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godreamUpon reflection, I've decided school would be far more interesting for all involved if textbooks were written by authors with actual style. This observation stemmed from reading Nietzsche in philosophy, and realizing it wasn't painful. Most of the authors so far -- I'm thinking Rousseau, Locke, all the way back to Aristotle -- maybe some of these folks just have terrible translators, but their writing is boring. Nietzsche wants to tick you off, he wants to make you mad, he writes like every word must be gospel truth. He asserts. I love it. "God is dead", he says, not, oh, "thus it seems the existence of some supernatural transcendental power has ceased". Or something. It's an assault of words, but not like a pummeling, more like a master fencer at work.
Then I was thinking of other authors with style. Neal Stephenson is first to jump into my mind. Scifi, so dramatically different from Nietzsche, obviously. Reading his stuff is like mental cartwheels, like your brain is going on the Superman roller coaster twelve times in a row, and at the same time like that moment when everything cancels out and suddenly the fifth degree polynomial resolves, and you can't believe someone actually thought of putting these equations together like this and at the same time are just awed by how obviously fundamentally well it works.
I think Roger Zelazny is in this category too. They want you to think he writes fantasy and scifi novels, but he doesn't. Really he writes epic poetry in paragraphs, full of brilliantly appropriate obscure offhand allusions, deep meaningful insights, and absurd but perfectly sensible in context sentences like, "Then the fit hit the Shan."
And yet -- with these exhibits A, B, and C -- I can't define what I think literary Style, capital S as well deserved, is. An indescribable way with words. A complete mastery of the language as a tool and/or as a toy. But that -- man, if I could ever have that, ever achieve that -- that's what I think is Real Writing. There are tons of excellent authors, well worth reading, who lack this. I could write a list pages long offhand. There are authors who have it sometimes (IMHO, in order of most-often down, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Laurell Hamilton fall here). It isn't necessary to have it to write something good. But I think it's this Style that could make any textbook -- devoid of plot, characterization, and atmosphere -- well worth reading for its own sake, its literary merit alone.
Ramble over. I should probably go do homework now.
Then I was thinking of other authors with style. Neal Stephenson is first to jump into my mind. Scifi, so dramatically different from Nietzsche, obviously. Reading his stuff is like mental cartwheels, like your brain is going on the Superman roller coaster twelve times in a row, and at the same time like that moment when everything cancels out and suddenly the fifth degree polynomial resolves, and you can't believe someone actually thought of putting these equations together like this and at the same time are just awed by how obviously fundamentally well it works.
I think Roger Zelazny is in this category too. They want you to think he writes fantasy and scifi novels, but he doesn't. Really he writes epic poetry in paragraphs, full of brilliantly appropriate obscure offhand allusions, deep meaningful insights, and absurd but perfectly sensible in context sentences like, "Then the fit hit the Shan."
And yet -- with these exhibits A, B, and C -- I can't define what I think literary Style, capital S as well deserved, is. An indescribable way with words. A complete mastery of the language as a tool and/or as a toy. But that -- man, if I could ever have that, ever achieve that -- that's what I think is Real Writing. There are tons of excellent authors, well worth reading, who lack this. I could write a list pages long offhand. There are authors who have it sometimes (IMHO, in order of most-often down, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Laurell Hamilton fall here). It isn't necessary to have it to write something good. But I think it's this Style that could make any textbook -- devoid of plot, characterization, and atmosphere -- well worth reading for its own sake, its literary merit alone.
Ramble over. I should probably go do homework now.
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Date: 2003-05-14 07:38 am (UTC)