Style Counsel by Ben Masters / Features / Untitled Books

"Here is a rule of thumb: never trust a critic who too easily dismisses prose for being ‘over-egged’. Overwriting is also writing over – filling out meaning and adding dimension.”

Style Counsel by Ben Masters

First-time novelist Ben Masters recently embarked on a PhD in English at Cambridge University. He presents the case that content is nothing without style.

I am a hoarder of theories of style. I nod sagely when Martha Nussbaum says that 'Style itself makes its claims, expresses its own sense of what matters.' I give a ready bow of accord when Susan Sontag states that 'Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist's will'. I feel impressed by the grandness of 'A prose is a vision, a totality. Great stylists should be as rare as great writers' (James Wood), and intrigued by the giddy thought that 'A style creates multiple, universal singularities' (Adam Thirlwell). I am eager to go along with the narrator of Anthony Burgess's almighty Earthly Powers when he exhorts me to 'Live for style'. And I sense that I am getting nearer to the truth when I read Martin Amis's seductive claim that 'Style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified.' But what exactly do we mean by style? What is my own working definition? Again, I defer: 'The conception of style is based on the fact that every writer has his own rhythm, as distinctive as his handwriting, and his own imagery, ranging from a preference for certain vowels and consonants to a preoccupation with two or three archetypes' (Northrop Frye). But what about... and what if... and how does...

Style is so much more than a theory to be got at. It is essential. It is vital. Take, for instance, the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb. A small, frail man beset by a debilitating stutter, it could be said (perhaps all too neatly) that Lamb found refuge in style. And so we get the domestic sublime of the Elia essays with their becalmed surface precariously maintained above an undercurrent of excess and absurdity, that fatal stutter never too far away, occasionally erupting in stylised and ironised forms: 'I know [Elia] to be light, and vain, and humorsome ; a notorious * * * ; addicted to * * * * : averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it ;-* * * besides ; a stammering buffoon ; what you will ; lay it on, and spare not ; I subscribed to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay at his door - - -' Lamb makes an art-form of deprecation. Instead of lachrymose pity, we get the most intense kind of self-revelation, all borne out by the ironic, digressive style; a pre-Dickensian pleasure in the indecorous energies of life, as seen through a contorting squint.

Henry James was another writer known for his painstaking habits of speech - all those delays and feints as he strained awkwardly for the best thought, the right phrase, for impossible precision. But James was able to sublimate this into a finely tessellated prose, fit for the challenge of life's complex qualifications and particularities. It is because of this facility for hyper-modification, for head-spinning minutiae, that James is so adept at creating paranoid and neurotic moods, as in this passage from The Golden Bowl: 'Quickly, quickly, on a certain alarm taken, eagerly and anxiously, before they should, without knowing it, wound her, they had signalled from house to house their clever idea, the idea by which, for all these days, her own idea had been profiting. They had built her in with their purpose--which was why, above her, a vault seemed more heavily to arch; so that she sat there, in the solid chamber of her helplessness, as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of which she could just manage to see by stretching her neck.'

And then there's Nabokov, one of the twentieth century's most self-conscious 'stylists', with the supporting theories to boot. The style is aristocratic and plush, every sentence like a language loom where words merge in and out of one another in an intricate weave. But as Nabokov famously remarked, 'I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.' This was an anxiety borne out by his tendency to read pre-written answers during television interviews. The self he wanted to present dwelt in the style.

Style, then, is a means of self-fashioning. Word and grammar games are life games, as Angela Carter intimated when she said that 'To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case - that is, to be killed.' Carter was restlessly alive to the potential for reinvention through all different kinds of style (from the literary to the sartorial), and for her this was best realised in the ornate mode. I share Carter's preference. As she once said in an interview: 'I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose - so fucking what?' To my mind, the greatest stylists are more often than not of the excessive school, from Dickens to Joyce to David Foster Wallace. Perhaps it is a question of sensibility. This is Burgess's take on the matter: 'The beauties of the plain style are often urged on me, the duty of excising rather than adding. [...] One has to be true to one's own temperament, and mine is closer to that of the baroque writers than that of the stark toughies. To hell with cheeseparing and verbal meanness: it all reeks of Banbury puritanism.' And here is a rule of thumb: never trust a critic who too easily dismisses prose for being 'over-egged'. Overwriting is also writing over - filling out meaning and adding dimension. I favour a fattened prose. 'An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his counting house' (Amis, again).

If style really can fashion, we must do away with the mimetic fallacy - the notion that literary prose mimics the content it describes. Though it is true to a certain extent (albeit uninterestingly so), it makes writing sound like a limp business of apathy and passivity, as well as encouraging many a lazy interpretation of how Foster Wallace produces a boring amount of detail because he is writing about boredom, or how Bret Easton Ellis writes with a plain style because he is writing about a vacuous culture. Such one-dimensional readings will never tell us much about a text, because style generates and moulds content as much as it reflects it; it is constitutive. When an author stylises a subject, he filters it through his perceptions. The author pays fidelity to what Nabokov called the 'artist's peculiar nature': 'Style is not a tool, it is not a method, it is not a choice of words alone. Being much more than all this, style constitutes an intrinsic component or characteristic of the author's personality.' Style has to do not only with how the author sees the world, but how he then shapes it. It is both perception and conception, as the author rises and moves forward to his senses. (This is not to say that everything an author writes necessarily aligns with his own views or feelings. The perceptions are often deliberately adapted to suit a given character (whose perspective may well be flawed), or to generate effects of distortion like irony and stereotype. It remains the cardinal sin of lit crit to equate, unquestioningly, narrator or character with the real flesh-and-blood author, precisely because to do so divests the critic of any responsibility to evaluate what that author might actually be trying to do.) And what of prose styles that purposefully seek a dissonance between form and content? As Amis's best novels show (Money, London Fields, Yellow Dog), tonal awryness can be far more valuable - can provide reader and writer alike with a new and revealing angle, with a moral purchase - than an unchallenging harmony.

The measure of a true style, however, is its ability to individualise writer and reader alike. For the writer this occurs in the gradual development of a personal decorum. Stylists originate a manner of proceeding that is both aesthetic (their unique combination of perception and expression) and social (something affective which is to be communicated). For writer and reader individualisation occurs in a new and surprising quality of vision; in the illumination of something that had not been recognised before. Indeed, as readers we inhabit and dwell in the author's style. This involves us in at least a double engagement: when we read we are identifying with the author (insofar as stylistic choices - conscious or unconscious - index what matters to that author) and the characters he creates, who exist within his style (the style is their cosmos). Therefore to attend to the particulars of a style is to attend to the particulars of a character's situation. To my mind this is more productive than both the old traditional humanist notion of reading empathetically for character, and the Deconstructionist quagmire where characters are nothing more than text. (Subscribing to the latter feels a bit like beating off into a sock... You know that to some extent it is real, but you can't help feeling there must be a better way of going about it). We can engage with a style: we can adapt to it, we can fight with it, we can exceed it. It is very difficult, however, to have a conversation with a self-referring system of signifiers.

Proust called identifying with an author's voice 'a voluntary pastiche'. The writer's voice momentarily becomes our own. For Proust this was a necessary step towards individuality because 'you can become original again afterwards, rather than making involuntary pastiche for the rest of your life.' (There is an insightful discussion of this in Thirlwell's Miss Herbert, from which I take this quotation, where Thirlwell refers to Proustian pastiche as 'a way of testing out the limits of a style. It is a form of map-making'). I think that this is true. As we begin to see in and through a writer's style - as we inhabit it and adjust ourselves to its peculiar demands - our perceptions are recalibrated. This may only be a partial process (we are subtly adapting our own perceptions rather than simply being taken over by another's), but it is nevertheless one of agitation and effort. Reading and writing are physiological experiences. This is perhaps what Amis means by 'style is morality': if morality can be said to exist at the level of the sentence, then it exists in style's ability to make us see afresh, its ability to prompt us and to encourage us to make choices. Style is affective in this way; it creates certain ethical and experiential pressures. To engage with a writer's prose is to attend to its specificities, to dwell in the uncertainty of wonder and to hold ourselves accountable to the call of the author. I would add one slight though significant qualification to this and say that these are more ethical responses than moral ones. They cultivate ways of knowing rather than knowledge itself.

The reader-writer relationship is of course a very intimate one. We put faith in certain authors. We have to trust them. Not in any typical, day-to-day sense - some writers, after all, might want to obliterate us (William Burroughs once said: 'If I really knew how to write, I could write something that someone would read and it would kill them'. And he's a favourite of mine). But we trust their writerly instincts and their ability to work us in a way that is invigorating and hopefully even pleasurable. We put faith in their style. And, of course, there are so many styles, because style is also possibility. This is why I love the trickster dexterity of Thomas Nashe, the impressionistic clarity of early H.G. Wells, the rich lyrical detail of Virginia Woolf, the all-at-once inclusivity of Saul Bellow, the jagged angularities of William Golding, the violent grandeur of Angela Carter, the hydraulic prose of J. G. Ballard... I love them because they've all got style.

.........................................................................................................................................................

Noughties by Ben Masters is published by Penguin Books.

Read an interview with the author here.

.........................................................................................................................................................

Tuesday, 7 February, 2012

In Features

More

Untitled Books

Your account

Untitled Books

Issue 44 / May 2012

"Here is a rule of thumb: never trust a critic who too easily dismisses prose for being ‘over-egged’. Overwriting is also writing over – filling out meaning and adding dimension.”