The Prose Stylist

[Corpsey]

I'd read it if I could print it.


maurizio gueli
4.0 out of 5 starsVerified Purchase
the book in very good shape, like bran new
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 April 2016
the book in very good shape , like brand new, It arrived quickly.
The stories were mmost boring, difficult to read .
This Author seems to have no respect for the reader,
Life is too short to read David Foster Wallace,
never again

 

[IdleRich]

Is there a difference between being a stylist and having a voice? Burroughs has a voice, but referring to him as a stylist doesn't feel right.

I think it's intended as a compliment generally speaking isn't it? All other things being equal. I mean you might have two writers who are both saying the same thing or things of the same value, but if one does it with style then she's presumably better than the other regardless of how good she is overall and where she sits in the hierarchical pantheon of authors - something which I assume can be written as an ordered list from... Shakespeare or whoever it is, all the way down to Paulo Coelho,

 

[william_kent]

I think it's intended as a compliment generally speaking isn't it? All other things being equal. I mean you might have two writers who are both saying the same thing or things of the same value, but if one does it with style then she's presumably better than the other regardless of how good she is overall and where she sits in the hierarchical pantheon of authors - something which I assume can be written as an ordered list from... Shakespeare or whoever it is, all the way down to Paulo Coelho,

Love the way you have defined the nadir of prose style

 

[version]

I think it's intended as a compliment generally speaking isn't it? All other things being equal. I mean you might have two writers who are both saying the same thing or things of the same value, but if one does it with style then she's presumably better than the other regardless of how good she is overall and where she sits in the hierarchical pantheon of authors - something which I assume can be written as an ordered list from... Shakespeare or whoever it is, all the way down to Paulo Coelho,

Maybe, but I think it can also be a backhanded compliment.

 

[IdleRich]

I may not have been very clear (ironically) - I was saying that if you wrote a list of authors from best to worst then you might go "this one writes great characters, move 'em up a couple of places" or "this one is a poor stylist, move them down" and so on. And I was actually saying that Coelho was not so much the worst stylist but, actually, if you took every single thing into consideration, he is undoubtedly the worst person who has ever written anything ever.

I'm kinda tying myself in knots here while striving for clarity strangely. I don't mean to say he's the worst person, he might be lovely, I mean to say he is the worst at writing.

 

[william_kent]

I may not have been very clear (ironically) - I was saying that if you wrote a list of authors from best to worst then you might go "this one writes great characters, move 'em up a couple of places" or "this one is a poor stylist, move them down" and so on. And I was actually saying that Coelho was not so much the worst stylist but, actually, if you took every single thing into consideration, he is undoubtedly the worst person who has ever written anything ever.

I'm kinda tying myself in knots here while striving for clarity strangely. I don't mean to say he's the worst person, he might be lovely, I mean to say he is the worst at writing.

But you you may be mistaken, although I have never read any Coelho, but I have had the misfortune of reading some prose by Will Self

Witness the incompetence: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/28/shark-by-will-self-extract

 

[IdleRich]

Maybe, but I think it can also be a backhanded compliment.

Yeah, but that's what I was trying to skirt round by saying "all other things being equal" - if you reviewed a book and said "Well, clearly, they are a great stylist" you are certainly leaving it open for the reader to conclude that they are not good at anything else. But what I'm trying to say is that, if that is indeed the case, then it's still probably better than being rubbish at literally everything. Though maybe not that much better. They very stylishly told an extremely boring, facile and muddled tale... hmmm.

 

[IdleRich]

That was what I was getting at

But you you may be mistaken, although I have never read any Coelho, but I have had the misfortune of reading some prose by Will Self

Witness the incompetence: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/28/shark-by-will-self-extract

What kind of style is this though "But you you may be mistaken" - is that for emphasis or some sort of trick that reveals you to be extraordinarily enraged?
I'm obviously messing around there of course, but it does actually raise the question of whether when an author deliberately writes from the viewpoint of a clumsy character - some sort of unreliable narrator, or even just a simple character, must they of necessity sacrifice style? Cos if it's something that at times must be thrown away how important can it be... or does that throwing away to create deliberate ugliness constitute a new stylishness of its own? This is the sort of thing I don't really know how to answer, and that's why I feel that it's probably better to consider something as a whole rather than to separate and compare attributes, as the same thing may be vital in one case and extraneous or worse in another.

 

[version]

But you you may be mistaken, although I have never read any Coelho, but I have had the misfortune of reading some prose by Will Self

Witness the incompetence: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/28/shark-by-will-self-extract

It's just a middling Burroughs impersonation, isn't it?

 

[william_kent]

It's just a middling Burroughs impersonation, isn't it?

“middling” is rating it too highly

 

[luka]

corpse have you read good old neon?

https://sdavidmiller.com/octo/files/no_google2/GoodOldNeon.pdf

what a boring, unpleasant and self obsessed person. horrible to read.

 

[mind_philip]

Jesus, that was part of Self's great modernist opus? Awful.

Personally I think DeLillo has got substance to go with the style, but the style is so singular that it draws the eye. He's particularly great at quickly sketching place with these little runs of adjectives and sudden switches from wide angle to close up and back again:

They drive south out of Denton into deep-green country. There were pastures abandoned to mesquite and juniper, places of sudden starkness, a burning glare, a single squat tree, burled and grim. The sky towered unbearably here.

(from Libra)

 

[shiels]

what a boring, unpleasant and self obsessed person. horrible to read.

That’s the whole point you knob. Suicidal people are boring you know that

 

[mind_philip]

DFW stikes me as more of a voicey writer than a stylist, though he was capable of writing a great sentence when he wanted to. But in a lot of his fiction, syntactic elegance would be counterproductive to the themes he was writing about.

 

[luka]

That’s the whole point you knob. Suicidal people are boring you know that

i know but why would anyone want to read it?

 

[luka]

to answer the question, if a book is basically unreadable then it's the work of a prose stylist.
wyndham lewis for instance, unreadable. conrad, unreadable. sinclair, unreadable.
lots of gristle and sinew, can't chew it.

 

[Clinamenic]

I also get the sense that with DFW and Pynchon and the like, namely those who use this byzantine syntax and have sentences which are half a page long, that there is a certain humor in doing so. Namely that the humor is in this complex syntax which bends over backwards just to convey some absurd or trivial details, but does so in a way that is grammatically and syntactically sound.

There's also that tendency to follow up such a sentence with an unusually short and punchy sentence, which I also think can be used humorously, which I think boils largely down to comedic timing, IE the punchy sentence includes a twist or a detail which re-renders the reader's comprehension of the first sentence. Or else, the punchy sentence trivializes the longer sentence, as if pointing out how needlessly complex it is. I remember noticing this a bunch in The Broom of the System, and sometimes in Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow.

Almost like an inner dialogue between syntactic styles.

 

[Clinamenic]

And its interesting when the authorial focus seems to be on this level of form, while the level of content (IE the character's dramatic needs, etc) is relegated to the periphery or is even toyed with and manipulated as a sort of vanilla plastic.

 

[Clinamenic]

Almost something nihilistic (or at least cynical) about it, now that I think about it, perhaps especially with DFW - but I've only read that one book of his. This also seems to get at a characteristic of postmodernism, where self-awareness and self-referentiality reach such an intensity that the actual substance starts to seem hollow, as if the character of the substance doesn't matter because the formal acrobatics can operate around substance of any given character.

 

[Clinamenic]

And its interesting when the authorial focus seems to be on this level of form, while the level of content (IE the character's dramatic needs, etc) is relegated to the periphery or is even toyed with and manipulated as a sort of vanilla plastic.

Gravity's Rainbow is full of this, where the couple hundred characters seemed like pawns in this sprawling and playfully conspiratorial chessboard theater, where the author's motivation seems to be to drive these characters' stories in order to engender as much colorfully complex content as possible, in order to have more fun material to manipulate with more complex formal techniques - all of which can be read as an artifact of literature's evolution unto postmodernism.