Nabokov does THAT because he can? OUCH!
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Nabokov does THAT because he can? OUCH!
There is no doubt in the matter. Jonathan Swift had the best prose style in the history of the English language, and he had a great sense of humor. Not only did he have style, but he had content; although some of the content is quite obscure now.
May I suggest there's more to being a great novelist than merely being a great prose stylist. Prose is not poetry. This isn't to suggest the stylized aesthetics of someone like Nabokov or Woolf shouldn't be commended. If a writer can successfully do what those two do with the form, then great. But stylized prose should not necessarily be treated as a cornerstone of aesthetics where the novel is concerned. See Dostoevsky and Balzac for proof. Judging a novelist almost exclusively on how good a prose stylist he is strikes me as rather posh and bourgeois, sort of like if we were to judge a painter exclusively on his skills as a draughtsman. For poetry, sure, judge all you want based solely on their linguistic skills, but the novel is more of a "content"-oriented form in my humble opinion at least. If one were to call out Dostoevsky or Cervantes for not being a "great prose stylist", perhaps it's because they didn't try to be and merely had other concerns more related to "content", and there's nothing wrong that. That doesn't make them inferior artists, especially when they're working within what is essentially a story-telling medium. The novel, like 'classical' music is a mode of expression that more easily rewards "substance" whereas poetry and jazz more easily reward "style". Painting and filmmaking accommodate both in equal measure I think, as does play writing. My polemic is in no way intended as some anti-experimentalist backlash. I feel Faulkner is among the very best, but if you feel the 'flowery' linguistic style of Nabokov, Woolf, or I don't know, Flaubert is the necessary pinnacle of literary achievement and should therefore be propagated as prosaic gospel, then you probably don't understand the true essence of novel writing, just like someone who can't comprehend why Jean Renoir is superior to Kubrick or Kieslowski doesn't grasp the true essence of filmmaking. Linguistic perfectionism is more compatible with poetry writing than with prose writing in my opinion.
John Steinbeck for the novel, Anton Chekhov for the short story.
I don't think anyone is saying that prose style is the exclusive way to judge the worth of a novel, but there's more to prose style than in your opposition of it to "content" or "substance". Take Nabokov for instance, whose style to me is a lot more than just 'flowery', but is often itself a meditation on perception and memory, and the relationship between language and life. I'll quote Pnin (considered one of his slighter works):Quote:
Originally Posted by mande2013
“What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself...never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because...the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind...but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.”
Sure it reads pretty, and some will probably read the content of this as being the banal point about having to subsist in a world in which this death happened, but to me the content is in the style; of the way in which Pnin having this painfully overwrought memory is described to us. 'Flowery' suggests it's all about how trippingly on the page something reads, but to me great prose style is more about how words are used to make the imagery more vivid and the thoughts and emotions resonate more deeply, and in this passage these seven words, "those gardens and snows in the background", just floor me.
Lol, did you get this off Nick Mount's lecture on Youtube? He was my first-year English Professor at UofT, and he said the exact same quote.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hal
I have been re-visiting the delicious Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee this and last week, some yummy prose style there.
I wondered about suggesting Laurie Lee myself, but I was not sure what the definition of prose was. Cider with Rosie seems too lyrical to be called prose, but then I have read it described as a prose poem. I am currently reading the follow up As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Laurie Lee is like a more lyrical George Orwell.Quote:
Originally Posted by Neely
If you are talking about style and nothing but style then Evelyn Waugh does it for me. His prose is pretty much perfect. When he was at Oxford he became involved with the Aesthetes and he retained a commitment to beauty above content throughout his writing career. When you read him you get the sense that he is refining and reworking his prose to make it ever more fine.
Aldous Huxley's first novel Crome Yellow is another masterpiece of style.
Oh, and PG Wodehouse. Wodehouse has a reputation as a light, comic novelist but, my god, the man was a genius with the English language. Someone once said that reading him is like swimming in Champagne- perfect description!
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Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote.
Jonathan Swift? Jonathan Swift!
Cormac McCarthy, Evelyn Waugh, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, Flannery O'Connor, Jonathan Swift, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, G. K. Chesterton, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Salman Rushdie, Edgar Allan Poe, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Lydia Davis, Alice Munro, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Tim O'Brien, Kazuo Ishiguro, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Harold Bloom, Ian McEwan, J. M. Coetzee
I prefer a clear and simple style of prose, I find it more beautiful and satisfying than fanciful stuff - and rarer. So Hemingway and Isherwood good. Henry James bad.
Some folk like their grapes off the vine; some prefer them peeled stuffed and simmered in wine
Ultimately this comes down to personal preference and is necessarily subjective. One would have to be very widely read to arrive at a satisfactory answer to the question, but, in any case, it wouldn't be definitive. However, we all have our preferences based on our reading experience and my preference is for le mot juste rather than the superfluous. Much of my reading has been in French and German at the expense of English so that my knowledge of English prose writing is somewhat limited and, to my mind, Emile Zola and Thomas Mann are equal to anything I have read in English but I would agree that Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene are masterly in their prose style, as are Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald whose compatriot Frank Norris is also a master prose stylist.
I concur with many of the previous suggestions, especially those regarding highly of Joyce (and even Hemingway- images from The Old Man and the Sea have been etched into my mind since Junior High.) Say what you will about Joyce, the controversy surrounding him on this forum is telling. I am astonished to read of no David Foster Wallace recommendations. DFW was the defining prose stylist of recent generations. He is THE GUY contemporary writers look to. An example from Forever Overhead:
"Around the deck of this old public pool on the western edge of Tucson is a Cyclone fence the color of pewter, decorated with a bright tangle of locked bicycles. Beyond this a hot black parking lot full of white lines and glittering cars. A dull field of dry grass and hard weeds, old dandelions’ downy heads exploding and snowing up in a rising wind. And past all this, reddened by a round slow September sun, are mountains, jagged, their tops’ sharp angles darkening into definition against a deep red tired light. Against the red their sharp connected tops form a spiked line, an EKG of the dying day.
The clouds are taking of color by the rim of the sky. The water is spangles of soft blue, five-o’clock warm, and the pool’s smell, like the other smell, connects with a chemical haze inside you, an interior dimness that bends light to its own ends, softens the difference between what leaves off and what begins"
^ thanks bro for the DFW recommendation,
I especially love his "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky," which is IMO one of the greatest literary criticisms ever
To anyone interested in this subject I would strongly recommend seeking out 'A History of English Prose Rhythm' by George Saintsbury.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/441228
Something I just wanted to put out here