Living by Fiction (10 page)

Shooting the Agate

Many contemporary prose styles derive from the mainstream of traditional fine writing. Fine writing, like painterly painting, has always been with us. We will, I hope, never cease to admire it. The great prose stylists of the recent past, until Flaubert, were fine writers to a man. A surprising number of these—those I think of first, in fact—wrote nonfiction: Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Samuel Johnson, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Ruskin, William James, Sir James Frazer.

Who were the grand stylists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction? There is the lovely Turgenev and the brilliant Gorky, if we are to believe their translators; Melville had a rare strength; Hardy can be wholly limpid; Dickens is often rhythmic and powerful. But we do not think of any of these, except Turgenev, as great stylists—although we wrong Dickens not to. Who else? Stendhal? Chateaubriand? I think fine writing in fictional prose comes into its own only with the Modernists: first with James, and with Proust, Faulkner, Beckett, Woolf, Kafka, and the lavish Joyce of the novels.

This is an elaborated, painterly prose. It raids the world for materials to build sentences. It fabricates a semi-opaque weft of language. It is a spendthrift prose, and a prose of means. It is dense in objects which pester the senses. It hauls in visual imagery of every sort; it strews metaphors about, and bald similes, and allusions to every realm. It does not shy from adjectives, nor even from ad
verbs. It traffics in parallel structures and repetitions; it indulges in assonance and alliteration. Here is a splendid sentence from Ruskin:

The sentences of this prose may be very long, heavily punctuated throughout, and welded together with semicolons. Its lexicon is enormously wide, its spheres of reference global. We think of it as decorous, but actually it is not. Those old men in frock coats were after power, and power they got, by going for the throat. (Far more decorous is plain writing, the prose of Hemingway, Chekhov, and other stylists in shirts, who carefully limit their descriptions to matters at hand, and who produce a prose purified by its submission to the world.) There is nothing decorous about calling attention to yourself:

Fine writing, with its elaborated imagery and powerful rhythms, has the beauty of both complexity and grandeur. It also has as its distinction a magnificent power to
penetrate. It can penetrate precisely because, and only because, it lays no claims to precision. It is an energy. It sacrifices perfect control to the ambition to mean. It can penetrate very deep, piling object upon object to build a tower from which to breach the sky; it can enter with courage or bravura those fearsome realms where the end products of art meet the end products of thought, and where perfect clarity is not possible. Fine writing is not a mirror, not a window, not a document, not a surgical tool. It is an artifact and an achievement; it is at once an exploratory craft and the planet it attains; it is a testimony to the possibility of the beauty and penetration of written language.

 

Clearly, we are in the presence of a paradox here. How can prose be said to penetrate and dazzle? How can it call attention to itself, waving its arms as it were, while performing metaphysics behind its back? But this is what all art does, or at least all art that conceives of the center of things as insubstantial: as mental or spiritual. Fine prose in this sense is like Shakespeare's dramatic poetry, or Milton's epic poetry, or even Homer's. If you scratch an event, you get an idea. Fine writing does not actually penetrate the world of familiar things so much as it penetrates what, for lack of a better term, we might call the universe or even the realm of ideas. That is, this language does not penetrate things so much as it bears them away with it.

Shakespeare does not analyze Lear, or enter Lear. There was no Lear. Had there been a Lear, we could only say that Shakespeare transmogrified Lear. Lear, like Melville's whale, is an aesthetic or epistemological probe by means of which the artist analyzes the universe. When
you really penetrate the world of things, as I understand the world of things, you encounter idea. And art, especially poetry and twentieth-century painting and fiction, objectifies idea on its own surface, by imitating thereon, in bits of world, the complex way that bits of mind cohere.

We have seen in twentieth-century painting that the art of mind and the art of surface go together. When painters abandoned narrative deep space, their canvases became abstract and intellectualized. With its multiple metaphors and colliding images, an embellished language actually abstracts the world's objects. Such language wrests objects from their familiar contexts. We do not enter deep space; we do not enter rounded characters; we contemplate them as objects. And when an artist both powerfully “realizes” his objects, rendering them in full material detail, and simultaneously “abstracts” them, rendering them under the aspect of eternity, then we may say that he penetrates these objects not to their specific, material hearts, but as it were out the other side, to their generalized forms, their created capacity to mean. He runs them through and hauls them off to heaven. Shakespeare does it with Lear; Cézanne does it with Mont Sainte Victoire. Paradoxically, an artist does all this on the surface, by the studied application of materials. He tacks his objects to the sky, either by baring their flattening forms, as Cézanne does, or, as Shakespeare does, by spiriting the objects out of the world with a hundred flights of language never heard.

 

At any rate, in this century even the illusion of penetration may no longer be the fine writer's intention. A fine writer may now, as in the eighteenth century, be
ironic or playful as well as sincere. He may brandish his wealth of beauties to engage us or to dazzle us, to recreate a world or to embellish a surface. Fine writing is still with us. Density, even lushness, and elegance, forceful rhythms, dramatically fused imagery, and a degree of metaphorical splendor—these qualities still obtain and are the hallmark of fine writing. Included in this category are the rich collages of Joyce, where modernist fiction begins. Also included are the brittle sarcasms of Nabokov, and his much-wrought tendernesses, and especially his cryptographs—those challenges to literary criticism and parodies of its finds which are such red herrings to young writers, who must be relieved endlessly of the notion that the critic's role is to “find the hidden meaning” and the writer's role is to hide them, like Easter eggs. Here in this generalized category of fine writing also belong the poignant lyricisms of Beckett, the surrealisms of Gabriel García Márquez, the traditional elegances of Richard Hughes, E. M. Forster, and Joyce Cary, and the prose of many excellent and traditionalist Americans, like John Updike and William Gass. This is Gass: “The sun looks, through the mist, like a plum on the tree of heaven, or a bruise on the slope of your belly. Which? The grass crawls with frost.”

 

Two subspecies of fine writing are particularly suited to modernist and contemporary modernist ends. One is a prose style so intimate, and so often used in the first person, that it is actually a voice. The voice appears in Europe throughout this century, and particularly between the wars. One could argue that it appeared in Eastern Europe and worked its way westward. It is the voice of a
crank narrator. You hear it a bit in Gogol, and in Dostoevsky; you hear it especially in Kafka; you hear it in Elias Canetti, Witold Gombrowicz, Knut Hamsun, and now in Beckett, and Nabokov (
Despair, Pale Fire
).

This crank narrator is an enraged petty clerk, or a starveling, or a genius, or a monomaniac, or any sort of crazy. His is not an especially adult voice. He specializes in mood shifts. His voice is poetic, bellicose, and resigned. It deals in ironies, self-deprecations, arrogances, apologies, aggressions, whinings, obscenities, lyricisms, abrupt silences, flights of transcendence, and tantrums. This tone's energy depends, of course, on the rapid juxtaposition of these disparate moods—particularly a lyric mood interrupted by a note of aggrievement. Samuel Beckett has written three great novels using this one trick. The fact of the sky, in particular, seems to call forth the essence of this prose style. In
Molloy
, Beckett writes: “The sky was that horrible colour which heralds dawn.” In
Ferdydurke
, Gombrowicz writes: “The sky, suspended in the heights, was light, fresh, pale, and sarcastic.”

The crank narrator is a character outside bourgeois European culture; so is his creator. These writers either derive from peripheral countries, or are Jewish, or émigré, or are in some other way denied social access to mainstream European culture. One could easily argue that this culture itself disintegrated early in the century, and now everyone is adrift: this would account for the curiously contemporary sound of the voice. You may recognize the following as an imitation of Woody Allen, but it is not:

This is another passage from Gombrowicz's
Ferdydurke
, which appeared in Poland in 1937 and caused a scandal. Now everyone has caught the sound of this sort of mood-shifting prose. It has moved from the provinces and ghettos of Eastern Europe to New York City; now graduate students in writing and comedians can reel it out like yard goods.

 

The voice of the crank narrator is modernist in its distance, irony, and alienation; it is a mood composed of many shifting moods. Another subspecies of fine writing is even more contemporary. I have no name for this. It is a dense extreme of fine writing, and it is diagnostically contemporary modernist.

This prose repeats a fiction's narrative collage in a surface collage. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it proceeds by the same leaping transitions and bizarre juxtapositions of voice, diction, and image as the fiction as a whole does. It may use the present tense: he walks, he remembers his father, his father is running. This flattens time and lends a floating, objectlike quality to the narrative. (Oddly, the eighteenth-century novelists used the present tense for immediacy. Now we have learned to use it for distance.) This prose is, above all, a wrought verbal surface. It changes subjects as often as it changes moods; it presents us with an array of all the world's objects moving so fast they spin. It whirls us on a tour of the world of language. It does not pause to examine any object; the verbal surface is itself the object.
I exaggerate; but the direction is there. Here is an example from a recent issue of
TriQuarterly
:

Writers of such modernist prose may use the stream of consciousness convention to enhance the collage effect. Early stream of consciousness writers—Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, and perhaps Joyce, and Tillie Olsen today—use a disjunctive, imagistic, irrational prose in order, I think, to describe human experience as intimately and accurately as possible. Both intimacy and accuracy are traditional goals for fiction. Today some writers who use stream of consciousness technique (Burroughs, Beckett) use it for contemporary modernist ends. They intend, I think, to write neither intimately nor accurately. Instead, they may use interior monologue to unify and to justify the surface collage of language. Here is a fragment from Beckett's
How It Is: