Word To Thing

At Wet Asphalt, "J.F. Quackenbush" defends B.R. Myers against his blogospheric critics. (Which, of course, includes me.) As I read the post, JFQ argues that, read comprehensively (a courtesy Myers himself was not willing to extend to Denis Johnson when reviewing Tree of Smoke), Myers is focused on essentially two flaws in contemporary fiction: an overemphasis on "the sentence as a unit of composition" and a concomitant focus on "novelty at the expense of meaning," as well as a kind of slippage between "authorial voice" and "character voice." The latter seems to be Myers's special bete noire, and according to JFQ, is "the one point that his critics have to counter if they want to save Myers' targets from his attacks." Further: "if his critics are going to respond to him, they need to create an argument that supports the trumping by authorial voice. This is something that his critics do not attempt."

I hereby take up this challenge, and intend to both "counter" Myers's analysis and supply an argument justifiying "the trumping by authorial voice" in works of fiction.

As someone who does indeed read fiction more for the "sentences" than for the plot or the "meaning" or whatever it is Myers thinks is being obscured by "too much writing," I am not well-disposed to Myers's reiteration of this complaint. However, to the extent that he is pointing out an overemphasis, as much by critics as by fiction writers themselves, on conventionally "poetic," writing, on prose that, as JFQ puts it, relies on "fresh" imagery in the form of pretty figures of speech (the kind of writing often privileged in writing workshops), I actually agree with some of this line of criticism. "Fine writing" of this sort too often substitutes for more challenging explorations in style and distracts attention from relevant formal considerations (such as point of view).

Unfortunately, Myers's review of Tree of Smoke offers no evidence that this sort of stylistic vapidity is what he has is mind in lamenting the dominance of the sentence in contemporary prose. The sentences Myers isolates are either accompanyed by no stylistic analysis at all, or are criticized for their denotative lapses, as defined by Myers's own schoolmarm-ish principles of "good English": characters do and say things that Myers finds objectionable, are described in terms he can't assimilate, objects and images are deemed inappropriate according to the most narrowly-focused notions of context ("from the villagers' perspective a less appropriate word than bric-a-brac is hard to imagine"), syntax ("Johnson fills the space between purple passages by dropping his sentence subjects, leaving bursts of adjectives to stand alone") and word choice ("As for snickering and creak, they will please only those who skim for startling word combinations"). Just as often his judgments are simply wrong. There's nothing "slapdash" about this sentence: "Listening for his murderers, he became aware of the oppressive life of the jungle, of the collective roar of insects, as big as any city's at noon." This seems to me a perfectly coherent account of the character's state of mind at this moment, and I do not in the least have to "linger over" these words "in order to make sense of them."

Myers is finally not at all interested in "style" as that word can be meaningfully applied to works of literature. His bilious examination of Denis Johnson's sentences ultimately can be reduced to the charge that Johnson doesn't understand the "proper use of words," doesn't obey the rules governing "application of word to thing" that Myers wants so desperately to enforce. He understands style to mean "which words are right for a given context" and thus the most damning indictment he can make of a writer like Denis Johnson is that "he does not respect words enough to think they should mean something," a formulation by which "meaning" in construed in the most literal, predetermined, unimaginative of ways. Fiction writers should get it "right," should find what's "proper" in their choice of words, should make sure they correctly evoke the plain meaning of words and represent the transparent relationship of "word to thing." Any writing that isn't pristine in this fussy Myersian mode is, per se, overwriting.

This indignation about writing that refuses to tame itself in a manner acceptable to B.R. Myers is related to JFQ's second point about "voice." JFQ elaborates:

The argument runs that an author's voice ought to subsume itself to the voice of a character at all times through a book rather than pushing through and printing itself on the characters. The reason that an author ought to do this is that not doing so displays a lack of the multivalence that characterizes novels and a lack of sensitivity to difference in the human condition as evidenced in language.

This is really quite an astonishingly autocratic dictate: "an author's voice ought to subsume itself to the voice of a character at all times." It necessarily restricts an author using 3rd-person narration to a formulaic version of "psychological realism" in which the author's prose style "subsume[s] itself to the voice of a character," whether that "voice" is literally the character's way of speaking or more broadly the "voice" in which the character's subjective perception is expressed. (Presumably this restriction would be eased for 1st-person narratives, as long as the "voice" is plausibly the voice of the character as well, and not just a fancy or idiosyncratic style imposed by the author--but then isn't narrative voice always imposed by the author?) It essentially eviscerates the concept of literary style itself, since the writer's prose is reduced to its most functionary role, as the medium in which the character's manner of thought and speech is reflected as transparently as possible.

As for "multivalence": How multivalent is Hemingway's fiction? Faulkner's? No two writers could have more contrasting prose styles, but what they do have in common is that their work does have a distinctive style. In both cases, I would argue, the author's own voice "push[es] and print[s] itself on the characters." If this were not the case, we would have no reason to consider Hemingway's "style" to have been as revolutionary as it in fact was, since he wouldn't be using his autistically laconic style for deliberate effect but merely to "reflect" the thinking of a series of autistically laconic characters. And what about those characters in Faulkner's work who "think" in Faulkner's own circuitous, declamatory style? Is Faulkner to be removed from the pantheon of American writers because in retrospect he failed to observe the Myers Rules of Decorum? Did he show "a lack of sensitivity to difference in the human condition as evidenced in language"? For that matter, how "multivalent" is the fiction of, say, Virginia Woolf, one of the great pyschological realists? Even when she's dipping in and out of the consciousness of multiple characters, how aware are we of the individuality of each voice, as opposed to Virginia Woolf and her fluent prose style in the process of dipping?

A writer who especially challenges the Myers/Quackenbush philosophy of prose style is the American writer Stanley Elkin. No writer in literary history has ever "printed" his own characeristic style "on the characters" more than Elkin. Here's a passage from his 1983 novel, George Mills:

Mills was always thirsty now. Talking to his horse, coaxing him along the orbit of the salt carousel, his tongue flecked with salt dust, his throat burned raw with the dry pebbles, gagging and talking baby talk, horse talk, nonsense, philosophy. He did not know what the other horse talkers told their beasts--the merchant was disinterested; it made him drowsy, he said, to listen; he did not like, he said, to stay long in the farm-- because they spoke in what Mills did not even know was Polish, and in addition to his constant thirst, to the annoyance caused him by his great raw burning and wounded mouth, to his stinging eyes and smarting, salt-oiled skin like the sticky, greasy glaze of ocean bathers, there was the problem of finding things to say to it, of saying them, getting them out through the hair-trigger emetic atmosphere of his throat and mouth. And in the mitigated light, watery, milky as the hour before sunrise save where the torches, igniting salt, exploded into a showerwork of sparkler ferocity, white as temperature. But mostly the talk, what to say.

Here's another from his 1971 novel, The Dick Gibson Show:

By now he had enough experience in radio to handle anything. He was an accomplished announcer, a newsman, an MC, an actor. He could do special events, remotes, panel discussions. He had a keen ear for which songs and which recordings of which songs would be the hits, and was even a competent sports announcer. Though he had not yet broadcast a game from the stadium, he had done several off the Western Union ticker tape, sitting in a studio hundreds of miles from the action and translating the thin code of the relay, fleshing it out from the long, ribbony scorecard. More than anything else this made him feel truly a radio man, not just the voice of radio itself, the very fact of amplification, the human voice lifted miles, beamed from the high ground, a nexus of the opportune. See seven states! And everything after the fact so foreknown, the game itself sometimes already in the past while he still described it; often the afternoon papers were on the streets with the final box score while he described for his listeners the seventh-inning stretch or reported a struggle in the box seats over the recovery of a foul ball--his foreknowledge hindsight, a coy tool of suspense: "DiMaggio swings. That ball is going, going, oh, it's foul by inches."

Both of these passages are ebullient, robust, bordering on excessive. (In my opinion, gloriously so. In his later work, Elkin's prose style became if anything more mannered, more extravagant, as if over the course of his career he'd learned to shrug off the nagging demands of character development, point of view, and plot construction to concentrate solely on the still untapped resources of writing itself.) They contain truly novel and "fresh" images--"the hair-trigger emetic atmosphere of his throat." Neither of them bother with the distinction between "author voice" and "character voice," neither of them bow to the commands of critics urging "multivalence." It's all Elkin, even Dick Gibson, who is after all a radio "voice" of great skill but who ultimately still speaks Elkinese.

In the literary world of B.R. Myers's dreams, we would presumably be rid of writers like Stanley Elkin, in my opinion one of the great writers of the post-World War II era. Anyone who is inclined to give Myers's criticism of contemporary fiction the benefit of the doubt should take that warning under advisement.

Readers like B.R. Myers and J.F. Quackenbush are of course entitled to their preference for writers who toe the stylistic line, who are careful not to intrude too much prose onto their prose styles. But no one should accept their criticism of writers who don't provide this service as anything but a stentorian defense of their preferences. If they don't like writers who write too much, they should stay away from them and not elevate their intolerance of style into some sort of universal principle of literary correctness.

Comments

[bdr]

As Alexander Main said, "How can I cross-examine the universe when it jumps my bond?"

[J F Quackenbush]

Just to make a point, i don't necessarily agree with Myers on the issue of authorial vs. character voice. I just think it's a position that deserves to be taken seriously. Also, I specifically argue that what Myers is in favor of isn't the psychological realism favored by someone like James Wood. But rather a more neutral narrative realism wherein the authorial voice is expressed through character voice, rather than stamping it out. I think Faulkner is a perfect example of someone who does this in a way that Myers would approve of, the opening of the Sound and the Fury leaping immediately to mind as an instance where the author's style serves the voice of the character rather than ignoring it.

More importantly, as far as I can tell, the criticism is limited to the expressions by the character--Myers has a whole raft of different complaints about third person narrative tropes which he uses to address those kind of complaints. This is where I think Myers has the most teeth in pointing out that thoughts and ideas attributed to characters through a perspectival third person narration don't really "fit" the character.

Now again, I think that it's fine to disagree with him on this point. I don't agree with him altogether, myself. But I think if you're going to argue with him, you have to do him the credit of taking his critical position seriously rather than making straw men of it. For example, I don't agree that Myers believes a writer should "make sure they correctly evoke the plain meaning of words." That's a bald misreading of both what Myers says wants to see in fiction and of what I claim he wants to see in my defense of him. The heart of the Myers view is that many contemporary authors are trying and failing to be stylistically original, and in doing so they're writing badly. This is not the same thing as saying that stylistic originality is a bad thing, in fact, in the Readers Manifesto he explicitly lionizes Joyce as the right way to write "mandarin" prose. But failing that, having a unique inimitable voice at all times present in ones work is not the most important thing, and one should not fake it if one doesn't have it

For myself I tend to agree with the second part and disagree with the first. Originality and depth of style is supremely important and must be done well for a writer to be taken seriously. But rather than writing in a more pedestrian fashion, I think it would be preferable if the likes of Rick Moody and some of the other folks that have fallen into Myers crosshairs would just not write at all.

[jonathan]

When doing "free indirect style," as Elkin is doing it in the second passage, there is a difference between using language that the character himself might use, like "truly a radio man," and words that the character might not use, like "nexus of the opportune." I like Elkin's writing, but... "nexus of the opportune" strikes me as infelicitious, because it seems abstract as well as not particularly apt for the character's internal reflection. I guess it could be justified in the sense that Elkins WANTS his prose to spill over like that. Or does he? I'm still undecided here...

[Dan Green]

J.F.: I don't think the Benjy section of Sound and the Fury is a very good example of what you're getting at. It's an unfiltered account of the character's consciousness--or at least wants to be taken that way--and thus an almost textbook case of "psychological realism." There is no authorial voice.

But what about a character like Vardaman in As I Lay Dying, an illiterate boy who in some passages sounds like a college professor? (Or like Faulkner.) Would Myers approve of this?

Whether you call what Myers wants "neutral narrative realism" or psychologial realism or whatever, it's still boring as hell.

Jonathan: Elkin does indeed want his prose style to "spill over." The "character's internal reflection" is of little interest to him unless he can incorporate it into his distinctive prose style.

[bdr]

Re - Elkin's "spilling over:"

As Leo Feldman said: "Obsession - that's where the money is. There's a king's ransom in other people's dreams."

Obsession, and its cousin excess, are two of Elkin's great themes.

[Steven Augustine]

"But rather than writing in a more pedestrian fashion, I think it would be preferable if the likes of Rick Moody and some of the other folks that have fallen into Myers crosshairs would just not write at all."

This is a pretty good imitation of the archetype of the critic as barren governess, severe in her envy. I'm no fan of Moody's, but he has his fans, and it's not quite apparent how Moody's ceasing to write (or exist, even, perhaps?) will restore the natural balance of good and evil, or suckage and brilliance, to the jolly world of Lit. On the other hand, I can well see how vaporizing a long list of people who earn their livings by selling the products of their imaginations might relieve you of some awful burden I can only guess at.

I wouldn't wipe my imaginary (incontinent) dog's arse with, say, anything by James Frey or JT Leroy, or the next nine-year-old wunderkind they rescue, with a six figure advance, from Kansas... neither would I wish them gone. If people enjoy that stuff, let them read it, whatever *my* opinion on its intrinsic aesthetic value.

It wouldn't give me a moment of pleasure to read that any writer with a following (with the notable exception of David Irving) had decided, suddenly, to go silent, on the advice of some prig with half a novel in a drawer somewhere.

Your above-quoted sentiment may well be a joke, but it says a lot about the sweepingly proscriptive, Mullah-ward drift of "criticism" these days. What, in the end, are you selling, Sir, but your own wounded resentments?

[Jack]

Throughout his Comédie Humaine, Balzac 'painted' images with clear prose. Later, we adapted such technique to something called 'movies.' Let's not forget that literature is art. Many authors become prose-challenged for lack of inspiration.

[marlyat2]

I enjoyed this myriad-minded exchange, Dan.

One stray issue for me is that reference to the "autistically laconic."

My experience is that children and adults with mild autism or Asperger's Syndrome often use words in a startling and even baroque way.

[brewdog]

I've only stumbled in here this past week, so I've missed a bit of the ongoing fray. But I'll do my best to fire off something worthwhile...

First, I'm happy that I even have the chance to discuss something so startlingly baroque as the distinction between the author's and character's voice. Having spent a little bit of time under the influence of Federman, I laugh at the rigid, concrete critics and readers who demand the artifice of formula from their novels. But as a writer, I can't abandon my desire for multivalence, for transcendent reader reactions, for grandiose conceptions along the lines of "How would Joyce have written this sentence if he had included it in 'The Dead'?". So, sure, I'm all for arcane wordiness if that's the kind of excess to be celebrated in certain circles.

There is no question, as far as I'm concerned, that the state of casual literary criticism is horrible these days and that openmindedness is sorely lacking. I haven't read "Tree of Smoke" yet, and I may never, but I have been intrigued by its critical reception starting with the NYTimes BR and continuing through to this page. It seems to me that Johnson's supporters are highlighting a piece of fiction that is messy both in subject and style, individual and probably oblique. As a writer who's been accused of all that and more ("too wordy" and "comma-happy" are the nicest of my criticisms), I say fuck it, let's have at it! We need more mess, not less, and if the fussiness of criticism can't handle the biohazardous prose, then whose problem is that exactly? Pack up your latex gloves and red trash bags and go review "The Kite Runner" or any other Oprah-approved sentences. Seriously.

Anyway. I love "Mullah-ward" enough to steal it. Good one Steven.

Here's the thing about Hemingway. I hate him. Not personally, mind you. But in the sun-drenched heat of Kilimanjaro's... Oops, got off on a Masaic tangent there. Still, if "autistically laconic" isn't startling and baroque, then I'm the bullfighter's cape. I smiled when I read it, knowing full well from my working with students that while it wasn't meant to reflect derisively on inventiveness, it does perfectly capture the terseness of conversation I've experienced. Or something.

I'll be back.

[Steven Augustine]

Brewdog:

I only post comments at all, given the thanklessness of the activity (larf), for that once-every-blue-moon "bing" of some other sick soul "getting" it, in whole or as a fragment.

"I say fuck it, let's have at it! We need more mess, not less, and if the fussiness of criticism can't handle the biohazardous prose, then whose problem is that exactly? Pack up your latex gloves and red trash bags and go review "The Kite Runner" or any other Oprah-approved sentences."

So: "bing" right back.

I thought the excerpts I read from "Tree of Smoke" indicated fairly strongly that the book isn't my bag, man, but it would be nice to offer a dissenting opinion on what constitutes "good writing" without being called "elitist" or any kind of "fascist" (living in Berlin, obviously, puts me under suspicion), for a change.

Neither loving Johnson's prose, nor endorsing the Quackenbush POV, I end up with no side from which to watch the ballgame, and, make no mistake, too many of these discussions feel exactly like a shout-down between Mets, or Yankees, fans. Even worse, I don't drink beer.

Here's to the truly great "messes"...

SA

[Amateur Reader]

Since I have thrown a couple of jabs elsewhere on your blog, I think I should say that this post is excellent - sharply argued, with clear, pertinent supporting examples. Convincing.

Also convinced me to read more Elkin.