Archaic Words
Saul Bellow and The Victim: The difference between antiquated and archaic words.
Dubrovnik, 2016
There’s a passage in Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim where the protagonist, Asa Leventhal, who is having a rather difficult few chapters, senses that he’s being followed while he strolls through a zoo:
The acuteness and intimacy of it astounded him, oppressed and intoxicated him. The heat was climbing again, and the pungency of the animals and the dry hay, dust, and manure filled his head; the sun, overflowing above the topmost twigs and bent back from bars and cages, white and glowing long shapes, deprived him for a moment of his sense of the usual look of things, and he was afraid, too, that his strength was leaving him. But he felt normal again when he forced himself to walk on.
Because it’s Bellow, the sentences are propulsive and fly with a vitality that you simply don’t see in a typical novel. Notice in the passage above—the deceptively simple passage, which I’ve ripped from a much larger section—how each sentence flows with a drive, verb to verb; how each sentence gives us just a nudge into Leventhal’s mind; how not one sentence slips into the most commonplace of traps, a needless repetition of prefixes and suffixes; and notice, most of all, how you didn’t really notice all that labor.
You won’t find a Bellow novel missing its ideas. Nor will you find one absent of principles, without a vision, forgetting to include its beliefs. You open the pages and find the philosophical, the religious, the political. But all those ingredients are but just a small part of the meal: what you want in a Bellow novel is to hear the vibrations of its characters. Beyond any intellectual firepower, the real sorcery is Bellow’s ear for the street.
…listening for footsteps and hearing instead a variety of sounds from below, the booming of radio music through the floor, mixed voices, the rasping of the ropes in the dumb-waiter; the cries of boys scudding down the street rose above the rest, as distinct as sparks from fire. With the setting of the sun, the colored, brilliant combers of cloud rolled more and more quickly into gray and blue, while red lights appeared on the peaks of buildings, pilot warnings, like shore signals along a coast.
Reading The Victim earlier this week, however, it was striking to discover how much its pages expressed the atmosphere of an earlier period. Perhaps, for a book published in 1947, this shouldn’t be striking, but consider the reaction as a more subtle point, one that results from Bellow’s very ability to inhabit the syntax of the time.
Because the novel so fully captures the spirit of his characters—in the slang and jargon and vernacular of its day—the pages appear even more distant than a typical novel from the period, much like how an old photograph of a hip, stylish crowd appears more dated than a photograph of a conventional crowd. To be trendy within your day is to appear passé in the future—the chic and trailblazing and glossy of any age present the demarkation that identifies the past as past.
A lesser novel, one without Bellow’s ear, one that missed the colloquialisms of the many tribes found in The Victim, would feel more contemporary today. But its characters wouldn’t shine, and its setting wouldn’t reflect an early 20th Century New York City, the summers of those years, but would, instead, simply reflect a past, one more elusive to contemporary readers.
A useful distinction comes to mind, the split between two words: antiquated and archaic. Although these words appear related and similar roots might, at first, seem plausible, each crept into contemporary English by a different path. Consider using the word antiquated for a novel that’s been supplanted, or somehow discredited—for writing well past its time. The pages simply aren’t relevant beyond its day. Although the word archaic is typically employed as an insult, consider it—when used for a novel—as a more illustrious description. An archaic novel provides the flavors of an earlier period, its tone and spirit and essence, in a manner that’s clearly dated, but undeniably relevant for contemporary readers.
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