ogingat:

nostalgebraist:

His idea of great writing (and this is a fairly common strain of current literary thinking – Martin Amis et al.) is basically “avoid cliche at all costs.”  This makes his own fiction nearly unreadable (to me) – the little I tried to read of Busy Monsters felt like watching a writer struggle to never say anything in a conventional way, resulting in a lot of staggeringly bad (if admittedly novel) sentences.

As much as I, too, like flavorful unconventional prose, I think this prevalent aesthetic view blinds people to types of masterful technique that rely on deft control rather than just saying as much cool stuff as possible.  Shirley Jackson, for instance, was an extremely talented writer, but she tends to be ignored by these people because her talent comes across in the cumulative effects of deceptively simple writing on the scale of entire stories or novels.  You couldn’t take an individual Jackson sentence out of context and say “dude, look at how cool this is!”, the way you could with a Giraldi or Amis or Updike or Nabokov sentence, but that doesn’t mean Jackson wasn’t a brilliant writer.

I have to admit I don’t understand these paragraphs in conjunction. Resorting to cliche is a way of giving up control. If you are in control you won’t be cliched. Under one view, in fact, you might say that cliche is precisely what you sound like when you’re letting something other than your authentic self and voice control what you say.

What I mean is that it is possible to expand the definition of “cliche” so far that one is no longer comfortable saying anything in an ordinary way.  This results in artificially “innovative” prose, where conventional turns of phrase are neurotically avoided even if their replacements aren’t any more informative or aesthetically worthwhile.

Here is a passage from page 2 of Busy Monsters:

From Gillian’s pictures and videos I knew this vulgarian was a colossus of a gent whose voice and testicular presence could hush the human flotsam in any riled-up room.  Furthermore, he had a face so uglified by his parents’ DNA that it recalled a clay-shaping exercise gone heinously wrong.  Left eye like the oblong knot in a plank of pine.  The kind of guy who eats a tomato like an apple.  A disposition downright redneck.  I’ve known fevered men like Marvin: they get a certain idea in their noggins or, worse yet, a funny feeling in their hearts, and nothing on earth can deter them from their channel.  They go agog with havoc, get off on outlawry.

This strikes me as bad writing, and in particular it makes me feel like the writer is straining desperately to say absolutely everything in a novel, eye-popping, exciting! new! way! even at the cost of texture, cadence, readability, etc.  It isn’t quite right to say that the problem with this passage is that it “isn’t cliched enough,” but I do think the problem with it is that the author is trying too hard to avoid cliche and overshooting the mark.  (If there were such a thing as “not cliched enough,” this would be it.)

Compare this to the famous opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

My name is Mary Catherine Blackwood.  I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance.  I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both of my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.  I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise.  I like my sister Constance, and Richard Platagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom.  Everyone else in my family is dead.

I think this is a great opening – immediately establishes a distinctive voice, engages the reader by immediately raising a number of questions, has an understated and charming sense of humor, flows in a natural and enjoyable way (compare to Giraldi’s awkward stop-and-go crashing about), etc.  But this is all a function of the way the passage works at the sentence-and-above level; you can’t pick out individual word or phrase choices and say “sick phrasing, bro!” the way you can with Giraldi (”testicular presence,” “hush the human flotsam,” ”uglified,” “a disposition downright redneck” … )  There aren’t any of those kind of flashy bits that stick out from the page like little jewels.  There’s just a paragraph of good writing.

Of course, it would be strange to call the Jackson passage “cliched,” since it surely isn’t.  But it has the kind of superficial mundanity that people like Giraldi avoid at all costs.  And yet it’s good, where Giraldi isn’t.

(via ogingat-deactivated20150801)