JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #68
September 9, 2021
I wrote last week in reaction to something Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her 1973 essay, "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," and this week I want to comment on another thing she says in that essay. The main thrust of the essay is to discuss the style of prose that is appropriate to the genre of Fantasy fiction, and, in so doing, Le Guin makes a contrast with "plain and apparently direct prose" in a certain kind of fantasy writing. This, she says, "is not really simple, but flat. It is not really clear, but inexact. Its directness is specious. Its sensory cues--extremely important in imaginative writing--are vague and generalized; the rocks, the wind, the trees are not there, are not felt; the scenery is cardboard, or plastic. The tone as a whole is profoundly inappropriate to the subject." Le Guin goes on to ask to what this flat, inexact tone is appropriate, and answers:
"To journalism. It is journalistic prose. In journalism, the suppression of the author’s personality and sensibility is deliberate. The goal is an impression of objectivity. The whole thing is meant to be written fast, and read faster. This technique is right, for a newspaper. It is wrong for a novel, and dead wrong for a fantasy. A language intended to express the immediate and the trivial is applied to the remote and the elemental. The result, of course, is a mess."
It is an interesting distinction that Le Guin is making here, the difference between a kind of characterless prose that seeks to disappear behind the information it conveys and one that is, as she describes elsewhere, "the creator’s voice ... where the act of speech is the act of creation." Although Le Guin is speaking specifically about the style of prose in fantasy fiction, she does gesture toward ordinary novels, insisting that "style, of course, is the book," not "an ingredient of a book." Style, Le Guin tells us, "is how you see: your vision, your understanding of the world, your voice." There is quite a bit of consternation about "voice" in some corners of the literary world, and it’s variously and vaguely defined, often reduced to a kind of shorthand for the shape of an author’s grammar or the set of their favorite words. I think what Le Guin is talking about might precede language--though I’m sure she herself would disagree with that formulation. Voice is related to vision, the artistic eye, the capacity of the writer to see what others might not and to convey that viewpoint with clarity and skill. More is thereby exposited than mere information, the mere organization of the world. Rather, we understand something fundamental about the makeup of the depicted creation, the underlying spirit that informs it. This, then, is the kind of style to which we might aspire.