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Thank you, Lori, for your piece on lists in Young’s novel. I’ve been finding them everywhere. I had been seeing them in the context of copia, the rhetorical technique of amplification and abundance. Besides her lists, I’ve noted her tendency to suspend a sentence while pursuing a rich detour that may itself have modifications and sub-clauses before it lands again several lines down. You practically need to diagram the sentences if you are not to get lost.

I’m interested now in how this copious style relates to our pace of reading. On the one hand, the pace is fast: a torrential outpouring of lists, metaphors, digressions etc. But the pace is also slow, given that anything like a plot moves at a glacial rate. I’ve just finished four chapters in a row devoted to the lady’s opium visions. What is said of her there is that she never leaves her bed, never goes anywhere; and at the same time, she is everywhere, at the farthest reaches of the globe and beyond. Reading this novel puts us in the same paradoxical situation. My compromise is to read the work as if I were reading it aloud, though I don’t actually do so. This allows me to appreciate the rhythms and cadences of Young’s prose, which itself has an opiate effect.

Peter

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Hello Peter, it's good to hear from you. The copia, ala Erasmus, does indeed slow down my reading in part, because I hang on every detail. It shows such a rich imagination on Young's part, and I've written in these posts about Young's ekphrasis of her own vivid imagination. There's a palpable avidity to her descriptions that I love. I don't find the overwrought, although I could understand if some readers feel differently.

And what you say about reading as if reading aloud is akin to my experience with the text. I've ordered a collection of Young's poems to further experience those rhythms and cadences.

Young's descriptions slow down an already slow narrative--not a lot of action for our characters and a lot of contextual repetition. What do we gain or lose by this "enforced" slowness of the reading experience?

Best,

Lori

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