the essential work of art is to magnify the ordinary

June 23, 2015 2:22 PM

As with anything in this world, excess is excess, but inadequate is inadequate. A writer must know when the weight of the words used to describe a scene is bearing down on the scene itself. A writer should develop the measuring tape to know when to describe characters' thoughts in long sentences and when not to. But a writer, above all, should aim to achieve artistry with language which, like the painter, is the only canvas we have. Writers should realize that the novels that are remembered, that become monuments, would in fact be those which err on the side of audacious prose, that occasionally allow excess rather than those which package a story — no matter how affecting — in inadequate prose.

Chigozie Obioma for The Millions: The Audacity of Prose.
posted by divined by radio (9 comments total)

Authorial howls of artful prose as created by James Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy, Shirley Hazzard, are becoming increasingly rare — sacrificed on the altar of minimalism.

I share Obioma's love of audacious prose, but believe that it should not be attempted more than it already is. The average writer should aim to write clearly and simply, and leave the audacity to the rare virtuoso. The Buller-Lytton Award, and other bad-writing "prizes" recognize the fact that we already have too many writers whose audacity exceeds their talent.
posted by Modest House at 2:36 PM on June 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was thinking only this morning of how much damage the “less is more” mantra has done. (It's not just a modern thing, either; a century and a half ago critics were complaining that Dostoevsky was too wordy and repetitive.) Some people like reading spare prose and some writers like to write it, but to elevate it into the be-all and end-all is folly.

> I share Obioma's love of audacious prose, but believe that it should not be attempted more than it already is. The average writer should aim to write clearly and simply, and leave the audacity to the rare virtuoso.

No. Bad writers are just as bad whether they're trying to write "clearly and simply" or not, and making a rule of it just makes it more likely that good writers who might have spread their wings have them bound instead. (And nobody thinks they're an average writer; how are you going to figure out who the "rare virtuoso" is in order to award them the prized Poetic License?)
posted by languagehat at 2:57 PM on June 23, 2015 [10 favorites]

But a writer, above all, should aim to achieve artistry with language which, like the painter, is the only canvas we have.

I'd like to meet this painter — she sounds audacious indeed, painting on language. And perhaps she mangles fewer metaphors.

Words were once so powerful, so revered, that, as culture critic Sandy Kollick once observed, “to speak the name of something was in fact to invoke its existence, to feel its power as fully present. It was not then as it is now, where a metaphor or a simile merely suggests something else.…"

This interlude of romantic fantasy seems to be quoted from a self-published book by Mr. Krolick (not Kollick)? Jeez. I mean, if one really wants to rhapsodize this way about the lost authenticity of the "primitive," one might at least go to the effort of finding a snippet of Rousseau.
posted by RogerB at 2:58 PM on June 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

Thanks Obioma.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:25 PM on June 23, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm 100% in favor of more writers treating language like a playground. We've allowed literature to become so boring and artless! Good prose should make you feel a little bit dizzy/high.
posted by naju at 4:10 PM on June 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
posted by betweenthebars at 4:52 PM on June 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

"how are you going to figure out who the "rare virtuoso" is in order to award them the prized Poetic License?)"

50 million dollars helps!

Nice article from a very good writer and a terrific person.
posted by clavdivs at 5:14 PM on June 23, 2015

Paul Beatty - he's got flare and skill...I am having a ball reading The White Boy Shuffle.
posted by bird internet at 5:26 PM on June 23, 2015

...written around the heyday of minimalism in 1985, that the “minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant turns its back on something almost holy — the human bond with ordinariness.”

Is this like: profound home truths in the idiom of Raymond Carver? Both this thing and the old NYT "Purple Prose" thing it links to are sort of polite about giving examples of the thing being rallied against.
posted by batfish at 6:34 PM on June 23, 2015 [1 favorite]