Movie Review of “Pulp
Fiction” (from Eskimo 11 print edition)
hen I saw “Pulp
Fiction” (1994),
Tarantino’s first big hit, I walked out
of the theater in one of those
trances that certain powerful films put me in, as if
the movie hadn’t ended, as if I and all those
around me were characters in it, moving according to
someone else’s artistic vision.
Like any
masterpiece, this film is both moving and monumental.
That is, it carries you along with it so you feel the
action, but it also lifts you up into a heightened
perspective from which you can see the
action.
The thing that
probably strikes viewers first about this movie is its
wildly non-linear narrative technique. It goes well
beyond the simple flash-backs and flash-forwards that
most viewers were familiar with. The movie ends where
it started, which is roughly in the middle of the
“real time” story (as that is reconstructed
in our minds afterwards). The
effect is like hearing the
fractured arpeggio of a big complicated chord whose key
we can only identify as the last notes fade into
silence.
In literary
composition, this kind of structure is called
periodicity. It is based on an unusually prolonged
suspension of both meaning and syntactical resolution
until the very end of the sentence. In English, the
most common arrangement of words in a sentence is
subject-verb-object (with some attendant clauses
perhaps thrown in along the way). But the sense of the
statement is generally parceled pretty evenly as the
reader moves along. If he stopped three-quarters of the
way through the sentence, he’d probably have
acquired about three-quarters of the meaning of the
sentence.
Periodic style comes
into English from classical models – Greek and,
more importantly Latin. Its master is Cicero, the Roman
lawyer whose life span closely matched that of Julius
Caesar, both of them living during the last century
before the birth of Christ – before Rome cast off
its republican toga for an imperial robe.
(After a half
millennium of meticulously laying the foundation for
Western civilization, the Greco-Roman world saw its
house sweepingly remodeled along the autocratic and
perfervid lines of Asian taste in both government and
religion. At the height of its military power in the
world, the Greco-Roman world began to lose its cultural
power. If a map of the region at this time showed the
Roman empire in red, it would look like painted lips
around the half-open mouth of the Mediterranean, like a
drunken prostitute who had put on too much lipstick,
too quickly, only to find that her last customer would
be more than she had bargained for. The history lesson
is a digression, but insofar as its theme is surprise,
it is relevant.)
Because Latin is a
highly inflected language, with a word’s
syntactical function indicated by its ending rather
than its position in the sentence, Latin word order is
extremely flexible. Nauta
amavit puellam. Amavit nauta puellam. Nauta puellam
amavit. These sentences all
mean the same thing: “The sailor loved the
girl.” (Nautam amavit
puella would mean
“The girl loved the sailor.”) Still, some
sentences stretch this flexibility more ambitiously
than others. Some sentences withold an important part
of their meaning until the very last word. This style
was called periodic, the underlying metaphor being a
race track: the race is not over until you have gone
all the way around it in a circle or ellipse (peri + odos =
“around the road”).
Periodic style was
characterized not only by this exaggerated suspension
of resolution but by elaborate syntactic complexity and
the frequent deployment of elements in pairs and
triplets (antithesis and tricolon). The style carried
with it a powerful aura of elegance. It presupposed a
heightened degree of intelligence in the audience. It
flattered the connoisseur of rhetoric. It might
intimidate the masses but Cicero wasn’t writing
for the masses.
With the waxing
again of Greco-Roman influence on European culture
during the Renaissance, the periodic style became a
model for elegance in English (I don’t know about
the other European languages). The height of its
influence probably came in the 19th century, with the
spread of both secondary and university education, at
the head of whose liberal arts curriculum reigned the
study of “the classics,” meaning Greek and
Latin, but mainly Latin, with its duumvirate of
literary masters, Virgil and Cicero.
The prose stylistics
of the Victorian gentleman may seem a long way from the
action films of Quentin Tarantino but both are based on
several key features:
+ the tight
bond between a master who has studied his models
closely and an audience of connoisseurs who are also
familiar with them
+ a relishing
of what those who are less educated with these forms
might find difficult
+ a highly
periodic style that emphasizes complexity, suspense and
the display of self-conscious artistry
+ a
reverence for the elite and a disdain for the masses
It is irrelevant,
here, that the Victorian’s elites function as
Tarantino’s masses and vice versa.
Tarantino’s disdain for high art and mainstream
art is based on the same division of cultural artifacts
into two classes: those within a charmed circle, often
protected from profanation by obscurity, venerated by
the members of the cult; and, outside this circle, the
common fare of the uninitiated masses.
I hasten to add that
I intend no sarcasm in this analysis. I would give both
of these artists, the cloistered Victorian and the
free-wheeling hipster, and indeed all artists, wide
latitude to indulge in whatever crotchets they like or
need to help them do their work. That doesn’t
mean that we, as readers, viewers, critics, have to
accept those crotchets along with their work. We should
think of these as the scaffolding used by the artist
– essential to the making of his art, but not
part of the work itself and certainly not essential to
our enjoyment or understanding of it. The ideal for the
critically informed spectator is impartiality to genre
and form and discrimination only between good and bad
examples of them. To act otherwise is to use art for
non-artistic purposes, as a criterion for membership in
some affinity group. The man who likes only summer
blockbusters and hates movies with subtitles or
anything that he could accuse of being
“weird” is no more to be shunned as a role
model than the woman who only likes foreign movies and
despises all summer blockbusters as plebeian. The
former reduces cinema to a receptacle for the
convenient disposal of his aggression fantasies. The
latter reduces it to a fashion accessory to enhance her
sex appeal.
(One digression
leads to another, leading to another and another. In
the bleak white wastes of the Arctic, it’s easy
for The Melancholy Eskimo to lose his bearings. Look
now. He has stumbled across a collection of tales by
Saki, the Edwardian humorist, and from them he singles
out a lovely example of periodic prose style.)
In “The Secret
Life of Septimus Brope,” the hostess, Mrs.
Troyle, is explaining to two guests why she thinks
another guest, Septimus Brope, an expert on cathedral
architecture, is trying to seduce her maid, Florinda.
One of these listeners suggests that she give him the
benefit of the doubt.
“I had already
done so,” said Mrs. Troyle, “until further
evidence came my way.”
She shut her lips
with the resolute finality of one who enjoys the
blessed certainty of being implored to open them again.
It’s the second sentence, of
course, that is periodic. Up until that last infinitive
phrase (“to open them again”), the reader
really has no idea where it’s going. This is one
of the pleasures of the style, the pleasure of letting
go of the steering wheel, an uncertainty made delicious
because the reader trusts that the author’s
guiding hand will grab it at the last moment.
H. H. Munro
(Saki’s real name) wrote in the years just before
World War I, a period we might well consider the sunset
of European civilization, before the decadence and
decline of the 20th century set in, just as Cicero
wrote during the sunset of the first great European
civilization. Not the least of the literary losses of
WWI was the death of Saki, who was probably the best
British humorist in between Wilde and Wodehouse.
Periodic style
entails a surprise, from the mild sort that serves as a
reminder to the reader that he needs to stay on his
toes, as a chastisement, almost, to remind him of the
elevated style of the author (“And they will know
that I am the Lord.”) – to the sharper and
funnier kind, when the surprise has that peculiar blend
of incongruity and ingenuity that causes laughter and
knocks the reader right off his toes (“And they
will know that the star of Hawaii
Five-O is Jack
Lord.”). In the latter case the sentence divides
naturally into a set-up and a punch line. Thus, on the
one hand, periodicity tends to mimic the structure of
the joke. On the other hand, when its tone is more
serious, the ending, with its miniature revelation and
reversal (Aristotle’s anagnorisis and peripateia),
mimics the Aristotelian structure of drama.
(The Melancholy
Eskimo observes here that, whether it’s comedy or
tragedy, the hero still goes through hell. The only
difference is that comedy lets us laugh at his trials
without being thought heartless.)
