What Makes Prose Good?

Can you separate good prose from good storytelling?

The Aurist Substack seeks to discover the best-written books each week. They are clear that they are not looking for the best books, the books that tell the best stories, but simply the best-written. This raises an interesting question. What does best written mean as distinct from any other property of a book? What, in other words, makes good prose good?

I don’t propose to answer this question, only to dissect it. My love is story. I regard fine prose as a great ornament to story, but it is clear that you can have a good story written in indifferent prose. Indeed, you can have a good story written in bad prose. But can you have fine prose in a bad story, like a golden glove fielder on a losing baseball team? I don’t know. I can’t get far enough into a bad story to find out. How about you? Would you read a lousy story for the dazzling prose it was written in? Is such a thing even possible? Let’s try to break it down. What exactly is good prose anyway?

Is prose good because it sounds good? J. R. R. Tolkien reckoned that the phrase “cellar door” sounded particularly beautiful.

Most English-speaking people ... will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.

I doubt that most English-speaking people were consulted on this question, and I have a distinct memory of my father, the English Prof, mocking this assertion. I tend to be with my dad on this. I am inclined to reject the premise that words can be beautiful if dissociated from their sense. I think that phrases are beautiful not because of their sound but because of the images they evoke. A beautiful phrase is beautiful because it evokes a beautiful image, not because of the sound it makes.

And yet it is obviously true that a sound can be beautiful in itself, independent of anything it expresses. In music, after all, certain intervals are more pleasing than others. Certain combinations of tones can form chords that are not only pleasing but can provoke different emotions according to their structure, major chords producing a different mood from minor chords, for instance. So why shouldn’t it be that certain syllables, and certain combinations of syllables, are beautiful in their own right, independent of their meaning?

By analogy with the emotional effect of different keys, could it be that different syllables or sequences of syllables can similarly evoke different moods? It is certainly true in both poetry and song that hard syllables and soft syllables make a huge difference to the sound of a song or a poem. It being Sunday as I write, I have had to sit stewing, as so often, through Bowdlerized hymns, in which hard Hs have been replaced by soft Ys by someone who cared only for ideology and not for verse. So perhaps the mere sound of syllables is indeed one of the building blocks of poetry. And since poetic effects can certainly spill over into prose, might this not make it an element of fine prose as well?

As I said, I’m asking the questions here, not answering them. But here’s my difficulty with this idea. Language definitely has a sound, and since music shows us that certain sounds and sequences of sounds can be beautiful, it is at least conceivable that a particular phrase, like “cellar door,” could sound beautiful, purely as a sound. But the primary function of syllables is to form words, and the primary function of words is to denote things in the world, and the phrase “cellar door” does not denote the loveliest of objects. If a beautiful-sounding phrase evokes a dull and pedestrian image, which of these effects predominates in the mind of the reader? Do you experience a moment of astonished wonder when you read or hear the phrase “cellar door?” No, me neither.

There’s a line from Brideshead Revisited that has always struck me.

I certainly never changed my rooms — there were gillyflowers growing below the windows which on summer evenings filled them with fragrance.

The main operation of this sentence is to express Charles’ priorities in his university days, rejecting all his cousin Jasper’s practical advice about the dangers of ground-floor rooms in favor of the fragrance of gillyflowers on a summer evening. But it was also the word “gillyflowers” that struck me. Perhaps it is simply because it was unfamiliar to me, but it strikes me still now that I have looked it up. Would the passage have the same resonance if it used a more familiar (to me) name for those plants?

I certainly never changed my rooms — there were carnations growing below the windows which on summer evenings filled them with fragrance.

Somehow that passage does not have the same feel to me. But why not? It ought, on the surface, to be more evocative since “carnations” brings a specific image to mind while (to me) gillyflowers does not. Could it be that “gillyflowers” is simply a nicer-sounding set of syllables than “carnations?” Could it be that the rhythm of the sentence is subtly disrupted by the replacement of four syllables with three? I don’t know. As I said, my purpose is to dissect the question, not to answer it.

English is a language that seems to lend itself particularly to poetry, and English is an amalgam of two different linguistic traditions, the more glutteral and abrupt Germanic and the more flowing romance languages, with many other borrowings besides. In English, there are usually four or five different ways to say the same thing, and one of the principles of English composition is to avoid repeating the same word but find another with the same meaning. Even if any beauty of the syllables as sounds is dwarfed by the beauty of the images the words evoke, English perhaps provides enough alternative word choices to allow the effects to be combined and to reinforce each other. And perhaps this is indeed an aspect of fine prose in English?

Even if this is so, though, can we agree that the primary impact of prose comes through the images it evokes? Even a clunky-sounding word, if it completes the perfect image in a way no other word could, surely deserves to be considered fine prose?

At this point I think we need to make a distinction between the effects created by story and the effects created by prose. A perfectly evoked image can produce a moment of recognition, or what we might call a moment of clarity. This moment of clarity in turn produces an emotion. Which emotion depends on what aspect of reality and experience the moment of clarity reveals, and on the particular disposition of the reader who receives it. It may be one of fear, one of hope, one of beauty, one of ugliness, one of despair, one of joy. The emotion is the product not of the words themselves, but of the image evoked by the words.

But the experience of having a moment of clarity also produces an emotion of its own, the emotion whose name I cannot put my finger on, that attends any moment of profound realization. Call it the eureka emotion. There is the reactive emotion that responds to the thing seen and the eureka emotion that attends the moment of seeing.

Story works in the same way. A story leads a particular character to a particular moment, and the realization of that moment produces a moment of clarity, which in turn produces an emotion, or rather, this pair of emotions: the eureka emotion produced by seeing and the reactive emotion produced by the thing seen. The reactive emotion produced by the thing seen may not be the same in every reader, but the moment of clarity and the eureka emotion produced by seeing should be.

The particularity of a character is everything in producing this effect. Every situation that a story might contrive is familiar in itself. What gives a story force and clarity is the particularity of the individual incident happening to the particular individual character that we have become invested in. It is not just another proposal we are invested in, but D’Arcy’s proposal to Lizzy. This is why it requires a story to lead us to that great moment of clarity and thus to the profound emotions that flow from it.

Story is thus fundamentally more powerful than prose alone. It simply has more tools than the static evocation of images and the emotional resonance of particular sounds and rhythms, which are the tools that prose alone has to work with. A story can build up to its great moments slowly and deliberately, creating deeper and deeper emotional investment in the character and their fate, like piling water behind a dam which can then burst forth in a mighty torrent when the dam breaks in the climactic action of the story.

There is no way that prose alone can rival this power to build up this level of emotional potential. This is something I see all the time in poorly told stories. The writer fails to carefully build to their climax, fails to store up water behind the dam, and then attempts to create strong emotion through the use of histrionic prose alone, creating no great torrent but only splashes in a kiddy pool. This is the very opposite of good storytelling, where the words that finally crack the dam and unleash the torrent are often the simplest and calmest of words, for they have no work left to do except to push the button that sets off the charge that blows the dam. Prose, no matter how artful, cannot unleash a torrent that the story has not first stored up.

But here is where the question of what constitutes good prose gets complicated. We can philosopically distinguish the effects of fine prose in creating moments of clarity by the evocation of images from that of stories creating moments of clarity by a sequence of events happening to a particular character, but fine prose does not occur outside of the context of a story. And so we have to ask how the effect of prose in evoking images and the effect of story in storing up tension like water behind a dam interact with each other. Because, of course, the interaction of these two effects is central to great fiction writing.

If fine prose evokes images, the effect of the unfolding story is to precondition the mind of the reader to expect certain events, to establish certain settings and themes, and this then primes them to call from memory one image rather than another in response to a particular word. The story, in other words, creates the conditions in which a particular choice of words can evoke a particular image. Whatever prose might be able to do unaided, it can do ten times more in a reader whose mind has been primed by a compelling story.

Conversely, if a story seeks to create tension that keeps the reader engaged in the events unfolding in the life of a character, the power of fine prose to create a moment of clarity by evoking the perfect image becomes a powerful tool for compounding and directing that tension. Fine prose, we might say, is the steel that hones the fine cutting edge of story.

Fine prose has another trick up its sleeve. By evoking images, prose can evoke symbols. A symbol, as I have defined it before, is an object that reminds us of a story. I said above that fine prose cannot match the power of story to build up tension. But through the use of symbols, fine prose can evoke the emotional power of stories. This is not the power of the current story in the moment when the dam breaks, but the power of the remembrance of the flood, which is a different but still powerful thing. What symbols do for a story is introduce the tension of that memory into the narrative, piling up more water behind the dam. The memory of a flood is, after all, an occasion of powerful emotion when we see cracks start to appear in a dam.

But should we count symbols to the credit of fine prose, or should they really be credited to story? All stories are told in prose, after all. We cannot credit all of story’s devices to prose merely because stories are told in prose. And it is story that establishes the context in which certain images function as symbols. There are few if any universal symbols, that is, images which recall the exact same story no matter what context they occur in. Virtually every symbol has its effect only when evoked in a specific context. The whole art of story is to make things meaningful and resonant by establishing the specific contexts in which those meanings and resonances are inescapable. Symbolism, then, is surely a creature of story rather than of prose.

What is more, the most devastating line in a story is often the simplest and plainest piece of prose. “Reader, I married him.” Such simple lines are devastating because they are the trigger that unleashes all the power of the tension built up through the entire story. At that moment, the story is on a hair trigger, and the most simple phrase will set off the epic and cathartic cascade of events and emotions. Too elaborate, the phrase would do nothing but distract from the moment. Good writing, good storytelling, in this instance, demands the plainest of prose. Such phrases, independent of the story in which they occur, have no merit as prose. All their merit comes from the role they play in the story; all their effect comes from the context in which they are used.

Given this, is it really possible to make a judgment on the fineness of prose independent of the story it tells?

Most modern poetry makes no attempt to tell a story. It seeks to produce effects by the juxtaposition of images and the sound of words alone, sometimes, though not often, aided by the use of meter and rhyme. This, I am convinced, is why poetry has fallen so far from favor with the general reading public. It ceased to tell stories, and thus lost most of its power and appeal. It is certainly why modern poetry holds no charms for me. When I consider the poems I particularly love, such as The Stolen Child, To His Coy Mistress, St. Agnes Eve, and Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister, all of them tell stories, and in all of them, story and image leap verse to verse upon each other’s shoulders.

The power of fine prose and fine storytelling to magnify each others potential suggests to me that prose is always at its finest when it is in perfect cooperation with story, and so to praise fine prose alone, without reference to story, is problematic. Surely, much of what makes fine prose fine is precisely how it benefits from and participates in the effects of story. When considered in the context of a story in particular, can we really judge the prose independently from the story it tells?

There are certainly lovers of fine phrasing for whom it seems not to matter that a novel or a poem tells no story. But it is impossible for me to regard this as fine prose (or poetry). It may in some sense be clever or inventive, but it is hollow to me, and therefore all I notice about it is the cleverness, the inventiveness of it, and then all I see is the self-conscious devising of the author, who is then calling attention not to the world or to life as it is lived, but to themselves and their own cleverness. That said, I neither scold nor bear a grudge against those who are charmed by prose technique independent of story. My question is, how can you actually separate the two? The question is not rhetorical but sincere. As I said, my aim is to dissect the question rather than answer it. I would like an answer, though. If you can help me towards one, the comments beckon.