Eric Lovelace The Wine of Astonishment

A language game.

by

Pamela Olson
Eric Lovelace The Wine of Astonishment by Pamela Olson Page 1 of 6 pages

Copyright 1991 2012 by Pamela Olson All rights reserved. All wrongs revenged. Its a story. Semblance to anyone is not intended nor should be inferred. Savvy, mate?
Doc Sererinsen's There Is A Girl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjG0S6dc-sY

A graduate of College of Marin then Sonoma State University, in the middle of The American Wine Country, California USA, Planet Earth, Milky Way, Pamela Olson is A Marin County Volunteer of the Year, founding board member North Bay Multimedia Association, Home Designer, Raconteur, Gardener, Wife, Time Traveler, Swimmer, Veteran, Mama, Friend, Real Estate Authority, Ballroom Dancer, Color Junkie, Bon vivant, Professor, Author and, Landlord Extraordinaire aka opinionated.

May all your storms be weathered, and all that is good get better.
Eric Lovelace The Wine of Astonishment by Pamela Olson Page 2 of 6 pages

Frank Sinatra - All or nothing at all @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LNBOTZbGA&feature=related A language game. There is a variety of spoken English: African English, Australian English, American English, American South English, AngloIrish English, Anglo-Saxon English, Appalachian English, Barbadian English, BBC English, Black American English, Black English, British English, Broken English, Business English, California English, Canadian English, Caribbean English, Cockney English, Common English, Creole English, German English, Elizabethan English, French English, Indian English, International Standard English, Irish English, Jamaican English, Japanese English, Jargon English, King's English, Literary English, London English, Modern English, New Zealand English, Nigerian English, Old English, Pidgin English, Queen's English, Rap English, Scots English, Shakespeare's English, Slang English, Standard English, Welsh English, and among others, Yiddish English. In the American media, regional speech is modified in the interest of clarity, intelligibility and neutrality. For example, the American newscasters. In contrast, American Presidents emphasize their accents. An accent is not necessarily a change in vocabulary. It is more the use of tone, lilt, singsong, dropping or adding r's, soft, loud, twang, nasal, burr, brogue, rounded vowels, lyrical, or rising inflection. There is a power in language that shapes national consciousness as different languages interpret and present reality differently. When compared culturally to the language I'm familiar with, the written form of the language used in The Wine of Astonishment, by playwright Eric Lovelace, is highly eccentric in its linguistic terminology. It is still a language, albeit a non-standard one by my cultural standards. Lovelace's meaning is often obscure to me, though it seems deep. I had no doubt reading this book, that language, as I knew it, was running amok. This form of non-standard language operates within its own field of reason. Lovelace uses words, in some cases, little more than written symbols to which meaning is attributed, as the expression or communication of the thoughts and feelings of his characters in The Wine of Astonishment. His medium is human speech. In my opinion, as in dreams, an excellent linguistic observation made to pass for logic. Lovelace's utilization of the standard language of a simple peasant woman's narrative was formalized and so constructed that the question of meaning was built into it. Here, questions of meaning were reduced to syntactic constructions. A linguistic analysis provides valuable distinctions that in the first reading of The Wine of Astonishment may be overlooked. It may also fail to do justice to the wide and popular spread of non-standard language. Eric Lovelace The Wine of Astonishment by Pamela Olson Page 3 of 6 pages

Truth, after all, is more often than not, a matter of majority decision anymore. However, my opinion here is not so much a linguistic criticism of The Wine of Astonishment so much as a philosophical comment on cultural grounds. Ethnic language has a particular form and manner of selecting and combining words unique to the characters that speak it. The form, style and phrasing is to The Wine of Astonishment's world as say, the language of poetry is to poetry, or the language of the army is to the army, or the language of the black man is to the language of his region. There is a similarity in The Wine of Astonishment's to even the vocal English sounds, words, and ways of combining them common to a particular nation, tribe or other group. I found part of reading The Wine of Astonishment is a study of language in general, as well as the particular language of the book. Of course, my years of exposure to many languages and dialects did not transform me into an expert; I just got use to the differences. I write culturally from what I've learned so far. If we agree that a rule is an established guide or regulation for action, conduct, method, arrangement, or even a complete set or code of regulations, then it follows that these fixed principles determine conduct, habit, and custom. The criteria and standard is something that usually and normally happens. The customary and ordinary course of events reflects in one's way of acting. Rules have influence over, and guides one's life. If we further agree that life is the activities of a given time or in a given setting, and the language of the people who take part in it, as, in military life, or a tower of offices of a businessman in San Francisco, then the result is the language in The Wine of Astonishment. If I can analyze the reference from Lovelace's character's viewpoint, this attempt will help me improve my understanding of the sentences Lovelace's characters, in a perfectly logical fashion, and seem to understand among themselves. The question then arises whether it is possible to find meaning that has some measure of validity within my viewpoint of meaning. In this case, the language game accomplished more than one job. On the surface, it seemed empty verbiage, yet within the descriptive account; I was able to get the meaning of this account. To me, a non-standard language initially conveys an absurd meaning or no meaning at all. Sometimes it even spills over into things I culturally perceive as of relatively no importance or value, trivialities. My knowledge and use of my language even goes so far as to classify impudent, foolish, or evasive language as non-standard. However, that's all because I've culturally learned it to be such. Linguistically, Lovelace's The Wine of Astonishment does have a reality. Language has qualities or a state of being real, of being true to life, with a fidelity to nature, as those who speak it know it to be. The characters in The Wine of Astonishment knew their language to be real. To Lovelace's narrator, the simple peasant woman, her world existed objectively, as actual, not merely possible or ideal. In reading The Wine of Astonishment, I found this peasant woman's world to be essential, absolute, ultimate, not relative, Eric Lovelace The Wine of Astonishment by Pamela Olson Page 4 of 6 pages

derivative, or phenomenal. At the time and location of The Wine of Astonishment, or for that matter, any time and location, real is anything that actually exists as we've learned it to be. From the view of word making, if we could invent a formalized language that is so constructed that others accept it as real, the meaning is the use according to the rules. This use is what happened in The Wine of Astonishment. One of the functions of a language is to name/denote and has usage within the rules of context. Lovelace writes logical and grammatically correct sentences. He just strings them together in one off the wall context by my linguistic standards. My concern here is not so much with Lovelace's' intellectual or moral content of what he wrote, but with the expression of it. He built this expression into the syntax of The Wine of Astonishment. Questions of meaning in The Wine of Astonishment can be reduced to syntax constructions, that concern the ways of putting words together. Language is a peculiarly human situation where meaning is often found within verification. I recognize similarity and meaning as derived from within. That then confers meaning on the sentences. Am I to stand outside the arena in which experiences and sentences are to be compared? Or is a sentence only to be compared with another sentence within the same culture? It certainly helps to know the cultural rules since language is so ingrained in our behavior. I find English has a teeming vocabulary. Nouns can become verbs and verbs nouns. Seems to me that any language can produce a form of life; but can any form of life produce a language? Understanding another language isn't a matter of just discovering the rules. The meaning is the use and the words are used just to get the job done. It's important to remember the setting also in which the language is spoken. A game, whether it's a language game, or chess, is more than the rules. For what we call common sense, is, in fact, a general tacit assumption about the meanings of words. Lovelace's usages come from his narrator's intangible sense of language appropriateness. Due to our usage of a word, we each possess some to a greater or lesser degree, a sense of what is right and what is wrong with words and sentences. It seems to become an almost instinctive process, as we are hard pressed to give a reason for why a word or sentence or paragraph feels wrong. Language is also gesture, tone and context. We live in and by language. In the right context, a split infinitive can look like the end of meaning, as we know it. Language follows its own path and protocol. Meaning does occur, and that is our starting point. The problem then, is to give a meaningful account of it within our references of meaning. I played with it and came up with the following.

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Vicissitudes
I am Ding...Woosh...Silence... Ding...Woosh My door is now open. A footstep approaches, shuffles in, and executes a turn. Ding...Woosh My door is now closed. And...silence All eyes watch my numbers. Three, Two, One. Ding...Woosh My door is again open. Footsteps echo away. More approach, shuffle in, and execute a turn. Ding...Woosh My door is again closed. I am

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