Volume 9 of of the collected works of Kim Il Sung is now out, and Mick Hartley is having a hard job containing his excitement:
Let’s hope the book maintains the powerful tradition in Korean revolutionary literature of keeping sentences long, with plenty of clauses which further elaborate on the idea first mentioned in the opening clause, thereby ensuring that the original idea becomes ever more entrenched within the consciousness of the reader as the theme is expanded upon and elaborated, very much in the way that a piece of music takes an original theme which is then embellished and repeated in different formats and combinations, which serves to increase the power of the music and can similarly be a powerful device to increase the power of a revolutionary thought or indeed instruction from a Great or Dear Leader, even if there is a risk, among those perhaps insufficiently devoted to the drive towards a successful and dynamic socialist country, that the original thought that started the sentence may have been forgotten by the time the reader comes in, panting but nevertheless certainly wiser and also older, to the end of the sentence.
Hartley has also been very good on the lockdown.
Bismark wrote in classical German – a form in which a single sentence would cover an entire page ending with 15 verbs all of whom the long-suffering reader would then have to assign to their clauses throughout the page in order to understand what the sentence meant.
Bismark was given as a translation exercise to German students in Oxford when I was there.
I fear Mick Hartley’s impressive sentence can hardly compare. Much worse for the glorious revolutionary cause is that I suspect the dear leader’s ‘best’ sentences can also hardly compare with this reactionary aristocratic warmonger’s routine achievements. How humiliating: the revolution defeated by a stylist. 🙂
I could say more about the absurdity of Kim’s style – but should perhaps refrain lest one of my own sentences on this blog be dragged out and shown to me. 🙂
I once wrote a book report on Crime and Punishment in the authors style. Page and a half, five paragraphs, six sentences. The teacher missed the humor.
About 25 years ago I had a gf from Georgia. She was an English Lit post-grad – beautiful girl, very smart (Studied at Oxford and Cornell where she graduated something-cum-whatever). Anyway, she thought I might like to try some good ol’ Southern Literature seeing as my knowledge of the cuture of that neck of the woods was basically not much beyond “The Dukes of Hazzard”. When I first visited her in Atlanta I was a bit dissapointed to see she drove a Honda and hadn’t welded the doors shut. She did look good in very shortly cut-off jeans mind so – on balance – it was worth the 9hr flight. Anyway she lent me a copy of Faulkner’s “Absolom, Absolom!” I don’t think I got past the first sentence because at 1,288 words it was the longest sentence ever published in the English language and made bloody no sense. I think he won the Nobel didn’t he? Shows what I know.
Anyway, here it is.
We Brits aren’t fervent enough yet, nor smart enough, so the sentences are short, like with ‘Protect the NHS!’.
Give them a month and it will be Devour the revanchist, Imperialist, anti-social, undistanced Zinoviev-Kamenev Deviationist capitalist hyena running dog Jardinist Zionist Fascist unclapping superstitious Falung Gong Taipei-funded Randian Japanese revisionist Burkean anti-Bolivaran, Pence-Cruz axis enemies of the People’. But Raab would make it sound like a moan, not a threat.
Thanks to DuckDuckGo i found this, which i remembered reading a long time ago.
I don’t know about German philosophers, but when i read Locke’s Second Treatise i found myself compelled to use a plain text document, and break up sentences with carriage returns for readability.
I read Faulkner’s Intruder In The Dust in high school. A book report was required, of course, and I counted (and reported) the paragraphs, words, commas, and conjunctions in one bloody sentence that took up much of two pages.
Then I got down to the report the teacher wanted, which he rather liked. He agreed the sentence in question was indeed somewhat over the top. At this stage of life, I feel no desire to go back, find the sentence in question, and count.
It all seems fine to me – I do not see a problem.
They have moved on from giving the Peace Prize to terrorists (Begin, Mandela) and dictators (Sadat) to giving it to the merely good sounding (EU, Obama).
They give Physics and Chemistry prizes to heads of laboratories these days.
Why would the Literature prize be related to quality?
You’ll never guess who came within an ace of being on the shortlist for the 1939 Peace Nobel?
I dunno about the “heads of labs thing”. The problem is a lot of hard sciences stuff is ultra-collaberative and the Nobel can only be shared three ways.