Textuality

Trent Walters replies further to some things I had to say about style in fiction (also to this post by Jeff VanderMeer):

Style is the feeling you get from reading the text. In order to capture this feeling, you must temporarily remove the meaning of the words and listen to their music only--like mentally peeling off the lyrics of a song to hear what feelings the tone is revealing.

I don't entirely disagree with this, but to emphasize "feeling" and to disembody "meaning" so thoroughly takes our attention too far way from the fact that finally style is a matter of words on a page. It's a concrete realization of what might at first be a kind of "feeling," and certainly an element of verbal music is involved as well, but to really appreciate style, in my opinion, we have to keep our eyes on the real prize: the play of words into sentences and sentences into the larger structures that literally produce the "text" we are reading.

In this context I do disagree with Trent when he writes that style produces "the texture of the overall story." This way of understanding style only reinforces the idea that style is really just a sort of verbal ornament, the surface feature of a work of literary prose that takes us to the more substantive stuff below the surface: character, plot, theme, etc. Certainly a successful prose style can work to create the illusion that these other things are what we're really interested in, but ultimately it is an illusion. Style can't be "the texture of the text"; it is the text, since finally a work of literature is only words. Perhaps we could say that a measure of a writer's prose style is the extent to which he/she can trick you into thinking there's more to it than that. Trent succumbs somewhat to such a trick in speaking of the so-called "invisible" style, which "calls more attention to the myth of the narrative as reality and forces the viewer to deal with the content more than a stylistic choice." Perhaps some plain styles can conjure up notions of the "myth of the narrative" and of a story's "content," but these are still functions of style. The writer just doesn't want you to think that they are.

And I certainly can't agree that "Style is an expression of ego: Look at what I do, says the writer of style, with the way I put words on the page." Perhaps bad writers proceed in this way, producing work that is supposed to be received as finally a variety of "personal expression," but such writing assuredly doesn't rise to the level of art. I won't go so far as T.S. Eliot and say that an accomplished literary style amounts to an "extinction of personality," but good writers channel ego into style, giving language life, not reflecting back on the author's own. In my view, even in a good memoir, the writer succeeds by focusing our attention on what is being done with words, using his/her experience as inspiration but not bringing us to "know" the writer in any real sense.

I would still argue that while discussions of such things as character or plot or point of view are perfectly useful ways of exploring our reactions to a work of fiction, we shouldn't delude ourselves into believing they're anything other than devices of convenience. Other devices could be made to substitute. Finally, writing is style.

Comments

[Richard]

This discussion reminds me of a comment a local (Baltimore) movie reviewer made about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (a movie I love, incidentally), that the thing with a movie "like that" is to determine whether its "story" would still be compelling if told in a more straightforward manner. In his opinion, it would not have been and he therefore judged Eternal Sunshine as lacking. As if the story existed separate from the manner in which it was told.

[Jonathan David Jackson]

Dan, I agree with you and Richard that style is not ornamental but a far more generative and originating element--the hard-to-pin-down gestalt that informs all of our decision-making in our work. Style = skin, organs, body systems rather than clothes.

[Trent Walters]

Jonathan David Jackson (and indirectly Richard),

Your metaphor is yours, not mine. Go back to my earlier metaphor of a song. Taking out style from some stories as one might remove lyrics from a song creates a different song. Take the music out of a movie, and depending on how heavily it depends on music to evoke feeling, it may fall apart. This isn't a condemnation of music or lyrics or style, but part and parcel of how the beast functions. Please understand my argument before pigeon-holing it.

[Jonathan David Jackson]

Trent--

I certainly was not trying to pigeon-hole your refreshing ideas. My post was clearly directed to Dan and Richard's ideas. Sadly, you seemed to take it differently. Just because I disgree doesn't make your views off-beat. If fact, your blog stirs me to think with gusto. Thank you.

Dan does have a valid point in my view about the generative nature of style rather than style as ornament.

JDJ