As
I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this year’s read on writing is Richard Lanham’s Style: An Anti Text Book. It’s a rare person I guess that loves to
understand the detailed nature of prose writing approaches. I guess most people enjoy reading and accept a
particular writer’s style, but I like to break it down: sentence structure,
sentence sequence, paragraph development, rhetorical approaches. It’s really the nuts and bolts of the writing
craft. And so I read at least one book on
writing per year.
I’m
a third of the way through Lanham’s book, and though he irritated me with an
overly extended gripe on how poorly schools teach writing, I think we share some fundamental
approaches to writing that go contrary to what Lanham refers to as “the
textbooks.” And so, he subtitles his book,
“An Anti Text Book.”
I
just enjoyed reading these two paragraphs opening his third chapter, titled, “The
Opaque Style. Just observe as he
describes the nature of prose style, how he constructs his style for simple
elegance.
Prose style knows but a
single taxonomy: the classification into high, middle, and low. That this has lasted with little protest from
Cicero’s day to our own demonstrates its flexibility more than its precision,
but any explanation of the Expository Prose Vision Moralized must pass through
it to a more satisfactory categorization.
The threefold division emerges from an earlier one, earlier in logic as
well as time: thought will demand one style, emotion another. Thought will find a style that is logical,
clear, unornamental, largely unpatterned.
Emotion will devise a different
strategy, appealing through form and stock response rather than through clarity
and logic. An intermediate position pops
up like a mushroom. It will do something
of both. Argue with feeling, move with
logic.
These three positions
form the basis for several discriminations.
We discriminate by purposes: reason within the low style, move in the
high, or “conciliate” (as Cicero calls it) by some combination. Or we separate by subject: high style for
serious subject, low for humble tasks of ordering life, middle for the mixed
world between or small subject that promises greatly. But neither purpose nor subject tells us
about the style itself, the pattern of words.
Three additional specific criteria can animate the threefold division:
syntax, diction, density of ornament.
The high style chooses specialized or unfamiliar or highly resonant
words and puts them into careful patterns of balance, antithesis, and
climax. It allows itself the ornaments
of sound (alliterations, assonance, rhyme), puns, the whole range of metaphor
and simile, the pleasures of repetition and restatement. The low style uses none of these; the middle
style, some, but moderately and in moderate combination.
Every
sentence is so finely constructed. It
progresses logically as one would expect, but it moves with a beating rhythm. The one ornament is the mushroom simile in
the first paragraph, and that enacts the very thing it describes, the muddle of
the middle style. I love how he uses the
colon to separate appositive nouns.
Notice this graceful yet daring sentence: “The threefold division
emerges from an earlier one, earlier in logic as well as time: thought will
demand one style, emotion another.” Have
you ever seen a sentence with a right branching, free modifying participle
phrase “earlier in logic as well as time” tack on a modifying independent clause
(“thought will demand one style, emotion another”) connected by a full
colon? If I have, I’ve never noticed,
but I don’t think so. Even the most
boring of subjects—the nature of prose writing—can be originally and
beautifully written.
UPDATE
(Aug. 21):
I
meant to add but I now realize I forgot to say that Lanham rejects the high,
middle, and low classification of prose style.
I was focused above on Lanham’s writing and his own graceful style and
not so much on completing Lanham’s thoughts.
After fully describing those categories he goes on to reject it. A few pages later he states:
The trouble with the
tripartite division is not that it is vague and thus inapplicable. It is so vague it is nearly always applicable—especially
so if you redefine it thoroughly, either morally or effectively. You can even adapt it to the dictates of
clarity and scientific prose. The high
style becomes bad, the middle good, and the low “colloquial.” No, the trouble lurks in the tripartite
division itself. Because it renders
comparison invidious, it introduces the dispute that invidious comparison inevitably
brings. It cannot just describe, it must
evaluate. Which purposes are best? Which subjects most serious? Who, what, most moral? More than this, it has repeatedly proved
itself tone-deaf. It can tell you what was
said and explain why it was said that way, but it seldom reveals the spirit in which it was said. It defines badly the kind of agreement struck
between writer and reader. It forces us,
finally, to take an attitude be formal (diction, syntax, density of figures),
moral (as with [Northrop] Frye’s definition), or scientific. It asks, in composition course, to teach
things that cannot be taught.
There
is more of course and Lanham goes on to
re-categorize style, but we’ll leave it here.
