The Centrality of Style

Style as Moral Failure

Near the end of her life, Angela Carter said, "I've got nothing against realism. . .[b]ut there is realism and realism. I mean, the questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality. I would like, I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS, but I, I haven't. I've done other things. I mean, I'm an arty person, ok, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose - so fucking what?"

The defensiveness with which Carter speaks here is well-justified. Not only was she accused of being un-British in her choice of subjects and her prose style, but writers like Carter, who willingly employ an "overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose" are frequently treated not like they are in some way bad writers but are actually bad people. I am frequently amazed at the vehemence with which some reviewers and readers react against stories or novels that are unconventional or stylistically "excessive." The authors of such works are regarded as deviant, hostile to "ordinary" readers, just plain contemptuous of good order in matters of storytelling and style. (Even a writer as conventional as John Updike is sometimes attacked for these sins.) And woe indeed to the writer who, like Carter, combines an extra-realistic approach and a "purple" prose.

Philip Roth once mordantly remarked:

. . .I set myself the goal of becoming the writer some Jewish critics had been telling me I was all along: irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious. . .A quotation from Melville began to intrigue me, from a letter he had sent to Hawthorne upon completing Moby Dick. . ."I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb." Now I knew that no matter hard I tried I could never really hope to be wicked; but perhaps if I worked long and hard and diligently, I could be frivolous.

And indeed from Portnoy's Complaint on, Roth produced numerous books that were "frivolous" in comparison to his earlier work, that went beyond the bounds of decorum in structure and good taste in style, that were "excessive" in many, many ways, but . . .so fucking what? They are also books that will continue to stand as among the best American novels written in the latter part of the twentieth century. They are all clearly the consequence of "hard and long and diligent" work, and in their very excesses and frivolity are as serious as anything written by more obviously earnest writers of the time, including Roth's colleague Saul Bellow.

Yet there are still readers who can only see the frivolity--that is the comedy, as savage as it can sometimes become--and the excesses—Roth's frequently freewheeling style—and who regard books like Sabbath's Theater and Operation Shylock as fundamentally not serious, as irresponsible treatments of subjects that ought to be treated in a grim and sober way. They welcomed, on the other hand, American Pastoral, because it seemed closer to this more earnest approach. I think Roth would probably agree with Carter in every particular of her statement, and both of these writers could serve as models of the sort of writer willing to endure the charges that their writing exemplifies moral failure, as long as they were ultimately seen, rightly, as aesthetic triumphs.

Whenever I hear or read someone urging writers to be "clear," to "communicate," to avoid "trickery," I can only take it as an exhortation to be good. Not to offend official sensibilities or imply that many readers are too timid in their willingness to take risks. In the name of literary decency not to engage in "too much writing." Perhaps in the long run these stylistic gatekeepers can be persuaded that literary form and style have nothing to do with morality, but most of them probably don't really much like literature, anyway, if "literature" is more than just an opportunity to assert your own virtue.

Too Much Writing

The Association of Writing Programs (AWP) puts out a review/journal called The Writer's Chronicle, similar in many ways to Poets and Writers. As does Poets and Writers, Writer's Chronicle always steers pretty close to the mainstream, dispensing "advice" and "analysis" that seldom strays from the conventional and currently accepted.

Rarely, however, has WC printed an essay as vapid and uninformed as "Translating Ideas: What Scientists Can Teach Fiction Writers About Metaphor," written by Debra Fitzgerald and featured in the March/April 2004 issue of the journal. The essence of her argument in favor of "scientific" uses of metaphor can perhaps be gleaned from this analysis rather late in the essay. First she quotes a passage from Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn:

The cat walked in from the main room and stood on my outstretched thighs and began kneading them with its front paws, half-retracted claws engaging the material to make a pocka-pocka-pocka sound. . .The cat was black and white with a Hitler moustache, and when it finally noticed I had a face it squeezed its eyes at me. . .The big Nazi cat went on raking up thread-loops from my trousers, seemingly intent on singlehandedly reinventing Velcro. . .its uneven cackling purr. [Ellipses inserted by Fitzgerald.] Fitzgerald's critique:

There is a clearly defined object here—the cat—but there are three different images attached to it. The big Nazi cat with the Hitler moustache and cackling purr intent on reinventing Velcro conjures up simultaneous images of an ethnic cleanser, a witch, and, I don't know, an inventor. While these images are fun and evocative, they are a dead-end. They do not heighten our understanding of the idea of this cat. It's a passage full of nonfunctional, decorative metaphors, a good example of writing that is all style, no substance.

This reading of the passage is so ham-handed that I can't entirely be sure I know what it's getting at, but the point seems to be that Lethem (it would be more accurate to say Lionel Essrog, the narrator), is not sufficiently concerned with giving us a clearly "functional" description of the cat, one that gives us an "idea" of the cat. (Why that would be necessary is not explained.) It's apparently not enough that Lethem would use the cat as an opportunity to create a word-portrait, a verbal construction, one that might go beyond the merely "functional" to help us see the "clearly defined object" in a less clearly defined, but perhaps more insightful way. Or, more importantly, that he would use this scene and Essrog's perception of the cat to help us more fully understand Essrog's own peculiar relationship to the world (keeping in mind his Tourette's induced verbal habits.)

I once taught a course in contemporary American fiction in which during our discussion of John Updike's Rabbit Run a student bitterly complained about Updike's generous (my word) prose style. In another class I had recently heard a similar complaint about Madame Bovary. (All that description.) I was led to say to the Updike-fatigued student—perhaps more harshly than I should have—that I found it strange to be accusing a writer of engaging in "too much writing."

(The rest of the class did find it amusing.)

I have to say that I think this is what Debra Fitzgerald's argument boils down too. Too many writers doing too much damn writing. Too much style, and not enough substance. This is not the occasion for going into a lengthy disquisition about the interaction of style and substance, about the way in which style creates its own substance, etc. Suffice it to say that Fitzgerald wants writers to follow scientists in providing strictly functional metaphors that help to explain and instruct, and that I think this couldn't be a more unfortunate and almost willfully obtuse understanding of what serious fiction—literature—ought to be about. Certainly there are plenty of writers who take the merely "decorative" as the index of good writing, but Lethem isn't really one of them, and neither is Updike.

What finally disturbs me the most about "Translating Ideas" is precisely that it is published by Writer's Chronicle and at least implicitly has its imprimatur. I can't be certain about the editors' intentions in publishing the essay, but I have to assume they at least in part found it compelling and worth passing along to its readers. And since a very large part of its readership consists of students and aspiring writers, that this is the advice they get from an influential "professional" organization to me borders on scandalous. Literature has already been shown the door in departments of literary study; is writing to be expelled from Creative Writing? 

Kerouac the Writer

When I read On the Road for the first time, I didn't care for it much. I didn't exactly hate it, but I was disappointed by it. I do recall being puzzled by the reputation this novel had of being a radical statement of postwar restlessness, or disaffected youth, or spiritual exaltation, or whatever other urgent "content" On the Road was supposed to offer. I couldn't find any statements at all in it, although the characters certainly seemed restless, occasionally expressed disaffection (but not with the government or what could be conveniently labeled "the culture"), and at times appeared to be in a state of exaltation (frequently drug- or alcohol-induced, but not always). The novels' style, as well, though obviously unconventional, did not at the time fulfill my expectations of what a transgressive style might accomplish.

In short, On the Road seemed rather tame to me, its rebellion more ingenuously earnest than hard-edged, and I read no further Kerouac for many years. Not too long ago, I decided to try reading On the Road again, expecting that I would quickly enough find it the same tepid experience as the first time around, that I would in fact probably stop reading it fairly early on and consign Kerouac permanently to the category of literary disappointments. However, although I can't say I immediately became entranced by it, I did not stop reading it. I did almost immediately judge the novel's protagonist, Sal Paradise, to be a more interesting character than I had previously, when he seemed to be mostly a cipher. Now I saw his restlessness as a genuine craving for experience, not affectation or pretense. At the same time, I found Dean Moriarty a less annoying character than I had the first time around, although I still wouldn't identify his appearances in the novel as necessarily among its highlights. I suspect that the reputation as an "outlaw" text to which I responded impatiently in my initial reading of On the Road, originates in an over-identification with Moriarty, who some readers took to be the novel's most important character. I think Sal Paradise is obviously the main character, and while Moriarty has his role to play in the intensification of Sal Paradise's immersion in experience, he does still too often come off as affected and pretentious, and future critics and scholars would do the novel a service by focusing more on the way his character reinforces the novel's formal and stylistic ambitions and less on his dubious deeds and spurious words of wisdom.

It was precisely the formal and stylistic qualities of On the Road that I eventually found myself appreciating more charitably on this second read. I think I originally experienced On the Road as essentially formless, even though I understood it was very loosely structured as a "picaresque" narrative ("very loosely" being the characteristic I noticed most). What now seems clearer to me is the strategy by which Kerouac both enlists the picaresque strategy—which is often thought of as a kind of denial of form, although it is not—and fractures it even further to convey an impression of "spontaneous" action that the novel merely chronicles. On the Road invokes the journey motif associated with picaresque, but where most classic picaresque narratives present the journey as a serial, unbroken series of episodes that lead directly to journey's end, On the Road fragments the journey, leaves it off only to pick it up again, the episodes united only by the participation of Sal Paradise, who meets up with and then departs from the various characters who contribute to his effort of "going West to see the country," as he puts it in the novel's first paragraph. The novel thus can be taken as an experiment with the picaresque form specifically, but also as an effective application of "form" more generally.

I never really agreed with the criticism that as a stylist Kerouac at best exhibits a "plain" style or that, at worst, in his dependence on the declarative mode his is essentially a style without style. He does frequently employ the declarative mode, but this approach also prompts Kerouac to long, cumulative sentences that invoke a kind of lyricism:

In Newburgh it had stopped raining. I walked down to the river, and I had to ride back to New York in a bus coming back from a weekend in the mountains--chatter-chatter, blahblah, and me swearing for all the time and the money I'd wasted, and telling myself, I wanted to go west and here I've been all day and into the night going up and down, north and south, like something that can't get started. And I swore I'd be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn't give a damn, just as long as I'd be in Chicago tomorrow.

It's true that Kerouac's prose does not much incorporate traditional figurative language—more of which may be what I was looking for in my initial reading of On The Road—but sentence length and structure are as much a part of "style" as metaphor or simile, and Kerouac's style is not just dedicated to moving the story along. This passage doesn't so much move forward as it does spin in circles once the essential action—getting on the bus—is established. It might seem that Sal Paradise is impatient to get beyond the usual recording of scene—"chatter-chatter, blah-blah"— but Kerouac uses that impatience to motivate Sal's creation of an alternative way of writing that 2mostly avoids fancy phrasing and obligatory dialogue (although Kerouac's novels have plenty of dialogue—it's just not of the purely ornamental variety) without sacrificing an attention to language to the exigencies of plot. An examination of a passage such as this one also shows that Kerouac was not oblivious to the effects of pace, rhythm, and variety: the short first sentence of the paragraph sets up the expansive second sentence, which is followed by the still-lengthy but more an afterthought final sentence.

Kerouac famously described his method of composition as "spontaneous prose," designed to mimic the spontaneity of jazz musicians. I take Kerouac to be sincere in his description of the aims and nature of this method, and it seems to capture the real achievement of Kerouac's fiction. It is dangerous to impute "development" in Kerouac's work, since the publication dates and the dates of composition of his books are so much at variance. (On the Road was written in the late 40s, while the published follow-up, The Dharma Bums, was written in 1957, after many of the subsequently published novels.) However, it does seem to me that in reading Kerouac's novels in the order of their publication it is in The Subterraneans (published 1958) that we really see a more radical version of spontaneous prose. We can see it as early as the novel's second paragraph:

. . .I was coming down the street with Larry O'Hara old drinking buddy of mine from all the times in San Francisco in my long and nervous and mad careers I've gotten drunk and in fact cadged drinks off friends with such "genial" regularity nobody really cared to notice or announce that I am developing or was developing, in my youth, such bad freeloading habits though of course they did not notice but liked me and as Sam said "Everybody comes to you for your gasoline boy, that's some filling station you got there" or say words to that effect--old Larry O'Hara always nice to me, a crazy Irish young businessman of San Francisco with Balzacian backroom in his bookstore where they'd smoke tea and talk of the old days of the great Basie band or the days of the great Chu Berry--of whom more anon since she got involved with him too as she had to get involved with everyone because of knowing me who am nervous and many leveled and not in the least one-souled--not a piece of my pain has showed yet--or suffering--Angels, bear with me, I'm not even looking at the page but straight ahead into the sadglint of my wallroom and at a Sarah Vaughan Gerry Mulligan KROW show on the desk in the form of a radio, in other words, they were sitting on the fender of the car in front of the Black Mask bar on Montgomery Street, Julien Alexander the Christlike unshaved thin youthful quiet strange almost as you or as Adam might say apocalyptic angel or saint of the subterraneans certainly star (now), and she, Mardou Fox, whose face when I first saw it in Dante's bar around the corner made me think, "By God, I've got to get involved with that little woman" and maybe too because she was Negro. . . .

The free-flowing disregard for sentence boundaries is very pronounced here, but this of course does not mean the passage lacks all structure or does not bear up under analysis. The fused clauses and phrases set up their own kind of rhythm, which can be heard if one reads the passage with care. The first three lines encourage us to read without pausing, but the forced pause created by the quotation marks around "genial" allow us to catch our breath before moving on through the next two lines and arriving at the inserted nonrestrictive "in my youth." Since Kerouac otherwise so insistently abandons the comma in such a passage, we must assume that the commas here are quite intentional, a way of creating musical effect, a staccato-like phrase that leads to the different kind of variation provided by the quoted words from "Sam." Similar effects are created in the rest of the passage through the use of dashes, which also introduces digressions that reinforce the analogy with jazz improvisation, and additional inserted commas, parentheses, and quotation.

This stylistic strategy seems to me a genuine contribution to literary stylistics specifically and to American literature more generally. It also makes The Subterrraneans itself an important text both in postwar American fiction and American literature as a whole. Combined with the novel's relative brevity (in my copy, 111 pages), the "bop prosody" of The Subterraneans makes it a work at least as close to poetry as to "fiction" equated in the modern era with "storytelling," in which "style" is often enough just another element of "craft" when it isn't disregarded altogether. The Subterraneans is probably just as revelatory of the "underground" culture of the 1950s as anything else written during the era, but it is less likely to be regarded as a work whose documentary value exceeds its literary merit. On the Road will no doubt continue to be taken as Kerouac's signature work, but I now think The Subterraneans will be more highly regarded by future readers as an innovative work of prose.

The criticism frequently leveled at The Subterraneans, that it offers, through the character of Mardou Fox, a severely limited portrayal both of women and African-Americans will probably linger into the future as well, but while it is true enough that the novel's narrator, Leo Percepied, has a view of women and African-Americans constricted by his background and the era in which he lives, his affair with Mardou is inextricably linked to his desire for experience (a trait he shares with all of Kerouac's protagonists), which in this novel means an affinity with the "subterraneans" of the title and an immediate curiosity about Mardou, who most strongly evokes the "Other" for Percepied. The limitations of Percepied's assumptions about gender or race have to be balanced against his acceptance of a way of life not much in accord with the cultural norms his background and the era would have him affirm. 

One could argue that Mardou isn't really much developed as a character at all, as neither are any of the other characters in this novel, even, to some extent, Percepied. Our sense of knowing them only incompletely, however, is probably an unavoidable consequence of Kerouac's method in The Subterraneans. It is a novel less concerned with the delineation of character than with its narrator's response to his experience and its delineation in language.

Personality and Prose

According to Zadie Smith, in a Guardian essay by now showered with much praise for its "honesty:

. . .writers do have a different kind of knowledge than either professors or critics. Occasionally it's worth listening to. The insight of the practitioner is, for better or worse, unique. It's what you find in the criticism of Virginia Woolf, of Iris Murdoch, of Roland Barthes. What unites those very different critics is the confidence with which they made the connection between personality and prose. To be clear: theirs was neither strictly biographical criticism nor prescriptively moral criticism, and nothing they wrote was reducible to the childish formulations "only good men write good books" or "one must know a man's life to understand his work". But neither did they think of a writer's personality as an irrelevance. They understood style precisely as an expression of personality, in its widest sense. A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don't think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.

Style is "an expression of personality" It's also a mark of the writer's "manner of being in the world." It's also "a personal necessity. . .the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness." It's also "a writer's way of telling the truth." It's also "the refinement of a consciousness." And it's also the "education of the emotions."

That's an awful lot of weight to heap on words and sentences and paragraphs, especially in fiction, which, except in the hands of narcissists and pseudo-philosophers, is not a medium for the "expression" of anything, but the attempt to convince your readers that words on a page evoke a "world," and to make something aesthetically pleasing out of prose. If you can do this, then all of the rhetoric about "human consciousness" and "telling the truth" and educating emotions is just so much bombast.

It is in fact finally difficult to know exactly what any of the declarations made in the above-quoted passage are even supposed to mean. How am I to know anything about the writer's "personality" from reading his novel? Never mind that I don't care about his personality in the first place—I want to know what he can do with words. There's just no way that fiction can embody the writer's personality. Personality is itself a fiction that we use to make overgeneralizations about ourselves and other people. At best, a work of fiction might create what seems to be a personality "behind" the work, but this doesn't happen with all fiction (and Eliot was right in suggesting that good writers try to avoid it, anyway) and to equate that personality with the "real" personality of the writer is to confuse a trope with reality, since. neither of these personalities exist in the first place.

Perhaps style could be "the expression of a particular human consciousness" if the writer's "consciousness" was itself the subject being explored. That is, if the writer was writing some kind of psychological memoir rather than fiction. But I don't see how consciousness in this pretentious way of speaking about it is even at issue in the writing of fiction, and I certainly don't see how style has anything to do with getting it expressed. A good writer's style does exhibit certain continuities and characteristics over time, but is this an effect of "consciousness"? Isn't it just a function of that writer's particular way of living with language? Similarly, style as a way of "telling the truth" might be plausible if by this we mean that the writer has found the right style—the right words and sentences and paragraphs—to evoke the fictional world he/she is after. If it means "telling the truth" about the characters and events portrayed in the fiction. If it means telling the truth in some more metaphysical sense, telling the truth about The Way Things Really Are, then Zadie Smith is again indulging in grandiose posturing.

Even more grandiose is her ultimate contention that style has something to do with "the refinement of a consciousness" rather than refinement of "words on a page." "Style" in art and literature is a material characteristic, an identifiable, distinctive arrangement and rearrangement of the elements of the medium, whether that be language, paint, musical sound, etc. It is not some ineffable, mystical quality, a "personal necessity," something these people have but those do not. Literary style is the means by which accomplished writers manipulate language for aesthetic effect. You can educate your emotions all you'd like, but if you haven't created something aesthetically pleasing with your words, you haven't succeeded as a writer of fiction

The inevitable consequence of associating a writer's sentences with the writer’s “manner of being in the world” is to conflate a response to writing as a response to the writer. A failure of art becomes a moral defect. Conversely, an artistic success becomes a vindication of "character," the experience of art reduced to the degree of one's sympathy with the artist, however much a figment of the imagination that figure turns out to be. Compared to these "refinements of consciousness" the writer makes available, all discussion of the skill with which he/she organizes "words on a page" is, of course, "merely literary."

The Erasure of Style

Most of the reviews of Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States (including the British reviews of the book under its original title of Miss Herbert) concentrated on its idiosyncratic structure and unceremonious tone (idiosyncratic and unceremonious for a work of literary criticism, at any rate). Reviewers seemed to find both annoying distractions from the occasional critical insight Thirlwell offers, and their reservations about Thirlwell as a critic were generally confined to these admittedly unorthodox features of his book.

While it is true that the central argument Thirlwell wants to make in The Delighted States could probably have been made in a much shorter book, perhaps even in a critical essay, I can't say I found either Thirlwell's circuitous method of analysis, which proceeds both back and forth across time and national literatures and sideways from author to author (at times providing unusual and surprising juxtapositions), or his conversational style particularly bothersome. I take the travelogue approach to be Thirlwell's attempt to reinforce the book's overriding point—that fiction in effect speaks an international language that manages to survive its migration through translation from one literary tradition to another—in the form his book assumes, and it is an effective enough device. It might not be the sort of method one expects from a work of serious literary criticism, but there is no inherent reason criticism can't accommodate such an alternative strategy.

Further, both the looser, more informal structure and the reader-friendly critical language Thirlwell employs seem to me to work to accomplish one of criticism's legitimate tasks, which is to explicate features of literary works that are not necessarily obvious to all readers, that require the critic to call attention to them as evocatively as possible. In The Delighted States, Thirlwell is making a case for the efficacy of translation that calls for numerous and at times subtle comparisons and analogies, and his manner of leading the reader along his route of unexpected congruences, pointing out the connections more as an enthusiastic guide than as a source of critical pronouncements, is a perfectly sound way to proceed. If the test of a worthwhile critic is whether his reader is able to regard an author. a text, or literary history with enhanced understanding, then Thirlwell passes this test readily enough.

Something that may have contributed to reviewers' lack of enthusiasm for The Delighted States is Thirlwell's emphasis on innovation in fiction, a preference that consistently informs his survey of literary influence and the role of translation in the evolution of fiction as a form. Along with his related emphasis on form (which he often conflates with "style"), Thirwell's focus on aesthetic innovation must have grated on the sensibilities of mainstream reviewers, who generally look askance at innovation as manifested in contemporary fiction and mostly ignore form in favor of what a work of fiction has "to say" (when they're not simply judging it for its superficial entertainment value, its success or failure at being a "good read"). For me, that Thirlwell's book illustrates the extent to which the history of fiction is the history of inspired change is its greatest virtue, but for some of its reviewers its own unconventional form as literary criticism may have only reminded them of Thirwell's implicit defense of the role of the unconventional in literary history.

None of the book's reviewers, however, chose to examine what to me is its most problematic claim--or, as it turns out, series of claims. In his commitment to the idea that all works of fiction are translatable, even down to a particular writer's distinctive "style," Thirlwell makes the following observations:

. . .A style may be as large as the length of a book. Its units may well be more massive, and more vague, than I would often like.

A style, in the end, is a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless.

In fact, it can become something which is finally not linguistic at all. For the way in which a novelist represents life depends on what a novelist thinks is there in a life to be represented. A style is therefore as much a quirk of emotion, or of theological belief, as it is a quirk of language.

A style does not entirely coincide with prose style, or formal construction, or technique. (20)

In order to maintain his position that fiction can be translated without appreciable diminution in the integrity of the translated text, Thirlwell needs to minimize the obstacles posed by "style" understood as a writer's characteristic exploration of the resources of his/her native language. One way to do that would be simply to dismiss the importance of style in comparison to all of the other elements of fiction that could well come through in a good translation without loss of effect. To his credit, Thirlwell does not do this; instead, he radically expands the meaning of "style" so that it includes. . .well, just about everything: It is "a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless."

But, of course, if style is everything, so "various" as to be "endless" in its features, it is really nothing. Thirlwell in fact deprives it of its one materially definable quality when he asserts that it might be "something which is not linguistic at all." This notion, that style is not fundamentally a phenomenon of language, recurs throughout Thirlwell's discussions of his international (although primarily British and European) cast of writers, even of those writers, such as Flaubert or Chekhov, known for their attention to "linguistic" style. He picks up on Marcel Proust's comment about style as "quality of vision" and uses this phrase as a kind of summary concept encapsulating his definition of style in its most "massive" incarnation. What persists in a translation, then, is this quality of vision, which in its grand scope dwarfs mere facility with language.

I confess I don't finally understand the need for this erasure of style in its tangible, most coherent form. However much it grasps metaphorically at a less tangible if still apprehensible object of our experience of fiction, to speak of "quality of vision" does not adequately account for the concrete achievements of writers as stylists. However much I value Flaubert's "quality of vision" (which is a lot), it just seems to me manifestly obvious that reading Flaubert in English is not the same experience as reading him in French. Reading Virginia Woolf in French cannot be more than a necessary if barely sufficient substitute for those French speakers without English who want to read her work. While I am reasonably sure that the comic vision of Stanley Elkin would still be preserved for those reading his fiction in a translation, how in the world could this writer's style survive the crossing-over?

Near the end of The Delighted States, Thirlwell scales back the grandiosity of his claims about translation:

All through this book, I have been arguing that style is the most important thing, and survives its mutilating translations--that although the history of translation is always a history of disillusion, something survives. . . . (429)

Yes, of course something survives. What serious reader sadly restricted to one language (or even two or three) would claim otherwise? Certainly I wouldn't. But I'm comfortable with accepting that this "something" includes inspired storytelling or formal inventiveness or compelling characters, but not style except in a more or less successful approximation. To stretch "style" into "vision" or "theological belief" is way too misty and metaphysical for me. I'm willing to settle for style as irretrievably "linguistic," a writer's artful way with words.

Avoiding Style

Graham Harman's attempt to elevate H.P. Lovecraft to the pantheon of supreme literary artists in his book, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Zero Books, 2012), begins with a defense of Lovecraft's work against what is probably the most famous dismissal of it, made by the critic Edmund Wilson in the 1930s. "The principal feature of Lovecraft's work," wrote Wilson, "is an elaborate concocted myth" about "a race of outlandish gods and grotesque prehistoric peoples who are always playing tricks with time and space and breaking through into the contemporary world, usually somewhere in Massachusetts." One of Lovecraft's stories, "At the Mountains of Madness," focuses on "semi-invisible polypous monsters that uttered a shrill whistling sound and blasted their enemies with terrific winds."

According to Harman, in his critique Wilson has unfairly "reduced to literal absurdity" Lovecraft's plots through an especially brutal "paraphrase," a term that Harman uses to describe any attempt to translate any "statement, artwork, or anything else" into terms other than its own. For Harman, Lovecraft is a writer whose work is especially noteworthy for its "deliberate and skillful obstruction of all attempts to paraphrase," and the burden of most of Weird Realism is to show how and why this is so. But is Wilson's paraphrase--if that's what it is--really unfair, a diminution of Lovecraft's actual achievement?

It certainly seems accurate to say that Lovecraft's work centers on the "elaborate concocted myth" of Cthulhu  and other related beings (the "Old Ones"), creatures who predate the appearance of human beings on Earth, who make occasional appearances in the present (providing the horror), and who originate from somewhere else in the cosmos. Perhaps the word "concocted" has pejorative connotations, but would the sense of the phrase markedly differ if Wilson had chosen a near-synonym such as, say, "fabricated"? Is it not simply true to say that in his stories H.P. Lovecraft fabricated an "elaborate myth," meaning one of Lovecraft's own creation? Isn't it also true to say that the creatures featured in this mythos are pretty "outlandish" (so outlandish that Lovecraft's narrators have a hard time describing them) and at times "grotesque"? In the first chapter of his book Harman refers to them as "monstrous creatures," and it's hard to see why this would be considered some kind of neutral description rather than itself a "paraphrase" that could be seen as just as condescending as Wilson's if we choose to forget that it is the very nature of horror that its creations be both outlandish and monstrous.

Similarly, it seems to me literally true and in no way a paraphrase of a Lovecraft tale to note that it is likely to be "playing tricks with time and space," that the "monstrous creatures" are likely to be featured "breaking through into the contemporary world," and that this is likely to take place in Massachusetts.(Arkham, to be more precise--although Wilson is correct that it might range outside of Arkham into the countryside as well). If anything, Wilson's characterization of "At the Mountains of Madness" seems even more accurate as a literal report on the creatures in that story. In short, I can find no compelling reason to regard Wilson's account of Lovecraft's work as reducing that work to "absurdity." I would not suggest that Wilson himself was attempting a neutral description, nor that he did not mean to communicate a negative judgment of Lovecraft's fiction. Clearly that fiction was at best not the sort of thing Wilson wanted to read; at worst it was too "outlandish" for him to take seriously absent some other compensatory quality he could not find.

Harman believes that any attempt to describe a literary work is going to be insufficient in capturing the spirit of the work (and sometimes such attempts can be just flat-out incorrect), and of course he is right. However, if Edmund Wilson can be faulted in his brief discussion of H.P. Lovecraft it is not because he has reduced the stories to absurdity (Wilson was perfectly aware that the novels of a writer like Dickens were full of the "outlandish," but he still thought Dickens a great writer) but because he has limited their possible appeal to their plots. His criticism is incomplete. It seems likely that had Wilson attempted a lengthier, more developed critique of Lovecraft's fiction he would have found little to recommend it in its atmospheric effects, its style, or its philosophical implications, but he would have more fully justified his position and more adequately stated his "paraphrase." Doubtless Graham Harman would have found it equally unpersuasive. But at this point dismissing Wilson because he is paraphrasing seems close to dismissing him because he doesn't like H.P. Lovecraft, and further dismissing any negative criticism because it can't escape the confines of Harman's conception of "paraphrase" (although presumably a positive evaluation can't, either.)

I myself think somewhat more highly of Lovecraft than did Edmund Wilson. But I don't think it's much of a defense to decry otherwise accurate, if only partial, summaries because they don't make the writer seem very serious. There are indeed elements of Lovecraft's fiction that can't be taken very seriously, and Wilson wasn't wrong to point this out. Only if you think Lovecraft's stories can't survive a focus on the goofier qualities of their plots would it even seem necessary to respond to Edmund Wilson. Graham Harman doesn't think that (although he probably wouldn't accept such a characterization of them), since most of his book is dedicated to showing that Lovecraft is also a stylist and a philosopher, but it does allow him to introduce the problem of paraphrase, which he will continue to pursue throughout the book as the primary form of criticism directed at Lovecraft's work, apparently presuming critics who finally can't consider a "pulp" writer like Lovecraft worth the effort to make more focused and nuanced criticism.

Most of the book is devoted to a systematic analysis of 100 passages from Lovecraft's fiction, each more or less concluding that the passage in question illustrates a typically Lovecraftian move, producing an effect that could not be created using some other move, cumulatively showing Lovecraft to be not just a good writer, but "one of the greatest of the twentieth century." Harman presents this as a form of close reading that avoids the flaws in the conception of close reading offered by New Criticism, which from Harman's perspective is guilty of a "holism" that puts too much emphasis on the "interrelations" among individual words, images and ideas within the work so that meaning becomes too dependent on internal (as opposed to external) context. This critique of New Criticism (specifically using Cleanth Brooks as example) is predicated on the philosophical assumptions of Object-Oriented Onotolgy/Speculative Realism, the currently prominent movement in philosophy of which Harman has been one of the most prolific proponents. I do not wish to focus on the validity of these assumptions per se, but only on the way Harman applies them to both literature as represented by H.P. Lovecraft and to literary criticism as represented by Cleanth Brooks--or at least by the account of Brooks Graham Harman provides.

My problem with Harman's characterization of New Criticism as exemplified by Cleanth Brooks begins with his initial description of what would seem to be a kind of first principle for New Critics: "A poem was to be treated as an autonomous entity, working like a machine to create certain effects." Although certainly "autonomy" is an important term in the New Critics' approach to "understanding poetry," there is little reason to believe that any New Critic, Cleanth Brooks especially, would consent to the idea that they regard a poem as an "entity" in the sense Harman has in mind. Since this sort of entity is more like a "machine," such a notion seems even more inappropriate as a characterization of the New Critics' contention that a poem should be read not as the means to a "statement" that could just as easily be paraphrased but as a self-enclosed work of art that indeed needs to be considered as a whole. Brooks does invoke the "organic" quality of a poem, but if this plausibly suggests a metaphorical "entity," it hardly seems consistent with the poem as "machine."

In my opinion, Brooks did not mean his account of poems as "organic," or his analogy between Keats's poem and the urn it apostrophizes, to literally objectify the poem as Harman does. In fact, Brooks in The Well-Wrought Urn is as likely to speak of the poem as an activity or a performance as to represent it as an object. Indeed, his analysis of "Ode On a Grecian Urn" specifically uses the terminology of drama to account for the poem's effects, his discussion of the poem's famous closing lines concluding that "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' has precisely the same status, and the same justification as Shakespeare's 'Ripeness is all.' It is a speech 'in character' and supported by a dramatic context." Brooks does not claim merely that poems "create certain effects." The effects are of the sort that require a very active reader, one who does not wait for the poem to announce its "meaning" but in a sense "follows" the poem in the same way an audience member needs to follow a play.

In considering the label of "formalism" often employed to discredit Brooks and the New Critics, Harman defends Brooks but maintains that, nevertheless, Brooks "fails to acknowledge the size of the problem that results from downplaying the content of literature so severely in favor of structural irony and paradox." Here it seems to me that again Harman is not characterizing accurately the position Brooks takes on the vexed question of the relationship between "form" and "content." Brooks does not "downplay" content in favor of form because he believes that in a poem--at least in a good poem--the two cannot be separated. Brooks writes, "The structure [form] obviously is everywhere conditioned by the nature of the material [content] which goes into the poem. The nature of the material sets the problem to be solved, and the solution is the ordering of the material." In Brooks's conception of a poem, it is meaningless to abstract the content from the form because the former has been transformed by the latter in a seamless merger to become the poem itself. If we want to talk of the "content," we can find it only in the "ordering" that form has made of it, that makes the poem what it is.

This ordering is what Brooks means by "context," but more importantly it is the reader's perception of context that is the most crucial element in our appreciation of poetry, not the irony or paradox the poem itself insists on or that the poet has "intended." "Meaning" is what the reader helps to create, not what the poem communicates directly. Thus when Harman asserts that Brooks cannot be right when he claims that the meaning we take away from the final line of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" comes from "its relation to the total context of the poem" because he gives inadequate respect to "individual elements within the poem," he is effectively emptying New Criticism of its own specific content, since at its core is the principle that  "the total context of the poem" is the poem. To instead attend closely to "individual elements within the poem" in their own "autonomy" is to treat the poem as something other than a poem.

While Cleanth Brooks certainly wants to correct what he thinks are misconceptions about what makes a poem a poem, ultimately The Well-Wrought Urn is more about what a poem requires of the reader than what it requires of the poet, less about getting the meaning right by attending to "total context" than about allowing a poem to afford the reader the most expansive reading experience possible, although no one such experience will be expansive enough to exhaust the poem's potential effects or implications. "Irony and paradox" are only elements that contribute to this expansiveness, not those that somehow prescribe what features poetry must exhibit to be poetry. Thus when Harman asserts that Brooks overlooks the fact that "philosophy and science display as much irony and paradox as literature," he is arguably correct, but only in the sense that the subjects of philosophy and science can be paradoxical, not because they aspire to incorporate irony and paradox as discursive modes that help to deflect "meaning" and thus discourage coming to conclusions.

Harman's critique of the unjustified holism of New Criticism is finally his own justification for the approach to Lovecraft's work he takes in his extended analyses of passages (sometimes single sentences) from Lovecraft's best-known stories. Here he both grants the autonomy to the "individual elements" within a literary work he believes Cleanth Brooks denied and uses these passages to discuss Lovecraft's fiction more broadly. This exercise seems designed most urgently to defend Lovecraft against the charge that as a prose stylist he leaves something to be desired, a task Harman performs through a tactic he calls "ruination," which is the effort to determine whether in "discovering how a given passage might be made worse," we might also "find an indirect method of appreciating its virtues." Not so surprisingly, we discover that very few of Lovecraft's sentences can be ruined in this way, as most attempts to do so fall woefully short of approximating in a suitably reductive form anything like the stylistically impeccable, philosophically charged effects Lovecraft's prose achieves. Although Harman does also cogently explicate some of the recurring features of Lovecraft's body of work along the way. it is difficult to take the relentless demonstrations of the difficulty of ruining Lovecraft's signature strategies as anything less than a prolonged rebuke of Edmund Wilson for his condescending "paraphrase" of Lovecraft, condescension that has continued to shadow Lovecraft's work ever since.

Certainly Harman's defense is vigorous: "Far from being a bad stylist, Lovecraft often makes innovations that feel like technical breakthroughs of the sort Vasari finds in various Italian artists." He does not hesitate to use words like "brilliant" and "masterful," to the point that ultimately even sympathetic readers might wonder whether Harman is protesting just a little too much. It is entirely possible to find Lovecraft's stories (some of them) to be imaginatively conceived and full of effectively creepy creatures and also to find them full of wooden prose and stilted dialogue. It might even be the case that these stories do indeed have interesting philosophical implications, even that they illustrate the particular insights of Speculative Realism/OOO, but why in order to concede these possibilities we must accept that H.P. Lovecraft is also a supreme craftsman and stylist is not at all apparent. The impression left by Harman's readings of Lovecraft is partly of a philosophically-informed literary critic making perceptive comments about the writer and work at hand, and partly of an ardent fan of H.P. Lovecraft so convinced of his genius that no kind of praise could possibly seem excessive: "The idea that Lovecraft is outclassed as a stylist by the likes of Proust or Joyce. . .is not an idea to which I can assent. The opposite claims seems closer to the truth."

To his credit, Harman does pick out passages that are certainly vulnerable to criticism by readers who share Wilson's judgment. Thus he quotes this sentence from "The Call of Cthulhu":

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone --whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong. . .

The emptiness of phrasing--"strangely poetic," "terrible vividness, "oddly said"--is particularly concentrated here, but this sort of writing is quite common in Lovecraft's stories. Harman plausibly appeals to the importance of considering that the source of such writing is in a first-person narrative by noting that in this case the phrase "strangely poetic" registers the narrator's "hesitation at endorsing" this account, but the persistence with which Lovecraft's narrators resort to formulations like this could also as easily be taken as a sign Lovecraft thinks they are appropriately evocative. Even if we grant the narrator's right to his flat phrasing, however, "terrible vividness" seems especially bland, and while Harman asserts this "empty signifier" actually "functions more effectively than any concrete list of terribly vivid things could ever do," he thus neglects to consider that to achieve the verbally "concrete" does not necessarily entail a "list." Likewise Harman claims that "oddly said" signifies that "the net result remains problematic for the narrator" without noticing that it does so in a particularly colorless way.

Harman's most substantive claim on behalf of Lovecraft as a stylist is that Lovecraft's fiction achieves what Harman calls "literary cubism." He cites this passage among others:

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing—but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

Rather than presenting a concrete, unified image of this creature, according to Harman Lovecraft instead "splits the usual relation between an accessible sensual thing and its accessible sensual qualities," presenting "such a multitude of surfaces that it can no longer be identified with any mere summation of them," in the manner of Picasso or Braque. Perhaps it is true that Lovecraft's favored way of conveying the sheer otherness of his benighted world is to splice together such separate images, simultaneously affirming and asserting their essential incompatibility, but this begs the question of whether any particular such stacking of images actually works very well. In this instance, I must say I cannot myself find the blurring of octopus, dragon and "human caricature" (whatever that might be) to be particularly effective. Not only does there seem to be no discernible reason why these things (rather than three other things) should be yoked together, but the breathless way in which they are invoked strikes me as rather silly. The narrator obviously regards this composite thing as terrifying; I just can't. (It doesn't help that the creature is not merely "shocking" or "frightful" but "shockingly frightful," a yoking together of equally vague words such that their "summation" merely blends them in a haze of cliché.)

Although the premises of Lovecraft's stories are frequently intriguing (within the confines Lovecraft's more general vision of the lurking, ancient horrors lying behind our ordinary reality allows), and the best of the stories create a legitimately ominous atmosphere and are well-paced enough to make their revelations effective, they are also consistently marred by this kind of writing. Too often we come upon descriptions such as this:

The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten foot high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast ten-foot bases.

I have no idea what a "rugose" cone would look like, and unfortunately the rest of the description doesn't make it any more vivid. "Other organs" seems just lazy, nor do "distensible limbs" emerging from the "apexes" (of the creatures?) make me see the creature any better. This is not the result of Lovecraft trying to merely "suggest" otherwise incomprehensible entities, but of bad writing. And again I am simply not able to take seriously the image of this "great race" clicking and scraping its paws in order to communicate. By the time we see them in locomotion through "the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast ten-foot bases," I can no longer suppress my laughter. (And why is ten feet so "vast"?) A writer who not infrequently produces prose that is unintentionally funny cannot, in my view, be a supreme prose stylist surpassing Proust and Joyce.

It seems to me that in putatively attending to Lovecraft's "style," Harman is not actually concerned with Lovecraft's style at all. While not all of Lovecraft's descriptions are as clunky as this one (his descriptions of actually existing terrestrial nature can sometimes be quite nice), they occur often enough that according to any definition of "style" consistent with its proper application to works of fiction—as a measure of the writer's care and facility with language considered as an artistic medium—Lovecraft's style is perfunctory at best, at worst indifferent to "art." What Harman is really responding to in Lovecraft's work is its fanciful ideas: the notion that the geometry is "all wrong," that an entity might be three-things-in-one. That Lovecraft's fiction is full of these ideas is undeniable, and if they lead Graham Harman to think these ideas are remarkably congruent with his own, that the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft provides an apposite literary illustration of the philosophical tenets of Object-Oriented Ontology, I offer no objection. However, in most cases, when Harman claims to be examining Lovecraft's style, he is at best instead highlighting the articulation of these ideas—"simultaneous pictures of a an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature." There is very little in this sort of articulation that could meaningfully be identified as "style" in the first place.

A city "whose geometry was all wrong" is a productively vague notion, and of course Harman argues that its vagueness is precisely the point. Lovecraft is depicting an alternate reality so utterly unlike our own that our usual terms and concepts can't possibly make sense of it except to declare that from the human perspective it is "all wrong." And indeed in the climactic episode of "The Call of Cthulhu," in which we finally get a view of the "Cyclopean city," it is presented as geometrically weird, "all wrong" according to ordinary human experience. Yet even here, the description remains vague and colorless, as when the city appears "loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours," full of "crazily elusive angles." Lovecraft does at least provide some more concrete illustration of these crazy angles and other loathsome features: "In this phantasy of prismatic distortion [the door] moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so the all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset." In fairness, there are other moments in this account when Lovecraft offers some real writing: "The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality, for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to be revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings."

However, this passage still reveals Lovecraft's fundamental limitations as a prose stylist. The recourse to abstract, pompous vocabulary ("tenebrousness," "gibbous," "membraneous") and the melodramatic effect created through reflexive italicizing and emphatic phrasing ("aeon-long imprisonment"), added to the work Lovecraft wants those adverbially modified adjectives ("loathsomely redolent") to do, substituting for more generous description, gives me, at least, the impression of a writer trying to avoid style more than cultivate it. You can say that this prosaic, deliberately stiff and doggedly bland kind of writing is Lovecraft's chosen style— but that doesn't mean it's very good.