“Hurray, three cheers and down the hatch for birth, Bill and Butch poured out the moon into the whiskey glasses, held up and downed and held again.” pg 8, The Girl
Language is very particular in Le Sueur’s The Girl. There is an abundance of punctuation, stop and go paragraphs, and sentences that mend and meld together, as well as dialogue. I think this helps to make the thoughts and actions of The Girl interact with the dialogue in way that presents the text as one long inner monologue. It’s interesting because of the way that you might not know when the actual dialogue beings and the narration ends. It makes you pay attention to the text more than if you know who is talking and when.
I also think that an especially important factor in Le Sueur’s writing, represented in this quote, is the type of slang and the very unorthodox vernacular she uses often. Sometimes it is even difficult to keep up with the words used by each character when talking. It can be almost compared to “teen speak” which has parents and teachers confused on a daily basis. But to teens, and the characters in The Girl, the language makes complete sense to them. They know what moon is, what the birth symbolizes to them: a bet to be made, money to be won. It may seem stupid to us, but it makes entirely too much sense to them. And to us, the reader, we want to understand what they’re saying and tend to pay particular attention to words and phrases that we have no sense of. It makes the text, like Aristotle says, something distinct and stylish that can be separated for normal dialect.
The language by Le Sueur also brings about this feeling of rush or hurriedness. The text is replete with run-ons and has very few pauses where the reader can get there bearing on what the timeline is or how fast paced the story actually is. Most of the events take place very quickly, and with no introduction or explanation. The girl’s relationship with Buck, her work at the bar; everything is very quickly formed and executed. Without realizing it, we as readers, have become fully engrossed in her day to day dealings without ever being told these are actual day to day events.
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I also agree that it seems as if Le Sueur is using a language of her own, but I didn’t really notice it at first until I came across terms such as bootleg, moon, or O. I also found it interesting that you bring up how Le Sueur immerses the reader into the Girl’s day to day life because I think it is the only way to really understand the characters’ own form of “teen speak.”
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