linebaugh
Well-known member
I imagine the quivvering overuse of qualifiers jammed in there without any sense is what made the late modernists do its exact opposite immediatley after in the stream of conciousness stuff
Writers you hate
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
It's been a very long time since I read Moby Dick but I don't remember the language being offensively ornate - although admittedly I might have a higher tolerance for that than some people do.
However, even I have my limits, and I've found that the absolute worst for this tendency is Henry James, whose prose frankly just takes the piss sometimes. Which is a shame, because he's a great writer otherwise, and knows how to tell a gripping story.
However, even I have my limits, and I've found that the absolute worst for this tendency is Henry James, whose prose frankly just takes the piss sometimes. Which is a shame, because he's a great writer otherwise, and knows how to tell a gripping story.
linebaugh
Well-known member
Did you see that excerpt i posted? its not that its ornate really its more that every now and then a sentence is completely busted
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Sure, I see what you mean.
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
People had better working memories back then.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Why write like that? Well from my experience in writing byzantine ersatz sentences, it usually has to do with a certain mindset I'm in, wherein I get fixated on a certain nuance I want to express and I lose track of 1) how likely it is a given reader will be able to follow me and 2) how likely a given reader will think that point is worth the intricacy incurred to express it.
I haven't read Moby Dick yet (thats what this is, right?) so I can't comment on that, but I feel safe in generalizing from my own experience here.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
This might be true. Certainly the effect of the internet on prose is to compress it. It's hard to read dense text on a screen. And by dense I mean any paragraph that's much longer than this one.
AHH that's better.
I noticed when reading "Tristam Shandy" how elastic the sentence seems to have been in the 18th century
Maybe it was parodic in Sterne's case, but anyway it seems like you could fuse about a million clauses with a sub comma back then.
What you're saying is Melville was "tuned in".
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Anyone who can parse this Wyndham Lewis sentence is a better man than me:
"Would this boy have met death with the exultation of a martyr rather than give up his picture of an old and despondent mountebank—like some stubborn prophet who would not forgo the melodrama forged by his orderly hatreds—always of the gloom of famine, of cracked and gutted palaces, and the elements taking on new and extremely destructive shapes for the extermination of man?"
"Would this boy have met death with the exultation of a martyr rather than give up his picture of an old and despondent mountebank—like some stubborn prophet who would not forgo the melodrama forged by his orderly hatreds—always of the gloom of famine, of cracked and gutted palaces, and the elements taking on new and extremely destructive shapes for the extermination of man?"
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
These complicated sentences require high working memory from both the writer and the reader. It's strange that the most articulate contemporary writers are clearly inferior in this regard to those of 150 years ago because there are many more of us now than then, and one would expect the most able to be more able. That the opposite has occurred suggests a rather significant overall cognitive decline, or it is, as you suggest, due to competing modes of expression that perhaps constrict available mental space for the word. But seriously, you get critically lauded novelists these days who write like children.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I was saying something similar earlier in the thread about screens destroying our concentration. But it's not just that, I think the rot must have set in much earlier with the decline in education standards and methods. I doubt many students are taught or encouraged to committ literature to memory nowadays. The decline in religious teaching too must be a big factor, learning prayers and hymns and passages from the bible by heart through repetition and belief.
linebaugh
Well-known member
Its not just a weakened memory thing though. In fact Im not sure its a weakend memory thing at all because as I was saying earlier writers stopped writing this way in the late 1800s. Its a change in stylistic preference. Ulysses is harder to follow than Moby Dick but easier to understand at the structural level of the sentences, for me at least.
linebaugh
Well-known member
Its the quivvering qualifiers, so much of writing before the late 1800' reads to me like this: 'craner, would you, and dont feel as if you cant say no, not that you are the type of man who needs reassuring in his abilty to speak his mind, like to come, if youre not already engaged, to my birthday party?'
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
I would add the deterioration of poetry: perhaps the decline of form/rhyme is because jettisoning them reduces cognitive load i.e. makes it possible for thicker people to write poetry.
Haven't all artistic forms become simpler in the past 150 years?
Haven't all artistic forms become simpler in the past 150 years?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
'Well that would depend, you see, my dear linebaugh, upon certain factors, well known to those who enjoy (if I may say so, and however sufferingly) my society, and those who follow my humble scribblings, chief among which, it may be said, would include the availability of wine and the presence of hot Neocon chicks.'
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
It is interesting, I wonder if that shift reflects a general change in the cultural values of the educated (the 1800s are at least stereotypically the age of reason/science, which might lead to a prose that is constantly qualifying and honing in on something more precise, whereas the 1900s sees the romantic movement, which is more about direct expression, and so on... And of course it's a time when "gentleman" are the authors and readers of literature and operating by this punctilious code of manners) or if it's to do with the growing literacy of the population and a shift in the function of writing.
Probably both, a bit.
I really admire writers who can construct these long long sentences that you can understand and have a rhythmic sort of perfection and build and build (makes me think there could be a connection, too, to the education of posh authors in former times including rhetoric, Latin, etc.). Dickens is a master at this.
luka
Well-known member
loads of rhymes in rap music. it's generally easier, for most people, to write with a preordained structure and some rhymes. it's a ready-made pattern.
paint-by-numbers.