The latest issue of The New York Review has a review
by Christopher Benfey of Toni Morrison’s new novella, Home. He quotes a
passage in which one of the protagonists, Frank, escapes from the psychiatric
ward of a hospital: “maniac moonlight doing the work of absent stars matched
his desperate frenzy.” Since this is the centennial
year of Arnold Schoenberg’s Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds ‘Pierrot
lunaire’ (three times seven poems from Albert Giraud’s “Pierrot Lunaire”),
first performed on October 16, 1912, I found it hard to resist the connection
to Giraud’s surrealistic turns of phrase. Of course, it is not just the phrases
that are weird.
Each poem in the set is strictly structured as thirteen
lines with a four-four-five grouping. The first two lines recur as the seventh
and eighth lines, and the first line appears again as the last one. That quote
from Morrison could easily be the translation of one of those opening couplets,
with that reference to “maniac moonlight” returning in both the seventh and
thirteenth lines.
I have no idea if Morrison is familiar with either Giraud or
Schoenberg. All I know if that she definitely has a command of imagery that
chills through its bizarre qualities. My guess is that there is no real
connection to Giraud in her words, but it is a clear case of how one good
linguistic turn deserves another!
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