The Craft of Writing and the Art of Style

Since this is my first post on the subject of writing, I'll try to be as explicit and precise as possible. If it is excruciatingly long, then – I don't apologize. Thomas Mann once said that a writer is someone for whom the act of writing is more difficult than for other people, and the corollary is that they spend more time on it than other people. So I have.

I have always been fascinated by stories. Before I could read, or so my parents tell me, I would memorize books and recite them as I turned the pages. When I was about seven or eight years old, I would sometimes shut myself in my room, draw the blinds, sit down, open a book, and not move until I was finished. I have written on and off my entire life, but since the age of about thirteen I started writing and have never stopped. Nor do I ever intend to stop.

To be a good writer, of course, one must be an avid reader. By the current date, I have sampled many different authors and styles of writing from various eras and cultures, but the sheer volume of human literary output makes me a dilettante at best. That is not to say, however, that my observations are entirely inconsequential. After all, I define myself by my writing.

So I think, before I touch on Scott Fitzgerald, that I'll begin at the beginning.

What is writing?

Goes rather far back, doesn't it? That's okay, I could have gone farther. In fact, I'll have to go farther. Because the answer to “What is writing” is “The use of symbols or characters to represent language,” which necessitates asking the question “What is language?” The answer, of course, is that language is a tool for communicating meaningfully between people. It's basically a shared code.

The study of linguistics has shown that language, like all cultural constructs, is a balance between order and chaos. Language abides by certain more or less inviolable rules, but some of these rules admit creative variation, alteration, and growth. The structure of these rules, shared amongst all speakers of a language group, allows one English speaker to communicate meaningfully with another English speaker. Violate too many of these rule however, and language becomes meaningless. As an example, I submit Ebonics.

That last comment would be disputed by linguists. Linguistics, which is a subfield of anthropology, prefers not to pass judgment on cultural quirks. To a linguist, every language, dialect, and pidgin variant has a grammar. Language as a system, after all, is what linguistics studies. It might not sound pretty to speakers of the common, proper, “vanilla” form of the language (the Queen's English as opposed to Ozark or Jamaican versions), but it holds meaning for those who are acclimated to it and its rules.

But very well, leave the linguists to their analysis and categorization of language, free of value judgments. But within the culture itself, language, and especially writing are always subject to value judgments. Granted, they are not always the same value judgments. Different sects within a language group fight to promote their own interpretation of what is “good” for that language. The birth and death of slang terms, for example, are subject to the whims of the under-educated, the clique-y conformists, the painfully ironic, children, and the overly tolerant (i.e. the inane “kicks” for a perfectly good word like “shoes” - there is no reason, Shakespearean or otherwise, to use a word which already has a use to the exclusion of another word which has only one function; to illustrate that point, consider the occasionally-used “eats” in place of “food” and the just-now-invented “hits” for “gloves” or “dongs” for “underwear”). Some of these variations catch on culturally and survive, either becoming enduring slang or managing to evolve into part of the standard language itself (take “cool” as a case in point).

Some groups argue for absolute permissiveness in all areas of language. Others advocate a more conservative approach, harping on very strict, set grammar and rules of word usage. As a rule of thumb, however, a language in which “all is permitted” is not a language, and a language which admits no change or permutation is a dead language. And the interplay of permissiveness and conservatism is the essence of a living language. In the contemporary atmosphere, however, it seems to me that grammarians are too conservative and speakers/amateur anthropologists are too liberal.

In all honesty, anyone who thinks Ebonics is permissible is too liberal, and anyone who thinks that book by Strunk & White is the Bible of modern English letters is too conservative. For a good book on the ideal contemporary style, take a look at the aptly titled Style by Joseph Williams.

Many grammatical principles and ideas on word usage which are espoused by Strunk & White are, quite simply, dead. In fact, White himself is occasionally guilty of violating his own rules.

Strunk & White say:

That. Which. That is the defining, or restrictive, pronoun, which the nondefining, or nonrestrictive.

The lawn mower that is broken is in the garage. (Tells which one.)

The lawn mower, which is broken, is in the garage. (Adds a fact about the only mower in question.)

The use of which for that is common in written and spoken language (“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass.”) Occasionally which seems preferable to that, as in the sentence from the Bible. But it would be a convenience to all if these two pronouns were used with precision. Careful writers, watchful for small conveniences, go which-hunting, remove the defining whiches, and by so doing improve their work.

Williams responds:

2. 'Use the Relative Pronoun that – not which – for Restrictive Clauses.' Allegedly, not this:

Next is a typical situation which a practiced writer corrects “for style” virtually by reflex action.
-Jacques Barzun, Simple and Direct (p. 69)

Yet just a few sentences before, Barzun himself (one of our most eminent intellectual historians and critics of style) had asserted,

Use that with defining [i.e. restrictive] clauses except when stylistic reasons interpose.

(In the sentence quoted above, no such reasons interpose.)

A rule has no force when someone as eminent as Barzun asserts it on one page, then violates it on the next, and his “error” is never caught, not by his editors, not by his proof-readers, not even by Barzun himself.

This “rule” is relatively new. It appeared in 1906 in Henry and Francis Fowler's The King's English (Oxford University Press; reprinted as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1973). The Fowlers thought that the random variation between that and which to begin a restrictive clause was messy, so they just asserted that henceforth writers should (with some exceptions), limit which to nonrestrictive clauses.

For the liberal side, there are those who think the dialogue of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is pretty.

Now, on a strictly linguistic basis, the dialogue in Their Eyes Were Watching God is merely representative of an English dialect which uses a different but coherent grammar, making it scientifically no “better” or “worse” (since science allegedly tends to avoid thinking in those terms, even though it seems to have no problem with believing in its own metaphor of physical “laws” rather than, say, “imperatives” or “necessities”) than Midwestern English. Similarly, if a culture's grammar mandates that “which” and “that” must be used in different contexts, that's fine, but if it says they can be used interchangeably, then that's fine, too.

Culturally, however, the grammarians themselves note that we use “which” and “that” almost interchangeably. We've made a value judgment. “Which” and “that” can be used wherever we feel they are appropriate. However, it's a value judgment about a linguistic grammar, not about style per se.

Now, to get further along in my long-winded non-diatribe, I'm going to skip over a lot and take a few things on faith (which I dislike doing, but which will have to suffice for now). Simply put, I think “proper” or “vanilla” English is infinitely more attractive than any of its bastardized, mongrel progeny. I like the fact that English is a polyglot language one that was originally Germanic but which also draws on Latin and Latin derivatives like French, Spanish, and Italian. It is a child of all Europe, in a sense, and its capacity for expression and variation is, in a word, beautiful. It's not quite the commanding, violent language of German, nor the uniform Japanese, nor the musical French or poetic Italian. But it is, in its own way, the language with the greatest horizon. So standard modern English, as the direct inheritor of Early Modern (Marlowe) and Middle (Chaucer) and Old (Beowulf) English, is the strain I find most attractive. And if that is only a prejudice, then it is both a good and triumphant one.

The general rules for a contemporary style can be found in any decent handbook on the subject, but the best one remains, as I have said, Joseph Williams's Style. From that book, you get a couple of general ideals which form the basic principles of good writing (and, naturally, specific methods of achieving them). Precision, clarity, directness, and a logical layout of one's ideas. Finally, of course, there is elegance – a subjective value if ever there was one.

Now, of course, that book can tell you the rules for a good, solid English style (such as that possessed by King, Crichton, Vonnegut, or Orwell), but it cannot make you into a John F. Kennedy, a Thomas Jefferson, a Friedrich Nietzsche. The most brilliant style is almost always a matter of such subjective taste that it begins to defy rational explanation. After all, weren't Kennedy's words perhaps overwritten? Didn't Thomas Jefferson lay it on a little thick? Wasn't Nietzsche sometimes florid and hysterical?

Yes, but what brilliance even so!

What price I wouldn't pay to write a passage as magnificent as this:

Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that "the old god is dead," as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an "open sea."—

True enough that the original was not English, but neither was the Bible, yet we venerate the poetic interpretation of the King James Version. We extol the virtues of the Hobbes translation of Thucydides. Rightly so. And I think Nietzsche's rhetorical powers were on a level with the greatest poets and orators in our history.

I have sometimes been accused of being a stylistic reactionary. One of my friends, I believe, is quite convinced that I must be not only an old soul but an archaic one. And sometimes there are jokes about my would-be elitist tendencies in matters of literary (or any) aesthetics. But allow me to justify myself, non-existent readers, ghost-people, shades of the Underblogopshere.

I know convincing people in matters of artistic taste is an issue not of argument but of cultivation. If one grows up listening to rap, it will never matter that no decent student of music history and theory will tell you that it is deserving of the name “music.” It will never matter that they would be right. The fact that you are culturally conditioned to enjoy it means that it would take a whole new conditioning process to acclimate you to another musical style. I speak here in generalities – there are always those who rebel against their culture and latch onto something else. And that's not to say one can't change one's tastes, either. I grew up in a more or less non-musical environment. My father listened to jazz, my mother to classic rock, and I to nothing. These days, I listen to Brahms, Shostakovich, and Richard Strauss. But it has taken time for me to come to terms with their forms of expression, and I am still only a bad listener to what their music says. I have defended my choice in music based on certain principles of aesthetics, but it did not originally appeal to me on rational grounds. It was an issue of cultivation of taste. I listened, and slowly I appreciated. Axiomatically: you can want what you like, but you can't like what you want.

I will now try to give a preliminary apology of my aesthetics, along with examples.

Writing – I should have said this before – is not a pure art. There are pure arts, of course. Music is the most notable example. Sculpture is another. Painting can be a pure art, and currently it has become one almost exclusively, but until the advent of the camera it was also a tool for transmitting images of something one had seen to those who hadn't. Other forms of human activity are only secondary arts. Architecture is a secondary art. It serves the purpose of providing shelter, and after it has performed its utilitarian function it may also aspire to aesthetic significance. Think suburbia for the former, the Hagia Sophia for the latter.

Secondary arts can only become pure arts if there is a change in the medium. For instance, painting became a pure art because images could be produced mechanically and with perfect accuracy via photography. This left the hand-crafted production of images to the realm of talent and creativity rather than necessity. Similarly, architecture could become a primary art if there were a change in building materials such that one substance was infinitely strong. This substance could then be arranged in ways that, with conventional building materials, would be structurally unsound, but with this new material would still be capable of supporting any weight. If that change occurred in the medium, then the utilitarian demands of architecture would be nullified and it could be considered a primary art.

With this in mind, we must realize that writing, which is, after all, the symbolic representation of language – and language is the means of communicating meaningfully between people – could only ever be a pure art if one could devise a means for transmitting coherent concepts, from one person to another, regardless of the code of language itself. Essentially, one would have to come up with a way to communicate concepts without regulation of symbols.

As a matter of fact, they tried this once. It was called “modernism.”

Now, I won't devote my post to defining or declaiming modernism, or to nitpicking its various virtues and villainies. I'm only going to say that the strain of practical nihilism in it was murderous to literature and to meaning. Go ahead and read the first page of Finnegan's Wake if you want any sort of evidence for what I'm saying. I will say this much, however: the discontent with received truth and absolutes was taken too far in modernism. I'm versed in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and I have a passing familiarity with Wittgenstein, but I am not about to join some radical French deconstructionist philosophicult. One can acknowledge the uncertainty of life in a text and create internal resonances for readers to question and interpret without making the text itself meaningless. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway claims his one virtue is that he is “one of the few honest people I know.” And yet, by the end, Miss Jordan Baker questions his integrity so much that she only “thought you were honest.” And we are relying on this man to tell us of Gatsby, that sad, wounded, even crippled romantic whose entire world was founded securely on a fairy's wing. This same Nick Carraway who tells us right off that he prefers to withhold judgment, but who is “glad” he said to Gatsby, “You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

Sad, beautiful, troubling, uncertain – and at once crystal clear.

Music is an art of sound, the plastic arts one of image, dance of motion, and writing of concepts. Because of this, writing is certainly the most fundamentally intellectual of the art forms. That is to say, when it is an art at all. Writing is also the most autocratic – authoritarian if you will forgive the incidental pun – of the arts. For writing to mean anything at all, it must maintain its “faith in grammar.” When writing questions its own capacity to transmit meaning, its doubt is of the kind that, to echo Wittgenstein, presupposes certainty. And the fact that we can ask a baker for a loaf of bread and watch the baker go and retrieve the loaf is all the scientific proof we need that language does have the capacity for meaning, skeptics be damned.

In any event, the demands of communication which are placed on writing make it virtually impossible for writing to be anything other than a secondary art. So if language is first and foremost a tool, then writing is, strictly speaking, a craft. This means that before a writer can be a good artist, he must be a good craftsman. This is no different from the architect, who must be a good worker before he can apply his creative powers to the embellishment of his creation.

This means that a good stylist must also be a good craftsman. Now, in the realm of “artistic” writing, discerning good styles can be difficult since many in the last century who have championed “experimental” styles have also been incredibly careful craftsmen and been driven by philosophy or purpose. In fact, it seems that to be heralded as great, all you need is to write a philosophy – any philosophy – into your work. That's it. That's all there is.

In light of the foregoing, I am going to turn to examples of style, drawn from a variety of authors. I am going to skip over those whose writing is solid and uncontroversial. A clear, direct, vivid style almost cannot be a bad thing. No one disputes that J.K. Rowling and George Orwell have a perfectly acceptable, functional style. But when people feel the need to be creative with their prose, to make it more than a craft, to add a layer of artistry to it all, then it becomes necessary to discern that which is done in good taste from that in bad.

I have drawn eight examples from authors/works with which I am familiar. Most of them are regarded by some parts of the populace as examples of genius.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (p. 1):

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

First we have this passage. I will admit my prejudice in favor of the author here. I find the imagery almost surreal in its oily clarity – permit me the poetic turn of phrase – though perhaps the sentence structures could stand a bit of revision. Notice that all of the sentences here are clear and direct, but also that they are not short, limited little things. Rather, the sentences are languid and varied in form. The use of modifying descriptors is moderate. Roughly one descriptor to an item, i.e. “motionless” brooding and “interminable” waterway.

At the same time, the sentences do not strike me as always perfectly formed. Take this line: “In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits.” It seems to hang in there, moving inexorably beyond what one might think of as its ideal focus, unregulated by punctuation. The images are beautiful, but the sentence borders on rambling. Rambling might sometimes serve a purpose for, say, Kerouac, but here we are concerned with an elevated elegance, not an explosion or superabundance. (Granted, not every “story” deserves the same style, but as a general rule of writing a personal style should tend towards a single ideal – naturally I wouldn't want Kerouac's narrator or Twain's Huck Finn to speak like Nietzsche, and the best example I can come up with for stylistic manipulation might be Flowers for Algernon – but unless you have a damn good reason for your book being a tale told by an idiot or one committed to the page by one committed to a prison, you don't really have an excuse for adopting a bad style because it's disingenuous – and a nonfictional “this is me” style should be elegant, elevated, refined, but at the same time individual rather than pretentious or contrived...and my apologies for bringing fiction into this, since that is another discussion entirely).

In any case, it's easy to see that the author has a command of English and that he goes a step beyond it to achieve something that is vibrant and alive. Blunt, utilitarian English could never have served to create the same dark, brooding atmosphere as this style does. Bleak, maybe, even empty, but not this perfect blend of poise and torment. Read that passage and you are there, on the Thames, on the Nellie, listening to Marlow, and waiting for the turn of the tide.

Janet Fitch, White Oleander (p. 38):

We swam in the hot aquamarine of the pool late at night, in the clatter of palms and the twinkle of the new-scoured sky. My mother floated on her back, humming to herself. 'God, I love this.' She splashed gently with her fingers, letting her body drift in a slow circle. 'Isn't it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind.' Her eyes were closed. Beads of water decorated her face, and her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils. 'But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It's so soothing. I feel infinitely better now.'

'I'm glad,' I said. I was glad she felt happier, but I didn't like the kind of happiness it was, I didn't believe in it, I believed it would crack open sooner or later and terrible things would come flying out.

This passage shares its virtues with the one which precedes it. Again, it is vivid, and moreover it is concise. The imagery is original, refreshing (and this is, of course, characteristic of the whole book). Astrid (for that is the narrator's name) swims in “the hot aquamarine” - the color, not the substance. The palms clatter; the sky is new-scoured and twinkles. The sentence patterns and lengths vary with their purposes. The similes are clear, apt, singular, individual: “her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils.” Above all, there is a sense of control. The language is highly deliberate. And the final sentence is beautiful. It moves from a timid position to the terror which lies beneath, ending on an appropriately striking note.

Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford (p. 3-4):

It may well be said that plain English cannot encompass a life so various, tortured and contradictory. And yet it was Marston who in his innocence called him Kind Kit. He did not know him. Words were moreover to him more than human reality. It was surely wrong of him to emend the verse about shallow rivers to whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals to his gallimaufry of Cantant avians do vie with mellous fluminosity. And not in jest neither. There is a limit to all things.

Cat, or Kit I said, and indeed about Kit there was something of the cat. He blinked his green eyes much and evaded, as cats will, the straight gaze either from fear of fearful aggression or of some shame of one order or another. Even in the carnal act the eyes were not engaged, at least not often, and it may well be that the sodomitical seek to avoid ocular discourse as speaking too much of the (albeit temporary) union of hearts.

Burgess was to style what Gary Oldman is to acting. He could adapt to anything. Witness the differences between his A Clockwork Orange, Earthly Powers, and Nothing Like the Sun (the last of which I detest) for a very passing acquaintance with the sheer range and versatility of which the man was capable. But even so, there are certain tendencies that show through in all of Burgess's prose. It is precise, it is controlled, it is clear. It is also original without being florid. “Plain English cannot encompass a life” (aside from being a half-joking commentary on the adopted Elizabethan English of the book itself) is a vast improvement over the same sentiment encapsulated in the cliché “words cannot express.”

And Burgess had power in the short and simple sentence - “There is a limit to all things” - as well as the long - “Even in the carnal act the eyes were not engaged, at least not often, and it may well be that the sodomitical seek to avoid ocular discourse as speaking too much of the (albeit temporary) union of hearts.” Could a few words be shaved from that sentence if absolutely necessary? I believe so. “Not often engaged” could replace “were not engaged, at least not often,” but that removes the gentle pause-and-turn from the fact to its explanation and inserts an abrupt right-angle. “Seek to” is also, strictly speaking, not entirely necessary. But again, this is a highly stylized variant of an already individual style, and so I won't dwell too much on what is, ultimately, a matter of subjective taste.

Just be glad I didn't try wading through Nadsat, ya starry vechk.

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor (p. 281):

Van closed his eyes in order better to concentrate on the golden flood of swelling joy. Many, oh many, many years later he recollected with wonder (how could one have endured such rapture?) that moment of total happiness, the complete eclipse of the piercing and preying ache, the logic of intoxication, the circular argument to the effect that the most eccentric girl cannot help being faithful if she loves one as one loves her. He watched Ada's bracelet flash in rhythm with the swaying of the victoria and her full lips, parted slightly in profile, show in the sun the red pollen of a remnant of salve drying in the transversal thumbnail lines of their texture.

This style amazes me. There is no hint of the pointed precision of other English stylists' poeticizing. Rather, this is rhapsody.

In all my reading, I have never encountered another author (save possibly Poe) who can make the borderline-excess of this style work for him. Then again, I have yet to seriously engage with some of the authors who deliberately mimed this style.

The beauty of this style is not merely its rich excess, but its force. It imposes itself on you without being formless or bloated. It is not a leech-infested swamp, it is the Galapagos. Swelling, eclipse, piercing, preying, swaying, flash. And the rhythm of words is there, too. Just read the last sentence. These touches do tend to fade the fastest (we have, after all, lost some of the musicality of Chaucer and Shakespeare to the erosion of time), so I won't dwell overmuch on them. All the same, the style is not only gorgeous but active and dramatic. The buzz of life hums in every line. I have nothing but admiration for it.

Now I'll turn to styles which I am compelled to decry-

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (p.78):

During my time in prison it happened, although extremely rarely, that some senior official visited the prison without a personal guard. It was instructive to see how this impressed the convicts, and impressed them favourably. A fearless visitor of this type always aroused their respect, and even if there was a possibility that something unpleasant might happen, it would not happen in his presence. The fear that convicts inspire is to be found wherever there are convicts, and I really do not know what it springs from. It does of course have some foundation, starting with the convict's outward appearance, the look of the acknowledged bandit; in addition to this, anyone entering a prison can feel that this entire body of men has been assembled here against its will and that, whatever measures are taken, it is impossible to convert a living man into a corpse: he retains his feelings, his thirst for vengeance and life, his passions and his desire to satisfy them. Yet in spite of this, I am positively convinced that there is no reason to be afraid of convicts. A man does not so readily or so swiftly go for another with a knife. In short, even if there is some possible danger at times, one may conclude from the rarity of such unfortunate incidents that it is not a very great one. I speak here, needless to say, only of convicted prisoners, many of whom are glad that they have at last reached the prison (so attractive does a new life sometimes appear!) and are consequently disposed to behave quietly and peaceably; and, quite apart from this, their own kind will not allow the truly restless ones among them to behave with too much audacity.

It pains me to say one bad word about this man. His genius is excelsior. His comprehension of humanity was unmatched by any other single mind save possibly that of Nietzsche himself. I have drawn great solace from his works, and I prize him above any other author. He was, however, a terrible writer. In a mad attempt to nail down concepts more firmly than a crucified convict, he overwrote and avoided simplification with such pathological and academic intensity that much of his prose lacks life. It is wordy beyond measure. Sometimes it is wonderfully nervous, sometimes it trembles, but much of it is quite simply overwritten.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (p. 23):

The man still crying against her neck, Marla takes another drag on her cigarette.

I watch her from between Bob's shuddering tits.

To Marla I'm a fake. Since the second night I saw her, I can't sleep. Still, I was the first fake, unless, maybe all these people are faking with their lesions and their coughs and tumors, even Big Bob, the big moosie. The big cheesebread.

Would you just look at his sculpted hair.

Marla smokes and rolls her eyes now.

In this one moment, Marla's lie reflects my lie, and all I can see are lies. In the middle of all their truth. Everyone clinging and risking to share their worst fear, that their death is coming head-on and the barrel of a gun is pressed against the back of their throats. Well, Marla is smoking and rolling her eyes, and me, I'm buried under a sobbing carpet, and all of a sudden even death and dying rank right down there with plastic flowers on video as a non-event.

'Bob,' I say, 'you're crushing me.' I try to whisper, then I don't. 'Bob.' I try to keep my voice down, then I'm yelling. 'Bob, I have to go to the can.'

“Writing the way people talk” would be fine if “people” didn't talk like illiterate, pretentious idiots. Would you want to read a whole book written in the manner of my blog posts? No? Good. I would be embarrassed to write such a thing.

William Faulkner, Light in August (p. 187-188):

Then she stopped laughing. There was no cessation of mirth in that, either. The still, abject, downlooking voice reached him. 'I made a mistake tonight. I forgot something.' Perhaps she was waiting for him to ask her what it was. But he did not. He just stood there, with the still, downspeaking voice dying somewhere about his ears. He had forgot about the shot sheep. He had lived with the fact which the older boy had told him too long now. With the slain sheep he had bought immunity from it for too long now for it to be alive. So he could not understand at first what she was trying to tell him. They stood at the corner. It was the edge of town, where the street became a road that ran on beyond the ordered and measured lawns, between small, random houses and barren fields – the small, cheap houses which compose the purlieus of such towns.

A master prose stylist once wondered how this man's “corncobby chronicles” could be considered masterpieces. I am, ultimately, inclined to agree. There is no writer more grotesquely overrated than this one. The prose meanders, it repeats pointlessly, it focuses on details which are irrelevant. There are, of course, moments of beauty in his works, but the style is, overall, too erratic. A good craftsman, I admit, lies beneath this warped and mutilated style. And he believed his own rationale for what he did. The problem is that things like this - “With the slain sheep he had bought immunity from it for too long now for it to be alive” - interrupt the fairly decent passages too often to be ignored.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (p. 1-2):

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.

For this I have nothing but contempt. Sure, it's an interesting linguistic experiment in how much we can get out of a text despite its patent lack of any sort of sensible governing principle, but in that sense so are passages of Joyce. Both should stay in the realm of linguistic experiments where they belong, or at least they shouldn't occupy more than a couple dozen pages. After all, a couple dozen pages is far more than they need to make their inane stylistic points.

Past that, I will merely quote an old conversation with the friend who convinced me to start posting these rants here in the first place:

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: [I am not a big fan of The Road.]

The Other Guy: Bad book?

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: [redacted] Well, not a "bad" book per se. I would call it terrible, mortifying, pretentious, absurd, sickening – a rape of the language, if you will – and, also, it's as dull as watching flies [redacted].

The Other Guy: Wow. That's..harsh.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Take a look at a page of something of his on amazon. Just go do it.

The Other Guy: This might take a sec.

[Discussion of Catch-22.]

[Discussion of incest in Lord of the Rings.]

The Other Guy: Um...one sentence into the excerpt, and McCarthy already abandoned traditional sentence structure (who needs noun>verb?!).

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Yep. He hates the language.

[Time passes.]

The Other Guy: What the hell is up with this guy's SENTENCES? They're like...WEIRD...

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: He talks about how semi-colons don't make sense...but then he does [redacted] LIKE THIS. Check out his *dialogue.*

[Redacted to preserve the intellectual reputation of another friend.]

The Other Guy: [redacted] "corrects" my poor grammar when I do things MUCH less terrible than all... all of this...

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Humans are designed to see PATTERNS. Patterns are the *human imposition of order on what is fundamentally chaos.* THERE IS A REASON MUSIC HAS HARMONY AND SENTENCES HAVE A SUBJECT, VERB, AND OBJECT. Order is a TRIUMPH over chaos. [It is PART OF WHO WE ARE. You CAN'T abandon that, yet he TRIES. People have been trying to do this from the 1920s on.] IT ISN'T NEW. IT HAS ALL BEEN DONE BEFORE. CAN WE ALL GO BACK TO MAKING SENSE NOW PLEASE?

The Other Guy: "In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls." WHOSE LIGHT? I am already frustrated by this writing.

[Discussion of Nazism.]

The Other Guy: And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the egg of spiders. And on that shore this dirty thing coughed, and was almost heard to say, "Gollum, Gollum." Er, wait, one of those sentences isn't from The Road..

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: LOL

The Other Guy: I don't like his metaphor. "sightless as the egg of spiders" implies that other 'eggs are not sightless, which is a blatant lie. I don't know of any creatures that are born with sight.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: I know of no eggs that can see period. It's sloppy writing.

The Other Guy: I ASSUME he meant 'young' by 'eggs' - which is retarded, but even granting that, it still makes no [redacted] sense.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: This is how it should have gone: "stared into the light with eyes sightless and dead, white as the egg of spiders." And, better imagery would be squid eggs. You don't get a more dead, milky white than squid eggs. Spider eggs? I don't even know what the [redacted] that looks like.

The Other Guy: I haven't even past the first page yet! Wow did you finish this!?

[Discussion of Yahoo! Answers.]

The Other Guy: Whoa... The Road = no apostrophes? In ... the narrative? Who needs apostrophes?

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: So did you see McCarthy's dialogue yet?

The Other Guy: Not yet. Pages 2-X took a long time loading, all at once. I'm on 2 now.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: ic

The Other Guy: "He thought the month was October but wasnt sure." Wasnt.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Yeah. Wasnt. I cant understand why hed do that

The Other Guy: Just in case I might have thought that was a fluke or something, the very next sentence: "He hadnt.." That's very witty. But, seriously, what the [redacted] gives? He did this... .... because he could?

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Basically. And his publisher let him get away with it.

[Discussion of capital punishment.]

He apparently doesn't "like" certain punctuation.

The Other Guy: Um...I might have found dialogue, but I'm not sure.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Yeah, that's a way to tell you've found it.

The Other Guy: LOL! He said: If [the child] is not the word of God God never spoke.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: See, this is the kind of [redacted] that I can juxtapose against Burgess. McCarthy does this because he's just a [redacted] up writer. [Burgess always has a reason for his stylistic changes.]

The Other Guy:

“The boy turned in his blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.
I'm right here.
I know.”

...............WHICH of these things were said? It's a mystery!!! Was it,

"Hi papa," said the boy
"I'm right here" said the dad
"I know" said the boy

or

"Hi papa" said the boy
"I'm right here. I know" said the dad

oooor

"Hi papa," he said. "I'm right here."
"I know," dad said

ooor WTF

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: *Geoffrey Rush voice* It's a mystery.

The Other Guy: I have absolutely NO idea how that conversation went. Whatsoever. Or what was meant by it.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: NO ONE DOES.

The Other Guy: What the [redacted] McCarthy. WHAT THE [redacted].

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: In ten years, McCarthy won't even know how it went. And in a hundred years, when the language has changed, scholars will be duped into thinking it is even SIGNIFICANT how it went.

The Other Guy: BUT PEOPLE LIKE THIS. THEY SAY THEY LIKE THIS. How did people get a film script out of this??? How the [redacted] did they decipher the conversations???

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Guesswork.

[Discussion of moral principles preventing the bartering of a Swedish bikini model orgy for ten minutes spent reading another McCarthy novel.]

The Other Guy: With your permission I'm actually not going to keep reading that excerpt of The Road. It's just garbage.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: That's fine. You discovered how the dialogue went.

The Other Guy: "Went" is one way of putting it. "Didn't went" would be another. Err, sorry: “didnt went.”*

Is that harsh? Sure. Overstated? Maybe a little. Prejudicial? Absolutely. And the spirit of it is still true. McCarthy's due is that he has flashes of poetic inspiration, and he manages to create a bleak atmosphere with his words. That, however, is nothing that cannot be done with a little effort in a normal style. For an even bleaker and more moving vision, see Heart of Darkness. Hell, see The Gunslinger. There is no valid reason for what McCarthy does as a matter of course. None. By degrees, violation of rules and principles is of course inevitable, even necessary in writing. That does not mean that one should commit the literary equivalent of the Rape of Nanjing. Clarity is sacrificed, meaning is spat upon, and communication is stampeded to death. McCarthy and Joyce think writing is a primary art. As I said before, it isn't.

That concludes my sketch of a comparison between good styles and bad. As always, things have to be taken on a case by case basis (down to the word at times), but the overall effect is what I have been looking at here. Now, at the risk of seeming perhaps to align myself with the title character, I will leave you with one more example of a style - an ineffably beautiful style - which too many contemporary writers have let fall by the wayside:

As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed – that voice was a deathless song.

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

And if you still think me an arch-reactionary with only the most myopic of views...then, as the Historian of my as-yet-unfinished story says, I have resigned myself to that.