Literary language’s mood can be carried over onto real, living things rather than arguments

Evidence

I was someone who read Adorno! And in this heavy, intricate, detailed, precise language whose aim was to elevate thought ever higher, and where every full stop was set like a mountaineer’s cleat, there was something else, this particular approach to the mood of reality, the shadow of these sentences, which could evoke in me a vague desire to use the language with this particular mood on something real, on something living. Not on an argument, but on a lynx, for example, or on a blackbird or a cement mixer. For it was not the case that language cloaked reality in its moods, but vice versa, reality arose from them. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1840

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how the ‘mood’ of High Modernist prose could be applied to mundane subjects (a blackbird, a cement mixer) — a description project bridging theory and ordinary life.
• DEFINE: States a reverse-causation thesis about language and reality: reality arises from language’s moods, not the other way around.
• XREF: connects to: Anthropomorphism is a literary necessity, not a scientific error. — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide…, 158; Physical objects in prose can register the emotional weight of unreciprocated speech — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 165; The novel relocates real event from human action to natural and bodily change — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 21 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Physical objects in prose can register the emotional weight of unreciprocated speech #corroborates (0.60) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 165