What the Dickens?
by Kim Pederson…….
My new word for today is “corpus” (plural: corpora). According to my good friend Merriam-Webster (or is it my good friends Merriam and Webster?), a corpus is the whole body or total amount of writings of a particular kind or on a particular subject, such as the total production of a writer, e.g., the Dickens corpus. Seeing this reminded me of a Roger Rosenblatt essay in The New York Times called “To a Writer, a Body of Work Is a Taunt.” Roger writes that readers and authors view a writer’s body of work (BOW) in different ways. Readers see a “static totality by which a writer may be assessed.” Authors, in contrast, see it “as a movie tough guy whom we have just popped in the jaw.” In Roger’s view, the BOW shakes off the punch and says, “That all you got?”
I can imagine Charles Dickens, the poster boy for said “corpus” definition above, looking at the BOW of most writers and saying, with an entirely different meaning, “That all you got?”
In his lifetime, Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, and penned hundreds of short stories and nonfiction articles. This sounds and is a huge amount of writing. (I can hear German author Rolf Kalmuczak scoffing, however, given his 1,000+ publications written under 100 pseudonyms.) Dickens is a good example for a corpus or BOW because of the name recognition. In his NYT article, Roger R mentions E.L. Doctorow, Russell Banks, and James Salter. He, Roger that is, also makes the distinction that the difference between a major and minor BOW is quality, not “heft.” He gives Allen Ginsburg, Ralph Ellison, and Joseph Heller as examples.
Of course, one’s BOW does not have to be limited to published works. Frank Gehry has buildings, for example, and John Frank Stevens has the Panama Canal. On the more “mundane” level where I live (and mundane here takes the gentler, all-embracing “of the world” definition), teachers teach hundreds, even thousands of students in their working lifetimes. Aid workers dispense millions of aid packets and so on ad infinitum. No matter. The rub, Roger R writes, with having a BOW of any sort, is that it “remains incomplete no matter the size of the output. The taunt persists: That’s it?”
We can all look at our lives and ask that question, and I have a feeling everyone does at least once before they shuffle off the mortal coil. When I consider my BOW, which is not insubstantial but not overly substantial and certainly not major in any way, I hear Peggy Lee singing softly in one ear, “Is that all there is?” If it is, she advises, “then let’s keep dancing.” (She also suggests breaking out the booze and having a ball, which is not such a bad idea either.)
In the other ear, I hear Aristotle whispering “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” I hope that’s true rather than Roger R’s pronouncement that the BOW “becomes a body of evidence in a case built against us.” That’s why, he tells us, writers do not like to read their published works. In my mind now, I see Aristotle squaring off against Socrates, who instructed us sternly that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I’m rooting for the big A to pop the big S in the jaw hard enough to knock him unconscious before any taunts can ensue. That would prove, if only in this rather desperate metaphorical way, that while our BOWs may be all we’ve got, they’re also, well, all we’ve got and sometime before mortality comes knocking we need to say, to be able to say, as Farmer Hoggett might, “That’ll do.”
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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.