Style, or form, not content, is acclaimed today, at least by whoever is in charge of declaring what is and is not literary fiction. It is poor form; but we are, after all, enduring the tackiest epoch in history where novels are concerned. Through form, the attempt is made to write above the level of plot-driven narratives, which ends up being a futile effort resulting in ambiguity. This endeavor to be groundbreaking and transformational requires a style that our present writers of ‘literary fiction’ haven’t got. So instead of being transformational, they end up being inconceivable and preposterous, and also gone sideways from a stream of consciousness track when that’s the target. For his own reasons and in his own way, William Makepeace Thackeray transcended plot in Vanity Fair. But without plot and without Thackeray’s talent, our social climbing writers of fiction can only slip and fall below the level of verisimilitude and acceptability. By form they mean something approaching to formlessness, like when Yann Martel, in his Life of Pi, injects paragraphs that are about nothing connected with the rest of the book, in order, probably, to be a cutting edge novelist. Their form is the absence of predictable content; it is also formlessness through hazy structure, structure being an element of style. And all of this is done to somehow dazzle the reader with whatever tone their slipshod methodology produces. Form is their thing, no matter how bad at it they are. Form as ‘the thing’ is easily discovered. Witness the remark by Christopher Hitchens about Nobel Prize winning writer Doris Lessing: “Some writers really do live for language and are willing to take risks for it…there is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words” (National Post, October 17th, 2007.) See the theory employed by Tom Griffiths in his narrative on Antarctica: “What historians and writers can do, Griffiths suggests, is to create a story, which itself ‘creates an atmosphere in which truth becomes discernible as a pattern’” (The Globe and Mail, Jean McNeil’s review of Slicing the Silence, November 3rd, 2007.) When a historian ‘creates’ (forms) a story that will cause atmosphere (tone), we should question his concern for facts and truth (content.) We should question the use of form (style) as chief. Rick Groen: “When his (gifted writer) flair for a great sentence fuses with his honest measuring of the human pulse, magic happens.” The emphasis here is on form, which is a synonym for beauty, or style. That plot (content) was still considered essential in the 19th century does not mean that form (style) has not tried to steer the ship before the 20th. We can dogmatize only generally. Instances of a venture to supplant content are quickly and effortlessly found, not only in the writings of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) but of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and others. Neither is the undertaking limited to just one philosophical school of thought. William Faulkner (1897-1962) says that language ‘might reveal something of man’s soul, his divinity’ (Gary Geddes, The Art of Short Fiction, p. 140.) This is the tail wagging the dog, as it were, form wagging content. He does not mean that the ability of linguistic communication reveals the image of God in man, which is another matter, but that man’s divinity may manifest through his choice of words. In The Rebel, Albert Camus states that even if literature “describes nostalgia, despair, frustration, it still creates a form of salvation. To talk of despair is to conquer it” (Ibid., p. 46.) ‘Description’ and ‘talk’ are form, or style. According to Faulkner, then, linguistic form, not content, might discover the answer to man’s plight. And according to Camus, the answer is in describing the problem! When a solution is found, however, it amounts to little. Think of the secular redemption that is communicated through the antihero’s loss at the end of Rocky. The secular story can redeem no more than to give the spirit a momentary lift. It can give a temporary boost by the description of loss; its redemption is the feeling of solidarity among graceless losers.
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