ajvenigalla
08-10-2015, 05:20 PM
Are there any among you who would consider themselves fans of "purple" prose? By purple, I will use the definition that Paul West gives:
Of course, purple is not only highly colored prose. It is the world written up, intensified and made pleasurably palpable, not only to suggest the impetuous abundance of Creation, but also to add to it by showing - showing off - the expansive power of the mind itself, its unique knack for making itself at home among trees, dawns, viruses, and then turning them into something else: a word, a daub, a sonata. The impulse here is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened with something almost intolerably vivid. When the deep purple blooms, you are looking at a dimension, not a posy
Beginning writers are often attempted to steer clear of purple prose, usually because bad purple prose is really bad and because the general tenor is to prefer leaner prose over more embellished prose — in short, to prefer Hemingway to Faulkner.
However, some of our best and most monumental works of literature do have what some would call purple prose if written today. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo is full of purplish, abundant detail. Here's one particular passage worth mentioning (it's from Part I, Book II):
You can easily imagine these two women who were both over sixty now: Madame Magloire, small, fat lively; Mademoiselle Baptistine, sweet, thin, frail, a bit taller than her brother, dressed in a puce-colored frock, a color in vogue in when she had brought it in Paris, and which was holding up well. To borrow one of those vulgar phrases that have the merit of expressing in a single word ideas that can scarcely be expressed in a page, Madame Magloire had the look of a peasant and Mademoiselle Baptistine of a lady. Madame Magloire was wearing a banded white bonnet, a little gold chain with a cross known as a jeannette around her neck, the only article of women's jewelry in the house, a bright white shawl known as a fichu peeking out of a homespun black dress with short wide sleeves, a red and green checked cotton apron, tied at the waist with a green ribbon, with a similar bodice piece, a stomacher, pinned up at the top at both corners, on her feet she wore clunky shoes and yellow stockings like the women of Marseilles....
—Les Miserables, Julie Rose translation
This is part of a much longer paragraph, and some would argue that it might technically be unnecessary. However, the prose here is beautiful, it captures a vivid sense of detail and a certain weight to the character(s) being depicted in the novel. Likewise, Hugo himself is recalling the Gothic style — heavily ornate and buttressed, with complex visual details and highly elaborate design. In this way, he is using "purple" prose in the best sense.
But what about the unnecessary stuff? Even that has its merits. For example, George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens, quoted this passage from one of his works:
Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated himself to three, and so on, till in a week's time he had got through the necklace — five-and-twenty beads in all. The sister, who was an industrious girl and seldom treated herself to a bit of finery, cried her eyes out at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it; but I needn't say, didn't find it. A few days afterwards, the family were at dinner — baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it — the child, who wasn't hungry, was playing about the room, when suddenly there was the devil of a noise, like a small hailstorm. ‘Don't do that, my boy’, says the father. ‘I ain't a-doin' nothing’, said the child. ‘Well, don't do it again’, said the father. There was a short silence, and then the noise began again, worse than ever. ‘If you don't mind what I say, my boy’, said the father, ‘you'll find yourself in bed, in something less than a pig's whisper.’ He gave the child a shake to make him obedient, and such a rattling ensued as nobody ever heard before. ‘Why dam' me, it's in the child’, said the father; ‘he's got the croup in the wrong place!’ ‘No, I haven't, father’, said the child, beginning to cry, ‘it's the necklace; I swallowed it, father.’ The father caught the child up, and ran with him to the hospital, the beads in the boy's stomach rattling all the way with the jolting; and the people looking up in the air, and down in the cellars, to see where the unusual sound came from. ‘He's in the hospital now’, said Jack Hopkins, ‘and he makes such a devil of a noise when he walks about, that they're obliged to muffle him in a watchman's coat, for fear he should wake the patients.’
Here's what Orwell said: "How does this advance the story? The answer is that it doesn't. It is something totally unnecessary, a florid little squiggle on the edge of the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens atmosphere is created." It wasn't for no reason that he said that Dickens' unmistakable flair is the unnecessary detail.
So, fellow literateurs, what say you about purple prose? Whom would you consider the best practitioners, living and dead, of the art of elaborate writing? And when would you call it terrible? And do you think it can still have a place in our modern time, a time when such stuff seems to be frowned upon?
Of course, purple is not only highly colored prose. It is the world written up, intensified and made pleasurably palpable, not only to suggest the impetuous abundance of Creation, but also to add to it by showing - showing off - the expansive power of the mind itself, its unique knack for making itself at home among trees, dawns, viruses, and then turning them into something else: a word, a daub, a sonata. The impulse here is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened with something almost intolerably vivid. When the deep purple blooms, you are looking at a dimension, not a posy
Beginning writers are often attempted to steer clear of purple prose, usually because bad purple prose is really bad and because the general tenor is to prefer leaner prose over more embellished prose — in short, to prefer Hemingway to Faulkner.
However, some of our best and most monumental works of literature do have what some would call purple prose if written today. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo is full of purplish, abundant detail. Here's one particular passage worth mentioning (it's from Part I, Book II):
You can easily imagine these two women who were both over sixty now: Madame Magloire, small, fat lively; Mademoiselle Baptistine, sweet, thin, frail, a bit taller than her brother, dressed in a puce-colored frock, a color in vogue in when she had brought it in Paris, and which was holding up well. To borrow one of those vulgar phrases that have the merit of expressing in a single word ideas that can scarcely be expressed in a page, Madame Magloire had the look of a peasant and Mademoiselle Baptistine of a lady. Madame Magloire was wearing a banded white bonnet, a little gold chain with a cross known as a jeannette around her neck, the only article of women's jewelry in the house, a bright white shawl known as a fichu peeking out of a homespun black dress with short wide sleeves, a red and green checked cotton apron, tied at the waist with a green ribbon, with a similar bodice piece, a stomacher, pinned up at the top at both corners, on her feet she wore clunky shoes and yellow stockings like the women of Marseilles....
—Les Miserables, Julie Rose translation
This is part of a much longer paragraph, and some would argue that it might technically be unnecessary. However, the prose here is beautiful, it captures a vivid sense of detail and a certain weight to the character(s) being depicted in the novel. Likewise, Hugo himself is recalling the Gothic style — heavily ornate and buttressed, with complex visual details and highly elaborate design. In this way, he is using "purple" prose in the best sense.
But what about the unnecessary stuff? Even that has its merits. For example, George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens, quoted this passage from one of his works:
Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated himself to three, and so on, till in a week's time he had got through the necklace — five-and-twenty beads in all. The sister, who was an industrious girl and seldom treated herself to a bit of finery, cried her eyes out at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it; but I needn't say, didn't find it. A few days afterwards, the family were at dinner — baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it — the child, who wasn't hungry, was playing about the room, when suddenly there was the devil of a noise, like a small hailstorm. ‘Don't do that, my boy’, says the father. ‘I ain't a-doin' nothing’, said the child. ‘Well, don't do it again’, said the father. There was a short silence, and then the noise began again, worse than ever. ‘If you don't mind what I say, my boy’, said the father, ‘you'll find yourself in bed, in something less than a pig's whisper.’ He gave the child a shake to make him obedient, and such a rattling ensued as nobody ever heard before. ‘Why dam' me, it's in the child’, said the father; ‘he's got the croup in the wrong place!’ ‘No, I haven't, father’, said the child, beginning to cry, ‘it's the necklace; I swallowed it, father.’ The father caught the child up, and ran with him to the hospital, the beads in the boy's stomach rattling all the way with the jolting; and the people looking up in the air, and down in the cellars, to see where the unusual sound came from. ‘He's in the hospital now’, said Jack Hopkins, ‘and he makes such a devil of a noise when he walks about, that they're obliged to muffle him in a watchman's coat, for fear he should wake the patients.’
Here's what Orwell said: "How does this advance the story? The answer is that it doesn't. It is something totally unnecessary, a florid little squiggle on the edge of the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens atmosphere is created." It wasn't for no reason that he said that Dickens' unmistakable flair is the unnecessary detail.
So, fellow literateurs, what say you about purple prose? Whom would you consider the best practitioners, living and dead, of the art of elaborate writing? And when would you call it terrible? And do you think it can still have a place in our modern time, a time when such stuff seems to be frowned upon?