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meringue style
What is style? What constitutes an author’s style? Vocabulary? Syntax? Subject matter? Certainly, obviously, all of that and more. What about process? It seems unsporting almost to consider process in examining literature. After all, it’s on the page, or it isn’t. But we, as writers, as readers, as critics, are clearly interested in the writing habits of our literary heroes. I somehow know that Thornton Wilder would write correspondence or a journal entry before beginning work on his novel or play each day, as a warm-up of sorts. I know other famous writers had this routine as well. Hemingway wouldn’t drink while he was writing.
So what is to be gleaned from this arcana? What do we hope to learn? How to write, of course. We hope that picking up these little habits, mimicking the motions of the titans, will imbue us with the ability to craft winning prose, or at least cleaver conceits. In Little League, I used to wave my bat around in circles like I saw the big leaguers do on TV. As a young man desperate to “become a writer”, I sat in cafes and scribbled in moleskins, as Hemingway had done.
But the deficiency was the same in both instances: all the mannerism, none of the substance. I hadn’t spent my life in a batting cage yet, I hadn’t earned the arrogance implied by waving my bat around like Daryl Strawberry. And all the cafes in the world wouldn’t give me the material to write For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway had to go to war for that. I loved the affectation, just hold the nonsense about blistered hands and bombed bridges. My view of process was too minimal, is still too minimal. The habits that matter most to a writer’s development are not writing habits, but living habits: do you put yourself in the way of situations worth writing about?
March 11, 2009
“Nobody reads anymore.”
- Steve Jobs
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the death of reading. Shuttered newspapers, slow ebook reader sales and falling literacy rates, it’s argued, all portend the demise of the written word. To fill the void, those holding a still-fogged glass over literature’s ashen mouth offer us its replacement: image-based language. The king is dead, long live the king.
Flickr, YouTube and Google, they say, have the vocabulary for this new language languishing on their servers. All the “words” need is a taxonomy, an index, and fixed definitions. No problem.
Image-based language cannot approximate written language because of its difficulty with precision. Photographic or cinematic mise en scéne in all but the most controlled set-ups is imperfect: accidental signifiers appear, meaning is unfixable. Fine for impressionistic art, but less valuable for philosophical wrangling. We use abstract symbols to describe the world, because its reality is beyond our complete grasp. We cannot create the whole of existence from scratch. Images are terrific when used to depict the world as it exists. They fall shorter when asked to depict the world as it is experienced. Readers subconsciously fill in the blanks, the parts of the universe the artist couldn’t or didn’t summon, that viewers have unpurposefully completed for them. This new language of images is doomed to such fundamental imprecision as to be practically useless.
The problem of imprecision in language is important because it plagues us already. Language has always altered over time, but our time is unusual in the amount of words whose incorrect pronunciations or definitions have become standardized. Our fondness for colloquial misappropriations intertwines with our society’s utter disdain for propriety and formality in conversation, knots our collective tongue and we speak as the deaf. Our stilted English already feels the lack inherent in any image-based language. It is a language of greetings and concrete things – free from ideas, from action and abstraction alike. It is direct as a river of Hemingway prose, but bereft of the emotional undercurrent.
And so what will the visual vocabulary created by our tongue-tied culture look like? We supposedly see its unorganized protolanguage on YouTube and MySpace. Will we be crass Eskimos, with a hundred “words” for fart? What is the visual equivalent of “sorrow”? Will our new visual language need interpreters? Genetic and environmental differences in ocular sensory perception among different people seem to make a high-res hieroglyphics so much less universally approachable than our current arbitrarily abstract system. How do you translate images? So many questions.
If Steve Jobs is right about reading, as, sadly, he might be, we’re staring at a future of human interaction impossibly less nuanced and expressive than its already stunted present.
Andrea gave me A Moveable Feast for Christmas. It seeped into my brain to leak out in my first post, yesterday. I can’t help aping the style. Those short taut sentences are like Alexander’s blade through the Gordian knot that is modern life. They are simple in structure and lean heavily towards physical action. In the book, Hemingway says that writing hungry gave his characters great focus: they were always hungry too, always knew what they needed. Their actions and speech always represent this clarity of vision. There are no Focault-esque baroque oddities, spirals of abstraction, clause draped upon clause, endlessly supplementing, clarifying, hedging. The conventional thinking has Hemingway’s style as a product of its times, a counterpoint to the disorienting horrors of the first war fought with the full technological bounty of the Industrial Revolution, to the relativism of appocalypse. I think what makes that style so appealing today is the new universality of its application.
We live today in a continuous state of upheaval. New technologies supplant old faster than ever before. World changing innovations are on tips of tongues in labs and on campuses, not only across the country, but across the globe. Breakthroughs are shared at near the speed of light and critiqued, corrected and expounded upon nearly as fast. But the sword cuts both ways, and let us not forget, is a sword. War becomes smaller, faster and more deadly to the innocent, it seems everyday. Soldiers die less and less often, more and more return home wounded or changed or both. Industries emerge and collapse in fruit fly cycles. Today’s “conflicts” may not be “World Wars”, but the specter of their violence and confusion covers the globe.
So it feels good for me, like I’m sure it felt good for him, to put something in black and white, to cut through a knot I could never untie, to present my version of events and say simply: this is how it happened for me. Excise lengthy digressions on subjectivity and Heisenberg: writing is presenting an answer to a problem whose solution is unknowable. Every good piece of writing is a religion, presenting a universe within our own, with rules and norms askew or realigned to our own, varying assumptions about the nature of reality suggesting varying modes of life. Hemingway’s voice is authoritative as Moses’. He hedges no bets, makes no disclaimers on his prognostications. That’s a welcome relief in a deconstructed world and it’s the reason he’s the embodiment of American literature. Who could help ripping that off?
