I don't mind suggestions like Bertrand Russell, but I'm mainly interested in fiction writers.
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I don't mind suggestions like Bertrand Russell, but I'm mainly interested in fiction writers.
Vladimir Nabokov (considering the fact that his primary language was Russian)
Thanks!
Yes, Joyce and Nabokov are among the more obvious choices. Anyone else?
Well, Wilde has beautiful prose.
There are also some really good stylists who don't immediately leap to mind - I've always been rather taken with Mary Wollstonecraft. Here is her rather fantastic description of a waterfall:
"The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares - grasping at immortality - it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me - I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come."
From A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
Nabokov spoke english practically from birth, not to undercut the achievement, but if it were a starting point for comparison one might be inclined to rank Conrad (who taught himself english ((on a boat)) at 20+) higher. Regardless, i actually think i agree with you.Quote:
Originally Posted by DisPater
my preferences would be something like (sorry, all obvious choices - except joyce, dislike him with a passion)
nabokov, fitzgerald, conrad, dickens, melville, mccarthy.
Though his creative vision frequently engendered cliche and gibberish, Joyce can make most everyone seem second-rate. This, for example, from Portrait:
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
I'm also a big fan of Bellow, who, for mine, can lay claim to one of the most singular and compelling styles of post-WWII novelists. Herzog, in particular, is a prose masterpiece. This from more or less at random*:
I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy - who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity - only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it.
Conrad and Nabokov aren't half bad either.
*More or less because I've underlined it heavily and repeatedly. :biggrin5:
I admire Nabokov's brilliant intellect and his endless imagination, but I find him a difficult writer to love. He takes his gifts and uses them to make games, to tease the reader, almost as though he enjoys proving himself more clever than his audience. I get the impression from his prose that he writes, primarily, to show off.
I prefer Conrad. His prose is wonderful and he uses it to a more noble purpose than Nabokov, I think. Conrad simply tells his stories as well and as truthfully as he can, with no trickery and no vanity - or, if he is guilty of vanity, he covers it well enough that I forgive him.
I think Kipling, at his best, is brilliant. He didn't revise enough, it seems to me, but he's electrifying just the same. My father used to read his Just So Stories to me when I was very young, and that was the first prose that I ever appreciated just for its sound. I still he my father's voice talking about "the great gray-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees ..."
Joyce is astonishing. Too bad he was so difficult. Still, I find myself reading some of his passages over and over. There's a description in Ulysses of a drowned man being brought into a boat: "Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun."
Anthony Burgess is also wonderful, though he may be a bit too influenced by Joyce.
T.C. Boyle is worth checking out, though I find him a bit annoying because he seems to despise his own characters; they're jokes to him, and it's as if he only writes to poke fun at them.
Martin Amis is good, too, but I think he follows Nabokov the way Burgess follows Joyce.
Funny that nobody has mentioned Hemingway yet. I guess the twentieth century's most influential stylist isn't ranked very highly these days.
I think there is a lot to this, but i think that's also why so many people love him - i know for a fact it is why i admire him.Quote:
Originally Posted by minstrelbard
What i disagree with is that he did any teasing in a way to show off his superiority. I think it was a testament to the respect and admiration he had for readers. His novels double as games, and the right solutions offer incredible insight to the reader, not only into life, but into the mind of the author. As a writer, and a person - i think he is far more difficult and rewarding than nearly anyone (especially Joyce). He's like the robert frost of literature, so seemingly simple at times, so mystifying in totality.
Don't forget that he was a pimp-*** chess player who spent a great deal of time creating complexasfuk problems for people to figure out. The key there being, to figure out - not to stump.
Yeah, but this is a thread about prose?Quote:
Originally Posted by minstrelbard
Gibbon
James Joyce, definitely.
Second, for me (and I doubt anyone will agree) is Henry Miller.
I don't really understand the hype around Hemingway. I've tried reading The Sun Also Rises 3 times and have never made it past page 30. His prose seems incredibly mundane to me. Maybe that's part of the intrigue.
Yes, Gibbon... Johnson, Robert Burton, Izaak Walton, Thomas De Quincey, Emerson, William James...
Most consistently good prose stylist or best, in sustained bursts? I'd probably nominate Evelyn Waugh for the first and Hardy for the second (I'm trying to avoid a few obvious choices). I'm a pretty serious Christian and bits of Tess of D'urbervilles knock me off my feet. "Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love."
Or:
"You will think of us when you be his wife, Tess, and of how we told 'ee that we loved him, and how we tried not to hate you, and did not hate you, and could not hate you, because you were his choice, and we never hoped to be chose by him."
Or:
"But, might some say, where was Tess's guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.
Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order."
Of course, Hardy's tragic sense occasionally leads him to write wordy clunkers, but he's capable of almost unmatched sublimity.
I actually appreciate Hemingway more for his narrative technique than his style, and by that I mean how he structures scenes, how he uses flashbacks, and so on. He makes fairly complex technical challenges look deceptively simple. When I have a problem figuring something out in my own writing I sometimes look to Hemingway to see how my problems might be solved.Quote:
Originally Posted by Desolation
Personally, I find The Sun Also Rises the most boring of the books of his that I've read, and the only one I've never wanted to re-read. Try his short stories, or A Farewell To Arms, or (my favorite) For Whom The Bell Tolls.
Nabokov, or maybe Fitzgerald.
Francis Bacon.
Most of his novels bore me to tears, but I greatly admire Henry James' style and craft. He doesn't use every big word he knows in every sentence; and the devices are used sparingly to a greater effect. The texts are smoothly written.
If you mean a writer who has a unique style, then I prefer Hemingway above all others. How anyone could find The Sun Also Rises boring is beyond my comprehension. I have read that novel 4 or 5 times, and find it intriguing. I have just gone through his major novels on cd, and they are a joy to listen to. I have just finished listening to around ten of his short stories, read by Stacy Keach who does a remarkable job. I read A Moveable Feast last month, but now I am going to listen to a new updated version with more of Hemingway's original writing thrown in. When first published, this book was edited by Mary Hemingway and others at Scribners. Now a new edition with a very good introduction by H's grandson is available. For the first time, in this Introduction, Hemingway's suicide is discussed and blamed upon his loss of memory and inability to write again caused by electric shock treatments at The Mayo clinic. The Health Care clinicians won another victory, as so aptly told by Ken Kesey. Someone posted here a month or so ago that H had cancer. Not true! He was killed by the Mayo Clininic.
Listening to the major works of Hemingway is my fourth time through hismajor works, and the clarity of his writing always amazes me. And his staging of flashbacks, as another poster said, are incredible.
Could you say why he was attending the Mayo Clinic?Quote:
Originally Posted by dfloyd
Nabakov is a great recommendation, he's got wonderful prose style. Honestly, I haven't yet made it thru any Joyce, his language is far too, well, dull to me. One obvious choice for me is italo Calvino. I can't believe nobody mentioned him (okay, maybe because he isn't classified as an English author? Either way he deserves mention!), he's got enormous creative power and beautiful literary style, his prose is rich, well thought out, and original!
"Her friends' lips were red, their teeth white, and their tongues and gums were pink. Pink, too, were the tips of their breasts. Their eyes were aquamarine blue, cherry-black, hazel and maroon."
-Cosmicomics; Without Colors; Italo Calvino.
...
"The lawn mower attends with defeaning shudder to the tonsure; a light odor of fresh hay intoxicates the air; the leveled grass finds again a bristling infancy; but the bite of the blades reveals unevenness, mangy clearings, yellow patches."
-Mr. Palomar; The Infinite Lawn; Italo Calvino.
Calvino isn't classified as an English writer because he doesn't write in English. If we are going into non-English writers it would seem you'd need to speak the language and be able to read the work in the original before you begin speaking of this or that writer as a brilliant prose stylist in Italian, German, French, etc...
Gertrude Stein's prose always puts a smile on my face.
edit:
"Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one."
Well, that's not what we mean by prose style. All authors are unique - that's part of being human. It seems as if you're saying u prefer him for his uniqueness rather than his actual skill. Which is fine - regardless - his style does not lend itself to prose like awesomeness.Quote:
Originally Posted by dfloyd
{edit}
Nabokov, yes....maybe Fitzgerald (though coming back to him I find his novels to be a mess--there are some brilliant and beautiful blurbs--but the construction is a disaster.)
Lawrence kind of rocks. And Truman Capote.
I am looking at this as talking about the beauty of language at it's highest.
LOL! And I'll keep my mouth shut about Hemingway--I'm mad at him right now.
Jazz music began as a relatively easy style to listen to, and even to play, but as it progressed, it grew more complex and difficult, until along came bebop and only virtuosos could play that music and it got pretty hard to listen to. So along came rock and roll - simple instrumentation, simple chord progressions and rhythms, and woo hoo! We're back to something we can all play and listen to.
Then rock got pretentious, with the arrival of highly skilled players such as Hendrix and Clapton, and with the development of progressive rock, only virtuosos could play it and relatively few liked listening to it. So along came punk rock, and woo hoo! We're back to what's easy and comprehensible.
Maybe a similar thing happened in literature. In the late nineteenth century, prose was getting pretty flowery, and with the late Henry James and others, it was maybe getting a bit unwieldy. And with Joyce's Ulysses in 1922, it got, for many people, unreadable. So along comes Hemingway in the 1920s and he writes simply, and woo hoo! Literature is easy again!
Hemingway was literature's punk rocker.
I'm just tossing that out there; I'm not prepared to defend it with actual arguments or anything. I'll just mostly use emoticons.
;)
minstrelbard--I think you're my new favorite poster:cheers2:Quote:
Originally Posted by minstrelbard
Agreed.Quote:
Originally Posted by _Shannon_
Yeah, I can see James Joyce as Jimi Hendrix. The timing doesn't really add up, but Henry Miller is, of course, Keith Richards.Quote:
Originally Posted by minstrelbard
Hemingway can be Sid Vicious.
:thumbsup:
I like the writing style of Cather, Thoreau, Edward Abbey, John McPhee, Barry Lopez, and Rachel Carson.
People may not be able to play like Hendrix, but they can listen to Hendrix. Normal people can not write like Hemingway or Joyce, does not matter much.
The complexity of Joyce is exagerated, it is not his invention, Mallarme was as much obscure as him and literature always had some tendency towards obscure meanings. Neo Classics like Voltaire aimed simplicity, Poe or Tchekhov too. But then you have Borges with a language simple enough for a kid and the entire complexity of themes. Even James, stilized, but far from the word-play of Joyce or even Carroll (Coleridge was already complaning about simplification of prose writers while compared to poetry writers), and of course, Stevenson was simple as hell.
The thing with Neo-Classicism though, generally in most parts of the world, it has a few great authors, then tends to drag for a long time, unable to evolve; it staggers, before being blown out in favor of often more radical, very new language.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
I think that is apparent in French, when Romanticism essentially redefines a genre mastered over a century before its death. It happens again in England, but it also happens in, from what I understand, Chinese literature, as well as other traditions.
Generally neo-classicism, from my understanding, follows a movement that first commences as artistically brilliant - such as the rennaissance, and then somehow gets out of control, where the styllistic modes invented and developed become to decorated and fanciful. Then some people get it in their heads to "tie down" the language into "pure forms" - so you get strong writers for a while, with clean, precise, and sharp lines. This of course, gets boring quick. So Racine can develop, and French can be governed by the court of Louis XIV, or Charles II, but it doesn't develop -so by the time Voltaire comes by, the style becomes satirical - it folds upon itself, with similar shows in Swift.
The movements only managed to really move forward with, instead of a lasting refinement in style, a change in style to conventions of the exact opposite. Popular novels brought out the popular, often "trashy" forms as a counter to the limitations.
Also, Romantic poetry seems to have remade verse forms - the movement in the exact opposite direction of classicism and the 18th century in general.
This in turn becomes fanciful, and the cycle arguably respins itself in a circular point - with Romanticism being the head, then Victorianism the fanciful period, turned into Modernism, the re-defining of prose back into "purer" form, that is, "common spoken language" or Joyce's "Scrupulous meanness" or Hemmingway's "Iceberg." If we take it that way, Postmodernism is the downturn of fancy leading to the next big bang.
But that all of course is just wishful thinking. Only I find it interesting to note how neo-classical style can only stretch itself so far.
I think simplicity always runs the risk of getting boring very quickly; that's why artists coming away from it tend to obscure it. Movements that emphasize clarity and simplicity generally lead to movements of stagnation, and then about-faces.
As such, I don't know how to view someone like Swift, Defoe. or Fielding; somehow they seem dry and boring, as if they were just echoing a rather dry idea, despite the fact that in another context, they would be revered as the great stylists of their time.
Likewise, I find reading Dryden a bore, but in terms of style, he seems to have perfected the couplet form to an unmatched level; stylistically he is one of the greatest poets of English - how do we then understand that in today's context?
The whole of idea of simplicity and difficulty, of form and deviance from the form, gesture to a process of refinement, and redefinition outside of refinement. Joyce already wrote in the refined style that was the emergent force at the time; you see it in Dubliners, and in much of Portrait. But the form couldn't contain anymore, so, arguably, he sought to write the book of forms - Ulysses - in which he uses every single style of English he could think of in as many forms as he could work in. To me it reads like a Neo-Classical text more so than anything else - D. H. Lawrence would be his Romantic counterpart, as outlined by F. R. Leavis I believe.
So where does that leave this whole idea? ultimately, some degree of difficulty will emerge whether the tradition is of simplicity or difficulty. Neo-Classical writers had a knack for taking the simple, and writing the most ridiculous out of it. Marinism in Italy proves such an idea, where a penchant for gimmicks in stylized forms dominates even in a time when "classical refinement" and subject matter were thought essential.
I guess it is no surprise now that poets as well as prose-stylists are starting to push more toward the "comprehensible" - you see that in a lot of emergent authors. I wouldn't be surprised if the "simple" - the rehashing of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads introduction - is rerealized in the nearby future - as of now it looks like it's either that, or a descent into flowery, over-formed language, or else stagnation.
I'd sell my soul to write like Emerson.
I'd give it away to write like Thoreau,
Jane Austen. Look how she employs abstract nouns and relations between ideas, among others.
But if you were to consider all languages, I would say Proust. A million times Proust.
Literature is admired when it becomes obscure and the obscurer the style of the writer the greater is his status. James Joyce in Ulysses simply tried to challenge the scholars or professors of his days and he had somewhere expressed this bluntly. Derrida too was much in praise of his style of writing. Derrida is a difficult read and so is Joyce' Ulysses. I feel reading him is a waste of time. There are greater writers to choose from and running after a stylist is sheer stupidity when at the end of it all you come across is wordiness and nothing else. I like to read Tolstoy, Dickens, V> S> Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie more. Of course I got impressed by Joyce's style and repertoires of approaches to writing works of prose but more often than not the attempt I find is exasperating all the time. We can say great things in simple words, and running after a horde of critics is rubbish. English is today a global language and there are so many styles of writing in English in different countries. There great writers writing in English in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Shrilanka, Hong Kong and we must consider their styles also. Americanism or Englishness is not quite enough. Globalism must be the norm and I urge commenters here to refer to some other great writers in English originating in some non-English speaking countries. From Indian for instance come great writers in English, like Arundhoti Roy, Arvind Adiga and the like. We can quote examples from other countries too
Blaze, in the U.S., Canada, Australia, N.Z., and the U.K., etc. there is a cultural sense of 'Ireland' that probably goes beyond what is usually experienced in other nations, even those where English is commonly spoken and sometimes a first-language. In the U.S., across the Atlantic from Ireland, we celebrate every year a holiday devoted to Ireland, and I know of a pub/bar that has an oral reading of Finnegan's Wake every year to celebrate the holiday in the city I used to live in. So Americans, Brits, Canadians, etc. may have a sort of "head-start" on Joyce, his vocabulary, and his style/vernacular. STILL, just as important, is the time-gap, that keeps growing between now and the time that Joyce wrote his often perplexing novels.
So, I think it is just fair to say that for a book to be a masterwork of English, it need not be beholden to modern usages, or trends. And I think you would probably agree with this, as you have spent an admirable time commenting on Joyce in other threads, and praising his obvious, yet sometimes elusive genius. However, you are most certainly right to point to the obvious (and more obvious with every day) fact that the modern world of English, and its use in many English-using countries deserves recognition for its skill and relevance, despite the relative paucity of built-up regard.
I am ashamed to admit that I have not read Roy or Adiga, but I imagine I will sometime. I have had the pleasure of reading some V.S. Naipaul, and I certainly understand your point.
More than anything, however, I wonder if you (a very interesting Litnetter who has commented on both Joyce and Dostoevsky, and quite often) have read much of Nabokov--a writer not so old as Joyce, and similarly respected among many, yet not a native-English-speaker?
Blaze,
With respect, I think your evaluation of Joyce is a little facile. I am the first to admit that his work can present a difficult and , it must be said, sometimes unrewarding experience. However, for the reader willing and able to handle some initial disorientation, (and here I leave Finnegan's Wake aside) there is much joy to be had not only in terms of prose, but with respect to humor and characterisation. That said, and as Bill points out, an appreciation of Joyce is undoubtedly aided by an intellectual climate in which his work is the subject of intense and continued study. In any case, your broader point about moving beyond the US and Europe is well made. Indeed, I can't believe I didn't mention Naipaul in my earlier post (though I suppose he is regarded in many quarters as a British novelist).
Joyce difficult is not born from challenge from scholars, that is silly to reduce his aesthetic ambition to a simple matter of showing off. At some point, when prose started to domain the scenario, some writers started to apply the directions and demands from poems to prose. Joyce was possible just the the one who did it best, all his works, albeit in prose, are written with rythim, the words picked because their sound, their combination. The difficult of FW is that we do not have to read it only, but listen to it. Other than that, his classification as elitist is far fetched, his books may be the glory of academic stabilishment, but his themes and even language were in many aspects mundane, there is some irony how he uses the mirror of Odissey to portrait a day and a commun man.
Anyways, route to JBI...
Yes, I think to be honest, that neo-classicism lacks better understanding from us. They have a imense merit to organize the world that Romanticism would explore. It is a great momment for very good translations (1001 Nights, Pope, Champman, etc) which are the ultimate source for much of XIX delight, even more with the end of latim.
As nature, I think Classicism (those who repeat the roman model, not themselves) have a tendecy to pastiche by its very nature. They seek a form, a spirit that is no longer theirs. This bring the irony to the most of them out. And yes, they wont develop much further: they already are in their area. The XVIII century then, also had the lack of faith to enrich their texts and they will always look old if compared with the recent writers.
I however would say that stagnation is the destiny of all dominant styles, eventually they fade away and some of the modern authors are quite neo-classics (Borges or Machado de Assis) and of course, they are also noted by their humor and language economy. I think Joyce Ulysses is one of those genre blendings texts, there is neo-classical references, but that accumulation of styles seems to me quite baroque. Proust seems to me more neo-classical but with modernist this is always hard to say. Perhaps the english counterpart could be Bernard Shaw or Fitzgerald...
Oh, I just meant that the movements seem to be moving in a cyclical structure. Certainly Joyce is not a prime example of neo-classicism. I just wanted to point out that he has those elements firmly engraved in him, as do Eliot, Pound, and then Auden to an extent.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
Real Neo-classical though really needs to turn from Restoration until the emergence of the novel - when couplets and letter writing were at their prime.
In truth, the art of writing letters seems the most outwardly neo-classical, given that it as good as sees the reemergence of Erasmian form - the so called abundant style. In that sense, the epistolary novels seem to be neo-classical to the core, in both style and diction.
What that implies (to me) is a rather unexperimental form of language, in a stylized form. The art is in how the form is manipulated - perfected - rather than in the form itself.
What Ulysses then seems to me, is the playing of all forms - it is neo-classical, in that it swallows all the models, and builds on all the models that come before it - but ultimately, the last passage proves the most innovative and famous - as does perhaps Nausicaa.
Hemingway. Give me the iceberg method over any flimsy, convoluted, passive description any day! Of course I'm only generalising here. There are many, many great writers who are massively descriptive, however Hemingway is the king of style for me.
He's definitely a writer's writer, and one I base most of my own writing on!
Other stylists I feel that are worth notable mention are Raymond Carver (matter of fact, simple, yet beauty steeped in ordinariness), Anton Chekhov (well, not technically an 'English' writer, but still a brilliant short story writer), Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Italo Calvino, John Cheever and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I think the ciclical structure is in crisis now. Anyways, I agree that letters do sound like neo-classic (unless you consider Werther) mostly because they are philosophical in their nature. So it is the essays and works with prefaces. Neo-classic prose seems to be more close to short forms. Historical narratives like Gibbons seems to be a need for epical poetry, which no neo-classic was really able to produce with competence.
I think the thing about Joyce is that the Neo-classic part of the book, the obvious influence, was a mirror. There is obvious distortions, which was a bit part of intention, it was not exactly the imitations that the poets used to do with Horace, Pindar, etc.