Assignment for 10/19

Christopher Durang is insane. Have you ever read his DMV sketch? Yeah. Crazy man. It doesn’t stop him from being funny and disturbing at the same time. In fact, his being nuts is probably what allows him to do it so well. “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You” is actually one of his more lucid plays.

The play is essentially a send-up of strict Catholicism. Durang has Sister Mary explain most of its core beliefs, focusing especially on ones that don’t make much sense, like changes to canonical belief that are not retroactive. There are a lot of important questions that Sister Mary does not answer. She just rolls right over them, only to have those same questions brought up by the former students who come to visit her. Diane and Gary’s deaths may be symbolic of all the Catholics who become “dead” to their families when certain things -- abortion, being gay, not quite believing -- are known.

Her behavior is a strange mix of maternal and childlike at the same time. Her affection for Thomas is almost maternal, but the way she acts towards her old students is petty and histronic. It calls her sanity into question, where before she was just eccentric. In many ways her old students have become older than she is. Their life experiences have taken them beyond the dogma that she taught them. She is reactionary, then, and mean, because she cannot accept anything that does not conform to her heavily circumscribed view of life.

There are so many things Sister Mary Ignatius can’t explain for us, and those are the things that organized deistic religion doesn’t do such a good job with, either.

Durang’s writing would probably be classed as “low,” in Lanham’s scheme. The play is supposed to be both a easy-to-understand presentation, so it makes sense that Sister Mary would be speaking in simple language. What has always bothered me about the “high/middle/low” spectrum is that, like so many other categorization schema, it is used to denote the quality of the work, rather than the quality of the prose. However, this is not what Lanham does, and I am very pleased with that. The quality of the prose overall does reflect on the rest of the piece, (meaning, success, etc.) but an author can employ many different styles in the same piece. In fiction, when functioning as narrator, describer of scenes and characters, mood-setter, and dialogue writer. In non-fiction, depending on the audience, the desired effect, whether it is meant to be read aloud or to oneself, the possibilities are endless. Good stylists often move between styles to achieve their desired outcomes, no matter what they are writing.

I would class Clinton’s speech as an example of this. He uses complex phrasing with more simplistic language to reach a large audience that he must draw to him. Orwell uses a uniformly high style in “Politics and the English Language.” His diction is varied, his phrasing carries the weight of his words effortlessly, and he works references, his own extremely pointed view, and close readings into the whole.