Style
Dear Friend,
Style is an essential element, though not the only element, of narrative form. Novels are made of words, which means that the way a writer chooses and orders his language largely determines whether his stories possess or lack the power of persuasion. Of course, a novel’s language cannot be disassociated from what it relates—words shape their subject. The only way to know if a novelist has succeeded or failed in his narrative undertaking is to decide whether, through his writing, the fiction lives, liberates itself from its creator and real life, and impresses itself on the reader as an autonomous reality.
It is, therefore, what a text relates that determines whether it is efficient or inefficient, life-giving or lifeless. To identify the elements of style, perhaps we should begin by eliminating the idea of correctness. It doesn’t matter at all whether a style is correct or incorrect; what matters is that it be efficient, or suited to its task, which is to endow the stories it tells with the illusion of life—real life. There are novelists who write very correctly, obeying the grammatical and stylistic imperatives of their times, like Cervantes, Stendhal, Dickens, García Márquez, and there are others, no less great, who break all the rules and make all kinds of grammatical mistakes, like Balzac, Joyce, Pío Baroja, Céline, Cortázar, and Lezama Lima. Their style is full of improprieties from the academic point of view, but that does not prevent them from being good or even excellent novelists. The Spanish writer Azorín, who was an extraordinary prose stylist (and nevertheless a very boring novelist), wrote in a collection of autobiographical essays titled Madrid: “The man of letters writes prose, correct prose, classical prose, and yet that prose is worth nothing without the leavening of grace, worthy intent, irony, disdain, or sarcasm.” It is a sharp observation: on its own, stylistic correctness does not guarantee either the success or the failure of a work of fiction.
On what, then, does the success of a novel’s language depend? On two qualities: its internal coherence and its essentiality. The story a novel tells can be incoherent, but the language that shapes it must be coherent if the incoherence is to be genuinely and convincingly simulated. An example of this is Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, a chaotic torrent of memories, feelings, thoughts, and emotions. Its power to bewitch derives from a prose that is seemingly ragged and fragmented but that retains beneath its unruly and anarchic surface a rigorous coherence, a structural consistency that follows a model or original system of rules and principles from which it never deviates. Is the monologue an exact description of consciousness in motion? No. It is a literary creation so powerfully convincing that it seems to us to mimic the meandering of Molly’s consciousness when really it is inventing it.
Julio Cortázar boasted in his later years that he was writing “worse all the time.” He meant that in order to express what he longed to express in his stories and novels he was increasingly obliged to search out forms of expression further and further from classic forms, to defy the flow of language and try to impose upon it rhythms, patterns, vocabularies, and distortions in such a way that his prose might more convincingly represent the characters or occurrences he invented. In truth, Cortázar’s bad writing was very good writing. His prose was clear and fluid, beautifully imitating speech, incorporating and assimilating with perfect assurance the flourishes, quirks, and phrasings of the spoken word: he made use of Argentine colloquialisms, of course, but also French turns of phrase, and he invented words and expressions with such ingenuity and such a good ear that they didn’t stand out in his sentences but rather enriched them with the “leavening” that Azorín believed was required of a good novelist.
The credibility of a story (its power to persuade) doesn’t depend solely on the coherence of the style in which it is told—no less important is the role played by narrative technique. But without coherence there is no credibility, or it is reduced almost to nil.
A writer’s style may be unpleasant and yet, thanks to its coherence, effective. Such is the case of someone like Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for example. You may not agree with me, but I find irritating his short, stuttering little sentences, plagued with ellipses and packed with exclamations and slangy expressions. And yet I have no doubt that Journey to the End of the Night and also, though not so unequivocably, Death on the Installment Plan are novels possessed of an overwhelming power of persuasion. Their sordid outpourings and extravagance hypnotize us, making irrelevant any aesthetic or ethical objections we in good conscience might raise.
I have a similar reaction to the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, without a doubt one of the greatest novelists of the Spanish language. Taken out of the context of his novels, his prose is exactly the opposite of the kind of writing I admire (I know it’s impossible to make such a distinction, but I make it to clarify my point). I don’t like his stiffness, his academicism, and his bookish mannerisms, which always give me the sense that they are informed by meticulous searches in dictionaries, a product of that old passion for archaisms and artifice that seized the Baroque writers of the seventeenth century. And yet this same prose, when it tells the story of Ti Noel and Henri Christophe in Carpentier’s 1949 novel The Kingdom of This World, an absolute masterwork that I’ve read at least three times, cancels out my reservations and antipathies with its contagious and overwhelming power and dazzles me, making me believe wholeheartedly everything it has to tell. How does the starched and buttoned-up style of Alejo Carpentier accomplish such a thing? Through its unflagging coherence and its aura of indispensability. His style has about it a conviction that makes its readers feel that he tells the story the only way it could be told: in these words, phrases, and rhythms.
It is relatively easy to speak of the coherence of a style and harder to explain what I mean by essentiality, a quality required of the language of a novel if that novel is to be persuasive. Maybe the best way of describing essentiality is to explain its opposite, the style that fails in telling a story because it keeps us at a distance and lucidly conscious; in other words, a style that makes us conscious of reading something alien and prevents us from experiencing the story alongside its characters and sharing it with them. This failure is perceived when the reader feels an abyss that the novelist does not successfully bridge in writing his tale, an abyss between what is being told and the language in which it is told. This bifurcation or split between the language of a story and the story itself annihilates the story’s power of persuasion. The reader doesn’t believe what he is being told, because the clumsiness and inconvenience of the style make him sense that between word and deed there is an unbreachable divide, a fissure that exposes all the artifice and arbitrariness that fiction depends on and that only successful fictions manage to erase or hide.
Such a style fails because we don’t feel it is necessary; indeed, as we read we realize that the same story told in a different way or in other words would be better (which in literary terms simply means more persuasive). We never feel any dichotomy of language and content when we read Faulkner’s novels or the stories of Borges or Isak Dinesen. The styles of these authors—each so very different—persuade us because in them words, characters, and things constitute an indissoluble unity; it is impossible to conceive of the parts in isolation. It is this perfect integration of style and content that I am alluding to when I speak of the quality of essentiality any creative writing must possess.
The essentiality of the language of great writers is detected, by contrast, in the forced and false writing of their epigones. Borges is one of the most original prose stylists of the Spanish language, and perhaps the greatest Spanish stylist of the twentieth century. For that very reason, he has exerted a great influence and, if I may say so, an unfortunate one. Borges’s style is unmistakable and functions extraordinarily well, giving life and credibility to a world of sophisticated intellectual and abstract ideas and curiosities. In this world, philosophical systems, theological disquisitions, myths and literary symbols, reflection and speculation, and universal history (contemplated from an eminently literary perspective) are the raw material of invention. Borges’s style adapts itself to its subject matter and merges with it in a powerful alloy, and the reader feels from the first sentences of his stories and of many of his essays that these works have the inventive and sovereign quality of true fictions, that they could only have been told in this way, in this intelligent, ironic, and mathematically precise language—not a word too few, not a word too many—with its cold elegance and aristocratic defiance, privileging intellect and knowledge over sensation and emotion, playing with erudition, making a technique of presumption, eluding all forms of sentimentality, and ignoring the body and sensuality (or noting them at a great distance, as lower manifestations of existence). His stories are humanized thanks to their subtle irony, a fresh breeze that lightens the complexity of the arguments, intellectual labyrinths, and baroque constructions that are almost always their subject matter. The color and grace of Borges’s style lies first and foremost in his use of adjectives, which shake the reader with their audacity and eccentricity (“No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night”), and in his violent and unexpected metaphors, whose adjectives and adverbs, besides fleshing out an idea or highlighting a physical or psychological trait, often serve to foster a Borgesian atmosphere. Precisely because it is essential, Borges’s style is inimitable. When his admirers or literary followers copy his way of using adjectives, his irreverent sallies, his witticisms and poses, their stylings are as out of place as badly made wigs that fail to pass as real hair, proclaiming their falseness and bringing ridicule down on the unhappy heads they cover. Jorge Luis Borges was a formidable creator, and there is nothing more irritating or bothersome than the “mini-Borges” imitators whose imitations lack the essentiality of the prose they mimic, making what was original, authentic, beautiful, and stimulating something caricaturish, ugly, and insincere. (The question of sincerity or lack of sincerity in literature is not an ethical issue but an aesthetic one.)
Something similar has happened around another great prose stylist, Gabriel García Márquez. Unlike Borges’s style, his is not sober but exuberant and not intellectualized at all; rather, it is sensory and sensual. Its clarity and correctness reveal its classical origins, but it is not stiff or old-fashioned—it is open to the assimilation of sayings and popular expressions and to neologisms and foreign words, and it possesses a rich musicality and conceptual purity free of complications or intellectual wordplay. Heat, taste, music, all the textures of perception and the appetites of the body are expressed naturally and without fuss, and fantasy draws breath with the same freedom, casting itself unfettered toward the extraordinary. Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera we are overwhelmed by the certainty that only in these words, with this grace and rhythm, would these stories be believable, convincing, fascinating, moving; that separated from these words they would not have been able to enchant us as they have: his stories are the words in which they are told.
And the truth is that words are also the stories they tell. As a result, when a writer borrows a style, the literature that is produced sounds false, like mere parody. After Borges, García Márquez is the most imitated writer in the language, and although some of his disciples have been successful—that is to say, they’ve attracted many readers—the work, no matter how diligent the disciple, fails to take on a life of its own, and its secondary, forced character is immediately evident. Literature is pure artifice, but great literature is able to hide the fact while mediocre literature gives itself away.
Although it seems to me that now I’ve told you everything I know about style, in view of your letter’s demands for practical advice, I’ll give you this: since you want to be a novelist and you can’t be one without a coherent and essential style, set out to find a style for yourself. Read constantly, because it is impossible to acquire a rich, full sense of language without reading plenty of good literature, and try as hard as you can, though this is not quite so easy, not to imitate the styles of the novelists you most admire and who first taught you to love literature. Imitate them in everything else: in their dedication, in their discipline, in their habits; if you feel it is right, make their convictions yours. But try to avoid the mechanical reproduction of the patterns and rhythms of their writing, since if you don’t manage to develop a personal style that suits your subject matter, your stories will likely never achieve the power of persuasion that makes them come to life.
It is possible to seek out and find a style of your own. Read Faulkner’s early novels. You’ll see that from the mediocre Mosquitoes to the estimable Flags in the Dust, as the first version of Sartoris was called, Faulkner found his style, the labyrinthine and majestic language, part religious, part mythical, and part epic, that animates the Yoknapatawpha novels. Flaubert also sought and found his style between the first version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, written in a torrential, unmoored, lyrically romantic fashion, and Madame Bovary, in which that unbridled style was severely curtailed and all the emotional and lyrical exuberance in it sternly repressed in favor of an “illusion of reality,” which he managed to perfect in five years of superhuman labor, the same amount of time it took him to compose his first masterpiece. As you may know, Flaubert had a theory about style, that of the mot juste. The right word was the one word—the only word—that was able to express an idea aptly. The obligation of the writer was to find that word. How did he know when he had? A whisper in his ear: the word was right when it sounded right. The perfect correspondence between form and content—between word and idea—translated itself into musical harmony. That is why Flaubert submitted his sentences to “la gueulade,” the shouting test. He’d go outside to read aloud everything he had written, out to an avenue of lime trees that still exists near what used to be his house at Croisset: the “allée des gueulades” the shouting allée. There he’d read as loudly as he could what he’d written, and his ear would tell him if he’d succeeded or if he’d have to keep trying out words and sentences until he achieved the artistic perfection he pursued with such fanatic tenacity.
Do you remember the line by Rubén Darío “My style in search of a form”? For a long time, I was disconcerted by it: aren’t style and form the same thing? How is it possible to search for form when it is there in front of you? Now I understand better because, as I mentioned in one of my earlier letters, writing is only one aspect of literary form. Another, no less important, is technique, since words alone do not suffice in the telling of good stories. But this letter has gone on too long, and I’d better leave that discussion for next time.