More on CROTS (Re: Terms Exercise) -- Nordquist, 15:55:04 02/19/05 Sat Date
Posted: 15:55:04 02/19/05 Sat
Author: Nordquist
Subject: More on CROTS (Re: Terms Exercise)
In reply to: Oakley Julian 's message, "Terms
Exercise" on 10:05:21 02/19/05 Sat
>Puzzlers
>Term #75 – Crot
>It’s not so much that I am puzzled by the example, as
>I am the term. We haven’t really dealt so much with
>“crot,” yet, so I don’t really know what it looks
>like. So, for all I know, this may be a perfect
>example.
CROT. (from Winston Weathers) A crot (crots, plural) is an obsolete word meaning
“bit” or “fragment.” The term was given new life by Tom Wolfe in his
“Introduction” to a collection of Esquire magazine fiction, The Secret Life of
Our Times, edited by Gordon Lish (New York: Doubleday, 1973). A basic element in the
alternate grammar of style, and comparable somewhat to the “stanza” in poetry,
the crot may range in length from one sentence to twenty or thirty sentences. It is
fundamentally an autonomous unit, characterized by the absence of any transitional devices
that might relate it to preceding or subsequent crots and because of this independent and
discrete nature of crots, they create a general effect of metastasis — using that
term from classical rhetoric to label, as Fritz Senn recently suggested in the James Joyce
Quarterly (Summer, 1975), any “rapid transition from one point of view to
another.” In its most intense form, the crot is characterized by a certain abruptness
in its termination: “As each crot breaks off,” Tom Wolfe says, “it tends to
make one’s mind search for some point that must have just been made — presque
vu! — almost seen! In the hands of a writer who really understands the device, it
will have you making crazy leaps of logic, leaps you never dreamed of before.”
The provenance of the crot may well be in the writer’s “note” itself —
in the research note, in the sentence or two one jots down to record a moment or an idea
or to describe a person or place. The crot is essentially the “note” left free
of verbal ties with other surrounding notes.
…The crots, of whatever kind, may be presented in nearly random sequence or in
sequences that finally suggest circularity. Rarely is any stronger sense of order (such as
would be characteristic of traditional grammar) imposed on them — though the absence
of traditional order is far more pronounced when the grammar is used in fiction and
poetry. The general idea of unrelatedness present in crot writing suggests correspondence
— for those who seek it — with the fragmentation and even egalitarianism of
contemporary experience, wherein the events, personalities, places of life have no
particular superior or inferior status to dictate priorities of presentation. Nearly
always crots are separated one from the other by white space, and at times each crot is
given a number or, upon rare occasion, a title. That little spectrum — white space
only, white space plus a numbering, white space plus a titling — provides a writer
with a way of indicating an increase in separation, discreteness, isolation.. . .
Crots are akin, obviously, to a more general kind of “block” writing — the
kind of writing found, for instance, in E. M. Forster’s Two Cheers for Democracy and
in Katherine Anne Porter’s essay “Audubon’s Happy Land.” In such block
writing, the authors have strung together short, fairly discrete units of composition to
make whole compositions. Likewise, a series of crots is not unlike a collection of
aphorisms — say those of Eric Hoffer who, in a book like The Passionate State of Mind
and Other Aphorisms, has brought together brief compositional units, some a sentence long,
some several paragraphs long, each quite distinct from the other, yet grouped into a whole
composition on the basis of a certain attitude and view of life common to them all. These
compositions of “blocks” or “aphorisms” are so much in the spirit of
crot writing that they may be considered a part of its development out of a traditional
grammar of style into the alternate grammar. The writing of Forster, Porter, and Hoffer
— in fiction and nonfiction — gives evidence of the usefulness of something
other than the ordered linear procedure of traditional grammar even to writers who would
not be identified as especially experimental or stylistically daring. (Weathers, Winston.
“The Grammars of Style: New Options in Composition.” Freshman English News 4.3
(Winter 1976): 14, 12-18. Reprinted in Richard Graves’ Rhetoric and Composition: A
Sourcebook for Teachers and Writers. 3rd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinemann,
1990. 200-214)
updated 25 February 2005