In or Out?

Trying to be more articulate about the big divide in prose style, with what I have come to call the "lucid and plain" style, on one side, and the "mannered" or "poetic" style on the other. These labels are possibly misleading, so I've been trying to find other prose-style categorizations or formulations that describe the schism. First, some examples so you know what I've talking about:

"Lucid and plain" prose stylists:

Mark Twain
Don DeLillo
Wendell Berry
Ernest Hemingway
Kurt Vonnegut

"Mannered" or "poetic" prose stylists:

Herman Melville
William Faulkner
Cormac McCarthy
David Foster Wallace
Thomas Pynchon

And of course all of them move back and forth on the spectrum. But, most basically, the "lucid" ones have something to say and their prose says it as clearly as possible. What they have to say is the important thing, and their prose is designed to get out of the way, to be a perfectly clean glass through which the reader can see what the writer wants him to see. On the "mannered" side, the writer has something to say, and sees the prose itself --its diction, its departures from strictly normative grammar, its idiosyncrasies, its self-consciousness, its artfulness (what I mean by "poetic") as being part of the means by by which the content of the story is made clear. So, if Cormac McCarthy, for example, is writing "about" the inevitability of fate and the pawnhood of people, his purpose is greatly abetted by his epic style, so very much an outlier in the modern fiction tradition, in which fate is out of fashion, and individual agency and freedom from fate is almost de rigueur. And David Foster Wallace, in his fiction and sometimes in his essays, seems to see grammar itself as the embodiment of the kind of certainty and societal agreement that really died in the trenches of Flanders (or thereabouts) but which is, by now, neither necessary to meaning nor accurately depictive of the diversity of modern mass culture and the sublimation (or sublation?) of the tradition of intellectual rigor into a kind of referential or allusive hyperlinked modernity in which "y'know what I mean" is current. And, besides, we do know what you mean, even without the rigor of grammar. Anyway, behind this idea is that grammar is a normative system to which all writing either conforms or doesn't, and the ways in which writers consciously deviate from the strictures of grammar are, in themselves, significant. They signify. True, also, of diction. Why does McCarthy fill his epic visions with arcana and the solid objects of lost ways? "Mansuete", "alparejas", "sprues", "thrapple", "archamandrite", "lazarous", "skelps"... I just flipped through Blood Meridian and those are just a few of the words McCarthy places before us like paleolithic totems, to be guessed at and to take us places, but not to places we can know. Like our fates. Places we can't know.

In my research I found a terribly unfashionable essay by Richard Lanham. I guess he's a big deal among literary types. In the few pages I found online, I found his almost-opaque description of the prose-style divide: he calls the two modes the 'At' mode and the 'Through' mode. The 'Through' mode is lucidity. The prose is designed to be seen through. Cultures that run on consensus value the 'Through' mode. There is no need for, nor tolerance of, much stylistic range or authorial drama in eras or places of societal agreement. The personality of the writer is neither welcome nor at issue. These cultures, contrary to the common political formulation (which sees anti-establishment modes as decadent) are decadent, or moribund, and value the maintenance of the tradition and order over the inventiveness of self-conscious art.

On the other hand, the 'At' mode is at home in Elizabethan England and modern America because we have little consensus. Our worlds are fractured. At least our spiritual, emotional, psychic worlds are, and the motives for "poetic" ( or 'At') modes of prose writing come from the extremes of the spectrum of all artistic motivation, from pure play, on the one hand (Pynchon, sometimes Wallace, Shakespeare, very often Melville before the depression got him), and, on the other extreme, from what I see (departing from Lanham here) as the writer's deep sense of estrangement from the norms of the culture. This estrangement shows in the writer's estrangement from the culture's approved forms in literature: the norms of standard prose, and even from the wide range of readily-understood narrative modes, and, in the case of McCarthy again, even from the modern, novelistic assumption that human motives can ever be clear. Lanham uses lots of examples, but the gist of his model is that normative standards in prose contain a certain range of political or social or psychological tolerance, and that an author's decision to step outside the bounds of this tolerance is organic and significant inasmuch as what he is trying to say is inconsistent with consensus, or critical of it, or, of course, in any way prescient, divergent, idiosyncratic, or prophetic (in the Old Testament sense of the word). A writer 'cries from the wilderness' not in the lucid, essayistic 'Through' mode, but with a stretching of grammar, diction, voice, and narrative mode that in themselves contain his isolation and self-consciousness and his critique. His unhappiness, really.

But, true to its nature, the 'mannered' or 'poetic' or 'At' mode can, self-consciously, choose to dress in suit and tie and go about downtown in the garb of lucidity and plainness. Good examples of this, where normal grammar and accessible diction serve subversive purposes, are DeLillo and Jonathan Lethem, among many others. But what you don't see is Romney conservatives using great stylistic latitude, all the head banging and hand-wringing of square-peg neurosis, all the refusals of normative grammar, and all the diction from the wilderness. They have no need, and to do so would be to stretch their culture's tolerance, and to open the gate to the prophets.