I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with themselves and, having completed a stint, deny themselves nothing that will not prejudice the next.
II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this régime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.
III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.
IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.
V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.
VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process. Nulla dies sine linea [“no day without a line” (Apelles ex Pliny)] — but there may well be weeks.
X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.
XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.
XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.
“The art of shaddowes you must know well… it is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work.”
– Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd
My latest obsession is Blake. I’m going through a collation of his poems and prophecies, part of an Everyman library rescued from a condemned building. It’s far from my first encounter, of course; to repurpose Kant’s line on Hume, when I was eighteen The Marriage of Heaven and Hell woke me from my dogmatic Catholic slumbers, and every time I go back to him I think of how he defies categorisation and therefore canonisation. Even though he was a contemporary of the Romantics, nobody with a proper familiarity with their work would ever think “Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake,” nor “Shelley, Keats, Blake.” His urbanism makes “Blake, Leopardi, Byron” a tantalising, but still probably false, trinity, owing to Blake’s obscurity in his own lifetime. As a progression of European “revealed” poetry from Medieval to Modern, “Dante, Milton, Blake” doesn’t seem quite right, either, despite Blake having illustrated one and written on the other, and only Yeats comes near him as a visionary lyric poet. As a visual artist, Blake obviously sticks out like a sore thumb among his contemporaries (and enemies) like Reynolds and the exhibited painters of the Royal Academy, but also seems too idiosyncratic to slide easily into formulation with his acquaintance and influence Fuseli. If he has an equivalent on the continent, it’s probably late Goya of the infamous Black Paintings, but only in the sense that genius is sure to madness near aligned.
Yet there have always been those to whom Blake is central in the history of English imaginative culture: more so than Shakespeare, whether they’d consciously admit that or not. I’ve been thinking for a while about the Canon, and I mean that in the most reified and rarefied Harold Bloom-esque sense, and how it seems to have its own Jungian Shadow. Two souls are housed within England’s literary breast, not so much wrestling for mastery but complimenting each other: the England of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, and that of Blake, Swinburne, and J.G. Ballard.
As this Shadow Canon beyond Britain, whom would it contain? The primary criteria for membership would be that the art cause the effect Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy:
a phenomenon which is the reverse of a well known optical one: When we make a determined attempt to look directly at the sun and turn away blinded, we have dark coloured specks in front of our eyes, like a remedy. Those illuminated illusory pictures of the Sophoclean heroes are the reverse of that.
Yet the Shadow Canon is not merely Sophoclean, nor narrowly Dionysian. (Much of Blake’s work is Apollonian in character.) One also cannot be wholly excluded because of Bloomian or True Canonicity. Dostoevsky of Notes from Underground, The Double and parts of Crime and Punishment is Shadow Canonical; Dostoevsky of The BrothersKaramazov, The Gambler, and The Idiot is not. The John Donne who wrote the Flea or called upon his god to “ravish” him would certainly qualify, as would Melville at his stormiest, Dante throughout the Inferno, and Goethe at his darkest moments of Faustian reflection.
Indeed, the Shadow Canon seems to turn on a Dionysian-Faustian-Orphic access, and its twin motivating powers are Decadence and duende. Yet being decadent or adhering to duende alone does not guarantee membership. With Salomé, Wilde is banging on this dark door, but who would let him enter? There’s too much façade, not enough nave. So a certain amount of raw emotional honestly is necessary, which might actually incline one to perform regular checks on early entrant Mr Swinburne to make sure he isn’t just making off with the club crockery. The inverse of this is Pessoa, who seems the perfect candidate for Shadow Canonicity in his moody idiosyncrasies, and yet his duende is too much the faux-humble proffering of an unsure heart for sacrifice, all sodden eyes and lowered head; the cult of loneliness that formed around him would make access to a vibrant pantheon difficult. We prefer the sheer bleak energy of Lorca – our poets must burn, not smoulder.
Wilde’s mistake was to covet, as an Irishman, a French national sport. The true easy decadence of Baudelaire might be enough to allow him, but one would have no hesitation at all permitting Blanchot, De Sade, Bataille, or the (Argentinean, but Francophone) Lautréamont.
If I tell you that the latter – subterranean, relatively obscure, mercurial, a poète maudit – is as close to a central figure as this canon can get, you might start to understand what I mean. If not, let me list some other names:
Thomas de Quincy
Emily Dickinson
Georg Trakl
Clarice Lispector
Jean Genet
William S. Burroughs
Ishmael Reed
Kathy Acker
Thomas M. Disch
Samuel R. Delany
Iain Sinclair
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Derek Raymond
Eileen Myles
Grant Morrison
Dennis Cooper
Just how you can work out that D E F, despite not containing any of the same constituents, is part of a sequence that began A B C, I hope you can see where I’m coming from. Some of the above are excluded from or are on the waiting list for the true Canon (Genet), others are fully fledged members (Dickinson). Some are counter-culture drug users (Burroughs), others aren’t (Sinclair). Some are there because they have correspondences in the true Canon (consider Trakl as the dark reflection of Wilfred Owen), others are so strange as to have nobody else like them even in opposition (Jodorowsky, who is incidentally the Canon’s greatest representative in film – try going “Welles, Hitchcock, Jodo” or even “Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Jodo” and see what I mean). Some are un-Canonical because of being genre writers (Delany, Raymond, Morrison), others are not. We note that most are queer, but it’s not a prerequisite. (De Quincy was married with eight children.) Some are suicides (Disch) or died young (Lautréamont), others reside in aged vitality (Myles).
Perhaps the only thing that unifies all these names is that they operate at the bleeding edge of culture. If the Canon is a tree, these artists are either the rich, rotting soil beneath or the fermenting fruit at the very tips. As much as I love Shakespeare and admire Milton, there are days when I think these others are the only writers worth reading.
Whether or not he ever stated it in so many words, that Proust felt the Dreyfus Affair was a definitive test of character comes across strongly during In Search of Lost Time – a test that lots of people, some of whom he liked and admired, failed.
Living through what will surely be seen by historians as a time of global political cataclysm, it’s hard to resist the temptation to think of every big debate or event in those terms, whether it be Brexit, Trump, Russia, Charlottesville, or #Me2.
Maybe it’s because we Millennials fall into the “Hero” archetype on the Strauss-Howe axis, and that the previous “Hero” generation would have been the same if they hadn’t had the literal Nazis to fight; or perhaps Strauss-Howe is a bunch of pseudo-social-scientific hokum and the documented polarising effects of social media, and instant/perpetual access to it, are more likely culprits.
Some of those debates or events are genuine tests, though. Watching a BBC documentary about it this week, I wonder how I would have reacted at the time of the Rushdie Affair. It’s now agreed by all and sundry that e.g. John Le Carré found himself on the Wrong Side of the Argument, which is closely akin to the dreaded Wrong Side of History. But in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015, after my initial reaction of unmitigated disdain and revulsion for the killers, I remember feeling an ambivalence about the victims that will probably seem just as quislingesque in the coming years as Rushdie’s detractors in 1989 look to us now, and publicly (well, on Facebook) compared the cartoonists to John McClane walking around Harlem with a “I HATE NIGGERS” sign.
I’ve watched the Labour anti-Semitism debate unfold with no small degree of horror over the past few years now, and while my left-wing anti-racist instincts have screamed for me to stick my flag in the ground before it’s too late, the (psychological) land seems to shift and bubble up beneath me every time I try to. Because I deeply hate the stupid personality cult that grew and hardened around Corbyn like a jizz-encrusted sock upon his ascension to party leader, I’m constantly trying not to hate the person at the centre of it, who seems as bemused by it all as I am. So when stories of him defending obviously anti-Semitic murals or “honouring” terrorists behind the Munich massacre pop up in the press, I find myself expending an unusual amount of mental energy understanding an explanatory context for someone I don’t have a great deal of regard for. (Also because my brain gets itchy if I ever find myself sharing the ostensible moral outrage of the Daily Mail and the leader of the Conservative Party.)
Usually, it turns out Corbyn is more guilty of stupidity or thoughtlessness than a conscious or unconscious hatred of Jews. That’s simply not good enough, and probably does enable the more insidious forms of “soft” (to appropriate a Deborah Lipstadt word) anti-Semitism that are genuinely present on the British left, and in quantities I, as a Northern socialist, was somehow ignorant of.
And yet, I detect on my side of the debate (almost inevitably the David Schneider position, albeit less optimistic in my case) a flavour of the detestable liberal-left fetish for political self-flagellation that allows centre- and hard-right politics to be so dominant in this country – politics that tend far more naturally towards anti-Semitism. At a time when the far-right is shooting up synagogues in Pittsburgh or gaslighting an entire country of Hungarians into thinking Jews are their enemy, that peculiarly English kind of navel-gazing is unseemly to me.
So here I am, on the sidelines about a potentially generation-defining issue, in a manner I’d find unforgivable had it been on Dreyfus or Rushdie. The sense that I’m failing a test is difficult to evade, but I remain mired in near-Oblomovian detachment from the whole thing.
I blew through the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time far too quickly, but Guermantes Way is different. One hundred pages of Proust describing a party during which a glass of water is knocked over tests the patience beyond a Bela Tarr-ian degree. (I’ll never forget the hour-long scene in Satantango consisting entirely of a fat doctor looking out of his window, falling over, and giving himself an insulin shot. One. Whole. Hour.) However, this leads to the Narrator’s first real encounter with the licentious Baron de Charlus, and not long after heavy or incisive critical blows begin to land. What other novel would include powerfully essayistic passages such as this?
“Today, people of taste tell us that Renoir is a great eighteenth century painter. But when they say this they forget Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To gain this sort of recognition, an original painter or an original writer follows the path of the occultist. His painting or his prose acts upon us like a course of treatment that is not always agreeable. When it is over, the practitioner says to us, “Now look.” And at this point the world (which was not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist is born) appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women. The carriages are also Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we want to go for a walk in a forest like the one that, when we first saw it, was anything but a forest — more like a tapestry, for instance, with innumerable shades of color but lacking precisely the colors appropriate to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe that has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe unleashed by a new painter or writer with an original view of the world.”
For as long as I can remember, my nan has had a canvas print of Renoir’s Dance at Bougival on her wall. Aside from Rossetti’s Beata Beatrice, it’s probably the first painting I became really familiar with, so it’s difficult to imagine a time when people simply refused to accept the figures he depicted were human beings.
A few pages later, Proust tears apart the discipline of sociology before it’s really gotten started:
“People foolishly imagine that the large-scale dimensions of social phenomena provide an excellent opportunity to penetrate further into the human soul; they ought, on the contrary, to realise that it is by sounding the depths of a single individual that they might have a chance of understanding that phenomena.”
It’s hard not to be reminded of George Eliot’s almost scientific assertion that Middlemarch is “A Study.” Czech sociologist Jan Keller has found this subject fertile enough ground for his as yet-untranslated book Condemned to Modernity, which is subtitled: What Sociology Seeks, Literature Found.
A Day at the Races by Steven Pinker. The world-famous linguist, statistician, historian, and prose theorist turns his hand to picking horses. By analysing form, breeding, weight, jockey and ground, Pinker skilfully weaves a brand new, fool-proof theory for beating the bookies at the tote.
Wash Your Ass by Jordan Peterson. After his mega-successful world tour, the world-famous clinical psychologist and academic doles out invaluable life advice for the billions of fans and admirers he met.
Isaac Newton: Charlatan by A.N. Wilson. The world-famous novelist, biographer and Moria orc brings some overdue balance to Newton’s reputation, unveiling him as a great hoaxer who could barely add up and who offered nothing but comforting reassurances and platitudes to a 17th century middle class. Foreword by Tom Wolfe.
How My Mates Talk to Each Other by Sally Rooney. The world-famous 12-year-old writing prodigy weaves another precocious novel about young twenty-somethings in Ireland who are so much more emotionally deep and interesting than anyone around them but spend their time doing and saying banal, unimpressive things.
Seriously, though. After shit like this:
2. Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.
…I can now well understand statisticians’ anger at Pinker a few years ago, when he rolled up to their hood and began spraying his foul scent all over the place.
In About Writing, Chip Delaney helpfully distinguishes between good writing and talented writing – only the former is about avoiding errors, sidestepping cliché, maintaining clarity etc. I know for a fact Pinker hasn’t read it, just like I know he’s never wrestled with those page-long sentences in Proust, the un-paragraphed rants in Bernhard, the bitter elliptical fragments of Celine. He’s never read Robert Louis Stevenson on the harmonious sound of delicate prose, or William Gass on Gaddis’ use of alliterative mid-word consonants, or Flaubert’s deliberate avoidance of assonance. He’s probably never even read about Martin Amis’s war on cliché.
He has read Strunk and White, and Fowler. He might have read some Nabokov. He therefore thinks he’s earned the right to lecture us on good prose, as if all writers needed was some jumped up little thug from the language labs to write a book stating the bleeding obvious. Watching a real novelist like Ian McEwan tongue his arsehole, as he did at one of those interminable Intelligence Squared fiascos, is unseemly. Whatever hideous middlebrow shite he’s been responsible for since, McEwan did at least write the Cement Garden.
Here are some notes I took from About Writing by Samuel R. Delany, which I could not recommend strongly enough for any budding authors or just people interested in the creative process of a novelist.
Pick a microstructure e.g. sentence of observation, sentence of analysis, sentence of observation, sentence of analysis and stick to it until you forget about it. These are like stabilisers on a bike. These can also get you going when you’ve slowed down.
Pick a megastructure and stick to it until it sinks in. E.g. a chapter about the protagonist, followed by one about two minor characters, followed by one about the villain, rinse wash repeat.
Scrutinise your diegetic theatre. Are those curtains really ‘muslin’? Is it accurate to say they ‘caressed the sill,’ or did they simply sway free, untouched by anything but the gentle breeze passing by the window? “Fundamental accuracy is the sole morality of writing.” – Ezra Pound
Don’t set out to describe a scene – simply mention objects in the room/corridor/street/field that are there, and might impinge upon the corners of your character’s perception. In this way, his/her subconscious is an emergent property of your observation.
Avoid the “false flashback.” Tell your story linearly unless there is a compelling stylistic or structural reason for not doing so. Don’t muddy the waters or make things unclear for the sake of keeping a mystery or twist a secret.
“Write as simply as you can for the smartest person you know.” – Blanche McCrary Boyd
Distrust any writing that occurs to you in blocks. Write one word at a time, one clause at a time, one sentence at a time, one paragraph at a time. This helps avoid flabby thinking and cliché.
Don’t write in the present tense. This is a pseudo-literary affectation that causes you to write sentences nobody would ever actually say, e.g. “Kevin walks to the fridge.” It does not make things more immediate or personal. It’s just pretentious and ineffective.
Reveal your hero’s socio-economic status as early as possible. The vast majority of great novels wouldn’t work without this information imparted early (War and Peace, Sentimental Education, Great Expectations, Ulysses, Middlemarch, Pride & Prejudice, Les Miserables…) even if they aren’t consciously novels-of-class. IOW all novels are novels of class.
Read as widely and as often as you can. When you do, imagine yourself in the position of the author, whether it’s Tolstoy or Mickey Spillane. Why did they make this or that choice? How would you have done things better?
Demolition for the Village View Apartments hadn’t quite finished: July dawns you could still wander the small streets (shortly to be replaced by concrete paths between scrubby lawns and red-brick buildings) and, among the devastated acres, catch sight, in the muggy morning, of fires here and there beside one or another still-standing tenement wall. Off beyond the Jacob Riis Houses with their green sliver of park, the East River’s sluggish oils nudged the city’s granite embankments or bumped the pilings beneath the Williamsburg bridge: girder, cable, and concrete rose from among the delis and cuchifrito stands, the furniture and fabric stores, the movie marquees on Delancey Street to span the night waters – where cars and subways and after-dark cruisers took their delicate amble above the blue-black current banked with lights – before striking deep into Brooklyn’s glittering flank, above the Navy yard.
In the summer of 1961 no one had yet named it the East Village: it was still the Lower East Side.
– The Motion of Light in Water, Samuel R. Delany
This just struck me as such a marvelous piece of writing, from Chip Delany’s memoir/bildungsroman about growing up black and gay in New York. It’s reminded me of my secret fascination with a city I’ve only ever seen from an hour stopover in Newark Liberty. I’m aware now that my New York doesn’t exist any more, and indeed it probably never did – but Delany’s prose is undergoing serious reconstruction work on the New York of my mind.
Can literature be said to have an architecture, or a topography? Or does it merely undertake work on the architecture of our minds, laying foundations of someone else’s dreams and shoring up old memories of things that never happened to us? I look at the paragraph above and think it looks so fine and complex, with its bold parentheses, subtle hyphens and italicised Puerto Rican delicacies, a melting pot of perfect punctuation even as the meaning the words convey peculates through my consciousness, rewriting streets and scribbling out buildings.
For anyone who has followed my last few posts, it may come as no surprise to know that I’m working again. As a writer, that is – trying to take advantage of a crippling injury that has left me sadly unable to get to my office and argue with clients from the totalitarian perspective of a hideous corporate egregore all day.
– Quentin Quark, transhumanist pulp hero and… CEO of a real company people are meant to take seriously
I deliberately chose the name “Quentin Quark” wanting it to sound ridiculous. The idea for the novel was to pin what I thought were interesting post-human ideas and philosophy on the framework of a Lester Dent-esque pulp story, setting up a contrast between content and context. Fine.
However, in the story, I don’t think I got the balance right. Because people take him seriously, calling him “Quentin” or “Dr. Quark”, the tone never really hitting that farcical attitude the name warranted.
Enter Javon Cray, the real life person for whom Quentin Quark is one of several pseudonyms, a corporate logo, a fictional superhero he plays to push his futurist ideas into the public sphere. It makes sense to me that a multi-disciplined scientist, in the vein of other pulp superheroes like Doc Savage or Reed Richards, should be able to handle multiple identities, too – dissociative identity disorder as a lifestyle choice, as I believe The Invisibles puts it.
– King Addrisi of Alexandria, an African city state on the Baraka River
This was my attempt to set up some kind of Doctor Doom-esque villain who ran his own country, but sounds more like an evil Black Panther (the superhero, not the civil rights group.Casual racism aside, any villain who talks like this is pretty much not salvageable:
“Leaving without this?” Addrisi’s voice said. Quentin looked up, and there was his enemy, standing on a balcony above, naked but for he disc in his hand. “The Gaia Program. The future of the world contained on this tiny circle. Like a mandala. It’s almost mythic, isn’t it?”
Addrisi leapt from the balcony and fell the ten feet to the floor, landing with a grace that belied his bulk.
“What are you thinking, Quentin? What are you thinking in that incredible mind of yours? Do you not realise the significance of our struggle? The location, our shared skin colour. It was here, in the heart of Africa, that mankind took its first steps. Here we first developed societal order. Here, you and I and my scientists fired our hadrons and restructured the standard model of physics!”
“Actually, I was thinking of that naked wrestling scene in Women in Love,” Quentin said. “What happened to you, Addrisi? You always wanted power, but you never served the status quo.”
“And when did you start serving chaos, instead of anarchy? Oh, yes, Quentin. I have spoken to your masters on the astral plane. Spoken with the gods you have been convening with. Kālī said…”
So, out with Addrisi and in with Isaac “Jericho” Blake, a rogue American technologist designated by the UN as a “science terrorist”. Without giving too much away, he’s essentially an evil Steve Jobs. Well – more evil, I mean.
– The terrifying computer program trying to take over the world… Monday!
No, that’s not when it plans to do it: that’s it’s name. I had intended for it to be a corruption of Spiritus Mundi, the “Spirit of the World” from Yeats’ The Second Coming – at the time I was reading a lot of Yeats, including his esoteric automatic writings contained in A Vision. Yeats’ concept of Spiritus Mundi was a kind of informational singularity, a space where the totality of human information and experience was recorded. Monday, an emergent artificial consciousness thinking itself to be a technological singularity, thus named itself.
Unfortunately, as much as we dread it all weekend, Monday is not really very scary. I’ve reworked this almost entirely in the redraft, but kept the Spiritus Mundi connection: the threat is now known as Zphy-Rah-Tus (A.K.A. Zphyratos… Zphyritus… Spiritus… geddit?), a mass of data that’s gone insane and demands we worship it.
Incidentally, the weirdest thing about this was, as soon as I started to re-work the emergent network consciousness concept I came up with four years ago, this popped up on io9: A Neuroscientist’s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious. This is the problem with writing science fiction at the start of the 21st century: your ideas reach a sell-by date very quickly.
– The writing itself was neither pulpy nor serious
Developing a voice is important; this is why I’ve been delving into texts where writers write about their craft recently. The Robert Louis Stevenson essay was especially helpful, as Stevenson is someone who attained the sort of balance I’m trying to get between a popular sense of adventure and a respect for the value of good prose, structure and so forth. Michael Moorcock, whose Jerry Cornelius books were the main inspiration behind Quentin Quark when I started it five years ago, strongly advises to science fiction and fantasy writers who are starting out that they
A) Stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt.
B) Find an author you admire (Moorcock’s was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.
I’m not going quite that far, but I am certainly picking a lot up from my perusals of The Master of Ballantrae, for instance. It seems fitting to me that Conrad admired Stevenson as I admire Moorcock – not that I’m implicitly comparing myself to those three esteemed gentlemen of letters, of course.
Aside from Stevenson, my other two consultants are How Fiction Works by James Wood and Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa. I hope to write more about both at a later date, but already they’ve been immensely helpful, especially in tandem with Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Llosa’s own The Feast of the Goat.
Both Wood and Llosa look to Flaubert as an almost Platonic example of how to construct a narrative (I really want to get hold of Llosa’s The Perpetual Orgy, his book analysing Madame Bovary). Wood asserts that Flaubert is none other than the inventor of the modern novelistic voice; “There really is,” he says, “a before Flaubert and an after him.” Reading his predecessors like Fielding, Defoe and even fellow realist Balzac, one will still encounter an essayistic narrator who thinks nothing of digressing with his own opinions and observations. After Flaubert, from Tolstoy to Christopher Isherwood to Ian bloody McEwan, these observations are either dressed up in the everyday or concealed by an ambiguous eye. By an ambiguous eye, I mean that we as readers can’t be exactly sure if it’s the character’s or the author’s.
Being shown these elements of fiction writing that we otherwise take for granted is both gratifying and hugely helpful – far more useful, I’ve found, than any number of How To Write Fiction-esque guides. As Moorcock rightly says, you learn from the masters, and Wood is adept at showing you their brushstrokes.
A few other quick notes, perhaps to expand upon later:
Far from the conventional view that a first person narrative is reliable whilst a third person narrative is omniscient and objective, Wood posits that the first person narrative is, at least, reliably unreliable – in contrast to the third person, which presents itself as reliable but in fact carefully selects the details it shows you and the thoughts it reveals.
Rare examples of an unreliably unreliable first person narrator include Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, the protagonist of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Italo Svevo’s Zeno.
Wood has led me to Henry James’ mastery of narration, just as William H. Gass’s The Sentence Seeks its Form led me to his genius of rhythm and sentence structure.
Death is often accompanied by the trivial: Falstaff babbling of green fields, Joachim feeling the blanket with his hand in The Magic Mountain. We don’t plan for death, as Proust rightly notes.
Perusing some of his essays, I’ve been lately thinking how unfortunate it is that Robert Louis Stevenson’s stock as a writer fell so dramatically sometime after World War I; once a literary sensation, he went from a world-renowned author to a rough and ready reputation as a scribbler of what were barely more than pulp adventure stories.
It’s nevertheless my view that he should be taken as seriously as Conrad (whom he greatly inspired) as a purveyor of English language prose. The reason I suspect he isn’t is because, whilst Conrad was admired by the Modernists, Stevenson wasn’t: Virginia Woolf wrote of Stevenson that he was “no critical artist” and guilty of “self-conscious […] sentimentality […and] quaintness.” Even prior to that, Leonard Bast in E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) is shown to have embarrassingly immature taste by enthusing (as I am about to do) over Stevenson’s essays. It seems strange now that there was once a time when the critics of Stevenson, like George Moore, were not only rare but based their attacks on Stevenson’s essentially being too great a stylist, and thus straying too far from the realist movement. It was in those days that Rudyard Kipling found in Stevenson’s work “the most delicate inlay-work in black and white”, and Oscar Wilde called him the “delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose.”
Fortunately, there has been some upturn in the man’s critical fortunes, thanks at least to three of my favourite writers in Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, all of whom praised his fiction to varying degrees. (Greene seemed merely to like him, whereas Borges flat out worshipped the man.) He was, in addition, a fine critic and engaging essayist, and I have included below his essay on style because it elucidates much I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to articulate in the past.
It’s a rare thing to find literary criticism that engages with prose; far more popular subjects are the “themes” or perceived politics. Upon studying literature, an undergraduate is far more likely to encounter feminist or post-structuralist analytical models than commentary upon Milton’s economy of vowel/consonant interplay, say, or even the rhythm of Shakespeare’s blank verse between the metrics. It wasn’t until last year, when I read William H. Gass on Henry James, Charles Dickens and William Gaddis (stylistic essays collected in the rather excellent Temple of Texts, available from Dalkey Archive Press), that I had even thought about the use of, for example, alliteration by a novelist; and this is after years of both formal and casual immersion in literature and criticism. Actually hearing Gass reading his 1995 novel The Tunnel on audiobook was similarly formative in this regard, and knowing this is a writer who agonises over his sentences made it easier to understand why he took over 20 years to finish writing that particular book.
Let me be clear that I’m not of the Harold Bloom mindset, attempting to rescue literature from the “school of resentment”. Literature is like a diamond with many facets, that one needs a full drawer of looking glasses to properly appreciate. It’s no bad thing to excavate meaning with a Marxian trowel or to run a feminist needle pick along its contours; one can in this manner learn much about the concealed preconceptions of the society and artist, and reciprocally employ the text to illustrate Marxism and feminism to a student afterwards. Little, however, information about the aesthetics of the piece is gained with those particular tools – imposing a framework from without can only bring forth so much from within.
The formidable Northrop Frye, in his theory of modes (An Anatomy of Criticism, a book nobody serious about literary criticism can avoid) put these popular schools to one side to engage with the text on its own terms. What resulted was a pattern-spotting exercise hoping to unveil the formula great works follow. It is more this sort of from-the-inside-out approach rather than a top-down imposition I would advocate to be applied on the specific level of sentence construction and prose rhythm, though Frye’s subject was a more general overview of literary “genres” or “modes”, from the epic to the romance, on the basis of whether the protagonist is superior or inferior to us in “kind” or “degree”.
A brief diversion on this. In her essay Historical Genres/Theoretical Genres, which addresses Tzvetan Todorov’s commentary on Frye’s Anatomy and Stanislaw Lem’s critique of Todorov, Christine Brooke-Rose provides Frye’s classifications in the form of a table:
She notes the table is incomplete as more combinations are possible than are addressed by Frye, further evidence that Frye was a more excellent critic than he was a theorist. Perhaps this distinction is explanation why Marxism and feminism, say, still seem predominant: it is they who still reign supreme on the level of theory, and our non-ideological interests are less antagonistic reclamation than equally protagonistic operations on the level of criticism. The attempted apotheosis of Frye’s criticism to the Olympus of theory is unsuccessful because it has transferred from “mere” observation into hagiography of another framework. It’s all well and good to discover that Oedipus is high mimetic tragedy as opposed to the romantic tragedy of Beowulf, but a problem may arise when shoehorning Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon into a low mimetic comedy category in order to illustrate the theory: we have gone from descriptive to prescriptive without utilising any viable judgement of quality, a judgement that Frye is unwilling to and uninterested in making.
There are at least as many approaches to quality as there are to thematic recognition or genre qualification. The critic James Wood is said to frequently take a conservative, moralist approach, chastising Flaubert for his emotional distance from the cruelty he portrays. Book reviewers often laud or criticise a work on the basis of plot, which is roughly as useful as judging a coat by its coathanger. A judgment on “character development” in works that are not for instance bildungsroman or kunstlerroman, i.e. where that is not the focus, is likewise unappealing. The quality of style, whilst not the only consistently credible discernment of value one could make, is perhaps the most universal arbiter between good and great works. It’s prescription without imposition, leaving agenda at the door.
The first element of style Stevenson identifies is the choice of words. He compares words to building blocks, and notes that it is these that are the most immediately noticeable element, “this form of merit is without doubt the most sensible and seizing”. This is then analogous to noticing the architect has chosen to use marble and mosaic in the interior of Westminster Cathedral, and judging the quality of the marble and ordered composition of the mosaic, before one deduces the Neo-Byzantine design ethic.
A good choice and ordering of words is not in itself good writing – according to Stevenson, Cicero’s superiority to Tacitus and Voltaire’s to Montaigne cannot be thus explained – but it is certainly a component. Here Stevenson in part anticipates the famous dispute between Faulkner and Hemingway, a story that is more often than not presented as the retort of the wise and grounded Hemingway putting the “poor” highfalutin Faulkner, who thought “big emotions come from big words”, in his place. This anti-intellectual strain is also to be found in Orwell’s popular insistence that a writer “never use a long word where a short one will do”. Stevenson would recognise that this is missing the point – the length or size of the word is not as important as the word’s “harmonious” sound (Stevenson on a few occasions mentions an internal “ear” as being key) in the context of the words around it.
Though it’s nothing than the other side of the same coin as Orwell and Hemingway, I do have some sympathy with Will Self’s argument that using obscure words can rescue a text from banality and being sent to a dictionary, as Faulkner said Hemingway’s readers never were, is not necessarily a bad thing – surely a strong vocabulary is better than a weak one? However, it’s not hard to infer from that same article that Self apparently believes lexical decisions are all that separate Joyce, Nabokov and Woolf from the middlebrow, and a less kind reviewer might look to this lack of understanding for explanation as to why Self will never reach that level of the stylists he clearly aspires to.
Contra Orwell, I would also say that in philosophical writing an obfuscatory tone is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps this is because of my preference for continental and poststructural thinkers over the members of Anglo-Saxon, analytical schools who would recoil in horror at the Sokal-tempting language of a Derridean. But complex ideas deserve to be treated with complexity – that one cannot render deconstruction easily into immediately accessible English isn’t a weakness of the idea or its conveyor, and might actually be part of the point. And if one does misread, this in itself can be fertile soil for one’s own ideas.
The next section, which Stevenson entitles “the Web”, begins with an interesting commentary on the arts that may no longer ring exactly true. Essentially, Stevenson identifies a diegetic/mimetic divide (if I may be allowed to stretch the definition of diegesis a moment), with architecture, music and dance on one side and sculpture, painting and acting on the other. The diegetic set are the thing-in-itself, whereas the mimetic are instances of art imitating life. Since Stevenson was writing, the rise of abstraction has meant that sculpture and painting have been able to cross into the non-mimetic realm, joining literature, opera, ballet and, now, film as transaxial arts that can belong to either category. It could be said that some sonic experimentation by guitarists like Steve Vai, who can make their instruments sound like pigs or cats, has meant that music has shown the potential to be mimetic; though whether this is musicianship or onanism I will leave to the discerning judgement of the reader.
None of this is really relevant to Stevenson’s point – he simply includes it as a preface to what these disparate arts nevertheless have in common: a unifying pattern. The Web, if you like. Like Frye’s identification of modes, Stevenson’s identification of the Web is an exercise in pattern recognition – just not on a cross-textual basis. Literature is, with music, one of the two “temporal arts”, composed of sounds and pauses in time. Therefore, these sounds and pauses cannot, according to Stevenson, be fragmentary in the manner of verbal communication but must be woven into a coherent structure.
Of course, a lot has happened in literature and music since Stevenson died in 1894, before the effects of chromaticism had begun to be felt in the music of Schoenberg and the Viennese School. What followed was works characterised by atonality and dissonance, and later the avant garde, free jazz and electronic movements in which discord is more notable than harmony.
Does this mean we would have to reverse Stevenson’s criteria to judge Webern, Stockhausen, John Cage, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, Captain Beefheart and Throbbing Gristle as the virtuosos they deserve to be known as? Whilst these artists lack an explicate pattern, all play to an implicate structure. Braxton’s non-compositional material is characterised as improvisational; however, if Braxton’s playing was, as it probably seems to the untrained ear, pure improvisation, it would indeed be analogous to everyday speech, Stevenson’s communication in the “business of life”, made in “broken words”, “carried on with substantives alone” and therefore “not what we call literature” (or, in this case, music). Of course, Braxton is not making it up as he goes along, but varying, deconstructing and playing against the themes of his predecessors, in the way that Schoenberg began by riffing (for want of a better word) on Wagner and the Romantics.
Even Braxton’s later music, which sounds like this:
cannot be dismissed. For whilst it lacks a pattern, it is not a random primordial soup in the way of everyday conversation: having rejected traditional Western forms, Braxton now builds towards new possible forms, saying of his Ghost Trance Music that it is part of “a process that is both composition and improvisation, a form of meditation that establishes ritual and symbolic connections (which) go beyond time parameters and become a state of being in the same way as the trance musics of ancient West Africa and Persia.” Convergent evolutionary parallels might be found in the Sufi devotional chanting of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or in the music of the Far East where, like Miles Davis or Morton Feldman, you play the notes that aren’t there.
The reason I include this is to remind us that just because something does not fit our tried and tested models and frameworks does not mean it lacks pattern. There is still a Web, just not a Web we would immediately recognise and easily contexualise within our cultural dialectic. Braxton in form might be seen as analogous to a science fiction writer in content, extrapolating beyond our temporal plane to see where our current technologies might take us. Within this analogy, Throbbing Gristle and other industrial musicians are alternate history scribes: like Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle asked what would have happened had the Axis powers won the Second World War and Poul Anderson speculates on a contemporary reality where Rome lost the Punic Wars in Delenda Est, Throbbing Gristle attempted to project a world where blues was not at the root of popular music. Just because form and style is harder to recognise than content and theme does not make experimentation in one less valid than the other. Is it different, and difficult? Yes. Is it inferior, and wrong? No.
Our literary equivalents are likewise some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Queneau, like Schoenberg always conscious of the rules even as he made up and rigidly adhered to his own, attempted to reconcile the improvisational manner of French speech with the stifling formality of it’s written grammar. Céline, like Queneau, used ellipses often, and thus his prose seems more characterised by dissonance than unity but nevertheless still clearly by rhythm. Burroughs, a fan of Céline, attempted to escape the temporal conventions of prose that Stevenson mentions by using the cut-up technique, evading what he saw as the “tyranny” of language and narrative to, like Braxton, allow “subliminal hints of the future to seep through” (according to Alan Moore, an idea upon which I have written before).
An aside: David Foster Wallace, a good writer who doesn’t quite merit inclusion alongside these titans, also experimented with breaking up prose, using footnotes rather than ellipses or cut-up.
Joyce went further than Braxton – rather than speculating or ruminating, he went ahead and crafted his own language. What’s extraordinary is there is still a great music to Finnegans Wake when read aloud – unlike Céline or Burroughs, it could not be said to be consciously atonal. Joyce was reputably a majestic singer as a young boy, which reminds us that language is born not in the mouth but in the lungs and throat, and that internal ear Stevenson speaks of must be employed to decipher its depths. Plato thought the written word an aberrant mutation of the spoken, whereas Derrida would have said the spoken into the written was natural state of change in the manner of a seed becoming a tree. It is in Joyce and other “musical” writers that we see there is no distinct and permanent divide between the two but a constant interplay. The phenomenon of reading literature in one’s head and never out loud is a relatively recent one, which may well have forced this artificial barrier that stops us from “hearing” the sonorous nature of great prose, or even from describing prose as “sonorous” at all.
Finally, there is Beckett; our Feldman, only better; the concave to Joyce’s convex; the returner of style to the corruption of the soil.
Would Stevenson have recognised these prose divergences from the Web as legitimate? Certainly he was able to sense the legitimacy of Whitman, who just as sure diverged from metre in his verse. In a different essay, Stevenson said that Leaves of Grass, “tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues […] New truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions.” Stevenson was, of course, addressing the morality of Leaves of Grass rather than its scansion, but he would be equally correct if speaking of prosody that seems to break the rules but actually pushes the boundaries beyond our immediate conceptions.
On sentence construction, Stevenson further defines the Web as a balance between pattern and logic, between fabric and argument. In order for the pattern to be strong, the argument must have some of the following criteria: brevity, charm, clearness. The weave of the pattern, though, should have a “knot”. It’s not entirely clear what Stevenson means by “knot”, though he uses it several times throughout the essay, and he gives no examples. I’m tempted to suspect it would be to the prose sentence what the caesura is to the verse line, but it’s more likely that Stevenson imagines the knot to be a word rather than a pause. Perhaps it is a hint of atonality within the sentence, a moment of dissonance – a clause that begins with “or” or “though”. Following the knot, Stevenson calls for suspension before solution, in the manner of a Petrarchan sonnet that poses a problem in the octave before resolving it in the sestet.
Let’s have a look at one of Stevenson’s own sentences, chosen at random (such is my confidence in Stevenson’s economy of language) from Kidnapped:
“She was still holding together; but whether or not they had yet launched the boat, I was too far off and too low down to see.”
The start of the second phrase here would surely be the knot, the rest of the phrase (up to “boat”) the suspension, before the sentence finally clears its meaning.
The sentence also holds up to the alliterative interplay Stevenson recommends later in the essay. There’s three pacing “s” sounds in the first three words, two “h” sounds in the next two, and “holding” is straddled by two equally spaced “t”s. There’s an almost discernibly prosodic structure to the middle of the sentence, too: the words that end in “t” – “but”, “not”, “yet” and “boat” – provide a baseline (please note this is asyllabic and anaccentual scansion):
but | whether or | not they had | yet launched the | boat
One two three, one two three, one two three, one.
This segues into the end of the sentence, where the “t”s are still important but the pattern is built around “too far off” and “too low down”:
I was | too far off | and | too low down | to see
One two, one two three, one, one two three, one two. The pattern now has a syllabic and perfect symmetry.
If this seems contrived and unlikely, it’s testament to how the sentence flows in perfectly natural progression. “There is nothing more disenchanting,” says Stevenson, “to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art.” Let’s see if we can redraw the sentence in bad prose, or at least prose that is dull and flat, and still maintain meaning and grammar.
“I couldn’t really tell if the boat had been launched because I wasn’t close enough and not very high up, but at least it wasn’t in bits yet.”
This is, of course, artificially constructed for a purpose, but the point remains that so too is the original. Comparison between them should emphasise how the “ear” can immediately discern between inspired and uninspired writing, even in a relatively uninteresting sentence that only conveys a surface meaning. The breakdown provides us with why this is, and how it is accomplished.
It has long been my contention that an ear for prose is best prepared by an ear for verse, and Stevenson as a critic is unusually well equipped for this purpose, able to discern amphibrachys and amphimacers as easily as iambs and trochees. So, too, should be the stylist, and I would always recommend a training in verse for the writer who wishes to master good wordsmithing. I concur, however, with Stevenson when he recommends prose be rhythmical but not metrical. You will notice that the sentence quoted above can not be broken down into metre, and you’d be hard-pressed to find many sentences in Stevenson that can. A single instance of metrically scansioned English is acceptable, but another immediately succeeding promotes “an instant impression of poverty, flatness, and disenchantment”; further, it’s the responsibility of the prose writer to expand his scale – he is “condemned” to venture beyond the safe confines of verse! In a 21st century culture where even most “poets” couldn’t tell you the difference between a pentameter and a perambulator, it’s refreshing to read suggestion that the novelist might hide in prosody, fearful of the potential foisted upon him by prose. It points the way to a knowledge paradigm we should reclaim for the sake of taking pride in our art.
I don’t feel I’ve exhausted Stevenson’s essay, but I hope I’ve been able to use it to explicate some of the quintessences of craft. Whilst it’s true that style isn’t everything to literature, no more than brushstrokes are to painting or notes are to music, it is nevertheless as close to fundamental as either. Good prose is to a novel what good musicianship is to a song, but for whatever reason less and less focus seems to be placed upon it. Could this explain why none of our English playwrights seem as grand as Marlowe or Jonson? Why our poets cannot compete with Milton or Spencer? Why our essayists pale in comparison to Thomas Browne and our critics are shadows of Johnson and Hazlitt?
We complain regularly that contemporary art is all concept and no craft – could it be contended English literature suffers the same affliction? So dissatisfied are we with work being produced in our mother tongue that all major literary events these days seem to be translations, from Bolano last decade to Krasznahorkai this, and because we can’t read them in their original language we can only hope to divine scraps about their style through the translator’s glass.
This is an inevitable symptom of Weltliteratur without polyglotism; the solution, though, is not to be found in learning Spanish and Hungarian but to expand our style on our language’s own terms. Stevenson, who could speak French, notes that whilst more effort was being put into English prose in his time, French prose was still superior. Contemporaneous to Stevenson’s essay were mainly his fellow genre writers like H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker, few of whom possessed his talent. The acknowledged master Henry James, American-born as Mark Twain, would not consider himself British until long after Stevenson’s death, whilst the admired Anthony Trollope and George Eliot had recently passed away. This left the humourist Jerome K. Jerome and Thomas Hardy flying the Union flag, whilst under Le Tricolore worked Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and, of course, still the peerless figure of Flaubert. (Stevenson might also have had on his mind Dumas; though he died in 1870 and cannot exactly be called a living contemporary, Dumas and especially the character of D’Artagnan left a larger and more lasting impression on Stevenson than anyone outside of Shakespeare.)
It is unfair, then, to say of our island’s prose that it is any less a force on the world stage than it was in the 1880s and 90s. Nor am I advocating that we try to imitate the authors from time’s past – we already see that in popular middle class authors like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. I concur with Gabriel Josipovici in Whatever Happened to Modernism? when he says:
“No composer would dream of writing like Tchaikovsky today, except in an ironic manner; no painter today would dream of painting like Sargent, except in an ironic manner; yet novelists writing in English seemed to want to write like the Victorians and the Edwardians.”
An awareness of style, I hope I have shown in this essay, should go hand in hand with experimentation and pushing the novel forwards.
There is, in fairness, a wealth of good literature in the language being produced worldwide that wasn’t there in the late 19th century, from the former Commonwealth and beyond. Should we, however, be complacent where the chairman of the Booker judges can confidently proclaim Hilary Mantel, a solid but unspectacular stylist, “the greatest modern English prose writer”? True or not, Peter Stothard’s comment should precipitate a call to arms among those of us feeling the draught of discontent.
The Literary Conference, written a year later, in 1996, presents us with a writer, César, who double-jobs as a scientist hell-bent on world domination. In the prologue, César gains sudden wealth and glory by solving the centuries-old enigma of the Macuro Line – a vast, triangular rope structure emerging from the sea off the Venezuelan coast, erected by inscrutable pirates. Realising that the Line is a massive slingshot, César catapults a treasure chest out of the sea and into his possession. The next day, his name emblazoning headlines the world over, César flies to a literary conference in the Andean city of Mérida at which he has been invited to speak, though he spends most of the conference idling by the hotel pool, observing his beautiful fellow-guests, indifferent to the event itself. His real reason for being there, we learn, is none other than to clone the great Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes – this, he has reasoned, is the surest way to achieve his tyrannical ambitions. He sends a laboratory-engineered wasp to retrieve a sample of Fuentes’ DNA, then grows sentimental and holds a funeral for the wasp upon its expiration. After setting up his ‘cloning machine’ on a mountaintop overlooking the city, César awaits the descent of his genius-army, meanwhile pondering affairs of the heart and his lost youth, and recalling the beautiful literature student he once had an affair with in the same city. In the denouement, César finds that it is not an army of Fuentes clones that comes pouring down the mountainside, but a throng of enormous, blue silkworms, each ‘approximately one thousand feet long and seventy feet in diameter.’ Momentarily distracted by the reappearance of his old flame, César must get his act together and prevent the worms from crushing the city.
implicate disorder 