Saturday, April 08, 2006

Concatenated quotes

Updike reviews Fernanda Eberstadt's Little Money Street in the New Yorker this week. Here he is talking about Gypsy girls:

Her value, as a virgin, is ascertained not by the young groom on the wedding night but, according to archaic folk custom, by the probing finger of a tribal crone: Eberstadt’s partially renegade Gypsy friend Linda explains, “For Gypsies, it’s a nasty old woman who is paid to penetrate the girl, like a gynecologist but with dirty hands, in front of all the husband’s family. It’s terrifying, it’s inhuman.” Landric sums up: “People talk about preserving Gypsy culture. But what am I as an educator supposed to do when the comportment of my students is frankly pathological?” Eberstadt, liberal enough to doubt liberal pieties, complains that “if these pedagogues were nineteenth-century missionaries to a cannibal island, they could not be more convinced that the belief system they wished to impose upon the Gypsy savages—in this case, egalitarian secularism—was as unequivocal a good as clean water.” Yet she comes down, finally, on the side of clean water, asserting that the French authorities are “using their utmost powers of imagination and sympathy to devise ways of freeing a community that was clearly stuck and unhappy.”

What struck me about this passage was not only Updike's striking language ("the probing finger of a tribal crone") – it was also the way that he strung quotations from three different people together in one paragraph.

Now there's no rule against quoting more than one person per paragraph, unless you're doing dialogue or conversation. But for some reason, at the back of my head, I always thought there was. I suppose that when I was learning English, I might have misunderstood my teacher's comments about dialogue, or maybe my teacher was the one with the misunderstanding. Either way, I'm glad I now went to the effort of looking my imaginary rule up, and coming to the conclusion it doesn't exist.

That said, I would be happy to break the rule if it did exist. If something's OK by John Updike and the editors of the New Yorker, it's OK by me.

Posted by Felix at 19:19 EST