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The death of literature - UnHerd

The death of literature - UnHerd

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  • He considered style to be the “inevitable by-product” of the writer feeling their way through the shape of their creation, through word choices and small decisions as well as big ones. I didn’t like the term “by-product” because it didn’t sound central enough — style mattered to me even then — and he said that he meant it in the way the appearance of a plant or flower is the by-product of its most essential inner workings, that there is simply no other way for the flower or plant to look according to its genetic structure. It is a definition I have never forgotten. It is a very exacting metaphor, and perhaps overly fanciful; I don’t know how often style and substance can be that closely connected. But it’s an inspiring way to look at how style, when arrived at through rigorous, sincere work, emerges from the inmost workings of a person; an extremely intimate consciousness.
  • An element of style that I especially care about is description of the world that the writer creates on the page. This currently undervalued technique can perform practical and useful functions, such as indirectly conveying a character’s emotions and locating the reader in a character’s world — where are they from, how much money do they have, what is their neighbourhood like? However, it can do more: it can give words to what is wordless and form to what is formless through creating pictures and images that irrationally make a connection to the deeper body of the story — the viscera or unconscious.
  • Fiction, even when it’s fantasy or sci-fi, is about life and life is not mostly about words. Consider how many things you’ve thought or seen that are impossible for you to say in words, even something simple, like someone’s facial expression. Life, even on a quiet day, happens so densely and quickly around us and most of it is about seeing, feeling and thinking in a not-strictly verbal way. Writing translates all of this into words but paradoxically the most powerful writing uses words in a way that transcends language to become more true to life; it mimics how we live in a world that is constantly changing and moving before our eyes.
  • Writing is a rational process of connected thoughts and ideas, but great writing comes from a stranger place; an interface between the intensely intimate perception of an individual and the social and natural worlds.
    • Note: Not about me, not about the world (as a standalone entity, anyway), but about my encounter with the world.
  • It made me realise I might sound either absurdly arty or just really old-school but — I think people still do look out the window. They might not think about trees, or beat-up buildings or cars or people or whatever else is out there — but they experience them. Or at least they used to. The year 2000 was before everybody had a phone and earbuds. That’s changed things. We are now much less likely to experience trees because… we may not see them even if we do look out the window.
  • More recently, in 2019, Joyce Carol Oates came to Claremont McKenna where I was teaching and did an intimate Q&A. I brought up the writer John Updike; I was teaching a novel by him which was hard for students to read partly because he was sexist and backward in his racial attitudes, but even more because he described his worlds very, very densely. He would spend pages describing what a character sees driving down a country road at night. Students had a hard time even tracking it — they could, but they had to try. (Note: at least one of them, once he got the hang of it, loved it, which was great.) I wanted to hear what Oates had to say about it because she’s of an older generation; she and Updike were peers. What she said was (paraphrasing again): yes, John could describe anything and everything but no one wants to read that any more, because (directly quoting) “people have moved on”/  I was really surprised by this. “Moved on”? We’ve moved on from the world we live in? How is that possible?
  • It is remarkable to me, based on the sample of humans that I’ve had in writing classes, both “kids” and adults, how many people: 1) express great concern about climate change and its effects on the planet, 2) are completely uninterested in other humans’ visions of what the planet they want to save looks, feels and sounds like, and 3) are even less interested in writing or just noticing what it looks like to them. Even as a writing exercise it’s hard for them to say, for example, what someone’s face looks like in a fundamental way. Which is not to say that they can’t do it. Some of them do it very well once they try. But it doesn’t occur to them in the way I think it naturally occurred to people of my generation.
  • Artistic looking is about care and respect. It is like saying: I see this human in my mind’s eye and this particular human is worth the most precise attention I can give them. Because they won’t be here forever and they are as amazing as any animal you might see in a documentary devoted to the heart-breaking beauty of endangered animals. That is not just respect, that is reverence. It is a more intense, focused version of reverence that normal, non-writers can experience or at least used to potentially experience all the time.