How to lose your voice

I leave aside for the moment Ms. Kael’s incessant but special use of words many critics use a lot: “we,” “you,” “they,” “some people”; “needs,” “feel,” “know,” “ought”—as well as her two most characteristic grammatical constructions: “so/that” or “such/that,” used not as a mode of explication or comparison (as in, e.g., he was so lonely that he wept), but as an entirely new hype connective between two unrelated or unformulated thoughts; and her unprecedented use, many times per page and to new purposes, of the mock rhetorical question and the question mark.

— Renata Adler, ‘The Perils of Pauline’

How to escape the chains of your grammatical character? The consequence imposed by hypotaxes? Subjection of subordinate clauses, the clutter of your articles? The lockbox of your vocabulary? How, in short, to lose a voice? By panelbeating or careful dismantling? Shouting till you’re hoarse, unpunctuation, lack of closure? By repetitive exercise of neglected syntactic muscle? Systematic sensual derangement? Artificial flower arrangement? The taking of assignments? Pressure of confinement? Realignment? Rhythmic shift? Power lift? Urban grift? Country manners, super^script? High tone? Low diction? Fragmentation? Ornament? Scatology? X, or Execration? Crack up, crack down, abstinence or incontinence? Common sense? The other five senses? Firepower, slow burn, formal feeling, fast churn? Wind up, wind down, window on the world, windward wend your weary way back home or stay afloat — unmoored adrift and all alone? Rhetorical questions.

Chris Price

Chris Price is struggling to escape a voice it’s taken decades to make.