The Knife of the Times

 I pulled off the shelf the volume that contains my 1st scholarly publication, William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet  (1983).  I had remembered that others in the Williams seminar at Stanford, with Gilbert Sorrentino, were in this volume but I am only finding one other essay, other than mine, by my friend Bob Basil.  Anyway, I will read his article soon, but I had someone thought that Joseph Conti was also in this book, but I am not finding him?  Such is memory. I have no need to re-read my own essay.  

Anyway, Sorrentino's own essay is only a few pages long, and analyzes the language of the story "The Knife of the Times." He explains that there are three varieties of language here, none of which is the habitual mode of Williams' other stories or novels. A habitual, automatic language, unmarked essentially. A refined, euphemistic language, meant to disguise reality. And the language of romantic fiction, also euphemistic. Sorrentino shows how each language variety appears, and how it is possible to use "debased" language with no satiric intent, a language unfit for literature but somehow redeemed. 

The story itself is about two women attracted to each other who have no adequate language in which to process their experience. 

Williams's story is a kind of linguistic miracle, in Sorrentino's retelling of it, and Sorrentino's brief essay is itself a critical miracle, for Mayhew. It is so direct, concise, and forceful.  It encapsulates Sorrentino's admiration for Williams, based on very specific ideas about language and its relation to reality. Sorrentino is an interested party here.  It would be possible to disagree, but I would see no point. I wish this were a normal way of doing literary criticism, not a rare exception.