I've recently had a few thoughts that I considered putting together in a post of miscellaneous thoughts, but then one of the thoughts grew, and I have singled it out for its very own blog entry, which is this one.
This will probably be another of those serial things that I start and then abandon, but anyway, the idea is that I want to identify specific viral traits in modern writing that have basically ruined prose style. The first of these, as the subject heading testifies, is the cheap joke.
But before I begin on that, what do I mean when I say that 'prose style' has been ruined? Briefly, I mean that, for the most part, readers and writers today no longer even know what a prose style is. There is no prose style, except for the one single prose style that has become so ubiquitous that the assumptions behind it have become almost invisible. This one single prose style, the early architects of which are the likes of Earnest Hemingway, who ripped-off James Frey shamelessly, is what might be called 'workshop prose'. There's a kind of Puritanism – in a distinctly work-ethic sense – behind it. Adverbs, for instance, are to be eschewed, for no very good reason, I suppose, apart from that they are extravagant, decadent, European and the work of the Devil. Having been a linguist and language teacher, as well as a writer, I would like to give my testimony that adverbs are, in fact, a perfectly respectable part of the English language. They are there to be used. Or are we expected to rip them from our very dictionaries in an Orwellian frenzy?
I'm afraid that I haven't read any E. M. Forster, but in the film Howard's End, one detail in particular that sticks in my mind is where the two sisters, together, admire the use of an adverb. If I recall correctly, there's a passage in some favourite text that has a description of trees in the twilight whose branches "droop glimmeringly". Workshop prose would forbid such exquisite love of language.
I'm not going to offer a definition of 'workshop prose' here, because I am still – I'm afraid – very busy, and taking a sort of tea-break, but I hope that, from the above hints, you know what I'm talking about. Simply pick up any work of fiction written in the past twenty years, and it's almost bound to be 'workshop prose'.
I blame this disease for many things, including the generation of a growing lack of discernment and attention span in modern readers. The other day I was asked a kind of soundbite question: "Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings?" I replied I hadn't seen all the Harry Potter films. But the question, I was told, concerned the books. "Ah, in that case, judging from the little I've read of the Harry Potter series, then it would definitely have to be The Lord of the Rings." Someone else said something like, "But The Lord of the Rings was so boring." I suppose I should not interpret this statement too freely without having much to go on in terms of evidence for the reasoning behind it, but I have encountered similar opinions often enough to think that I can descry a pattern in them. Just as people accustomed to eating very poor, tasteless food balk at food of high quality and taste, and often cannot endure it in their mouths, so those who know only 'workshop prose' find prose that actually has a style – and whatever else you may say about Tolkien, he did have a prose style – to be indigestible.
So now, let me proceed to one of the symptoms of the disease I have called 'workshop prose'. Even workshop prose, in its blandness, has a 'range' of tastes (as Pot Noodle has a range of flavours). Some of them are more light-hearted than others. The cheap joke belongs largely to the celebrity-turned-author, perhaps because this form has been pioneered by comedians such as Ben Elton. In fact, it could also be called Ben Elton prose style. The philosophy behind it seems to be that anyone who can string a series of cheap jokes together into a narrative is a literary genius. Such has been the influence of this particular strain of the workshop virus that it is now almost compelete all-pervading. Even I cannot escape it. This blog is riddled with it, I'm afraid. It has its counterpart in cinema, too. In cinematic convention, it is bad form to look directly at the camera. This breaks the illusion of the film. The illusion can be broken similarly by what are known as 'asides to the audience', which can mean that the actors or the director include details in the production that would not exist in the world of the story unless someone was aware of the audience. This can be done artfully – Oliver Hardy looked directly at the camera, and it worked – but inevitably, it is more often done in the form of a cheap joke, which reduces the entire affair to something to munch popcorn to. Just watch any Spielberg film and you'll soon see what I mean. There are, for instance, the hilarious gophers who watch, amazed, the results of a nuclear test explosion in the latest Indiana Jones film.
I don't want to go on about this at length. I will therefore give a single example of the Ben Elton prose style of cheap jokes – now, sadly, employed even by those who are not professional comedians – in the hope that the example I have in mind is sufficiently egregious that no more examples will be necessary. I must have been listening to the radio, and books were being discussed. I can no longer recall the title of the book in question, or its author. I imagine the author was the kind of person who would be sitting next to Germaine Greer on some celebrity panel one week and Phill Jupitus the next. A woman was speaking and she picked out – very correctly, as it seemed to me – an unforgivable flaw in the writing. The writer was male, but was writing a female character. This character, in the passage in question, was experiencing PMT. At one point she described herself, in bed with her partner, as "shouting at him for breathing too loudly". The reviewer pointed out that the man might think, "She's shouting at me for breathing too loudly", but the woman would not think that about herself. It was an obvious – a crude and juvenile – act of glove-puppetry. I mean, I've always considered character one of my weaknesses as a writer, but I've never been quite that bad. This, however, is the cheap joke school of prose writing. Just knock together a few cliched gags about menstruation and call yourself Ben "Shakespeare" fucking Elton.
Let us, if we can, turn away from such things.
Justin Isis writes:
I think my thoughts on this are pretty complex or at least conflicted. On the one hand, I actually dislike the prose style in most 19th century English literature, which almost always feels too “conversational” and certain of assumptions I don’t at all agree with. While in some cases this can be amazingly awesome (like the now-forgotten ‘The Honorable Peter Sterling’), I find that it tends to drag over the course of a whole book.On the other hand, I dislike Hemingway in general and his prose style as well, especially the way it’s (d)evolved down through Raymond Carver (not bad, but certainly not GREAT either) into the third-hand minimalism of a Chuck Palahniuk. I think a lot of my favorite prose has been translations, to be honest – usually from French and Japanese fiction. Native-speaking writers are usually too full of assumptions and stereotyped associations to produce really interesting prose a lot of the time. On the other hand, the translated prose feels “neutral” and so the author’s attitude or ideas can come across more clearly. I also like that it feels faintly unnatural. I just think the combination of greatness in the original combined with the inexact science of translation can lead to things which even the original author probably didn’t intend but which are nevertheless amazing.I agree that most prose nowadays is terrible. Especially like Booker Prize-winning prose. I tried reading that ‘The White Tiger’ book that just won this year – terrible. Completely contrived prose style, obviously affected for the viewpoint character, like a bad Hollywood movie. A lot of it is people who start writing when they’re 30 or so. It probably takes at least ten years of fairly serious practice to even get a hang of prose style, much less develop an original or at least consistent one, but these people probably think “I’ve lived a bit, I’ve read a lot of books, I can do this!” I think my ideal of prose is something that’s spare but at the same time incisive, like a scalpel blade. It’s not bland but neither is it excessively heavy, and it contains a maximum of affecting images and novel word-combinations in the minimum amount of space. I think I also place a lot of emphasis on NOT saying things, so that what’s not there is at least as important as what is. There are all kinds of other things; really I feel like every story or novel or whatever requires a slightly – or greatly – different prose style depending on its formal and subject-matter constraints. There seem to be very few writers who can actually do this, though. I feel like most writers are just generally bad – “rambling on” types who never really worry about flow or paragraph construction or rhythm, they just keep banging away with the “story”, barely stopping to think. The opposite of this kind of writer – equally bad, in my view – is the one who tries so hard to be literary that every other sentence has some contrived metaphor or simile, or some use of language that sort of makes sense but really doesn’t make that much sense when you think about it and probably wasn’t worth including, but which was intended to be poetic. I read this story by David Foster Wallace today called “Octet”; apart from having an amazingly terrible prose style, it was probably one of the worst short stories I’ve ever read. I think you could probably learn more of what NOT to do by reading this than by reading actual quality writing, since the flaws are so apparent that they’d probably sear themselves into the memory as a warning.
Well, I don’t see a consistent descent from a golden age in terms of prose style, and when I say ‘modern’ here, I don’t mean ‘Modern’. I suppose I mean recent or contemporary. There was a time when I was really into nineteenth century literature, but, in the English language, it does have its own version of workshop prose. It’s just probably slightly less mercenary and slightly more intelligent on average than contemporary workshop prose. I think maybe what I most like in literature, however, actually is ‘Modern’. I’ve noticed, for instance, that, whenever I visit art galleries, really ancient stuff is interesting, but when we get past the middle ages, say, it all seems pretty boring, getting only gradually more interesting (with a few exceptions) until it hits the peak of impressionism and surrealism, and then it goes suddenly downhill to the worst art ever produced in the history of the human race. I think literature might be the same.I am most interested in literature just where it becomes very introspective, and confessional, and experimental, with people like T. S. Eliot, I suppose. And even H.P. Lovecraft, though I think he probably hated Eliot, was part of the same Modernism, with his non-Euclidean cities and so forth. In terms of Japanese literature, which, of course, has a slightly different development, I’m talking kindai rather than gendai – Meiji through to the end of the Showa, basically. In a similar way, it seems that’s where things start to become really personal and self-aware.
This link is highly relevant:http://theteemingbrain.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/hemingway-media-culture-and-the-impoverishment-of-modern-english/