Sunday, January 11, 2015

Style vs. Story -- an essay

Jackson Pollock,
image from westpacificview.com


My husband recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. If you’ve been following my blog very long, you know I’m a big fan of those three books. My husband is not only widely read, but well-read so I value his opinion.
The Border Trilogy? He liked them. After he got past McCarthy’s style.
McCarthy does not use standard punctuation. For someone who not only knows the basic rules of punctuation, but respects the role of rules in controlling chaos, this can interrupt the flow of the story.
Much of McCarthy’s stories are in dialogue for which he uses few or no attributions, making it sometimes difficult to know who’s speaking. Again, because the reader may have to go back quite a ways to figure out who’s saying what, the story is interrupted.
McCarthy writes run-on sentences that would give Henry James pause. And yes, by the end of the book, McCarthy the story-teller becomes McCarthy the Philosopher with a capital P.
All this being said, why did my husband like the books? For the same reasons I did. The characters, the setting, and the stories. McCarthy does those three things so well, that many of us readers overlook (and in some instances, overcome) his style.
Not everyone is willing or able to get past a writer’s style to get to the good parts.
How many of us were introduced to Shakespeare in school? And haven’t touched him since.  
How was that introduction made? Through reading. Keeping in mind that Shakespeare wrote plays and poems in the styles of plays and poems. To make things more uncomfortable we were subjected to that form of torture peculiar to traditional English teachers – divvying up the script among students who then read their parts cold. Not only are the students reading their parts unrehearsed, they are reading them in what amounts to a foreign language with which they have little familiarity.
(If you could see me now, you’d see my hands thrown into the air – whether in exasperation or supplication even I can’t tell.)
And Shakespeare’s characters and settings and, best of all, his stories are lost to his style.
Okay, so sometimes you have to do reading differently. Shakespeare, we should watch performed by qualified actors under the tutelage of good directors. There are numerous DVDs available from professionals and wonderful productions by college and high school drama departments throughout the English speaking world.
Charles Dickens is another writer we’re introduced to in school. And seldom, if ever, read again. I very early on discovered that I could follow Charles Dickens if I read him out loud or at least heard him as I read silently. But he wrote for pre-television readers. His wonderful stories were produced chapters at a time in periodicals. People would get the newest installment and gather together in their living room and listen to someone read aloud to them. So, in a way, these are performance pieces, too. Dickens, language sounds like the story he’s telling. He paints pictures with his descriptions and dialogue and even the names he chooses for his characters. We are transported into his stories. If we do not read them in our modern way of reading which is somehow fast – more like we’re watching a movie.
I couldn’t read James Joyce. And I can’t stand being left out. I had to find a way into his stories. Then I discovered his work on audio-books. By a reader who has a slight Irish accent. Of course! Joyce’s stories are all inside his head and he’s Irish. So I experience his stories inside my head. With a slight Irish accent.
 Generally speaking, my husband (and he is not alone in this) is of the opinion that a writer whose style makes the story difficult to read is ostentatious, arrogant, and a waste of the reader’s time. There are too many good stories out there and too little time to read them. Why waste that valuable time reading a writer who is more focused on his style than his story?
     My opinion? I’m still working on Faulkner.

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