Carrie had the Pimlico reprint of Week-End Wodehouse out, and I’ve been flipping through it again. With Nick B-W I’ve talked now and again of the way some musicians use astonishingly insipid lyrics that unfurl into entire poems only through acceptance of their hokeyness, and to Mom the other day I was muttering that certain scenes in Harry Harrison’s non-highbrow Stainless Steel Rat series have stayed asonishingly vivid after one or two reads many years ago. (They’re mostly in the earlier parts of the series, around the introduction of Agelina and the first time he saves the world — the Gray Men; the rainy beach, burning shuttle, and farmer’s skiff; the cave he builds on ancient modern Earth, &c.) In the introduction to Week-End, Hilaire Belloc said that P. G. Wodehouse was the best living writer of English out of sheer sure vividness. It’s convincing, but, like anything more than fifty years old, the reasoning and stated scope feels awkward. (Reading outdated genuises in the original is weird. It’s also odd that modern translations of works first translated n years ago tend to sound n years old. Trying to out-KJV the King James Version is both silly and doomed.)
In the order I think of them, here are the writers whose prose renderings of sensations and abstractions strike me as excellent:
What was I measuring? Prose is the magic between words and ideas. Getting it right takes at least two of instinct, experience, and intelligence; getting it as well as Wodehouse takes genius. Good prose gracefully reflects reality; great prose does such a job on your perception that its effect is indistinguishable from defining reality — magic. This is what people are dimly poking when they say that books are better than movies because they leave more to the imagnination: a great writer makes you think it’s happening to you; you see the action, make the arguments yourself, and remember it like life.
(Children, who are still getting used to language and reality, are more succeptible than hard-headed adults. Children are all stoned: intellectually they’re remarkably like, say, Einstein or Shakespeare on LSD, speed, and pot. (This is interesting to think about while around children or stoned people.) They have incredibly credulous and unimaginably imaginative minds that will do the detail work of any correctly presented story; the hard part for authors is correct presentation. We elders are similar in kind if not degree: everyone’s a little stoned all the time, poets and mathematicians and lovers more than others.)
Different people in different moods feel more comfortable with certain things implicit and others explicit; any overall level of detail is a compromise redeemed by the tuning of one detail against another that abstracts to good writing, painting, or music. There’s a place on the implicit/explicit spectrum for every kind of entertainment and art, from the most abstact music to the best-rendered virtual reality. They don’t cross-compete — economists would disagree, but the only artistically interesting squabbles are between two forms trying to live in the same niche on the detail scale.
Good prose is like walking: rhythmic, flexible, human travel, exposed and observant. It’s honest and sincere but not predictable, and it is incapable of boring. It’s the best way to see get to know a place, they say. It will use roads, tunnels and bridges if they’re there, but it can go where nothing conscious has been before, alone, quiet and moving.
This is all about taste. Prose is art; there’s something cuspy and analog about it — the theoretical finitude and reducibility of expression acknowledged but unapplied — and it’s not for forcing on other people. I have, on the other hand, absolutely no compunction about spraying my prose or metaprose all over. To my taste, a definition of good prose is self-support: it tends to stay in the content corner and not talk about itself except when trying to. Except as humour or last chocks against misunderstanding, these tick me off:
They break the spell and disturb the purity of the illusion. I don’t like saying so, though: usually people whining over broken illusions are scared of actual mysteries being dissolved instead of the protrusion of one context into another. (When actual alleged spells are broken, the properly flexible mind can see the spell or the reality as convenient, or even superimposed. A spell is an abstraction (in this subcontext, an unwilling or unknowing one), and we can’t live without abstractions, but to reveal them as such is not to destroy them. Geeks, who understand such things, create them willingly by, e.g., referring to computer code as having intentions. Willing suspension of disbelief applies to all writing, even the driest: we agree to run a model of the author’s train of thought to see if it works, provisionally granting statements that we would reject as the Truth. Another duty of prose (towards the form end) is to provide for smooth suspension, and things that use the reader’s concentration for anything other than model-train building — ignoring it is worth noting that
, correcting typos, or finding a footnote — are in the way of communication.
People feel like something is lost when impressive things are explained in terms of unimpressive things. We resist (rightly or wrongly) the ideas that our minds are nothing but cells and that cells are nothing but atoms, that aliens aren’t among us, and that eerie conincidences happen in accordance with the laws of physics. Everything that seems engaging and warm is made awkward by inopportune literal explanation: love as physiology is so weird an idea that we try our darnedest to forget it.
What is it that we want back when things are explained? Nothing: nothingness — mystery. Mystery lets there be something better than possible, and that’s fun to hope for. But every time you smash a mystery, you find three behind it; it’s not like science, philosophy, or art is going to run out of worries. (People have quite often called frontiers final. Cannonically, Alexander the Great cried that there was nothing left to loot; there are scientists now seriously supposing that we’re almost done.) By sloppy but reliable induction and extrapolation, it’s clear that every mystery belongs to the class of solvable mysteries. (All you religious folks can can bally well shut up — I didn’t say solvable by humans.)
I just finished Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, and I think he may break my list up there. He has just about every desirable skill except that extreme solidity of prose. He certainly has a better grasp on art than Sterling, and he manages to explain some, which I respect. If only he could lay off the sex a little — even the literarily valid sex — ahhh well. His microwriting isn’t as good (can’t be as good?) as his paragraph-scale stuff, though, and — hrm.