style

NAM LE: The key word here is “style.” Today, it carries a cosmetic residue; we associate “style” with stuff that draws attention to itself. This, in itself, isn’t bad—we’re reading and writing at a time when for a work of art to not draw attention to its worked aspect, its artfulness, is blinderism at best and bad faith at worst. I don’t have a problem with this. I personally suspect it’s been this way from Aristotle onward but anyway, what’s material is that it’s this way now. For me, the interesting question then becomes how to draw attention to style without copping out, without becoming necessarily arch or defeatist or esoteric or ironic. Without breaching the dream-state that’s the sine qua non of fiction. Nabokov called what you’re referring to as “necessity” the “inner force of style”: the enlivening energy, the urge to precise articulation, the thing in the absence of which style is arbitrary and a story nothing more than a proof of itself.

I know I’m being nebulous. Part of this is because I resist your phrase, “besides style.” Style is everything. Style is eye, window, and view. And, of course, when it serves its purpose, style is beside the point, is rightly subsumed by subjectivity and subject. Perhaps the handiest definition of literature is language where style and subject are inseparable. Sentences have a wisdom that inheres in their structure, syntax, and constituent parts, and not merely in what they purport to signify. I get agitated when I see critics lauding writers for their “invisible prose,” as though style were only a window to be scrubbed out of sight.

CHARLES D'AMBROSIO: I agree that style is everything, so to me the surface is the hardest part of any story—but if it’s true that style is “everything,” then I think narrative or plot or character or dialogue, any of those “elements,” can’t be considered “not-style” or some other lesser category. Maybe it’s like Aquinas’s idea of divine simplicity, that the being of God is identical to the attributes of God. A story is simple, not composite, assembled from parts. I’m comfortable with the way “style is everything” sweeps up and includes the entirety of a fiction (style as well as what I called “the elements”) because I grew up entranced by the mystery of the Trinity. In fact, we were taught to distinguish ourselves from Protestants based on our capacity to accept this utterly mystical truth. I guess I think of the things of fiction, in a William Carlos Williams’s way: “No ideas but in things.”

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