Between the Chainsaw and the Cricket Bat
An expanded meditation on literary style.
Note: Though I said in my original post that a longer response was not ideal, the folks at The Lamp thought otherwise, having liked what little I’d actually said just enough to ask me to expand on it in their pages, as a letter to the editors. That being perhaps my true and natural medium, I set about doing exactly that. Nothing came of it so far as I’m aware, and I’m not sure if Hart even saw what I wrote, so I’m putting it on here for whatever it’s worth to you.
Though it was clear right away in his essay, “How to Write English Prose,” that David Bentley Hart and I share a common cause of maintaining the beauty, clarity, and vibrancy of written English, it dawned on me more gradually that we also shared a common enemy. Perhaps because he mentions it only in passing in the piece.
Mr. Hart’s main audience is young people (young men?) who’ve been cursed with the literary urge. But certain references indicate more specifically that his audience is young would-be writers who have suffered at the hands of the American English (or “Language Arts”) curriculum. What I acerbically rendered earlier as pure prejudice now has a clearer rationale. Our public schools are smitten with works, like The Old Man and the Sea and Of Mice and Men, that are time-efficient; as well as humorless satires, like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ayn Rand’s Anthem, that leave no ambiguity as to their meaning. So if I found Mr. Hart's conception of American literature to be rather simplistic and incomplete, that is at least owing to the fact that it is taught simplistically and incompletely.
But my disagreement as to his solutions remain. It is not so much that he wants new rules for our prose. Legislating grammar and syntax is a centuries-old custom. Swift’s “A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders” (“Proper Words in proper Places, make the true Definition of a Stile.”) is the most enduring across the ages. Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style is the most useful in recent memory, as it derives from his work with college students, who need all the help they can get. For the most part, Mr. Hart’s technical advice is sensible; while his heresies on our prohibitions of “SAT words” and adverbs are notable if only because I’m on maybe my seventh consecutive New Years resolution to cut down on both.
But his conceptual and aesthetic advice betray a tension with his lawgiving. He writes of what makes a “great national prose,” but it is the prose of the English nation, and within that, it is the musical, Latinate style of the pre-Augustan writers, and that of their Romanticist heirs, he most prizes. Mr. Hart wants to liberate the digital age young in order to ascend to long-forbidden levels of idiosyncrasy. But within reason, like good Englishmen. The innovations of the Irish writers are too feral … too Celtic, even when they aren’t actually Celtic. The prose of our own nation, on the other hand, is given too easily to “grand effects” either due to “the presence of our magnificent landscape or because of the absence of a long cultural history.” To inveigh so strongly against the Language Arts teacher only to hoist the white flag is tragic indeed.
Perhaps the problem is that American national prose is akin to one of the many cryptozoological concoctions roaming within this magnificent landscape I keep hearing so much about. It is a melding of many conflicting registers and psychological shades, and never witnessed in any coherent fullness. We have our sacred texts of high-flowing, moralistic rhetoric; we also have our moonshine and alleyway vernaculars. American prose is always racked by a series of poles: common sense and burlesque, liberty and bondage, optimism and cynicism, the town meeting and the backwoods hermit, the solemnity of the church and the ribaldry of the carnival, the stoicism of the country and the pragmatism of the city. It takes a truly intrepid artist to even try to reconcile them. Only a few (Edith Wharton, Nathanael West, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor) have succeeded.
But these may be set aside as matters of taste. Even if Castle Rackrent is not plausibly better than Emma, or whatever, I would still prefer Maria Edgeworth’s gothic-comic monologue of Ascendency era Ireland. Nor does anyone need to agree with me (still, you should read it all the same). But there is later in Mr. Hart’s text a matter of principle that I found pretty vexing. Namely the proclamation that “language is magic.”
It is invocation and conjuration. With words, we summon the seas and the forests, the stars and distant galaxies, the past and the future and the fabulous, the real and the unreal, the possible and the impossible. With words, we create worlds—in imagination, in the realm of ideas, in the arena of history. With words, we disclose things otherwise hidden, including even our inward selves. And so on. When you write, attempt to weave a spell. If this is not your intention, do not write. (Emphasis mine, of course.)
The verbal psychedelia is all very fine, but I resent any attempt to dictate what my literary intentions should and should not be. For starters it is quite rude; but more importantly, it offends my own principles. I don’t like magic. I actually think magic fucking sucks and is fake. I’m not Chris Morgan: MINDFREAK. But if your voice reaches its fullest development in writing magically and nothing else, I’m hardly going to prevent you from doing so. You either have an idea and put all your faculties to work in finding the form and tone that best articulates it, or you don’t have an idea and you do something else—or nothing at all. That’s it. To impose further is when the prerogative of a lawgiver becomes the prerogative of a tyrant. The same goes for those writers for whom language is something other than sorcery. It may be a costume, it may be architecture, it may be bitter medicine, a blunt instrument, or a sharp object.
Here I risk possible association with the “popular creativity” Clare Coffey highlighted in Rupi Kaur, in which “excellence is an irrelevant category to the efforts of ordinary people.” Rather, I believe that excellence is flexible across styles and mediums, and nations for that matter. England has its excellence, as does the United States, Wales, and even Australia. Pantera represents a kind of excellence, as does an Onion article you remember years after you’ve read it.
Literary excellence as espoused by Mr. Hart resembles the cricket field: where elegant movements depend upon a complex set of rules, and where eccentricity emanates from an aristocratic elan. There are people who can go all their lives playing cricket and interacting almost exclusively with other cricket fanatics. It has my respect (one of my favorite novels is The Go-Between after all); but to me that is only half of the human mind, which needs anarchist versatility to offset the Tory excellence.
A truly worthy literary artist should like to be full-minded. She should be able to sow mayhem with the force and precision of a cricket bat just as much as she should be able to enforce excellence with the relentless and omnivorous teeth of a chainsaw.