Excellent piece! I love your commentary on this topic. I definitely wouldn't read a bad story even if it had beautiful prose... but I also really struggle with good stories with bad prose. As an example, I really wanted to like Wuthering Heights but found the prose so repellant that I stopped reading it (and I understand that it's objectively a good story).
Perhaps this deserves more thought, but I've been thinking often of Eliot's commentary on the Metaphysical Poets of late. He writes about the unity of the "sense" and the "sound" of words and argues that the Metaphysical Poet is the poet who unifies these two elements. Words like "gillyflowers" sound like what they signify in a way that "carnations" don't. Eliot uses as an example Edgar Allen Poe's use of the word "Nevermore" in "The Raven," which he says has the right sound but not the right sense.
The most beautiful poem--and perhaps the most beautiful story--is the one wherein sense and sound are aligned. The beauty is in part in the alignment, which I think is why "Reader, I married him" packs a punch and feels perfectly phrased even though its objective beauty is less than striking. When the sense and sound are not aligned, it can create dissonance. Much like in music, dissonance, if done well, can be artistic and even beautiful; if done poorly, it can be detrimental to the experience of the art.
Wuthering Heights had so completely faded from memory that I looked it up on Project Guttenburg and found this:
"Joseph was an elderly, nay, an old man, very old, perhaps, though hale
and sinewy. “The Lord help us!” he soliloquised in an undertone of
peevish displeasure, while relieving me of my horse: looking, meantime,
in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of
divine aid to digest his dinner, and his pious ejaculation had no
reference to my unexpected advent."
So yes, I think we are on the same page here. :-)
As to the union of sense and sound, though, I am not yet convinced. Obviously, there are cases of onomatopoeia. But the very fact that we recognize such words as a special case suggests that such words are rare. I would be more inclined to think that the sound of most words is related to their sense only by the fact that we are accustomed to hearing that sound used in that sense.
I can see that rhythmically, certain words work because the emphasis falls in the right place, or they have a hard or soft sound where each works best. Thus my lament about Bowdlerized hymns that replace hard sounds with soft ones. I can see, too, that in certain cases a run of harmonious syllables can have a lovely effect. But if these things are what is meant by matching sound to sense, they are happening at the sentence level rather than at the level of individual words.
Then the question becomes, is there any more to this effect than rhythm or a happy babble of syllables? Neither of these are to be sconed, of course. I did not choose the phrase "babble of sylables" without attention to its sound. I suggested that gilliflowers might be rhythmically superior to carnations in Waugh's sentence. And maybe it also produces a happy babble of syllables in its context. But you are suggesting more than that, that the individual word gilliflowers "sounds like what they signify." I have no desire to contradict you on this. I think I would rather like it to be true. But then I find myself asking, "How does it do so?" and, "Is this effect universal or at least reliable?"
And on that note I am remined of Schubert's The Trout Quintet, which I think is a fine piece of music, and yet I don't think that if you played it to someone who had not heared it and did not know it name, that they would say at the end, "Oh, that piece is about a trout."
These are all excellent points! I think I mean something less literal when I say something "sounds like what it signifies." The strictest interpretation of that would of course be onomatopoeia. What I mean is something closer to the semantic field of a word or phrase being aligned to the intended meeting of the piece/story.
I again think that your "gillyflowers" versus "carnations" comparison is a good one. In isolation, I wouldn’t say that “gillyflowers” necessarily conveys more of what the flower is than “carnations,” but it does more appropriately convey Ryder’s delighted, boyish attraction to them. Conversely, it might be more harmonious to say that one left “carnations” at a grave than “gillyflowers.”
Perhaps a funny example, but I also like the comparison of this line from Hopkins’ “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe”: “I say that we are wound with mercy round and round, as if by air.” Hopkins’ image is so beautiful, conveying the sweetness and security of the gift of Mary to the whole Church by invoking the presence of air in the world.
Compare to a line by admittedly inferior poets, the British rock band Sweet: “Love is like oxygen.” Simple. Direct. In literal meaning very similar to Hopkins’ line. We have the substitution of love for mercy, but those two are intimately connected. But “love is like oxygen” sounds desperate. It highlights a different quality of air—namely, that it is necessary for life, that we are dependent upon it.
We cannot flip the two lines and retain the sensory meaning of either piece, though they literally mean very similar things. “God’s glory which would go / Through her and from her flow / Off, and no way but so. / Love is like oxygen: the same / Is Mary, more by name” simply does not have the same beauty. And Hopkins’ line does not work in Sweet’s song, either.
You make a very good point. It isn't about the reader's ability to picture the particular blossoms in botanical detail. In that sense, the species does not matter at all. Fiction isn't film, and it's not the picture that counts, but the impression of the picture.
I like to say that fiction is addressed to memory, not the senses. But the impressions of the senses are not photographic, and so neither is the impression of memory, but something else, something idealized, some compound of emotion and impression and hope and meaning. (I'm being very fuzzy here because I have a sense of something I can't put my finger on, and right now I couldn't be less fuzzy if I tried.) But yes, something about the word gillyflowers, though I cannot picture them, still plugs into that sense of the moment in a way I can taste but not define. But somehow with "gillyflowers," I have a sense of them gently moving in the breeze, whereas with carnations, I have a sense of them in bunches or buttonholes. And maybe that's exactly the point. Maybe that's exactly the semantic field of "carnations" and the reason it wouldn't work in that passage.
In other words, it's not just that words have multiple associations to choose from but that they have dominant and secondary associations. Things that lie close or further away in the semantic field. And so if you want the secondary associations, which are certainly available, you have to manipulate the context such that the association you want becomes the natural association. But if you can't do that economically, choose a synonym, even one with almost no semantic field at all for many readers, but one which has a sound that in some ineffable way fits the sense.
And if any of that makes any sense at all, then yes, all these elements play into the construction of fine prose. But it also remains true that the effects of prose are shaped by its context in story, and the same phrase exactly can be brilliant, banal, or downright oafish in different contexts.
And that fits exactly with your analysis of Hopkins and Sweet, I think. Thank you!
Didn't expect to see you a) disagreeing with Tolkien and b) actually convincing me to side with you against him!
I wouldn't call this a counterpoint, but a possible gray area, because the book in question has good story-bones, but it wouldn't be half the book it is--literally and metaphorically--without the method employed. Absalom, Absalom! would fill maybe 80 pages told chronologically, and it wouldn't be nearly as compelling. None of the reveals would retain their dramatic force. Faulkner's prose, circuitous method, and long meandering sentences elevate a straightforward Biblical retelling into a profound, mysterious, heartbreaker of a book.
Oh, I disagree with Tolkien all the time. :-) I come by it honestly. Tolkien belonged to the old school of English studies that was concerned with philology and wanted every undergraduate to be fluent in Anglo-Saxon. My father belonged to the new school that was interested in the interpretation of literature and the close reading of texts, and thought that learning Anglo-Saxon was a waste of time. Disagreeing with Tolkien was the default position in my house growing up.
And I grew up, and first read Tolkien, before he had attained the oracular status that he seems to have for so many people today. I tend to cite him more often than I naturally would because he is one of the very few remaining authors that you can confidently expect most readers to be familiar with. The current adulation of Tolkien, both as an author and as a philosopher (if that is the word), actually sours me on him slightly. I find much to admire in his work and his ideas, but not quite so much as I am expected to admire them.
I've never taken the time to acquire a taste for Faulkner. He seems to be one of those authors who requires a deliberate process of acclimatization, like learning to drink wine. But as I said, fine prose can be a great ornament to story, and I don't see why that shouldn't be the case here. More than that, there is more to story than merely plot, far more to be said than merely what occurred. One must build the pressure and the volume of water behind the dam, and engender love for all those who live in the floodplain, and you cannot do that with plot alone.
I do agree with you on the "Tolkien Effect." While he wrote my favorite book, I imagine he himself might be nonplussed with his celebrity status. For many authors I admire, I can assume that other readers of that personage will be kindred spirits; with Tolkien that's diminishingly the case since his readership is so vast.
I waffle on Faulkner a bit; I have grown to love him although that took lots of effort after many of deriding him. I tend to believe great art should be effortless on the part of the partaker —while it maybe challenges and provokes us, I dont think enjoying it should feel like work. Even a child can appreciate the William Tell Overture or a striking painting even if he doesn't understand them, because children can recognize beauty too. But to enjoy Faulkner takes a lot of practice and patience, to the point where I don't blame anyone for deciding they don't wish to devote those resources to him. And yet, he's a great author. Would I consider him better if he was a little more accessible? Would his works carry the same heft and he be as regarded as he is now? I don't know.
I agree. Great art should be effortless to consume. That doesn't mean that difficult art can't be worth our while. Effortless art is extraordinarily difficult and rare. Difficult art may be the best art we have on its subject, and worthy of study for that reason. Also, art is of its time and culture, and so art that was effortless when it was written may become more difficult with time, as Shakespeare has to a degree.
But then, of course, we have Jane Austen, who is as effortless today as she was when she first wrote. Dickens is not so far off either. And it is also a point in Tolkien's favor, though he is not so far from us in time as Austen or Dickens, that he is also effortless art. I do not count him as an artist on par with Austen or Dickens, but all credit to him for rejecting the drift into deliberate difficulty that was already affecting the literature of his time and has become so pervasive in our own.
For writers in our own time, I would say, don't try to be literary. Strive to be clear and accessible and tell a good story. If you have a vision worthy of the attention of future generations, trust that it will come through. But if you strive to be difficult and obscure to please the literati of the moment, future generations will certainly have no use for you.
Great read here! And I’m going to side with Tolkien as far as his quote was concerned. I think words and their pronunciated sound can be beautiful (or evoke some other emotion or mood) even removed from their attributed meaning. I don’t think it projects all the way to make a case that you should attempt to tell a bad story with spectacular prose. It feels cheap, like trying to sell a bad product with expensive packaging. But even if you shouldn’t, I would say you “could,” have good prose telling a low quality story. As the elements of a story aren’t directly tied to the words, rhythm, or even medium you choose to share the story. However, James Dyson said great design comes from how well all the elements of a design fit together, and I think all good writers would acknowledge this—that “good” writing is how all of these components are done well and come together in a way that adds to each other. In this case, how good prose accompanies a good story to make something “really good” (for lack of a better term haha).
In short, I wouldn’t read a bad story written in good prose, unless I was setting out to study good examples of prose (as an isolated exercise, not for enjoyment). But bad prose could keep me from enjoying a good story. Both would be required for a good “telling.”
I think the Dyson quote is on the money. Unfortunately, the novel is the most complex piece of art that any single mind can undertake, and it is rare to find any author who can execute all the elements of a novel well individually, let alone integrate them all perfectly. Even those who do it once or twice struggle to do it consistently.
And actually, I think this is true to one extent or another across the arts, and it seems like for the last century or so, all the arts have tended to become fragmented, with people choosing to build a genre around a single aspect of the complete art. Thus we have abstract art and atonal music and literary fiction that chooses to emphasize language and the psychological dissection of character over story, and various forms of genre fiction that choose to infinitely repeat a limited set of tropes with stock characters and themes.
And perhaps it is indeed true, and has always been true, that you can't consciously manipulate all the threads at once, and so you must lead with your strength and hope that you have absorbed enough of the rest of the elements to make a reasonable fist of them tacitly while your conscious attention is focussed on its main goal. For me, at least, that main goal should be story. I think it very possible that if you have read sufficiently and with the right kind of attention, that if you just focus on telling the story, fine prose will emerge in its wake. But if you focus on creating fine prose, I think the chances of tacitly creating a fine story are pretty slim. (BTW, Robert McKee said just this in his seminal book, Story.)
I agree. I love what you said about artists choosing to fragment and run full speed with one aspect and (at least seem to) disregard the other aspects of the whole. While there’s nothing wrong with that inherently, and I think isolating can help an artist hone one skill at a time, I prefer the literary works that aim to get 4-5 stars across all categories. What you said is true though, you can never get it perfect in every area, but that’s where writers (and all artists) have to find their strategic fit. How can I approach all the elements of a story in a way that lets my strengths and sweet spots as a writer shine? Im so fascinated with the process and what people come up with. Thanks for stimulating all these thoughts GM!
I think that when you are actually writing a story in English, you start to realize that word choice and phrasing are intrinsic to the telling of that particular story. What’s so very difficult is exactly that each word has several synonyms, but it’s the selection and arrangement of exactly the right words for this character and this story that creates tone and mood and grip. Of course you have to be able to imagine characters and devise a plot, but the telling of a story is in the words, and the words have to express that particular story sentence by sentence. That’s why it’s so very hard to pull off.
Yes, it is very much the case that as prose tells the story, the story shapes the context in which the prose is received. Think about some of the greatest movie lines of all time. "I'll be back." "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." These lines are not, on their own, great prose. Their whole impact, and the whole of the reason that we remember them, is based on where they occurred in the story: who said them, to whom, and at what moment in the unfolding of events.
And so, as you say, it is the selection and arrangement of exactly the right words, but it is equally the context that makes those words the right ones, that strips away all the myriad of meanings and rejects all the synonyms for the word that is right in the moment.
So, imagining characters and devising plots and choosing the words to tell the story don't just have to be done simultaneously; they have to be done in harmony. And so much of the effect in the story, so much of the emotion, so much of the affection, so much of the suspense, so much of the exact right words at the exact right moment, has to be set up long before it is paid off. You are not just clearing rubble as you go along to make a road; you are thinking about the roof of the tower as you lay the first foundation stone.
But at the same time, you can't do that with a blueprint, the way the "plotters" try to do it, because it is also a matter of discovery. In some sense, I think storytelling is deeply intuitive. I think one is born with or develops a story sense that keeps you on track or tells you when you have met a dead end. Because it all has two work together all the time. You can't layer it on one element at a time because all the elements work so imtimately together, the exact right words framing the exact right moment which in turn frames the exact right words which frame the character who in turn frames the exact right words for the next action and so on to the end.
Which is to say that writing a novel is a formal logical impossibility, and we should be gobsmacked if ever one of us manages to pull it off.
So basically the only reason to do such an all-consuming thing is because you have a mind that works this way whether you want it or not….Which likely means that you have problems with, say, knowing how you know what you know, because your intuitive perceptions are always out in front, and your rational understanding is always lagging behind.
Perhaps, yes. Except that if that is so, I think there are a lot of people out there doing it for another reason, which I can't quite figure out. But I think there is some important sense, at least, in which the artist is always asking, "Do you see it too?" and desperately trying to recreate that exact experience just to know if they saw it right. Or maybe it's not always that question, but sometimes, "Is this what you are seeing? Have I got it quite right?"
In any case, I believe in the priority of experience over ideas. If ideas are coming along at all, they better be lagging behind, because when ideas get out ahead of experience, we're all in trouble.
The would-be literary rule keepers like to say that the verb to be is the weakest verb. They could not be more wrong. It is the most powerful of all verbs. It is, indeed, one of the names of God. It is the isness of things that we go in search of. Not the ought, not the why, not the how, but the what, the isness of life.
Hi Mark, I struggle with this in my posts. As I write history, it seems more like describing the flow of a wild river rather than water built up behind a dam. But it still needs a story. Your points seem applicable to my writing as well. A fast flowing river cannot continue forever. It needs an estuary where it empties into a broader river or sea.
Yes, I think this is why so many people prefer to read historical fiction rather than actual history. The past is much more a wild river than it is a formally constructed dam. There are times, of course, when a landslide will block the river and water will build up behind it until it breaks through and floods the lands below. Those are the moments in history that people like best, but they are not representative of history itself. This is why I tell people that you can't learn history from historical fiction.
But even serious history has to make some concession to the human need for story. Story is how we organize our memories and our understanding of events (which is why eyewitnesses are so unreliable). Writing good popular history that is true to the nature of human events and yet compelling enough to hold the interest and stick in the memory of the ordinary reader is enormously difficult.
I find this line of thought interesting considering your previous essay about different types of novel: where you derided novels of ideas and held up novels of experience.
It seems to me that here you are holding up prose of ideas and, at least, dismissing prose of experience.
Not everyone has an ear for music, and it can be difficult to ignore meaning in words you know. Have you ever tried listening to the great poetry of a language you don’t speak?
My German is basically non existent but the works of Goethe have a beauty to the sound and rhythm of them separate from any meaning. Try finding a recoding of “die zauberlehrling“.
Or maybe a reading of Beowulf in the original language.
"Derided" might be a bit strong. My main point really was to urge a priority of experience over ideas, and thus to urge the value of the novel of ideas. I confess it had not occurred to me to distinguish a prose of experience from a prose of ideas. But if I had, I think I would have said that a prose of experience was concerned with the evocation of images while the prose of ideas was concerned with the expression of propositions. But you are using the term differently, using prose of experience to mean the experience of the sound of the words themselves. That's an interesting take.
Most of my novels are set in the Anglo-Saxon period, so I have, in fact, listened to parts of Beowulf read in the original language. Honestly, I can't say that I found the sound particularly pleasant. But I also think that when it comes to listening to words read aloud, the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the reader's voice seems to play a much bigger role in the enjoyment of the experience. There are people whose voices are a delight to the ear, and people whose voices are like fingers on a blackboard. How does one separate the sound of the word from the sound of the voice that reads it?
I typed up a response, but then it wouldn't post because it was too long. I pasted it into google docs, and realized it was 5 pages, almost 2000 words long :)
I'll have to see if I can trim it down to sane length.
I'm going to structure my thoughts around the notion that there are three different views of language and words that have been dominant in Western Civ.
I will call these views the Metaphysical Model, the Logical Token Model, and the Deconstructed Model.
In the Metaphysical Model, words can be thought of as "phonetic incarnations" of things. Real beings (things that exist) can be said to be instantiated as ideas in the mind and incarnated as words.
In this view the idea of the thing and the word for it are both distinct from the thing in one way, but also directly connected to the thing in a real way.
In this view language has been said to be "the house of being" real things are incarnated and dwell within the words that express those things. Even the statement "express the thing" implies that the thing itself is being made present and apprehendable by speaking the word.
In the Logical Token model, words no longer directly connect to metaphysical realities (things that have real existence) rather words are labels or tokens that simply represent concepts.
In this view, language has ceased to express things, and now only expresses ideas. The implicit connection, of course, is that ideas are also not an instance of things, but rather a purely mental phenomenon.
In this view, the word is simply a pointer to a definition and it is the definition that matters.
In the Deconstructed Model, language has lost all relation to things and to definitions, and words essentially do not have "pointing power" at all. They are not references to things or to definitions. They are simply tools to be manipulated to produce an effect.
In this view words do not "mean" rather they simply are. I'm here glossing "Ars Poetica" - "A poem should not mean but be". The following lines from the poem are also instructive...
"A poem should be palpable and mute, as globed fruit." - The idea being that the object fruit does not mean anything, it simply is. So should poems (and ultimately words themselves) should not mean, but simply be.
"A poem should be equal to: not true." The concept that words and language can be "true" is present most fully in the Metaphysical Model, but also still there in the Logical Token model. In the deconstructed model, words can no longer be true, because meaning is a prerequisite of truth.
The reason I wanted to establish this context is because I think it bears on understanding Tolkien’s view, and also the view of the Poets you reference, who are concerned only with the sound of the words, and not their meanings.
The current poets you reference I deem to be in the Deconstructed Model. As with all aspects of Postmodernism, this view is fundamentally obsessed with power. Because there is no inherent meaning, words cannot in that sense be “true” or be ‘the right words’. The only remaining consideration is are the words useful, which is to say, do they give power to accomplish what the author wants to accomplish.
In this view, the primary quality of language is that it produces effects in the minds of the hearers or readers. Essentially the primary job of language is manipulation.
In the Logical Token Model, the primary job of language is practical clarity, and in the Metaphysical Model, the primary job of language is to express, or incarnate, things.
Based on these characterizations I would say that the Metaphysical Model is Enchanted Language, the Logical Token Model is Disenchanted Language, and the Deconstructed Model is Language as Sorcery.
I don’t think Tolkien had much contact with the Deconstructed Model, though I am willing to be proven wrong if anyone has information that suggests otherwise. I think that Tolkien was living in a world dominated by the Logical Token Model, but that he, himself, was an ardent proponent and lover of the Metaphysical Model of language.
Thus when we turn to the famous / infamous Cellar Door quote, I think it is kind of an anachronism to imagine that this places Tolkien into the camp of the Deconstructed Model. In other words, I don’t think he has any intention or notion of implying that the meaning of the words (or their spelling, since that is also mentioned) doesn’t matter.
Rather, I think what Tolkien is trying to do is provide a corrective to what he sees as the degradations and abuses of the Logical Token model.
In the Logical Token Model, the aesthetic of language and words is generally disregarded in the interest of what is deemed to be practical clarity. Since the primary property of words is the definition, and the primary job of language is clarity, when two words have the same definition, it is always better to choose the more obvious, and common word.
In one of Tolkien’s letters, he refers to this attitude as “writing down, flattening, Bible-in-basic-English”. He believed that this attitude was robbing language of its proper beauty, and as a result it was producing people who had no love of language and words.
Tolkien’s own view of language was the old Metaphysical Model. In this Enchanted view, language itself is the source of magic. In the Essay on Fairy Stories (if memory serves) Tolkien talks about how adjectives are the original source of magic, because being able to abstract properties of a thing, the redness of blood, the swiftness of a horse, the strength of an ox, was prerequisite of thinking that those properties could be applied to other things.
I think that this view works particularly well for storytellers, because it reveals the truth that telling a story IS an act of magic.
In the Metaphysical Model, we can think of words “incarnating” things… but that means we can also recognize that different words incarnate the same thing, but with different manifestations. Tolkien goes into this example in letter 234, referenced above, using the example of the words “silver” and “argent”.
These words refer to the same thing, but they do not mean exactly the same thing. They both refer to the chemical element Ag. But they incarnate it in the world differently, based on both the aesthetic of the sound and also the aesthetic of the spelling (both are different and matter depending on the context).
In both Ag is incarnated, but in one incarnation it is Ag + Z (one aesthetic) and in the other it is Ag + Y (a different aesthetic). These different incarnations are not used in the same way, and they produce different effects in the reader / hearer.
If we apply the Metaphysical Model to the question of your article, is prose separable from story? I think it suggests that the answer is yes, but only partially.
If we think of a story as also incarnating something into the world, its own act of magic, I think it suggests that the story could appear under different guises. Each different guise would enhance different aspects of the story. Some, of course, might be totally unsuitable and simply make the story worse.
But what if the story itself is bad? The very fact that the Language as Sorcery model exists suggests that effective prose can be used to bad ends. The Deconstructed Model does have one thing right… Words really do produce effects in the mind of the reader / hearer.
The question is, are those effects congruous with the thing producing them, or incongruous? The Deconstructed Model, of course, would say there is no such thing as congruous, or incongruous. The Metaphysical Model insists that there is. In the Metaphysical Model, the good should not invoke the effect of revulsion. Likewise the evil should not invoke the effect of admiration. Those are incongruous effects.
Thus we come to a possible distinction between “good prose” and “effective prose”. Good prose produces congruous effects and speaks truly of the world. It employs skill to make beautiful what ought to be beautiful and to demonstrate the ugliness of those things that are ugly. Effective prose employs skill to incongruous ends, to make beautiful that which is ugly, and to make ugly that which is beautiful.
This is fascinating. Let me tell you how I think of words, and you can tell me if it corresponds to one of these models or is something different. First, we should note that the concept of a word is not precisely defined. If words name things, then some things are named by one word and some require two or more to name them, and that things that have a one-word name in one language may have a two or three-word name in another language or may not have a name at all. There is even a theory that what a language names and what it has no names for can influence the way speakers of that language think.
Second, my father liked to say that the smallest unit of meaning is the sentence. That is, words alone are merely signifiers; they just point, they don't make any claim. This accords with my pet saying that language is stories all the way down.
Part of the reason that the sentence is the smallest unit of meaning is that most words signify a range of things. Sometimes the things signified cluster around each other, and sometimes they are completely unrelated. You can't tell from a word alone which of these many referents it signifies. It signifies all of them. Only when you include it in a sentence does the big ball of wibbly wobbly referents begin to resolve.
And in many cases, a single sentence cannot fully resolve it. Something it requires a whole story to resolve it. And often ambiguities remain that even the author is not conscious of. In some cases, specious arguments are made that convince even the person making them because they have used a word in one sense in the premise and the same word in a slightly different sense in the conclusion.
Fully resolving a word to a single referent is really hard. Most of the time, we rely on context to resolve it -- not the context of the word in the sentence, or the story, but the context in which the story is told: the people it is told to and the circumstances in which it is told.
Furthermore, the overall impression that is given by a story is not the result of resolving a word to a single referent at all, but by triangulating its ball of referents with other words' balls of referents to create and image or an impression or an emotion that is not a referent of any of them singly.
In other words, only stories mean anything. Language is stories all the way down. Words are fuzzy balls of signifiers that have to be constrained and triangulated with each other to form stories in order to say anything coherent. And even then, they are coherent only in cooperation with our innate or developed sense of the real. Stories are not self-contained. They are inculturated. Stories are made up of references to stories, all the way down.
I worked in technical communication for many years, and there are fascinating studies in that field that show that people interpret instructions in terms of their existing mental model of a machine and will ignore the plain meaning of even the most straightforward instruction in favor of actions that make sense in their existing mental model, even if they don't work on the machine they are using.
Language, essentially, sits on top of a set of stories we have learned about the world and how it works. We hear and comprehend the stories that language tells in terms of the stories we already know. And indeed, were this not so, language would not work at all, because exact specification would be infinitely complex.
But it is, I suppose, because we do not ever fully resolve the wibbly wobbly ball of referents around every word that every story and every line of poetry has resonances, rather like the overtones of a musical instrument, overtones which make it beautiful or ugly to the ear.
And that, I suppose, is a large part of what makes good prose good, and why good prose is always good in the context of a story, though a story on what scale is the question that matters when one is talking about the prose of a novel.
There are a couple of ideas that this stirs for me.
First is the notion that words both reveal and also veil.
Based on my earlier post I could see the impression arising that in "incarnating things" words serve a purely revelatory function, but this is not the case. Words also conceal, or veil the realities that they contain.
You might almost say that there is something shy about meaning, or something intimate that is not meant to be simply displayed in its nakedness before the world. Rather the very thing that conveys meaning, also obscures it to a certain degree.
I think this meshes with your comments about imprecise nature of words and language.
I do think individual words have meaning, but that meaning is generally not precise. It is veiled and because it can convey multiple levels of meaning, it is unresolved until more context is provided.
Thus I think I can agree in spirit with the idea that sentences are the smallest unit of meaning, because they are the smallest unit that is necessary to resolve a meaning to a point where it can be clear enough to communicate.
Moreover, I would add that the imprecision and the multivalent meanings and layers of meanings in words are actually what make language so wonderful, so marvelous, and so powerful.
There is a reason why the idea of honing language down to a point of precision where there is a strict one to one relationship between words and definitions is a common feature of dystopian literature. It robs beauty out of life and it destroys peoples' ability to think.
There is similarly a reason why people enjoy good wordplay wherein double and triple meanings and layers of meaning are the primary tool.
I agree very much with the notion that language is directly connected to how we think and even what we are able to think. I have long been a proponent that languages are not created equal, but that some languages are particularly well suited to different types of thought, as well as different types of expression.
This is due both to the vocabulary of the languages, the stock of words plays a great role in determining what ideas can be expressed, but also the aesthetic of the language, because how the ideas are expressed, also matters. Is it expressed beautifully? mechanically? with nuance? or with bluntness? All those things matter.
The depth of meaning that can be expressed, depends upon, to a certain degree, the ambiguity and the multivalent uses of the words that are available.
I think this is also visible in that the mode of language used also affects what can be expressed. You can say things in poetry, that can't be said in prose. You can express things in music (which I would count as a kind of language) which cannot be expressed in prose or poetry. Music is the most ambiguous of meaning, but that ambiguity also enables it to express things that are impossible otherwise.
Second is that I believe the fundamental nature of reality to be relational. Reality is not, at the most basic level, a bunch of individual things all existing apart from each other. Rather it is a bunch of things all existing in relationship to each other.
Thus, while we can separate things in order to consider them individually, that is not really their "nature" or their "natural state".
I think this makes sense with what you are saying about words and sentences etc as well.
Meaning is resolved not by words only, individual and alone, but by words in relationship to each other. This is not a denial of the meaning of individual words, but rather it is a recognition that their various meanings and nuances are emphasized, or selected, by how we place them in relation to other words.
All of this reminds me of the topic of Mercury, the celestial lord of language for the ancient and medieval peoples. The metal associated with Mercury was quick silver (which we just call mercury). The celestial sphere of Mercury was held to be the governor origin of language.
The imagery of drops of quick silver speeding around on a plate, with the drops running into each other and combining, then splitting apart and darting off to run into other drops and combine again was applied to the art of language.
It is the image of words combining and dividing over and over to form new meanings and new expressions. Saying one thing, then another, and sometimes two or three things at once.
Excellent piece! I love your commentary on this topic. I definitely wouldn't read a bad story even if it had beautiful prose... but I also really struggle with good stories with bad prose. As an example, I really wanted to like Wuthering Heights but found the prose so repellant that I stopped reading it (and I understand that it's objectively a good story).
Perhaps this deserves more thought, but I've been thinking often of Eliot's commentary on the Metaphysical Poets of late. He writes about the unity of the "sense" and the "sound" of words and argues that the Metaphysical Poet is the poet who unifies these two elements. Words like "gillyflowers" sound like what they signify in a way that "carnations" don't. Eliot uses as an example Edgar Allen Poe's use of the word "Nevermore" in "The Raven," which he says has the right sound but not the right sense.
The most beautiful poem--and perhaps the most beautiful story--is the one wherein sense and sound are aligned. The beauty is in part in the alignment, which I think is why "Reader, I married him" packs a punch and feels perfectly phrased even though its objective beauty is less than striking. When the sense and sound are not aligned, it can create dissonance. Much like in music, dissonance, if done well, can be artistic and even beautiful; if done poorly, it can be detrimental to the experience of the art.
Wuthering Heights had so completely faded from memory that I looked it up on Project Guttenburg and found this:
"Joseph was an elderly, nay, an old man, very old, perhaps, though hale
and sinewy. “The Lord help us!” he soliloquised in an undertone of
peevish displeasure, while relieving me of my horse: looking, meantime,
in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of
divine aid to digest his dinner, and his pious ejaculation had no
reference to my unexpected advent."
So yes, I think we are on the same page here. :-)
As to the union of sense and sound, though, I am not yet convinced. Obviously, there are cases of onomatopoeia. But the very fact that we recognize such words as a special case suggests that such words are rare. I would be more inclined to think that the sound of most words is related to their sense only by the fact that we are accustomed to hearing that sound used in that sense.
I can see that rhythmically, certain words work because the emphasis falls in the right place, or they have a hard or soft sound where each works best. Thus my lament about Bowdlerized hymns that replace hard sounds with soft ones. I can see, too, that in certain cases a run of harmonious syllables can have a lovely effect. But if these things are what is meant by matching sound to sense, they are happening at the sentence level rather than at the level of individual words.
Then the question becomes, is there any more to this effect than rhythm or a happy babble of syllables? Neither of these are to be sconed, of course. I did not choose the phrase "babble of sylables" without attention to its sound. I suggested that gilliflowers might be rhythmically superior to carnations in Waugh's sentence. And maybe it also produces a happy babble of syllables in its context. But you are suggesting more than that, that the individual word gilliflowers "sounds like what they signify." I have no desire to contradict you on this. I think I would rather like it to be true. But then I find myself asking, "How does it do so?" and, "Is this effect universal or at least reliable?"
And on that note I am remined of Schubert's The Trout Quintet, which I think is a fine piece of music, and yet I don't think that if you played it to someone who had not heared it and did not know it name, that they would say at the end, "Oh, that piece is about a trout."
These are all excellent points! I think I mean something less literal when I say something "sounds like what it signifies." The strictest interpretation of that would of course be onomatopoeia. What I mean is something closer to the semantic field of a word or phrase being aligned to the intended meeting of the piece/story.
I again think that your "gillyflowers" versus "carnations" comparison is a good one. In isolation, I wouldn’t say that “gillyflowers” necessarily conveys more of what the flower is than “carnations,” but it does more appropriately convey Ryder’s delighted, boyish attraction to them. Conversely, it might be more harmonious to say that one left “carnations” at a grave than “gillyflowers.”
Perhaps a funny example, but I also like the comparison of this line from Hopkins’ “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe”: “I say that we are wound with mercy round and round, as if by air.” Hopkins’ image is so beautiful, conveying the sweetness and security of the gift of Mary to the whole Church by invoking the presence of air in the world.
Compare to a line by admittedly inferior poets, the British rock band Sweet: “Love is like oxygen.” Simple. Direct. In literal meaning very similar to Hopkins’ line. We have the substitution of love for mercy, but those two are intimately connected. But “love is like oxygen” sounds desperate. It highlights a different quality of air—namely, that it is necessary for life, that we are dependent upon it.
We cannot flip the two lines and retain the sensory meaning of either piece, though they literally mean very similar things. “God’s glory which would go / Through her and from her flow / Off, and no way but so. / Love is like oxygen: the same / Is Mary, more by name” simply does not have the same beauty. And Hopkins’ line does not work in Sweet’s song, either.
You make a very good point. It isn't about the reader's ability to picture the particular blossoms in botanical detail. In that sense, the species does not matter at all. Fiction isn't film, and it's not the picture that counts, but the impression of the picture.
I like to say that fiction is addressed to memory, not the senses. But the impressions of the senses are not photographic, and so neither is the impression of memory, but something else, something idealized, some compound of emotion and impression and hope and meaning. (I'm being very fuzzy here because I have a sense of something I can't put my finger on, and right now I couldn't be less fuzzy if I tried.) But yes, something about the word gillyflowers, though I cannot picture them, still plugs into that sense of the moment in a way I can taste but not define. But somehow with "gillyflowers," I have a sense of them gently moving in the breeze, whereas with carnations, I have a sense of them in bunches or buttonholes. And maybe that's exactly the point. Maybe that's exactly the semantic field of "carnations" and the reason it wouldn't work in that passage.
In other words, it's not just that words have multiple associations to choose from but that they have dominant and secondary associations. Things that lie close or further away in the semantic field. And so if you want the secondary associations, which are certainly available, you have to manipulate the context such that the association you want becomes the natural association. But if you can't do that economically, choose a synonym, even one with almost no semantic field at all for many readers, but one which has a sound that in some ineffable way fits the sense.
And if any of that makes any sense at all, then yes, all these elements play into the construction of fine prose. But it also remains true that the effects of prose are shaped by its context in story, and the same phrase exactly can be brilliant, banal, or downright oafish in different contexts.
And that fits exactly with your analysis of Hopkins and Sweet, I think. Thank you!
Didn't expect to see you a) disagreeing with Tolkien and b) actually convincing me to side with you against him!
I wouldn't call this a counterpoint, but a possible gray area, because the book in question has good story-bones, but it wouldn't be half the book it is--literally and metaphorically--without the method employed. Absalom, Absalom! would fill maybe 80 pages told chronologically, and it wouldn't be nearly as compelling. None of the reveals would retain their dramatic force. Faulkner's prose, circuitous method, and long meandering sentences elevate a straightforward Biblical retelling into a profound, mysterious, heartbreaker of a book.
Oh, I disagree with Tolkien all the time. :-) I come by it honestly. Tolkien belonged to the old school of English studies that was concerned with philology and wanted every undergraduate to be fluent in Anglo-Saxon. My father belonged to the new school that was interested in the interpretation of literature and the close reading of texts, and thought that learning Anglo-Saxon was a waste of time. Disagreeing with Tolkien was the default position in my house growing up.
And I grew up, and first read Tolkien, before he had attained the oracular status that he seems to have for so many people today. I tend to cite him more often than I naturally would because he is one of the very few remaining authors that you can confidently expect most readers to be familiar with. The current adulation of Tolkien, both as an author and as a philosopher (if that is the word), actually sours me on him slightly. I find much to admire in his work and his ideas, but not quite so much as I am expected to admire them.
I've never taken the time to acquire a taste for Faulkner. He seems to be one of those authors who requires a deliberate process of acclimatization, like learning to drink wine. But as I said, fine prose can be a great ornament to story, and I don't see why that shouldn't be the case here. More than that, there is more to story than merely plot, far more to be said than merely what occurred. One must build the pressure and the volume of water behind the dam, and engender love for all those who live in the floodplain, and you cannot do that with plot alone.
I do agree with you on the "Tolkien Effect." While he wrote my favorite book, I imagine he himself might be nonplussed with his celebrity status. For many authors I admire, I can assume that other readers of that personage will be kindred spirits; with Tolkien that's diminishingly the case since his readership is so vast.
I waffle on Faulkner a bit; I have grown to love him although that took lots of effort after many of deriding him. I tend to believe great art should be effortless on the part of the partaker —while it maybe challenges and provokes us, I dont think enjoying it should feel like work. Even a child can appreciate the William Tell Overture or a striking painting even if he doesn't understand them, because children can recognize beauty too. But to enjoy Faulkner takes a lot of practice and patience, to the point where I don't blame anyone for deciding they don't wish to devote those resources to him. And yet, he's a great author. Would I consider him better if he was a little more accessible? Would his works carry the same heft and he be as regarded as he is now? I don't know.
I agree. Great art should be effortless to consume. That doesn't mean that difficult art can't be worth our while. Effortless art is extraordinarily difficult and rare. Difficult art may be the best art we have on its subject, and worthy of study for that reason. Also, art is of its time and culture, and so art that was effortless when it was written may become more difficult with time, as Shakespeare has to a degree.
But then, of course, we have Jane Austen, who is as effortless today as she was when she first wrote. Dickens is not so far off either. And it is also a point in Tolkien's favor, though he is not so far from us in time as Austen or Dickens, that he is also effortless art. I do not count him as an artist on par with Austen or Dickens, but all credit to him for rejecting the drift into deliberate difficulty that was already affecting the literature of his time and has become so pervasive in our own.
For writers in our own time, I would say, don't try to be literary. Strive to be clear and accessible and tell a good story. If you have a vision worthy of the attention of future generations, trust that it will come through. But if you strive to be difficult and obscure to please the literati of the moment, future generations will certainly have no use for you.
Great read here! And I’m going to side with Tolkien as far as his quote was concerned. I think words and their pronunciated sound can be beautiful (or evoke some other emotion or mood) even removed from their attributed meaning. I don’t think it projects all the way to make a case that you should attempt to tell a bad story with spectacular prose. It feels cheap, like trying to sell a bad product with expensive packaging. But even if you shouldn’t, I would say you “could,” have good prose telling a low quality story. As the elements of a story aren’t directly tied to the words, rhythm, or even medium you choose to share the story. However, James Dyson said great design comes from how well all the elements of a design fit together, and I think all good writers would acknowledge this—that “good” writing is how all of these components are done well and come together in a way that adds to each other. In this case, how good prose accompanies a good story to make something “really good” (for lack of a better term haha).
In short, I wouldn’t read a bad story written in good prose, unless I was setting out to study good examples of prose (as an isolated exercise, not for enjoyment). But bad prose could keep me from enjoying a good story. Both would be required for a good “telling.”
I think the Dyson quote is on the money. Unfortunately, the novel is the most complex piece of art that any single mind can undertake, and it is rare to find any author who can execute all the elements of a novel well individually, let alone integrate them all perfectly. Even those who do it once or twice struggle to do it consistently.
And actually, I think this is true to one extent or another across the arts, and it seems like for the last century or so, all the arts have tended to become fragmented, with people choosing to build a genre around a single aspect of the complete art. Thus we have abstract art and atonal music and literary fiction that chooses to emphasize language and the psychological dissection of character over story, and various forms of genre fiction that choose to infinitely repeat a limited set of tropes with stock characters and themes.
And perhaps it is indeed true, and has always been true, that you can't consciously manipulate all the threads at once, and so you must lead with your strength and hope that you have absorbed enough of the rest of the elements to make a reasonable fist of them tacitly while your conscious attention is focussed on its main goal. For me, at least, that main goal should be story. I think it very possible that if you have read sufficiently and with the right kind of attention, that if you just focus on telling the story, fine prose will emerge in its wake. But if you focus on creating fine prose, I think the chances of tacitly creating a fine story are pretty slim. (BTW, Robert McKee said just this in his seminal book, Story.)
I agree. I love what you said about artists choosing to fragment and run full speed with one aspect and (at least seem to) disregard the other aspects of the whole. While there’s nothing wrong with that inherently, and I think isolating can help an artist hone one skill at a time, I prefer the literary works that aim to get 4-5 stars across all categories. What you said is true though, you can never get it perfect in every area, but that’s where writers (and all artists) have to find their strategic fit. How can I approach all the elements of a story in a way that lets my strengths and sweet spots as a writer shine? Im so fascinated with the process and what people come up with. Thanks for stimulating all these thoughts GM!
I think that when you are actually writing a story in English, you start to realize that word choice and phrasing are intrinsic to the telling of that particular story. What’s so very difficult is exactly that each word has several synonyms, but it’s the selection and arrangement of exactly the right words for this character and this story that creates tone and mood and grip. Of course you have to be able to imagine characters and devise a plot, but the telling of a story is in the words, and the words have to express that particular story sentence by sentence. That’s why it’s so very hard to pull off.
Yes, it is very much the case that as prose tells the story, the story shapes the context in which the prose is received. Think about some of the greatest movie lines of all time. "I'll be back." "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." These lines are not, on their own, great prose. Their whole impact, and the whole of the reason that we remember them, is based on where they occurred in the story: who said them, to whom, and at what moment in the unfolding of events.
And so, as you say, it is the selection and arrangement of exactly the right words, but it is equally the context that makes those words the right ones, that strips away all the myriad of meanings and rejects all the synonyms for the word that is right in the moment.
So, imagining characters and devising plots and choosing the words to tell the story don't just have to be done simultaneously; they have to be done in harmony. And so much of the effect in the story, so much of the emotion, so much of the affection, so much of the suspense, so much of the exact right words at the exact right moment, has to be set up long before it is paid off. You are not just clearing rubble as you go along to make a road; you are thinking about the roof of the tower as you lay the first foundation stone.
But at the same time, you can't do that with a blueprint, the way the "plotters" try to do it, because it is also a matter of discovery. In some sense, I think storytelling is deeply intuitive. I think one is born with or develops a story sense that keeps you on track or tells you when you have met a dead end. Because it all has two work together all the time. You can't layer it on one element at a time because all the elements work so imtimately together, the exact right words framing the exact right moment which in turn frames the exact right words which frame the character who in turn frames the exact right words for the next action and so on to the end.
Which is to say that writing a novel is a formal logical impossibility, and we should be gobsmacked if ever one of us manages to pull it off.
So basically the only reason to do such an all-consuming thing is because you have a mind that works this way whether you want it or not….Which likely means that you have problems with, say, knowing how you know what you know, because your intuitive perceptions are always out in front, and your rational understanding is always lagging behind.
Perhaps, yes. Except that if that is so, I think there are a lot of people out there doing it for another reason, which I can't quite figure out. But I think there is some important sense, at least, in which the artist is always asking, "Do you see it too?" and desperately trying to recreate that exact experience just to know if they saw it right. Or maybe it's not always that question, but sometimes, "Is this what you are seeing? Have I got it quite right?"
In any case, I believe in the priority of experience over ideas. If ideas are coming along at all, they better be lagging behind, because when ideas get out ahead of experience, we're all in trouble.
The would-be literary rule keepers like to say that the verb to be is the weakest verb. They could not be more wrong. It is the most powerful of all verbs. It is, indeed, one of the names of God. It is the isness of things that we go in search of. Not the ought, not the why, not the how, but the what, the isness of life.
Hi Mark, I struggle with this in my posts. As I write history, it seems more like describing the flow of a wild river rather than water built up behind a dam. But it still needs a story. Your points seem applicable to my writing as well. A fast flowing river cannot continue forever. It needs an estuary where it empties into a broader river or sea.
Yes, I think this is why so many people prefer to read historical fiction rather than actual history. The past is much more a wild river than it is a formally constructed dam. There are times, of course, when a landslide will block the river and water will build up behind it until it breaks through and floods the lands below. Those are the moments in history that people like best, but they are not representative of history itself. This is why I tell people that you can't learn history from historical fiction.
But even serious history has to make some concession to the human need for story. Story is how we organize our memories and our understanding of events (which is why eyewitnesses are so unreliable). Writing good popular history that is true to the nature of human events and yet compelling enough to hold the interest and stick in the memory of the ordinary reader is enormously difficult.
I find this line of thought interesting considering your previous essay about different types of novel: where you derided novels of ideas and held up novels of experience.
It seems to me that here you are holding up prose of ideas and, at least, dismissing prose of experience.
Not everyone has an ear for music, and it can be difficult to ignore meaning in words you know. Have you ever tried listening to the great poetry of a language you don’t speak?
My German is basically non existent but the works of Goethe have a beauty to the sound and rhythm of them separate from any meaning. Try finding a recoding of “die zauberlehrling“.
Or maybe a reading of Beowulf in the original language.
Sorry, technical issues posted this comment 5 times
"Derided" might be a bit strong. My main point really was to urge a priority of experience over ideas, and thus to urge the value of the novel of ideas. I confess it had not occurred to me to distinguish a prose of experience from a prose of ideas. But if I had, I think I would have said that a prose of experience was concerned with the evocation of images while the prose of ideas was concerned with the expression of propositions. But you are using the term differently, using prose of experience to mean the experience of the sound of the words themselves. That's an interesting take.
Most of my novels are set in the Anglo-Saxon period, so I have, in fact, listened to parts of Beowulf read in the original language. Honestly, I can't say that I found the sound particularly pleasant. But I also think that when it comes to listening to words read aloud, the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the reader's voice seems to play a much bigger role in the enjoyment of the experience. There are people whose voices are a delight to the ear, and people whose voices are like fingers on a blackboard. How does one separate the sound of the word from the sound of the voice that reads it?
I typed up a response, but then it wouldn't post because it was too long. I pasted it into google docs, and realized it was 5 pages, almost 2000 words long :)
I'll have to see if I can trim it down to sane length.
I'm intrigued.
I'm going to structure my thoughts around the notion that there are three different views of language and words that have been dominant in Western Civ.
I will call these views the Metaphysical Model, the Logical Token Model, and the Deconstructed Model.
In the Metaphysical Model, words can be thought of as "phonetic incarnations" of things. Real beings (things that exist) can be said to be instantiated as ideas in the mind and incarnated as words.
In this view the idea of the thing and the word for it are both distinct from the thing in one way, but also directly connected to the thing in a real way.
In this view language has been said to be "the house of being" real things are incarnated and dwell within the words that express those things. Even the statement "express the thing" implies that the thing itself is being made present and apprehendable by speaking the word.
In the Logical Token model, words no longer directly connect to metaphysical realities (things that have real existence) rather words are labels or tokens that simply represent concepts.
In this view, language has ceased to express things, and now only expresses ideas. The implicit connection, of course, is that ideas are also not an instance of things, but rather a purely mental phenomenon.
In this view, the word is simply a pointer to a definition and it is the definition that matters.
In the Deconstructed Model, language has lost all relation to things and to definitions, and words essentially do not have "pointing power" at all. They are not references to things or to definitions. They are simply tools to be manipulated to produce an effect.
In this view words do not "mean" rather they simply are. I'm here glossing "Ars Poetica" - "A poem should not mean but be". The following lines from the poem are also instructive...
"A poem should be palpable and mute, as globed fruit." - The idea being that the object fruit does not mean anything, it simply is. So should poems (and ultimately words themselves) should not mean, but simply be.
"A poem should be equal to: not true." The concept that words and language can be "true" is present most fully in the Metaphysical Model, but also still there in the Logical Token model. In the deconstructed model, words can no longer be true, because meaning is a prerequisite of truth.
The reason I wanted to establish this context is because I think it bears on understanding Tolkien’s view, and also the view of the Poets you reference, who are concerned only with the sound of the words, and not their meanings.
The current poets you reference I deem to be in the Deconstructed Model. As with all aspects of Postmodernism, this view is fundamentally obsessed with power. Because there is no inherent meaning, words cannot in that sense be “true” or be ‘the right words’. The only remaining consideration is are the words useful, which is to say, do they give power to accomplish what the author wants to accomplish.
In this view, the primary quality of language is that it produces effects in the minds of the hearers or readers. Essentially the primary job of language is manipulation.
In the Logical Token Model, the primary job of language is practical clarity, and in the Metaphysical Model, the primary job of language is to express, or incarnate, things.
Based on these characterizations I would say that the Metaphysical Model is Enchanted Language, the Logical Token Model is Disenchanted Language, and the Deconstructed Model is Language as Sorcery.
I don’t think Tolkien had much contact with the Deconstructed Model, though I am willing to be proven wrong if anyone has information that suggests otherwise. I think that Tolkien was living in a world dominated by the Logical Token Model, but that he, himself, was an ardent proponent and lover of the Metaphysical Model of language.
Thus when we turn to the famous / infamous Cellar Door quote, I think it is kind of an anachronism to imagine that this places Tolkien into the camp of the Deconstructed Model. In other words, I don’t think he has any intention or notion of implying that the meaning of the words (or their spelling, since that is also mentioned) doesn’t matter.
Rather, I think what Tolkien is trying to do is provide a corrective to what he sees as the degradations and abuses of the Logical Token model.
In the Logical Token Model, the aesthetic of language and words is generally disregarded in the interest of what is deemed to be practical clarity. Since the primary property of words is the definition, and the primary job of language is clarity, when two words have the same definition, it is always better to choose the more obvious, and common word.
In one of Tolkien’s letters, he refers to this attitude as “writing down, flattening, Bible-in-basic-English”. He believed that this attitude was robbing language of its proper beauty, and as a result it was producing people who had no love of language and words.
Tolkien’s own view of language was the old Metaphysical Model. In this Enchanted view, language itself is the source of magic. In the Essay on Fairy Stories (if memory serves) Tolkien talks about how adjectives are the original source of magic, because being able to abstract properties of a thing, the redness of blood, the swiftness of a horse, the strength of an ox, was prerequisite of thinking that those properties could be applied to other things.
I think that this view works particularly well for storytellers, because it reveals the truth that telling a story IS an act of magic.
In the Metaphysical Model, we can think of words “incarnating” things… but that means we can also recognize that different words incarnate the same thing, but with different manifestations. Tolkien goes into this example in letter 234, referenced above, using the example of the words “silver” and “argent”.
These words refer to the same thing, but they do not mean exactly the same thing. They both refer to the chemical element Ag. But they incarnate it in the world differently, based on both the aesthetic of the sound and also the aesthetic of the spelling (both are different and matter depending on the context).
In both Ag is incarnated, but in one incarnation it is Ag + Z (one aesthetic) and in the other it is Ag + Y (a different aesthetic). These different incarnations are not used in the same way, and they produce different effects in the reader / hearer.
If we apply the Metaphysical Model to the question of your article, is prose separable from story? I think it suggests that the answer is yes, but only partially.
If we think of a story as also incarnating something into the world, its own act of magic, I think it suggests that the story could appear under different guises. Each different guise would enhance different aspects of the story. Some, of course, might be totally unsuitable and simply make the story worse.
But what if the story itself is bad? The very fact that the Language as Sorcery model exists suggests that effective prose can be used to bad ends. The Deconstructed Model does have one thing right… Words really do produce effects in the mind of the reader / hearer.
The question is, are those effects congruous with the thing producing them, or incongruous? The Deconstructed Model, of course, would say there is no such thing as congruous, or incongruous. The Metaphysical Model insists that there is. In the Metaphysical Model, the good should not invoke the effect of revulsion. Likewise the evil should not invoke the effect of admiration. Those are incongruous effects.
Thus we come to a possible distinction between “good prose” and “effective prose”. Good prose produces congruous effects and speaks truly of the world. It employs skill to make beautiful what ought to be beautiful and to demonstrate the ugliness of those things that are ugly. Effective prose employs skill to incongruous ends, to make beautiful that which is ugly, and to make ugly that which is beautiful.
This is fascinating. Let me tell you how I think of words, and you can tell me if it corresponds to one of these models or is something different. First, we should note that the concept of a word is not precisely defined. If words name things, then some things are named by one word and some require two or more to name them, and that things that have a one-word name in one language may have a two or three-word name in another language or may not have a name at all. There is even a theory that what a language names and what it has no names for can influence the way speakers of that language think.
Second, my father liked to say that the smallest unit of meaning is the sentence. That is, words alone are merely signifiers; they just point, they don't make any claim. This accords with my pet saying that language is stories all the way down.
Part of the reason that the sentence is the smallest unit of meaning is that most words signify a range of things. Sometimes the things signified cluster around each other, and sometimes they are completely unrelated. You can't tell from a word alone which of these many referents it signifies. It signifies all of them. Only when you include it in a sentence does the big ball of wibbly wobbly referents begin to resolve.
And in many cases, a single sentence cannot fully resolve it. Something it requires a whole story to resolve it. And often ambiguities remain that even the author is not conscious of. In some cases, specious arguments are made that convince even the person making them because they have used a word in one sense in the premise and the same word in a slightly different sense in the conclusion.
Fully resolving a word to a single referent is really hard. Most of the time, we rely on context to resolve it -- not the context of the word in the sentence, or the story, but the context in which the story is told: the people it is told to and the circumstances in which it is told.
Furthermore, the overall impression that is given by a story is not the result of resolving a word to a single referent at all, but by triangulating its ball of referents with other words' balls of referents to create and image or an impression or an emotion that is not a referent of any of them singly.
In other words, only stories mean anything. Language is stories all the way down. Words are fuzzy balls of signifiers that have to be constrained and triangulated with each other to form stories in order to say anything coherent. And even then, they are coherent only in cooperation with our innate or developed sense of the real. Stories are not self-contained. They are inculturated. Stories are made up of references to stories, all the way down.
I worked in technical communication for many years, and there are fascinating studies in that field that show that people interpret instructions in terms of their existing mental model of a machine and will ignore the plain meaning of even the most straightforward instruction in favor of actions that make sense in their existing mental model, even if they don't work on the machine they are using.
Language, essentially, sits on top of a set of stories we have learned about the world and how it works. We hear and comprehend the stories that language tells in terms of the stories we already know. And indeed, were this not so, language would not work at all, because exact specification would be infinitely complex.
But it is, I suppose, because we do not ever fully resolve the wibbly wobbly ball of referents around every word that every story and every line of poetry has resonances, rather like the overtones of a musical instrument, overtones which make it beautiful or ugly to the ear.
And that, I suppose, is a large part of what makes good prose good, and why good prose is always good in the context of a story, though a story on what scale is the question that matters when one is talking about the prose of a novel.
Interesting and enjoyable!
There are a couple of ideas that this stirs for me.
First is the notion that words both reveal and also veil.
Based on my earlier post I could see the impression arising that in "incarnating things" words serve a purely revelatory function, but this is not the case. Words also conceal, or veil the realities that they contain.
You might almost say that there is something shy about meaning, or something intimate that is not meant to be simply displayed in its nakedness before the world. Rather the very thing that conveys meaning, also obscures it to a certain degree.
I think this meshes with your comments about imprecise nature of words and language.
I do think individual words have meaning, but that meaning is generally not precise. It is veiled and because it can convey multiple levels of meaning, it is unresolved until more context is provided.
Thus I think I can agree in spirit with the idea that sentences are the smallest unit of meaning, because they are the smallest unit that is necessary to resolve a meaning to a point where it can be clear enough to communicate.
Moreover, I would add that the imprecision and the multivalent meanings and layers of meanings in words are actually what make language so wonderful, so marvelous, and so powerful.
There is a reason why the idea of honing language down to a point of precision where there is a strict one to one relationship between words and definitions is a common feature of dystopian literature. It robs beauty out of life and it destroys peoples' ability to think.
There is similarly a reason why people enjoy good wordplay wherein double and triple meanings and layers of meaning are the primary tool.
I agree very much with the notion that language is directly connected to how we think and even what we are able to think. I have long been a proponent that languages are not created equal, but that some languages are particularly well suited to different types of thought, as well as different types of expression.
This is due both to the vocabulary of the languages, the stock of words plays a great role in determining what ideas can be expressed, but also the aesthetic of the language, because how the ideas are expressed, also matters. Is it expressed beautifully? mechanically? with nuance? or with bluntness? All those things matter.
The depth of meaning that can be expressed, depends upon, to a certain degree, the ambiguity and the multivalent uses of the words that are available.
I think this is also visible in that the mode of language used also affects what can be expressed. You can say things in poetry, that can't be said in prose. You can express things in music (which I would count as a kind of language) which cannot be expressed in prose or poetry. Music is the most ambiguous of meaning, but that ambiguity also enables it to express things that are impossible otherwise.
Second is that I believe the fundamental nature of reality to be relational. Reality is not, at the most basic level, a bunch of individual things all existing apart from each other. Rather it is a bunch of things all existing in relationship to each other.
Thus, while we can separate things in order to consider them individually, that is not really their "nature" or their "natural state".
I think this makes sense with what you are saying about words and sentences etc as well.
Meaning is resolved not by words only, individual and alone, but by words in relationship to each other. This is not a denial of the meaning of individual words, but rather it is a recognition that their various meanings and nuances are emphasized, or selected, by how we place them in relation to other words.
All of this reminds me of the topic of Mercury, the celestial lord of language for the ancient and medieval peoples. The metal associated with Mercury was quick silver (which we just call mercury). The celestial sphere of Mercury was held to be the governor origin of language.
The imagery of drops of quick silver speeding around on a plate, with the drops running into each other and combining, then splitting apart and darting off to run into other drops and combine again was applied to the art of language.
It is the image of words combining and dividing over and over to form new meanings and new expressions. Saying one thing, then another, and sometimes two or three things at once.