Style & Content Must Match...But What's the Risk?

I can't think of a writer more staunchly dedicated to style without giving a damn about making the job easier or more difficult for the reader than William Gaddis, author of such surreal American classics as The Recognitions and JR.

Gaddis, 1975

David Foster Wallace mentioned that if any writer wanted to know who had inspired him most, in terms of style and voice, it would be Gaddis. And this is most apparent in Wallace's last book of stories, Oblivion.

Linguistic tics befuddle, challenge, and inspire the reader throughout in a way that drew both praise and criticism from reviewer and novelist Walter Kirn, who seemed to get caught between marveling and denouncing the work for its overstimulated, tweaked-out abundance of hyper-detailing language and description.

In other words, fiction-Wallace as usual. But with Oblivion, it's Wallace after a lifetime of experience. The language, at first obfuscating the narrative, transforms itself into the picky, obsessive, anxious interior landscape of the character, and it fits. It fits well. The hard reading is worth it. For fiction lovers, it's a book to pore over.

Yet, if the authorial hand is too apparent in the advanced stylistic cues, he is also absent from what we usually expect in short stories, where the writer makes the time pass with a clumsy kind of "Two weeks later" exposition -- or as Gaddis calls it below, "narrative intrusion".

But what is the risk in losing yourself in the particular pattern of consciousness of the character? You run the risk of alienating the reader. You take a chance at overshooting your level of talent. There has to be a profound, layered context by which to root and justify your stylings.

And, as Gaddis says below, if you don't have the ear for voice, you won't soak it up no matter how hard you listen, pay attention, or take "special measures" to acquire it.

Here is a nice cutout from an interview in 1982 provided by Biblioklept:

Style and content must match, must be complementary, accounting in part for a difference between the two books, though the lack of a conventional narrative style had already jarred a good many readers of The Recognitions when it appeared, as its hapless reviews show. J R was started as a story which quickly proved unsatisfactory, inspired- here’s the legitimate gossip—-by the postwar desecration of the Long Island village of Massapequa where my family had had property since around 1910, take a look at it now and you’ll see all the book’s worst hopes realized. In approaching J R as a novel, I was at pains to remove the author’s presence from the start as must be obvious. This was partly by way of what I mentioned earlier, obliging the thing to stand on own, take its own chances. But it was also by way of setting up a problem, a risk, in order to sustain my own interest, especially since the largely uninterrupted dialogue raised the further risk of presenting a convincing sense of real time without the conventional chapter breaks, white spaces, such narrative intrusions as “A week later . . .” How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me. As for what you call speech patterns, one is always listening and has got an ear or hasn’t, and without one, unless perhaps in dealing with an unfamiliar language and culture, no amount of your special measures like riding around on school buses will get you out of the swamp.

What Kind Of A Writer Are You? Zadie Smith Explains Reading As A Balanced Diet

In Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith relates her experience writing novels. In some ways, it might be called advice. Below is a highlight of what I thought was helpful, to a degree, for the struggling novelist:

Some writers won't read a word of any novel while they're writing their own.... They don't even want to see the cover of a novel.... Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type while he's writing and he'll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. It's a matter of temperament. Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra--they'll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I'm too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I'm syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoevsky, patron saint of substance over style (103).

As a writer, I'm not as much of a promiscuous reader as it sounds like Smith is. I would go bonkers with so many books open on my desk. I like to make a close study of a novel while reading it, and then bury it back in the bookshelf after internalizing all I can.

Reading as a balanced diet is a fine way to approach which books we obsess over, glance at, and study. While I'm writing a novel, I can't help but scan the used bookstores for titles that might somehow teach me more about what I'm writing, or trying to.

My current novel is about a drunken mayor of a small town attempting to pull off a surprising feat that will get him back into good graces with all the people, so when I saw William Golding's The Spire, something about a church dean trying desperately to get a crushing spire to be built atop his ancient, crumbling church lured me in. There were lessons about the head of a community undertaking a job despite the grumblings and backstabbing of a small group of people.

I also keep my eyes open for stories about people in small towns, in rural places. Only you know the tone of your novel and where you wish it to go, so it's beneficial to align your reading choices to inform your work.

The other great idea in the highlight paragraph is to be careful that what you're reading doesn't shift the way you're writing your novel. David Foster Wallace has the tendency to make you want to bloat your paragraphs with minute details and do tricks with your sentences. But that doesn't work for everybody, and if you're not adept at it, it certainly won't for you. Also, not every novel needs to be hypersensitive to detail, and overstimulated in its storytelling.

So if you find yourself mimicking one writer more than you think is healthy for maintaining coherency and consistency in your current writing project, substitute what your reading for something else that's in the opposite style. Or a more moderate style. 

Stylistic Payoff in Herzog by Saul Bellow

I picked up a smelly, old paperback copy of Saul Bellow's Herzog at a library book sale. After just finishing Mailer's Harlot's Ghost (all 1308 pages of it), Bellow's depictions of a middle-aged Jewish intellectual and professor felt almost like a breeze, although blustery at times.

As much as the writer reads for pleasure and entertainment, so too should he read opportunistically to learn, steal, or master what others have mastered in their storytelling ability.

Bellow's Herzog is extraordinary in how it shifts perspectives and tone rapidly, and the purpose for doing that becomes even more clear in the novel's final 75-pages.

Moses E. Herzog is a mess. A slob with too much in his brain to know what to do with it. He's abandoned his writing projects, particularly his book about the Romantics and Modernism:

But Herzog worked under different orders -- doing, he trusted, the work of the future. The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with. This was where he came in. The progress of civilization -- indeed, the survival of civilization -- depended on the successes of Moses. E. Herzog.

But how passive a man Herzog is. His second ex-wife claimed she was no longer in love with him, and threw him out of the house he purchased, put a restraining order on him, and never let him visit his daughter. He rents an apartment in New York. He has a lover who wants more from him. He has a crumbling house in the Berkshires that he bought for his ex-wife with all his inheritance money. His daughter lives in Chicago with his best friend who is acting as father and husband for his family.

So Moses Herzog has taken to writing letters. To dead philosophers like Nietzsche, to old friends, to the priest who converted his ex-wife to Christianity, and so on. Sometimes Herzog's letters are physical, and sometimes he composes them in his mind. When he's composing, Bellow changes the text into italics.

The result is a protagonist who is hopelessly distraught about life, love, and his own writing project (even a professor from Berkeley had published a book that made much of Herzog's project superfluous).

But for the reader, the mental landscape Bellow creates is rich with perspective and changes in voice. It can also be tedious, but in the calculated way that only a form contrived to match its content can achieve.

Here he sees an old friend, Nachman, who owes him money, but the man flees, so Moses composes a letter:

I felt it would be cheaper in the long run to send you back to New York. In Paris I was stuck with you. You see, I don't pretend that I was altruistic. Perhaps, thought Herzog, the sight of me frightened him. Have I changed even more than he has? Was Nachman horrified to see Moses? But we did play in the street together. I learned the aleph-beth from your father, Reb Shika (163).

The constant shifting from epistle writing or imagining, back to a close third-person narrative, then suddenly a line or two in first-person, and then back to third, is an effective way to whirl around the mind of Herzog awhile. We see him from the author's perspective. We hear his thoughtfulness in one string of considerations after another. We read what is intended as letter, and then what is more carefully left out. This type of polyphonic thought that makes up Herzog is what some say has cemented the book in the so-called postmodern category.

Often a thought of the past produces snippets of a letter, and the beginnings of a letter often take Herzog back to a specific time in his life, so it is through this blustery approach the days in the life of Herzog are populated.

There are no real rules in the book about when a flashback (or "fleshbeck" as John Barth mocks it) occurs, as they are rather sudden affairs, cutting swiftly into whatever Herzog finds himself doing, and then occupying space a short while, before drifting somewhere else.

Many times Herzog's thoughts are at work, chomping away at his would-be groundbreaking book. Thoughts of Rosseau, of science, of modern lackluster life in light of the industrialized fallout, and letters to Dr. Schrodinger and Spinoza to have discourse about their ideas. His mind goes to these rehashed philosophies as easily as it remembers certain anatomical features of his current lover in the city.

By the last hundred pages of the novel, when Herzog once again sees his daughter, June, the perspective solidifies. Because of the earlier controlled whimsy of internal dialogue, brooding, and setting scores mentally with a wide range of people, the solidity of the experience is striking. The barrage of memories and malaise clears up. Herzog holds a hand over his mouth to block the emotion from coming out, as he spies on his daughter with her stepfather and his ex-wife. Suddenly, all of his mental faculties are focused.

How can the use of language, perspective, and tone better reflect the mental state of your main character? What is the effect of your stylistic choices?

Book: Herzog, by Saul Bellow, 416 pages. Fawcett Crest, 1965.