Excerpts (examplars) abstractly organized under the rubrics
of FORM, STYLE, CONTENT & THEME
FORM
Speaking of Emily Bronte he says that
‘her verse
strains conventional form; in fiction she strained form too. Form is a means
not an end; if the end violates the means, let convention bend. What matters is
not fiction but the truth that fiction tells. ‘
. . .
. .
The case for the ‘proper novel’ is still made , not the
least by novelists who continue to work in what they believe to be an unbroken line that stretches from
Defoe and Fielding – well, to Howards Jacobson, Hilary Mantel, Nicole Krauss.
But Borges knew that tradition is not synonymous with
convention: on the contrary the dry hand of convention is at that throat of
that vital and irreducible thing
that is tradition. Taste agrees with convention, judgment is engaged with extending tradition. As Don Quixote shows, the author’s
tilting-spear against the impotent windmill of convention is irony.
. . .
. . .
“Miss Gertrude Stein”, wrote Wyndham Lewis “is the best
known exponent of a literary system that consists in a sort of gargantuan
mental stutter.” He likens her
process to the speech of the mad. “Her art is composed, first, of repetition,
which lyricises her utterances on the same principle a that of hebrew [sic]
poetry. But the repetition is also in the nature of a photograph of the
unorganized word-dreaming of the mind when not concentrated for some logical
functional purpose.” This describes at once her method and what it works away from.
. . .
. . .
In Lessing’s The Grass
is Singing, the first page of the novel has told us what the end will be.
This is a novel not of suspense but of process, as the concluding sentences
which do not presume to understand, make clear: “Though what thoughts of
regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded human affection were compounded with
the satisfaction of his completed revenge, it is impossible to say. .
. the integrity of the book is in this phrase, ‘it is impossible to
say.’
Incompleteness,
withholding of interpretation from areas the novelist intended to remain
unexplained, creates space for readers
willing to subject the darkness.
“Writing is a process of dealing with not knowing, a forcing
of what and how . . .
The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. It is
not simple, because it is hedged about with prohibitions,
roads that may not be taken. The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into
account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives. There is no
place for clichés or off-the-peg language, for “content” conventionally
conceived. “I think the paraphrasable content in art is rather slight – ‘tiny,
as de Kooning puts it. The change of emphasis from what to the how seems to me to
be the major impulse in art since Flaubert, and it’s not merely formalism, it’s
not that superficial, it’s an attempt to reach the truth, and a very rigorous
one.”(Donald Barthelme)
There is the stage method. According to that each character
is duly marshaled at first and
ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that at the right crisis each one
will reappear to act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will stand
before it bowing . . .
But there is another method – the method of the life we live lead. Here
nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each
other, and pass away. When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not
return. When the curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are
brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows. If
there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that the players in the
gaslight cannot hear his breathing. Life may be painted according to either
method; but the methods are different. The canons of criticism can bear upon
one cut cruelly upon the other.( Emilie Schreiner, preface to The Story of an African Farm -1883)
In the abundant evenness of Anthony Trollope’s work, an
evenness in which excellent novels and dull novels are delivered in the same
idiom, at the same steady pace, one is put in mind of Fielding’s “painful and
voluminous historian” who feels himself compelled “to fill up as much paper
with the details of months and years in which nothing remarkable happened, as
he employs on those noble eras when the greatest scenes have been transacted.”
Such histories are like newspapers, with the same count of words whether or not
there is news; their writers are like stagecoaches that run back and forth on
the same route whether or not they carry passengers.
STYLE
Flaubert developed the style
indirect libre; as in Joyce, the thoughts of the characters are set down
without preamble, without “he reflected” or “she felt,” so that inner elements
carry the weight as “objective” detail. The narration moves, without the reader
being consciously aware, between “omniscient” or “objective” and the
subjectivities of characters. Their sincerity or candor coexists with the
narrative’s irony. Jane Austin did something of the sort, but Flaubert developed
into the central principle of his art and reflected on its practice. Gore Vidal
finds here “no such thing as a subject, style in itself being an absolute
manner of seeing things.” John Cowper Powys compared his prose to a “great
cracked bassoon”, which has something of Flaubert’s tone about it. Here is
Flaubert’s own instrument: “Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we
beat out tunes for bears to dance, when all the time we are longing to move the
stars.”
Proust takes us to the heart of Flaubert’s manner. He
resists the strong metaphors that lend “a kind of immortality to style” and
seldom rises above the level of the speech of his most common characters. He
does not entertain the possibility that this is the point of them, that they
are – in Madame Bovary at least – in
character, and their colloquial weakness does not draw us way from a character
whose perspective we have assumed. Proust concentrates on elements in the prose
that are hard to translate, the nature of the language that creates “the great
moving pavement” that are the passages of Flaubert. “ There is,” he says, “a
grammatical beauty (as there is a moral or a dramatic beauty) which has nothing
to do with correctness.” A sentence can begin in one place and end up in quite
another, and the forward movement of style is not a compression of completed
sentences but an interlocking pattern; a prepositional phrase or subordinate
clause rises above its station and governs what follows. Proust speaks of the
“hermetic continuity of style” achieved, hence the moving pavement.
. . . .
. .
Philip Roth’s My Life
as a Man is about the thrills, vertigo and final satisfaction of writing from and of the
self. Though the self is fictionalized, the fiction is thin, like the convenient
shadow-fancies that facilitate onanism. Style over content, a solipsistic
spider, decidedly male, stirs its guts and lets out a shimmering thread.
‘The style”, wrote Stevenson, “is therefore the most
perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most natural is
the disjointed babble of the chronicler,
but which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant
implication.”
. . .
. .
Martin Amis shares Saul Bellows revulsion to Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He starts by
anatomizing its cliches, then cuts deeper into it. “Equally enthralling and
distasteful, it is Waugh’s problem comedy,” he says, likening it to Mansfield Park as “worrying, inordinate,
self-conscious, a book that steps out of genre and never really looks at home
with its putative author.” Amis locates the effects of Waugh’s snobbery on the
writing: “There is something
barefaced, even aggressive, in the programmatic way the novel arranges for its
three most un-regenerative characters to claim the highest spiritual honors.”
Charles Ryder’s first conversion
is social and sexual;
at Brideshead he is drawn into the baroque. Amis speaks of
the disjunction between the novel’s heartlessness and its elaborate and
elaborated style: But is the baroque not gesture and effect in lieu of actual content? The pillars sustain
nothing, an architecture of show without substance, to which the current heirs
have nothing but the accidental claim of birthright.
. . .
. .
Twain brings back into literary usage, “in this age of mass
literacy,” Updike says, some of the properties of speech. “In utterance there’s
a minimum of slowness. In trying to treat words as chisel strokes, you run the
risk of losing the quality of
utterance, the rhythm of utterance, the happiness.” His example is from Twain:
“He describes a raft hitting a
bridge and says that ‘it all went to smash and scatteration like a box of
matches struck by lightning.’ The beauty of the ‘scatteration’ could only have
occurred to a talkative man, a man who had been brought up among people who were talking and loved to talk
himself. The diction and cadence of written speech are of course not speech but
artful contrivance, yet the art tends towards placing the speaker back in the
text as speaker: not James’s celebrated ‘point of view.’ but something basic to
older traditions of storytelling . The telling is foregrounded and slowness at all costs avoided.
Joan Didion celebrates, as it is hard not to do, V.S.
Naipaul’s resistance to theories and his dependence on fact. Theory and ideology are ‘no more than scaffolding,
something to be erected or demolished; something imposed (a word Naipaul often
uses in relation to ideas) on the
glitter of the sea , the Congo clogged
with hyacinth, the actual world” She looks at the opening of Guerillas and notes, “The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the
first page . . .
tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization
of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image.”
A luminous, billowing image, with color, smell, peril in it, tells us “who runs
the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life
of the island this profit has been historically obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in
the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself.” Naipaul traffics in facts.
He sees and feels them with a Homeric impartiality and clarity. He is not a
comforting writer any more than Gibbon or Conrad is.”
. . .
. . .
Steinbeck to a writer friend who told him correctness in
writing was necessary “good manners,” “But I have no interest in the printed
word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my
words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be
read. I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener
. . . When my sounds are all in place, I can send them to a
stenographer who knows his trade
and he can slip the commas about
until they fit comfortably and he can spell the words so school teachers will not raise their eyebrows when they
read them. Why should I bother?” No wonder his writing was susceptible to film
treatment: it came to him as images and voices.
. . .
. . .
‘The style”, wrote Stevenson, “is therefore the most
perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most natural is
the disjointed babble of the chronicler,
but which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant
implication.”
CONTENT
When Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1930, he rendered the coup de grace to the Howells in his
address, “The American Fear of Literature.” He began in a friendly patronizing
voice, almost like Howell’s. “Mr. Howells was one of the gentlest, sweetest,
and most honest of men,” and then, to the jugular, “but he had the code of a pious
old maid whose greatest delight was to have tea at the vicarage. He abhorred
not only profanity and obscenity but all of what H.G. Well’s had called the
jolly coarseness of life.” Only the Great War put an end to his stifling
influence on American letters. His greatest achievement was “to tame Mark
Twain, perhaps the greatest of our writers, and to put that fiery old savage
into an intellectual frock coat and top hat.” His type survived. Lewis’s
medicine, magisterially administered, tried to purge the republic of American
letters of one of its most persistent types.
Lewis spared his Nobel audience the whole story of his
struggle . . .
He comes from a country in which most of us – not readers alone but even
writers – are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of
everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues.
“If the citizens of the United States were indeed the
devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust
themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and
best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to
teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.” (Frances
Trollope, Anthony’s mother, after her time in Ohio, 1827)
Theodore Dreiser was warned by his boss, “a most eager and
ambitious and distressing example of that pseudo-morality which combines a
pirate-like acquisitiveness with an inward and absolute conviction of
righteousness,” that he wanted novelty, not the “mush” of other magazines. But
nothing should be accepted that did not strongly appeal to the common reader,
and everything had to be “clean”. “a solid little pair of millstones which
would unquestionably end in macerating everything vital out of any good story.”
Gore Vidal cannot abide John Updike’s ingratiating obedience to the reader. His
conservative politics and his comfy aesthetics express “blandness and
acceptance of authority in any form.” He “describes to no purpose,” aspiring to
be “our good child.” His final verdict: “Updike’s work is more and more
representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever
more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more
excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up.
. . .
. . .
.
Henry James distanced himself from Howell’s notion that
American freedom from custom, class, and ingrained tradition was liberating for
the novelist. In the first place, did such freedom, could such freedom, really
exist in society? “It is on manners, usages, habits, forms, upon all these
things matured and established, that a novelist lives – they are the very stuff
his work is made of and in saying that in the absence of those ‘dreary and
worn-out paraphernalia’ which I enumerate as being wanted in American society,
‘we have simply the whole of human life left,’ you beg (to my sense)the
question. I should say we had just so much less of it as these same ‘paraphernalia’ represent, and I think they
represent an enormous quantity of it.”
THEME
Provincialism is a theme central to European and then
American fiction. It has to do as much with attitude as with location. We have
experienced its effects in
Stendhal, where Julien Sorel slowly rises out of it, and then is destroyed by
it. Balzac does not trust the reader as Stendhal does: he underlines what he
means with essayistic strokes. “Far away from the centers of light shed by
great minds, where the air is quick with thought, knowledge standstill, taste
is corrupted like stagnant water, and passion dwindles, frittered away upon
infinitely small objects which it strives to exalt. Herein lies the secret
avarice and tittle-tattle that poisons provincial life. The contagion of narrow-mindedness and
meanness affects the noblest natures; and in such ways and these, men born to
be great, and women who would have been charming if they had fallen under the
forming influence of greater minds, are balked of their lives.”
Thomas Hardy’s theme is individual un-fulfillment in time.
His vision is of a past unrealized, full of potential: “Everything glowed with
a gleam,” but “we were looking away.” The past with its choices is placed
beside a present those choices impoverished. Life is ever “a thwarted
purposing.” “The English peasant
lived and still lives in a milder, flatter world than Hardy’s,” says Pritchard,
“a world where conscience and self-interest keep down the passions, like a pair
of gamekeepers.”
Joseph Conrad ends his “Note” on his first book (Almayer’s Folly, 1895) with the words:
“the curse of facts and the blessings of illusions, the bitterness of our
wisdom and the deceptive consolation of our folly,” an epigraph for his entire
oeuvre.
Stevenson is not far away. He wrote, ”No man lives in the
external truth, among salts and aids, but in the warm, phantasmagorical chamber
of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls.
”There is no such thing
as unfictionalized fact: as soon as a fact finds a context, it behaves in
accordance with it.
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