posted
I'm reading N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, a contemporary Native American literature novel. The first several times when derivatives of some came up, they stopped the flow of my reading, as somes invariably do. Upon scrutinizing their usage, I estimated they were related to the interior discourse of the protagonist and that they resonated with his vague uncertainty regarding his predicament and outcome. Although I've never broken stride over somes in dialogue, there's none of those somes in here yet.
After I'd considered and accepted the somes, they no longer interrupted the flow of the story, even when they weren't definitively separate from the narrator's discourse. Peculiarly, they seem to be acting as the protagonist's thoughts melded with the narrator's discourse. Fascinating! The protagonist is also the primary point of view character. The story is in third-person, past present, close access, with lots of variance in psychic distance, and occasional auxilliary perspectives.
For me, avoiding any instance of some's derivatives has been a best practice in my writing, yet in this story I've noted somes being used effectively as a rhetorical scheme for the first time in any story I've read. I've noticed an occasional some in some of the better stories I've read, in dialogue or definitive interior monologue, but never as deftly used as in this story. None of the instances I've encountered in the story so far are definitively indeterminate (sic--what an oxymoron) forms of some, as an adjective: some apples fell off the cart, as indeterminate pronouns: something happened that surprised her, somebody fell out of the open door, someone left the door open, or the adverb derivative somehow: somehow the carpet flew across the hall.
An example from the novel; "And even then the boy could sense his grandfather's age, just as he knew somehow that his mother was soon going to die of her illness. It was nothing he was told, but he knew it anyway and without understanding." [p.11] The context subtracts the vagueness and adds a mystical quality of knowingness to the usage of the indeterminate adverb somehow.
I'm reading the novel and other Native American literature to get a sense of the distinct cultural mindset of Native American storytellers. It's for research on a novel concept I'm developing.
posted
I'm at a loss. You mean the writer, rather than say, say, "The carpet flew across the hall," he says instead, "Somehow the carpet flew across the hall"?
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posted
"Some" (and its variations) can be examples of what "some" people call "weasel" words, or "fudge" words. They are words that can weaken the story because they are indefinite, and there are those who are "quite" vehement against them.
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posted
In the "somehow the carpet flew across the hall" example, what Ms. Dalton-Woodbury said, plus, in that and the other examples, essential information is missing, the context could be more specific--even recasting some apples replaced with a few apples--or the somes could be left out altogether. I encounter somehow in that sort of usage as a way of not saying what natural or supernatural force caused the action. I want to know, though.
A flying carpet flying across the hall? Is it a magic carpet or did a natural or human agency cause it to fly across the hall, is the question it raises for me. Not having an answer frustrates me and disrupts the flow of my reading. I stop and try to figure out if I've missed context or the writer did.
When some has vague meaning, in my opinion, it's a failure of the writer to reach the top of the narrative arch and provide information for the reader to understand the context.
In House Made of Dawn I'm seeing that the information is provided; however, my writerly hyperawareness of some has caused me to stumble over instances of it, evaluate it, and accept it as effective usage.
posted
speaking only as an observer, some Apache people use the word 'some' in English in ways the old Anglos never intended. For example, "I feel some way," was a favorite statement by patients in the IHS ER, and which frustrated the docs to no end.
It was also used by teenagers who were asked to explain something basically inexplicable, like how the cow got painted purple, usually accompanied by a baffled shrug. "It happened some way."
It takes on a separate role in Apache-processed English, as does the word power. Which is one of the reasons I think AA has never taken off on the rez. it just resonates with different meanings that underlay its intended English construction, regardless of what it's supposed to mean. Somehow.
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