Vocal range
Oct. 7th, 2006 09:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceUmm. I just posted this on the Write Fantastic LJ - ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
writefantastic - because I thought it's a topic that ought to be covered; I was going to let it rest there, because others have said it better elsewhere.
But nah, what the hell, you-all can have it here, too...
There's been a great deal of debate buzzing around the interweb in recent weeks and months, about the thorny old question of voice vs content, transparency vs poetics, does style have any place in genre, however you like to phrase it. I haven't tried to follow it all, no one could; besides, I don't have the patience for endless overcomplications or rants designed to cast light only on the ranter's own cleverness. Nor did I intend to contribute.
However, this last couple of days, a couple of things have triggered me: some bold assertion (I forget where) that no, style has no place in a fiction of ideas, absolutely none, the only function of the words is to convey the meaning; and this post, which claims transparency to be a universal good, the real thing, mature writing as against the other thing.
So, for what it's worth, herewith my two-penn'orth:
And let me say, right upfront, that I do have a voice. Nay, more: I have a Voice. It's loud. Even I can hear it, I just checked. While in person I am the quietest of men, last to speak and first to fall respectfully silent, on paper this is not the case. What's interesting to me about this is the way that voice carries over from one work to the next. That's not a conscious act; what I'm conscious of, indeed, is the need to do the opposite, to establish a unique voice for each book. A couple of months ago I finished the new fantasy sequence, set largely in Ottoman Istanbul, where the prose is sometimes as rich and embellished as the settings it depicts; now I'm halfway through a contemporary urban fantasy which is deliberately light on description and light of tone, all about pace and heat and tension. I just glanced back at them both, and it is so obvious that they were written by the same hand. Granted, they're both fantasies of one sort or another, so to some extent pitched at the same audience; but the same holds true across genres and forms and decades. Novels or short stories, SF or litfic or porn, now or twenty years ago, there is still an essential Chazness in the way I use the language, regardless of whatever it is I'm actually saying.
Which is, of course, as it should be. Singers have their individual voices, whatever the material; so do actors. Artists have their own ways with paint and brush, pianists their own detectable touch on the keys. And so on.
Which is why this whole question seems to be null-space to me; I don't recognise that it is a question. Pianists do actually have to touch the keys, artists do have to handle paint and brushes, singers have to use their vocal cords (their own, not someone else's); writers have to choose the words they use and the order in which they use them, and we give ourselves away with every choice. You can't have prose without style. It can be mechanical, it can be mimetic; it can be self-effacing, strive for transparency if you wish; it can be clumsy or gauche or sophisticated or mellifluous or embellished or whatever, but it cannot be missing.
Art sits, surely, in the relationship between style and content: not only what you say, but how you say it. The suggestion that transparency is the true literature, that if the prose is noticeable it's bad prose, is as fatuous as the opposite contention, that style is queen and beauty is truth per se.
Me, I love a stylist: someone who weighs words for what they are as well as what they mean, the shape of them in the mouth and on the page, their strike against the ear and how they play, how they balance with each other. I will cheerfully dwell awhile with the language alone, and sometimes I expect my readers to do the same. Sometimes not: sometimes it's all "Nine coaches waiting - hurry, hurry, hurry," and let's get on with the story. Pace is about changes of pace, just as voice is sometimes about a whisper, sometimes a shout.
To be honest, I don't think I could be transparent if my life depended on it. I want to be a presence on the page, that's important. I don't want readers to see through me, except in a smart analytical sense; I want them to see me, watch me do my thing. I'm with Yeats on this one: how can we tell the dancer from the dance?
All publication is an act of ego, that's inherent, or we wouldn't put our names on our books; we wouldn't sign our posts. But it's more than that: it matters that this is my work, because I am inherent in it, and if you don't understand that you will never understand the work.
- Chaz Brenchley
writefantastic - because I thought it's a topic that ought to be covered; I was going to let it rest there, because others have said it better elsewhere. But nah, what the hell, you-all can have it here, too...
There's been a great deal of debate buzzing around the interweb in recent weeks and months, about the thorny old question of voice vs content, transparency vs poetics, does style have any place in genre, however you like to phrase it. I haven't tried to follow it all, no one could; besides, I don't have the patience for endless overcomplications or rants designed to cast light only on the ranter's own cleverness. Nor did I intend to contribute.
However, this last couple of days, a couple of things have triggered me: some bold assertion (I forget where) that no, style has no place in a fiction of ideas, absolutely none, the only function of the words is to convey the meaning; and this post, which claims transparency to be a universal good, the real thing, mature writing as against the other thing.
So, for what it's worth, herewith my two-penn'orth:
And let me say, right upfront, that I do have a voice. Nay, more: I have a Voice. It's loud. Even I can hear it, I just checked. While in person I am the quietest of men, last to speak and first to fall respectfully silent, on paper this is not the case. What's interesting to me about this is the way that voice carries over from one work to the next. That's not a conscious act; what I'm conscious of, indeed, is the need to do the opposite, to establish a unique voice for each book. A couple of months ago I finished the new fantasy sequence, set largely in Ottoman Istanbul, where the prose is sometimes as rich and embellished as the settings it depicts; now I'm halfway through a contemporary urban fantasy which is deliberately light on description and light of tone, all about pace and heat and tension. I just glanced back at them both, and it is so obvious that they were written by the same hand. Granted, they're both fantasies of one sort or another, so to some extent pitched at the same audience; but the same holds true across genres and forms and decades. Novels or short stories, SF or litfic or porn, now or twenty years ago, there is still an essential Chazness in the way I use the language, regardless of whatever it is I'm actually saying.
Which is, of course, as it should be. Singers have their individual voices, whatever the material; so do actors. Artists have their own ways with paint and brush, pianists their own detectable touch on the keys. And so on.
Which is why this whole question seems to be null-space to me; I don't recognise that it is a question. Pianists do actually have to touch the keys, artists do have to handle paint and brushes, singers have to use their vocal cords (their own, not someone else's); writers have to choose the words they use and the order in which they use them, and we give ourselves away with every choice. You can't have prose without style. It can be mechanical, it can be mimetic; it can be self-effacing, strive for transparency if you wish; it can be clumsy or gauche or sophisticated or mellifluous or embellished or whatever, but it cannot be missing.
Art sits, surely, in the relationship between style and content: not only what you say, but how you say it. The suggestion that transparency is the true literature, that if the prose is noticeable it's bad prose, is as fatuous as the opposite contention, that style is queen and beauty is truth per se.
Me, I love a stylist: someone who weighs words for what they are as well as what they mean, the shape of them in the mouth and on the page, their strike against the ear and how they play, how they balance with each other. I will cheerfully dwell awhile with the language alone, and sometimes I expect my readers to do the same. Sometimes not: sometimes it's all "Nine coaches waiting - hurry, hurry, hurry," and let's get on with the story. Pace is about changes of pace, just as voice is sometimes about a whisper, sometimes a shout.
To be honest, I don't think I could be transparent if my life depended on it. I want to be a presence on the page, that's important. I don't want readers to see through me, except in a smart analytical sense; I want them to see me, watch me do my thing. I'm with Yeats on this one: how can we tell the dancer from the dance?
All publication is an act of ego, that's inherent, or we wouldn't put our names on our books; we wouldn't sign our posts. But it's more than that: it matters that this is my work, because I am inherent in it, and if you don't understand that you will never understand the work.
- Chaz Brenchley
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Style v Content
Date: 2006-10-07 10:22 am (UTC)If ever I needed a reason to hold Martin Amis in contempt (apart from his being so close to being a plagiarist as there is a debate about whether he falls over the edge - read Einstein's Babies alongside Philip K Dick [no, don't read Einstein's Babies, just read the Philip K Dick]) it is a contribution he made to this debate in which he wrote, given the choice between meaning and effect, he would always choose effect.
And they wonder why nobody but a self elected tiny minority of pseudo-intellectuals read contemporary English 'literary' novels.
The answer to the question, 'Whatever happened to Martin Amis?' is 'not enough'.
Re: Style v Content
Date: 2006-10-07 10:25 am (UTC)That's scary.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-07 11:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-07 11:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-07 02:16 pm (UTC)What's going to be fascinating as regards Voice is reading books by authors whose blogs I also read. I suspect it'll make their books even more rewarding: of course, I only read the best authorblogs.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-07 03:26 pm (UTC)And seriously, it would be interesting to get some feedback here, whether that same authorial voice is identifiable between the formal constraints of fiction and the casual chatter of a blog. Do I still sound like me, with my other hat on? (I do remember, when my first book came out, more than one friend said "I could hear you talking" - but that was long ago, and it's possible that the narrative voice and the personal voice have drifted apart in the meantime.
God, I love this stuff. I could spend my life asking 'how does fiction work, and how does it relate to its author?' - if it weren't for the fact that I do occasionally have to write the stuff.
Which I also love, but in wholly different ways. The baggage.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-07 04:19 pm (UTC)Anyway. Yes. The books are more formal, as you say, but the flavour is the same. Does that make sense?
I love this stuff, too!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-07 04:29 pm (UTC)Makes perfect sense to me - but then, of course, it's what I want to hear. I am the opposite of the unbiased auditor.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-09 12:54 pm (UTC)Gah, I can't find the right words today. It's Monday and I didn't get enough sleep last night. But I hope that made some sort of sense :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-09 01:20 pm (UTC)And that's (a) what I meant above, and (b) what I was hoping for with the books, what I always hope for: that the colour and texture of the language contributes to the colour and texture of the world and the characters' experience of that world. It takes wool and dyes and spinning to make cloth, as much as it does a loom...