AWP Presentation: Notes on Literary Style in Fiction

UPDATE: The full and corrected version of this essay is now up at LitHub, as "Elements of Literary Style." I'm keeping the introduction here, with one quote. Please check out the full version at LitHub, and many thanks again to Christian Kiefer, and to Jonny Diamond at LitHub, for agreeing to run the piece.

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Yesterday I mentioned that I would post my remarks for the AWP 2018 panel "Profundity as Purpose: Thoughts on Sentences, Vocabulary and Style," organized by writer and critic Christian Kiefer. Other panelists included Coffee House Press editor Caroline Casey; acclaimed writers Kim O'Neill and Christine Schutt. I should note that I slightly modified the introduction below when I read it aloud, and also read only a portion of the full set of notes, to which I added a few quotations, by panelists O'Neill and Schutt, based on their remarks and readings. Many thanks to Christian, Caroline, Kim, Christine, and everyone who attended the panel, which was held at 9 am on Saturday, and drew a full house. Many thanks to Christian and my fellow panelists, and to all who attended the event!

(I should also note that at the panel Caroline and I offered the name of some living authors whose styles exemplified what Christian, others on the panel, and I were talking about--ourselves included--but I decided not to list them here, because there are so many great fiction writers, and I do mention but a few of the many I admire and regularly read with enthusiasm in my notes. I encourage J's Theater readers to add names of distinctive living fiction stylists they admire in the comments, if you'd like, and I'll aim to post them at some point soon if there are more than a handful.)

Lastly, I also want to note another highlight of this year's AWP, which was attending the Jack Jones Literary Arts' welcome event at the Columbia Cafe in Tampa! Many thanks to Kima Jones and Allison Conner, and it was so much fun to meet everyone on Jack Jones' roster--which includes yours truly--and its fans!

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INTRODUCTION

I want to begin by thanking Christian for organizing this panel, and thank all of my fellow panelists for their thoughts on this topic, I initially thought I would write a short essay, but instead I decided to draft a series of provisional notes on the topic of literary style in fiction, interlaced with quotations on the topic by various writers of note. (You can find a number of these quotes online, as well as on the website "Some Literary Criticism Quotes," which is where I culled them.) Unless otherwise noted, however, the comments and thoughts are mine.

Two quotes:

Is there an ethics of style? How might we talk about it? What happens when we consider how one template for now-dominant literary styles, emphasizing craft and de-emphasizing politics, that are taught in many—most?—MFA and undergraduate programs, may have their possible origins in the US government-funded approaches instituted at Iowa and Stanford, as Eric Bennett argues us in his 2015 scholarly study Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (University of Iowa Press)? Even setting this particular history to the side, as usually occurs in most creative writing programs, doesn’t every artistic act require some level of ethical inquiry? Are there styles and stylistic approaches we might label more ethical or less, and if so, why? Or might another way to speak of the ethics of style be to raise questions not just of historicity and genealogy, but also of the truth(fulness) of representations in relation to a given narrative? What role or roles do the larger social, political, economic, and cultural contexts hold in this line of questioning?

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“In order to find his voice he must first have mastered style”

–A. Alvarez, The Writer’s Voice

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Prose (fiction) should not be musical; this is the province of poetry. (“Poetry is music set to words” –Dennis O’Driscoll.) This is another dictum I have always worked under, and to some degree, because of my inner sensibility, against. Yet so much of the most memorable prose, not just poetry, appears to aspire to, as the old phrase goes, and often achieves the condition of music. What lines in prose fiction do you most readily recall? Even the ideas and statements that engrave themselves on your consciousness do so not just because of their aptness and timeliness, but because of how they were written, how they unfold, almost like lyrics or lyric, as prose.

Will Schutt & Christine Schutt Visit Rutgers-Newark (Writers@Newark)

On October 8, fiction writer Christine Schutt and her son, poet Will Schutt, read as part of the Rutgers-Newark Graduate MFA program's Writers@Newark series. Christine Schutt is an acclaimed fiction writer, with two short-story collections, Nightwork (Knopf, 1996) and A Night, A Day, Another Night, Summer (TriQuarterly/Northwestern UP, 2005); and three novels, Florida (TriQuarterly/Northwestern UP, 2004), a National Book Award fiction finalist; All Souls (Harcourt, 2008), a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist; and most recently, Prosperous Friends (Grove Press, 2012). I was familiar with her in part because of Florida and because she visited Northwestern during my time there, though I was away on the date of her reading. I was not aware of her son's poetry, however, until I saw his name on the poster for the reading, and even then, I did not dip deeply into until MFA program director Jayne Anne Phillips invited me to introduce him. Both writers read beautifully, Will from his award-winning collection, as well as from new poems, and his mother from her most recent novel. It was a honor to meet and hear both of them.
Here is my introduction for Will:

To compare poetry to portraiture is hardly original, but we might still note that we do not always equate seeing, looking, and thinking--writing--with action, painting's physical labor. Yet poetry by its very nature is a form of action, of shaping, a poeisis, always, entailing mimesis and more that may not be captured in that mirror we hold before nature's complex and ever-changing face. Will Schutt's poems hover in that "middle ground," to use his phrase, between sight and act; they engage and reproduce this tension in their onward-rushing, page-zigzagging lines, and their calm, patient arguments.

"Remembering is nice," Schutt says in "Beach Lane," but the excellent poetry we find in this volume requires more, requires a voracious seeing, akin to hogs devouring a hillside, as Schutt memorably metaphorizes in "Wild Hogs," transformed into verbal art. It demands that Schutt "put everything into it," as his lyric speaker, quoting his father, says in "American Window Dressing," a poem whose title, like many in this collection, embodies this paradox.

Schutt successfully enacts this generative tension, through his attentiveness to the visual, with a painterly precision--

 I go on
 looking at the bright bathers as they step
out of the ocean to towel off
 with their bright, Testarossa red towels
  -- from "Wild Hogs"

--and to the aural, for he is aware, as a poet who quotes rock lyrics and imagines the sad music accompanying his parent's faltering relationship, which he hears by analogy, in glimpsing a snapshot of Peter Lorre and Lotta Lenya, that if a picture can convey more than a thousand words, sound engenders worlds as well:

   I stood eyelevel
  with row after row of ducks, like smoker's
 lungs, in the restaurant windows
  off Confucius Plaza--thick tar up top
 swizzed into brown and rose gold.
  A metal sling dug under their wings
 ended in a hole the heads were put through.
 -- from "American Window Dressing" 

Schutt's poems picture not only the privileged middle-class spaces he has inhabited, but what exists just on the peripheries, at those edges these poems are not always ready to view or listen to, but nevertheless try to. More, he is a poet interested in history, and its contiguous connection to the present; in images, in anecdotes, these poems summon the past as a way of entering the present also. The metonymic relationship this empowers gathers form and force through the poem's care with observation, the poet's exact music.

Schutt's meticulousness carries over into his translation work, represented in Westerly by a series of poems that form the volume's center. He brings into English selected short poems by mid-century Italian writers--Sanguinetti, Merini, the great Montale--who too struggle to resolve the quandary posed by the struggle between the eye and the hand, the ear and the heart. What charges the stasis and conditionality of these poems is the fact that they are not mere thoughts, but poems: to write is to act, as Schutt demonstrates throughout.

Will Schutt is the author of Westerly, which was selected by judge Carl Phillips for the 2012 Yale Series of Younger Poets, one of the most prestigious prizes for American poets under the age of 40. A graduate of Oberlin College and Hollins University, Schutt has published poems and translations in Agni, A Public Space, FIELD, The New Republic, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the Stadler Center for Poetry and the James Merrill House, he currently lives in New York City.

Copyright © John Keene, 2013. All rights reserved.