This is another passage from Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, which appeared in Poland in 1937 and caused a scandal. Now everyone has caught the sound of this sort of mood-shifting prose. It has moved from the provinces and ghettos of Eastern Europe to New York City; now graduate students in writing and comedians can reel it out like yard goods.
The voice of the crank narrator is modernist in its distance, irony, and alienation; it is a mood composed of many shifting moods. Another subspecies of fine writing is even more contemporary. I have no name for this. It is a dense extreme of fine writing.
This prose repeats a fiction’s narrative collage in a prose collage. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it proceeds by the same leaping transitions and bizarre juxtapositions of voice, diction, and image as the fiction as a whole does. It may use the present tense: he walks, he remembers his father, his father is running. This flattens time and lends a floating, objectlike quality to the narrative. (Oddly, the eighteenth-century novelists used the present tense for immediacy. Now we have learned to use it for distance.) This prose is, above all, a wrought verbal surface. It changes subjects as often as it changes moods; it presents an array of all the world’s objects moving so fast they spin. It whirls us on a tour of language. It does not pause to examine any object; the verbal surface is itself the object.
William Gaddis and Denis Johnson use this prose in fiction. Anne Carson and Albert Goldbarth use it in vivid narrative essays. Mark Strand and W. S. Merwin use it in lyrics short as poems—as Rimbaud did in Illuminations. This prose is a shifting and refracting language surface whose subject matter is largely its own technique. The world, flattened and fragmented, becomes for the reader a vivid and ironic memory in chips and dots. Such works are objects composed of glittering language cemented by reference. The partly abstracted language surface is like a paint surface that replaces deep space. No sentimentality interferes with formal development. The pleasure such prose affords to the senses, and its attraction to the mind, may be considerable.
A very self-conscious, hammering prose is difficult to sustain over the length of a novel. Even if the writer can keep hammering, the reader may balk at being hammered. A fiction writer does well to unify dense prose with a voice. An English writer, Nik Cohn, wrote a novel using such an opaque voice. Arfur, published in the seventies, combined the rhythms of a rarefied New Orleans jazz slang with the vocabulary of pinball (!) to make a brilliant piece of fine writing. Cohn refers to “a very mosey style of walk, adopted off the riverboats, known as shooting the agate.” “Willie the Pleaser,” he writes alliteratively, “he was a cheat without equal, and he taught me many strokes, how to flare, how to float, how to flick from the elbow, so that I became an expert in all the paths of subterfuge.”
Since Dorothy Richardson, stream-of-consciousness convention has provided a handy narrative occasion for technical collages—like Ulysses, like The Sound and the Fury, Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep, and Tillie Olsen’s “Hey Sailor, What Ship?” These and many others are rich and broken cubist surfaces. Their very intimacy, on the other hand, makes them anathema to those postmodernist writers who prefer to handle characters from great authorial distance, as if with tongs. For Borges and Nabokov, who despised Freud, stream-of-consciousness prose is suspect for its perilous proximity to matters subconscious, which in turn is entirely contaminated by the enthusiastic attention of amateurs.
There are abuses. In the nineteenth century, fancy-writing abuses ran to the pious sublime, and in our own, to the private ridiculous. Here is a fragment from Beckett’s How It Is:
my life a voice without quaqua on all sides wordscraps then nothing then again more words more scraps the same ill-spoken ill-heard then nothing vast stretch of time then in me in the vault bone-white if there were light bits and scraps ten seconds fifteen seconds ill-heard ill-murmured ill-heard ill-recorded my whole life a gibberish garbled six-fold.
Or do you prefer this? It is William Burroughs, writing in A Distant Hand Lifted:
You/and I/sad old/broken film/knife/cough/it lands in/cough/present time/long cough/decoding arrest/wasn’t it?::::::cough/immediacy/cough/empty arteries must tell you/cough/“adios”/who else?/cough/drew Sept. 17, 1899 over New York???
Sometimes too-dense fine writing is simply a psychological tic on the writer’s part. The prose of the first thirty pages of Nabokov’s Ada is a barrage of language released from occasion. It is a breastwork of puns and cryptic allusions which effectively defend the novel’s contents from the reader’s interest, until Nabokov is good and ready. The opening of Cormac McCarthy’s excellent Blood Meridian and his Suttree are similarly obscure. So, for that matter, is the opening of War and Peace—but not because of its prose. Many great writers accidentally release and reveal a certain amount of self-consciousness, anxiety, or even hostility as they settle in, or resign themselves, to the task.
Fine writing is still with us. Density, even lushness, and formal diction, forceful rhythms, dramatically fused imagery, and a degree of metaphorical splendor—these qualities still obtain. Henry James launched the century with a splash: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl. It is hard to see why writers write anything else after James, and readers read anyone else, but literature persists.
Here in the generalized category of fine writing belong the brittle sarcasms of Nabokov, and his much-wrought tendernesses, and especially his cryptographs—those challenges to literary criticism and parodies of its finds that are such red herrings to young writers, who must endlessly be relieved of the notion that the critic’s role is to “find the hidden meanings” and the writer’s role is to hide them, like Easter eggs. Here also belong the poignant lyricisms of Beckett, the embroideries of Gabriel García Márquez, the surrealisms of Italo Calvino, and the polished turns of Milan Kundera. Traditional in their elegances are E. M. Forster, the Ford Madox Ford of The Good Soldier, and Richard Hughes, Anthony Powell, Joyce Cary, Edna O’Brien, the D. M. Thomas of The White Hotel, Julian Barnes, and Graham Swift. In this country, grand stylists like E. L. Doctorow, Lee Smith, William Kennedy, Marilynne Robinson, Louis Begley, Denis Johnson, John Updike, and William Gass continue to expand the territory of fine writing.
Penetration may no longer be the fine writer’s intention. A fine writer may now, as in the eighteenth century, be ironic or playful as well as sincere. He may brandish his wealth of beauties in a traditional way, as a traditional painterly painter handles paint: to describe beautifully and suggestively, to engage us, to fashion a world in depth. Or he may go abstract, and raid the world for fleeting images from which to fashion a moody expressionistic surface. This is Gass: “The sun looks, through the mist, like a plum on the tree of heaven, or a bruise on the slope of your belly. Which? The grass crawls with frost.”
CALLING A SPADE A SPADE
Other twentieth-century writers avoid fine writing. Borges, interestingly, disclaimed his early story “The Circular Ruins” for its lush prose. Fine writing does indeed draw attention to a work’s surface, and in that it furthers modernist aims. But at the same time it is pleasing, emotional, and engaging, like quondam beautiful effects with paint. It is literary. It is always vulnerable to the charge of sacrificing accuracy, or even integrity, to the more unfashionable value, beauty. For these reasons it may be, in the name of purity, jettisoned.
With Flaubert a new value for prose styles emerges. Prose must not be elaborate, at risk of being lacy. Instead it should be, as the cliché goes, “honed to a bladelike edge.” This is a new sort of beauty in prose. Verbal dazzle, after all, is almost universally attractive; nineteenth-century Europeans admired it enormously. It takes a sophisticated ear, even a jaded ear, to appreciate the beauty and integrity of a careful simplicity. I am thinking here of the prose of Flaubert, Chekhov, Turgenev, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Wright Morris, Henry Green, and Borges.
This prose is, above all, clean. It is sparing in its use of adjectives and adverbs; it avoids relat
ive clauses and fancy punctuation; it forswears exotic lexicons and attention-getting verbs; it eschews splendid metaphors and cultured allusions. Instead it follows the dictum of William Carlos Williams: “no ideas but in things.”
Plain writing is by no means easy writing. The mot juste is an intellectual achievement. There is nothing relaxed about the pace of this prose; it is as restricted and taut as the pace of lyric poetry. The short sentences of plain prose have a good deal of blank space around them, as lines of lyric poetry do, and even as the abrupt utterances of Beckett characters do. They erupt against a backdrop of silence. These sentences are—in an extreme form of plain writing—objects themselves, objects that invite inspection and flaunt their simplicity. One could even, if one were cynical, accuse such plain sentences of the snobbery of Bauhaus design, or of high-tech furnishings, or of the unobtrusive dress suit: one could accuse them of ostentation. But I anticipate a theoretical flaw I have never encountered in fact. As it is actually used, this prose has one supreme function, which is not to call attention to itself, but to refer to the world.
This prose is not an end in itself but a means. It is, then, a useful prose. Each writer of course uses it in a different way. Borges uses it straightforwardly, and as invisibly as he can, to think, to handle bare ideas with control: “Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which each thing has its place; I deny the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked.” Robbe-Grillet uses it coldly and dryly, to alienate, to describe, and to lend his descriptions the illusion of scientific accuracy. His prose is a perceptual tool: “…the square in the far left-hand corner of the table corresponds to the base of a copper lamp now standing at the right-hand corner: a square base about an inch high…” Hemingway uses it as a ten-foot pole, to distance himself from events; he also uses it as chopsticks, to handle strong emotions without, in theory, becoming sticky: “On the other hand his father had the finest pair of eyes he had ever seen and Nick had loved him very much and for a long time.” (This flatness may be ludicrous. Hemingway once wrote, and discarded, the sentence, “Paris is a nice town.”)
Writers like Flaubert, Chekhov, Turgenev, Cather, and Knut Hamsun use this prose for many purposes: not only to control emotion, but also to build an imaginative world whose parts seem solidly actual and lighted, and to name the multiple aspects of experience one by one, with distance, and also with tenderness and respect. Wright Morris is a careful writer of unadorned prose. He wrote, “The father talks to his son. The son listens and watches his father eat soup.”
This prose is craftsmanlike. It possesses beauty and power without syntactical complexity. Because of its simplicity, writers use this prose to handle children, as Joy Williams does often in her stories in Taking Care. These children see the lives around them with mocking irony. Philosophically, they stick to facts, as though they believed that where we cannot be certain, we should be silent. The effect is deadpan: “There is Jane and there is Jackson and there is David. There is the dog.”
Many Western writers (like Jim Harrison), many if not most Scandinavian writers (like Knut Hamsun, Pär Lagerkvist, and F. E. Sillanpää), and other writers of scenes rural (like Flannery O’Connor in the South and John Berger in France) use plain prose to handle characters who do not belong in a drawing room, but are not merely picturesque rustics like Hardy’s. Plain prose follows such characters intimately, lovingly, even a little ironically, and always with respect. It is a perfected prose of surpassing delicacy, control, and power. It honors the world because the characters honor the world. Listen to these adjectives:
Floyd Warner kept a calendar on which he jotted what sort of day it was, every day of the year. Windy, overcast, drizzly, rain, clear and cool, clear and warm, and all through October he put simply, Dandy. Practically every day was dandy, and that had been true over the years. (Wright Morris, Fire Sermon)
This prose is a kind of literary vernacular. It possesses the virtues of beauty, clarity, and strength without embellishment.
In England, Henry Green also writes very often from the minds of people who are not formally educated and who know the world and love it on its merits. Green’s prose is sometimes stylized to the point of self-consciousness. It is so plain it distracts as much as any fancy writing. Almost any experimental writing is fine writing; Green’s is experimental plain writing. At its quirkiest, it omits articles for the sake of concision, and sounds like Tonto: “Mr. Cragan smoked pipe, already room was blurred by smoke from it.” The warped purity of such sentences in Living achieves a watercolor lyricism: “Just then Mr. Dupret in sleep, died, in sleep.” “What happened of her. What did her come to?”
Plain prose is almost requisite for handling violent or emotional scenes without eliciting dismay or nausea in the reader. We have long since tired of imitation fine writing, of bad fine writing, of the overwritten straining prose that we find not only in unskilled and youthful literature but also in junk fiction—and we tire of it especially in the wringingly emotional and violent scenes of which failed literature and junk are made. So unless he is William Faulkner, a serious writer of this century has little other recourse than to plain writing for violent and emotional scenes. If a writer wants to play safe, he will underwrite drama. Plain prose affords distance; it permits scenes to be effective on their narrative virtues, not on the overwrought insistence of their author’s prose. The central love scene of Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume “A Dance to the Music of Time” ends unforgettably: “I took her in my arms.”
There is something about plain writing that smacks of moral goodness. Interestingly, many writers turn to it more and more as they get older. (The exception is Joyce, whose writing gets steadily fancier and worse as he ages.) There is a modesty to it. Paul Horgan uses it in his “Richard” trilogy, a series of novels that take the form of autobiography. Henry Green uses it in his autobiography; Graham Greene uses it in his autobiography. It is a mature prose. It honors the world. It is courteous. Its credo might be that of French entomologist J. Henri Fabre: “Lucidity is the sovereign politeness of the writer. I do my best to achieve it.” Part of its politeness to readers is based on respect; this prose credits readers with feeling and intelligence. It does not explain events in all their ramifications; it does not color a scene emotionally.
This prose is humble. It calls attention not to itself but to the world. It is intimate with character; it is sympathetic and may be democratic. It submits to the world; it is honest. It praises the world by seeing it. It seems even to believe in the world it honors with so much careful attention. In the nineteenth century, readers liked their prose syntactically baroque and morally elevating. Each bit of world was a chip off the old sublime, and tended distressingly, in the prose that described it, to ascend to heaven before we got to know it.
Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs…(Walden)
Our reaction to such ebullience is of course to reverse it. We have modern tastes and like writing that is precise and uncluttered. We are agnostic or materialist and like writing fastened to the world of things. This plain prose represents literature’s new morality. It honors each thing one by one, without metaphor. No angelic systems need be dragged in by the hair to sprinkle upon objects a borrowed splendor. Instead, each of the world’s unique objects is the site of its own truth and goodness. Each thing is its own context for meaning. Its virtue is its stubborn uniqueness, in its resistance to generalization, and even in its resistance to our final knowledge of it. The most general trend we know is speciation.
Plain prose can be polished to transparency without losing strength. At its best, its form follows its function so accurately that its very purity and hard-won simplicity excite our admiration almost in spite of themselves. It does not err on the
side of exuberance. It does, in theory, win through to material “things as they are”—things seen without bias or motive. That can be its epistemological claim. Aesthetically it can claim control, purity, and the dignity of material essences. And it can claim the just precision of a tool, the spareness of bone, the clarity of light. Do not confuse these claims with the clichés of contemporary craftsmen in materials who labor to help you understand that a wooden spoon may have integrity, a wooden apple barrel may have dignity, a wooden bench simple functional beauty, so that you labor in turn to find some kindling and a match. There is nothing clichéd about clear prose yet. For all its virtues, fine writing may be a mere pyrotechnic display, dazzling and done. And plain writing is not a pyrotechnic display, but a lamp.
I have contrasted these two categories of written prose as if they were opposites—and indeed they are. They are ends of a spectrum. If we put radically experimental prose together with dense and shifting prose collage at one end of the spectrum, we must put at the other end a plain, humble prose that points to the world. It is a broad spectrum. It extends clear from the art end of art to the life end of art. Naturally, most writers of this century, including the historical modernists themselves, write a prose that falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum—just as the stories and novels themselves do. The prose, that is, points to a world we can enter, a world of emotional depth analogous to Renaissance painting’s deep space; the prose, insofar as it refers, is invisible. Simultaneously, this prose builds a complex patterned, and semi-opaque, technical surface.
If we call very opaque modernist prose a painted sphere, and plain prose a clear windowpane, then we will see that these are extremes; most literary prose belongs somewhere in the middle. Or if we call fancy experimental prose “poetry” and plain prose “science,” then again we will see that most prose falls somewhere in the middle. In this middle ground we have contemporaries writing complex modernist fiction using straightforward prose. We have writers using dislocated prose to tell stories of intimacy and depth. We have most frequently writers of traditional literature modified by this century’s concerns, who use a beautiful and strong literary prose that may be flat, tough, or shifting. This prose is at once perfectly clean and capable of stunning elegance.