the letter e’ in them. One would think it impossible to write even a paragraph without that frequently-used vowel which has such an ubiquitous presence in every kind of writing. One of many reasons adduced for this is that when we use words in the past tense, we end the word, mostly with ‘ed’. It is said that he kept that letter e’ in his typewriter tamped down to ensure that he did not even accidentally use it. An intrigued lady used an oxymoron of an  epithet calling the author a’ genuine fake’

Here is another piece of odd writing, of which this paragraph is an example. author e.e.cummings was a twentieth century poet. he used innovative language, punctuation and typography in his pieces. he used not only his name the way it has been typed here, i.e., all-lower case, but also a few poems in that typographic style.
In a widely quoted poem he did not use the concluding dot or period sign and this omission was examined in depth as of special significance! To conclude: was it just a novelty or out of humility that he adopted this style? Anyway, as someone said, even he had to use capitals when referring to God’!