July 29, 2022
This is the second part of our discussion of the pleasures of language, in which we move from nonfiction to the language of literature itself, not that there is always a clear dividing line. We bring with us our hopefully-useful diagram of rhetorical possibilities, rhetoric being the study of language that works on people rather than objectively reporting facts and ideas—moves them, persuades them, changes them. It is a diagram of twin axes, vertical and horizontal, each of which is a spectrum of possibilities. The vertical axis represents a range of high, middle, and low styles, a distinction going back to the old Classical rhetoric books. In modern nonfiction writing, these become formal, conversational (or informal) and popular usage.
Applied to literature, this distinction becomes more complicated, but it may help us to understand a crucial difference between modern and older literary styles, one that puzzled me when I was a student but which no one seemed to talk about, much less justify. Formal style in literature means something quite different from its nonfictional definition as the objective factual and conceptual language of science and the law. Older formal literary style is indeed a “high” style,” elevated, lifted up beyond the common level. It is a language of authority, the authority of an elite upper class educated in the way necessary to produce and understand such language. Undergraduates taking a survey of earlier British literature, up through the 18th century, may find themselves wondering: why did they all write in such a complicated, artificial, difficult manner, whose ornate pretensions muffle any true voice of feeling? In Shakespeare’s history play Henry IV, Part 1, when King Henry furiously upbraids some of his followers, he emits the following:
My blood hath been too cold and temperate, Unapt to stir at these indignities, And you have found me, for accordingly You tread upon my patience… (1.3.1-4)
Is earlier English literature a stylistic dark age before the invention of freshman comp, in which people finally began to be taught to write naturally, as they speak? Worse, did they perhaps actually speak like that? The answer is yes, and dressed like it too. The artificial rhetoric has the same purpose as the artificial dress, all the lace and satin and corsets and wigs and codpieces we see in the old paintings: to remake and refine nature into culture, the “natural man” into the “gentleman” and “gentlewoman.” They were trained in elaborate language and elaborate manners—“they” being an aristocratic elite for whom the artifice is a symbol of authority and superiority.
In the very next scene, in a tavern, when Prince Hal and Falstaff are bantering, the
situation is complex because both characters are slumming: Hall is pretending to be just one of the guys, and Falstaff is a renegade to his class, for he is really Sir John. However, the style abruptly shifts into a lower gear, from poetry to prose, from aristocratic formality to the colloquial:
Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? (2.1-4)
A famous passage in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry provides the rationale for the artificial splendor of literary high style. Hamlet exhorted the Players to hold the mirror up to nature, but in fact, Sidney says, the task of the poet is to improve nature, which is imperfect and fallen:
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done…Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.
The 700 pages of Sidney’s prose romance, the Arcadia, are apt to leave modern readers as glazed as the relentlessly polished surface of its style. And yet, some modern readers do respond to the old high rhetoric, enough to make E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1926) one of the classics of modern fantasy, despite, or rather because, of its archaic style:
Now the Queen carried them into her palace, and into a great hall where was her throne and state. The pillars of the hall were as vast towers, and there were galleries above them, tier upon tier, rising higher than sight could reach or the light of the gentle lamps in their stands that lighted the tables and the floor…and on the walls strange portraitures; lions, dragons, nickers of the sea, spread-eagles, elephants, swans, unicorns, and other, lively made and richly set forth with curious colours of painting: all of giant size beyond the experience of human kind so that to be in that hall was as it were to shelter in a small spot of light and life, canopied, vaulted, and embraced by the circumambient unknown.
We know from Eddison’s later Zimiamvian trilogy that he was possessed by a nostalgia for the good old aristocratic days. Another recreator of the high rhetorical style in modern fantasy is Lord Dunsany, author of tales such as “The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth,” and whose very name was high style: Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany. Eddison and Dunsany are among the great names in the history of fantasy, and readers love them not despite their high formality but partly because of it.
Still, by the 18th century, the old aristocratic order was worn out, and the high rhetorical style along with, in poetry the latter dwindling to what the Augustan age called poetic diction. Don’t say “a school of fish” when you could say “the finny tribe,” and don’t use “low” words at all—to say “put on your pants” is vulgar.
But a new age was coming in, of democracy and the middle class. Wordsworth’s famous Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798) was an attack on poetic diction in favor of “the real language used by men.” Sidney’s ideal of a poetry that takes a brazen nature and makes it golden is dismissed as “gilding the lily.” An ambiguity remained, however, indicated by the fact that the style of Wordsworth’s own poetry was not truly popular but middle or conversational style. Indeed, the conversational blank verse of his epic, The Prelude, elevates itself at moments of intensity to its own kind of high style, influenced by Milton. The ambiguity, which was not just Wordsworth’s, was as much social as aesthetic. The middle class ideal of the 18th and 19th centuries was not proletarian but genteel, and the ideal of the “gentleman,” not of aristocratic lineage but nonetheless refined, educated, and respectable, produced a style that was still by modern standards stiff and mannered, although the intent was rather to be “mannerly.”
Writers varied in their ability to get around the restrictions of the genteel style. Walter Scott and his American disciple James Fenimore Cooper managed to be important writers despite being weighed down by it. This is the opening of Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans—an adventure story, mind you, of the French and Indian Wars:
It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered, before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide, and, apparently, an impervious boundary of forests, severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict. But, emulating the patience and self-denial of the practised native warriors, they learned to overcome every difficulty; and it would seem, that in time, there was no recess of the woods so dark, nor any secret place so lovely, that it might claim exemption from the inroads of those who had pledged their blood to satiate their vengeance, or to uphold the cold and selfish policy of the distant monarchs of Europe.
The hardy colonist is not the only one struggling for a long time to effect the rugged passes and traverse short distances.
But in the United States the revolutionary spirit went much farther in throwing off the genteel style in favor of a genuinely conversational one, and one of the chief innovators was Mark Twain. Compare the Cooper passage to the following, from Twain’s Roughing It:
Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to get one Jim Blaine to tell me the story of his grandfather’s old ram—but they always added that I should not mention the matter unless Jim was drunk at the time—just comfortably and sociably drunk.
And of course in his greatest work, Twain boldly took the risk of telling an entire story in a genuinely popular style, through the voice of an uneducated young boy named Huck Finn.
The replacement of the old genteel version of high style with a conversational style seasoned with a bit of popular, street style took place in poetry as well. Again, juxtaposed examples get the idea across more effectively than any explanation. The elite high style of William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” begins with its title: you have to know Greek to know that it means “view of death”:
To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language, for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And gentle sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere he is aware.
Compare the famous opening of Whitman’s Song of Myself:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
Twain was not willing simply to offer an alternative: he published a wildly funny attack on Cooper in two parts called “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” and “Fenimore Cooper’s Further Literary Offences: Cooper’s Prose Style.” In high school, my best friend Dennis and I thought it was one of the funniest things we had ever read: it honed our adolescent snarkiness even as it gave us valuable lessons in precision of language. You can find it on the Internet—I recommend it as both instructive and entertaining. Twain’s central point is that an orotund style may function not just as a class marker but as a disguise for ineptitude. He makes his point with devastating humor: Cooper is one of those writers who combine deep archetypal power with a surface half-literacy. In the first of his essays, Twain lists 18 stylistic rules violated by Cooper in every work he wrote. I sometimes quote rule 13 to my students: “Use the right word, not its second cousin.” But it is not so simple as not knowing the precise meanings, let alone nuances, of words. In the second essay, Twain quotes a passage in which Cooper repeatedly throws in extra words and uses big, overblown expressions where simple ones would have sufficed. Any writing teacher will recognize what is going on: not an insufficient vocabulary but a desire to sound impressive:
Notwithstanding the swiftness of their flight, one of the Indians had found an opportunity to strike a straggling fawn with an arrow, and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place. Without any aid from the science of cookery, he was immediately employed, in common with his fellows, in gorging himself with this digestable substance.
Twain spends a whole hilarious paragraph dismantling the first sentence of this indigestable substance:
We don’t care what the Indian struck the fawn with; we don’t care whether it was a struggling fawn or an unstruggling one; we don’t care which fragments the Indian saved; we don’t care why he saved the “more” preferable ones when the merely preferable ones would have amounted to just the same thing and couldn’t have been told from the more preferable ones by anybody, dead or alive; we don’t care whether the Indian carried them on his shoulders or in his handkerchief; and finally, we don’t care whether he carried them patiently or struck for higher pay and shorter hours. We are indifferent to that Indian and all his affairs. There was only one fact in that long sentence that was worth stating, and it could have been squeezed into these few words—and with advantage to the narrative, too: “During the flight one of the Indians had killed a fawn and he brought it into camp.”
Twain ends his first article by saying, “There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now,” politely suppressing the obvious inference that this kind of writing is what killed them—or “hastened their untimely demise” as Cooper would no doubt have said. Twain reduces that first sentence to a short, factual statement: the rest is the megaphone of the Wizard of Oz.
However, the utilitarian, just-get-the-job-done prose of American realism and naturalism, which increasingly replaced the rhetoric of cultivated gentility, was capable of its own tone-deaf ineptitude. Like most of the realists, Stephen Crane, who gave up quickly on university education and turned to journalism, was more interested in honesty and authenticity than in being mistaken for Oscar Wilde. However, style is not just a matter of polish but of precision and control, and, past a point, an unfocused style blurs the most honest vision, distracts with its awkwardness at the very moment of emotional intensity, as in this line from “The Blue Hotel,” in which a man looks at a bottle of whisky: “The weak-kneed Swede was about to eagerly clutch this element of strength, but he suddenly jerked his hand away and cast a look of horror on Scully.” Additionally, in the later 19th century, alongside pedestrian but artistically serious writers like Crane, a vast industry of popular formula writing such as we examined in a previous newsletter grew up to appeal to a mass population with no elite educational background. Nor did the writers themselves always have much educational background, elite or otherwise. The dime novels of Twain’s era gave way to the pulp magazines of the early 20th century, out of which American science fiction developed, and these were partly supplemented, partly superseded by the paperback revolution after World War II.
I first read Twain’s sendup of Cooper around the same time that I read the first important book of science fiction criticism, a collection of articles and book reviews called In Search of Wonder (1956, 1967) by Damon Knight. Knight was a highly intelligent, wonderfully witty reviewer: I have wondered whether Twain was not the model for his annihilating essay on A.E. van Vogt, a pulp writer of the 1940’s whom critics as brilliant as Fredric Jameson profess to find something of value in, although I simply cannot see it. Twain and Knight have at least one thing in common: even though they are clearly enjoying themselves, they are not just indulging in the pleasure of a thoroughgoing hatchet job but are trying to raise the bar for fiction writing in their time. Knight was a member of the generation in which science fiction became serious literature for the first time, and he used his reviews to raise consciousness. The works Knight demolished have long passed into oblivion, but his reviews provide a historical perspective on how untutored truly popular writing really has been. It is worth thinking about, because we are once again faced with a comparable situation. Just as it has become impossible for writing so unsophisticated as some of the books Knight reviewed to be published any longer by the major and the small literary publishers, along comes the Internet, and, with it, self-publishing, print on demand, fan fiction, and so on. I am not striking, or advocating, a moral pose, ranting against the tide of illiteracy washing over the bastions of what is left of Western civilization. Naïve popular writing is harmless, and some of it has its own goofy charm. Knight’s attitude is mostly good natured, satirizing these hack writers as Shakespeare satirized his low-life characters—whose most frequent comic trait, in fact, was the mangling of the English language.
Some of his ridicule was directed at examples of what James Blish, another important early reviewer-critic of science fiction, called an idiot plot: a plot that could not work unless everyone involved was an idiot. Yet although he was examining works of a commercial plot-driven genre, it is fascinating how much time he spent talking about style. The oldest book Knight reviews is The Blind Spot, by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint, from 1921. He is reviewing it because it kept getting republished as a “classic,” even though the stylistic obtuseness of the authors is jaw-dropping. Examples:
For years he had been battering down the skepticism that had bulwarked itself in the material.
…he had backtracked on his previous acts so as to side in with the facts…
It was a stagger for both young men.
There was a resemblance to Rhamda Avec that ran almost to counterpart.
She is fire and flesh and carnal—…at whose feet fools and wise men would slavishly frolic and folly.
In another novel, one character recites a self-composed bit of doggerel whose final line is “We will trod the Milky Way,” to which another responds, “You can sell that, Marc.”
In yet another novel, the following description:
[She] came out of the bed with a single leap that carried her a good two feet into the middle of the room. She stood there on tiptoe, her head thrown back, her body arched rigidly.
Knight remarks that two pages later she hasn’t moved a muscle.
Finally, the master himself, A.E. van Vogt, one of whose stories probably inspired the Alien movies:
His mind held nothing that could be related to physical structure. He hadn’t eaten, definitely and unequivocally.
Gosseyn’s intestinal fortitude strove to climb into his throat, and settled into position again only reluctantly as the acceleration ended.
His leveling off on a basis of unqualified boldness permitted no time gap.
His brain was turning rapidly in an illusion of spinning.
As is the reader’s by this time. It is understandable that someone like Margaret Atwood does not want to be associated with science fiction even as she continues to write it. I only add that the history of science fiction is one of a popular genre somehow learning to transcend itself in the most unexpected way. Consider the fantasist Harlan Ellison, who grew up in Painesville, Ohio about an hour from where I live, like Stephen Crane bounced out of college after about a year, like Crane went into journalistic nonfiction, and whose early work in the formula fiction markets of the 1950’s was typical hackwork written for pennies a word—yet who somehow, unlike Crane, transformed himself into a prose stylist, an uneven one sometimes, but at his best unforgettable. When I was eighteen, a line from Ellison’s story “Bright Eyes” produced in me what James Joyce called “aesthetic arrest”: “No stars chip-ice twittered insanely against that night; for in truth the night was mad enough.” The relationship between popular formula fiction and literary writing is a very complex one.
The conversational middle style is more or less inevitable for realistic literary fiction: its “window pane prose” gives the illusion that we are looking through it directly at reality, unembellished by “style.” But, like the nonfictional prose we sampled in the last newsletter, fictional prose is capable of shifting “horizontally” towards the lyrical or the satirical, the oracular or the witty. A shift into poetic style arrests the straightforward narrative and plunges it into mysterious depths. A writer who uses this technique with great effectiveness is Alice Munro. A story called “Oh, What Avails” begins in a humdrum neutral style:
They are in the living room. The varnished floor is bare except for the rug in front of the china cabinet. There is not much furniture—a long table, some chairs, the piano, the china cabinet.
But a while later, we get the following:
It’s just this—that suddenly, without warning, Joan is apt to think: Rubble. Rubble. You can look down a street, and you can see the shadows, the light, the brick walls, the truck parked under a tree, the dog lying on the sidewalk, the dark summer awning, or the grayed snowdrift—you can see these things in their temporary separateness, all connected underneath in such a troubling, satisfying necessary, indescribable way. Or you can see rubble. Passing states, a useless variety of passing states. Rubble.
In “Pictures of the Ice,” two people, Karin and Austin, go down to the lake in winter after a storm because Austin wants to take photos of the shapes the wind makes of the ice. Most of the narrative is in middle style with a touch of the colloquial because it is from the uneducated Karin’s point of view: “Karin is nervous when Austin stands alone to take pictures. He seems shaky to her—and what if he fell? He could break a leg, a hip. Old people break a hip and that’s the end of them.” But this is the description of the ice:
And all the playground equipment, the children’s swings and climbing bars, has been transformed by ice, hung with organ pipes or buried in what looks like half-carved statues, shapes of ice that might be people, animals, angels, monsters, left unfinished.
Munro never shows off by trying to sound poetic. These moments, to a discerning reader, are keys to their respective stories.
Huck Finn inaugurated a new fictional project of trying to find ways to write not just from the point of view of uneducated, underprivileged or otherwise challenged characters but with their actual voice. One way to get around the limitations of such a character’s narrow perspective is by stylistic counterpoint. In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, sometimes the story is told by one of the characters:
The first time me and Lafe picked on down the row. Pa dassent sweat because he will catch his death from the sickness so that everybody that comes to help us. And Jewel dont care about anything he is not kin to us in caring, not care-kin.
At other times, an uncharacterized narrator breaks into a vivid lyricism:
When Jewel can almost touch him, the horse stands on his hind legs and slashes down at Jewel. Then Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings…
Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” however, follows the Huck Finn pattern of staying within the confines of a limited character’s language and point of view. At least, we begin by assuming that the unnamed narrator is limited—ignorant, socially inept, vulgar, likely at any moment to blurt out something inappropriate. But we slowly begin to realize that we think of him that way because that is how his wife thinks of him and how he thinks of himself, which makes him intensely insecure. He is terrifically uncomfortable having to relate to his wife’s blind friend, and is constantly making gauche remarks, at least to himself: “The blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say.” And yet he spends nearly a page imagining the tragedy of the blind man’s recent loss of his wife; the awkward language does not disguise the genuine feeling:
She died in a Seattle hospital room, the blind man sitting beside the bed and holding on to her hand. They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together—had sex, sure—and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding.
The end of the story is a tour de force in which the two men draw a cathedral together as a way of helping the blind man, Robert, imagine what a cathedral is like, the narrator with his eyes closed. But what really happens is that the narrator breaks out of his own limitations, which were emotional and had nothing to do with education or social class. In the story’s last lines, he says, “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. ‘It’s really something,’ I said.” The only thing he can think to say is pathetically inarticulate. But that is not because he is limited. It is because he has had an intuition of something unlimited, something the people of the Middle Ages built entire cathedrals trying to express, something that is beyond all language, yet which all language is trying to express.
Correction:
In the newsletter on laughter, I named the three great silent-film comedians as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Ross. I meant Harold Lloyd. Harold Ross was the founder of The New Yorker. He talked. My apologies. Thanks (as usual) to Dennis McCurdy for catching the error.