The Prose Stylist
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It can feel like an admission good prose is all they have. That they can't do the other things. When I think of someone being referred to as a stylist, I think of someone like DeLillo where many will say his plots go nowhere and his characters all sound the same, but his sentences are impeccable.
I don't think I've seen Beckett referred to as a stylist even though he has a voice and an ear and an eye and sometimes a gimmick.
I don't think I've seen Beckett referred to as a stylist even though he has a voice and an ear and an eye and sometimes a gimmick.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I bought this book after reading the Oxen episode of Ulysses. Joyce used another guide to prose history which I couldn't find.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I dunno it's probably something you could define in different ways
I suppose with the acclaimed 'stylists' you can usually tell it's them within a few sentences.
They don't write conventional sentences, or if they do they don't structure them conventionally.
Perhaps 'stylist' suggests a self-consciousness about style that you'd find in the modernist/postmodernist writers.
Like Dickens I don't think is seen as a 'stylist' but he writes in this unmistakable way – but maybe that's less about the rhythm of the prose than the metaphors he uses, the way he sees the world.
I suppose with the acclaimed 'stylists' you can usually tell it's them within a few sentences.
They don't write conventional sentences, or if they do they don't structure them conventionally.
Perhaps 'stylist' suggests a self-consciousness about style that you'd find in the modernist/postmodernist writers.
Like Dickens I don't think is seen as a 'stylist' but he writes in this unmistakable way – but maybe that's less about the rhythm of the prose than the metaphors he uses, the way he sees the world.
Yeah, maybe you can reduce it to something along the lines of a writer who cares about their language and sentences above all. That would make DeLillo a perfect example as by the time he was writing The Names he said he'd write by the sentence and focus on things like the shape of the letters.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Oh interesting, I haven't read any DeLillo, but this does remind me of a bit of Pynchon and DFW (perhaps more so the latter, but I've only read Broom of the System). Absolutely beautiful sentences, excellent on a purely aesthetic level, but when you dig does into substance, it doesn't always seem to compare with the style. I mean, you could argue thats as much a reflection of postmodernism itself, and that Pynchon and DFW are just zeitgeist mouthpieces.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
I did think that Oedipa Maas's treatment more closely approximated a character arc/development, perhaps more so than anyone in GR, but I could be forgetting someone. I think character development is a way to tap into some of the more substantial potnetial of literature, and most of the characters in GR were more like chess pieces and monad-like windows into some maximalist phantasmagoria.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Yeah and the paranoid/conspiratorial "style" is really more than just a prosaic sensibility in his case, at least in what I've read. It permeates the psychology of characters and kinda colors the whole world they inhabit.
jenks
thread death
I think a prose stylist is someone whose prose style you really like but which drives others mad. It can be the ornate spiralling sentences of Proust, the muscular pithiness of Hemingway, the strange elusiveness of Lispector - it’s the very grain of their voice I think. It’s the self conscious choice to write ‘like this’ rather than ‘like that’
shiels
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shiels
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I ask because its a very corpsey story - a funny exploration of self doubt, wanting love, worries about authenticity, to be seen as clever. Its obviously an indirect suicide note from him, but it does have a pay off and lesson and imo its the best thing hes done and maybe the easiest thing to read. Did you like it @jenks ?
jenks
thread death
Not read dfw for a while - i used to be huge fan - i will settle down and have a re-read of this tonight