George Steiner on Lawrence Durrell, baroque prose, and the impoverishment of English
George Steiner, in my view, is one of the greatest literary minds ever (and is so much greater than that as well), standing alongside Rene Girard, Harold Bloom, Cynthia Ozick, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf as one of the literary luminaries of all time. He's an incredible stylist, a polymath of high wisdom, and a learned example of a dying breed, the old-fashioned, old-world intellectual.
One of my favorite passages of his writing comes from a collection of essays on the baroque novelist Lawrence Durrell:
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But this does not mean that this jeweled and coruscated style springs full-armed from Durrell’s personal gift. He stands in a great tradition of baroque prose. In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne built sentences into lofty arches and made words ring like sonorous bells. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, used the same principal device as Durrell: richness through accumulation, the marshaling of nouns and epithets into great catalogues among which the eye roves in antiquarian delight. The feverish, clarion-sounding prose of De Quincey is a direct ancestor to that of Justine. And more recently, there is the example of Conrad. In the later parts of Lord Jim and throughout The Rescue, Conrad uses words with the sumptuous exuberance of a jeweler showing off his rarest stones. Here also, language falls upon the reader’s senses like brocade.
This baroque ideal of narrative style is, at present, in disfavor. The modern ear has been trained to the harsh, impoverished cadence and vocabulary of Hemingway. Reacting against the excesses of Victorian manner, the modern writer has made a cult of simplicity. He refines common speech but preserves its essential drabness. When comparing a page from the Alexandria novels to the practice of Hemingway or C. P. Snow or Graham Greene, one is setting a gold-spun and jeweled Byzantine mosaic next to a black-and-white photograph. One cannot judge the one by the other. But that does not signify that Durrell is a decadent show-off or that his conception of English prose is erroneous. We may be grateful that Hemingway and his innumerable imitators have made the language colder and more astringent and that they have brought back into fiction the virtue of plain force. But they have done so at a price. Contemporary English usage is incredibly thin and unimaginative. The style of politics and factual communication verges on the illiterate. Having far fewer words at our reach than had the educated man of the seventeenth and even of the late nineteenth century, we say less or say it with a blurred vagueness. Indeed, the twentieth century has seen a great retreat from the power of the word. The main energies of the mind seem directed toward other modes of ‘language,’ toward the notation of music and the symbol-world of mathematics. Whether in its advertisements, its comic-books, or its television, our culture lives by the picture rather than the word. Hence a writer like Durrell, with his Shakespearean and Joycean delight in the sheer abundance and sensuous variety of speech, may strike one as mannered or precious. But the fault lies with our impoverished sensibility.”
— George Steiner, “Lawrence Durrell I: The Baroque Novel” (from Critical Essays on Lawrence Durrell)
Reading and pondering over Steiner's commentary, and having been a strong admirer of the baroque, the ornate, the elaborate, and the lush in literature, I agree with Steiner. In our quest for a more concise, plain, forceful English, I think we have let ourselves be impoverished in our English, in our language. "Show don't tell" and "omit needless words" are okay in and of themselves, and they may be useful at times, but I think, like Steiner, that we have lost much of the power of the written word.
I love visual art, and I love cinema, but I have had a strong love for the written word, which is why I do find myself more drawn to the baroque prose of masters like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy. Their words read like music, like poetry, like a decorated brocade of beautiful jewels. While Ernest Hemingway is brilliant author whose stories I do like, I do find myself more drawn to the more ornate writers that Steiner speaks of. Flannery O'Connor, a comparatively plainer author than, say, Hawthorne, appeals to me a lot, not only for her "grotesque" art but also for those times where she delves into descriptive prose, ranging from either a sentence or two describing the setting or a paragraph or two.
Now, I'd like to close with two passage of beautiful "baroque" and "descriptive" prose:
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...the altar remains, a rough wooden altar backing on a wall of rough-hewn stone. Four walls washed with lime, a door opposite the altar, two small arched windows, on the door a great wooden crucifix, above the crucifix a square window stuffed with a bale of hay, in a corner, on the ground, an old glazed windowframe all broken—that is the chapel for you. Near the altar is nailed a wooden statue of Saint Anne dating from the fifteenth century, the head of baby Jesus was taken off by a Biscay musket. The French, managing to gain control of the chapel for a moment before being dislodged, set fire to it. The flames filled the place; it turned into an oven. The door burned; the floor burned. The wooden Christ did not burn. Fire lapped at his feet, which can now be only seen as blackened stumps, then it stopped. A miracle, according to the people of these parts. The decapitated baby Jesus, though, was not as lucky as Christ. — Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Another:
Quote:
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. — Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
