October 16, 2023
The Place of Style in Thinking about Literature
Today’s post – “The Place of Style in Thinking about Literature” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn and here is his own blog.
Art is contact with the inhuman that dwells in all of us: be it the animalistic and abject subhuman – as in Lautréamont, Clive Barker, Artaud, Pierre Guyotat – or the angelic and sanctified superhuman – as in the biblical psalmist, Rōdhakī, Hāfez or Petrarch. Style, therefore, is not a form of individual expression, externalization of the soul, exposition of a supposed interior, but the making up of a just form (fair, as in Law, fit, as in Fashion). This form is just because it is homologous to the world, it follows the same logic as the world (homo-logos): as obscure, dense and impenetrable as the matter of the day.
Style, therefore, is the way to make things – ideas, beings, moments – last in time, which means that language also lasts to allow this lasting. It thus opens up the chance for a reader to place their own time transversely in the timed chronometer of work and routine.
Style and Thinking Literature
That’s why I’m surprised that some people always read the same works made up of appeased, well-thought-out and well-spoken, rhetorically polished languages from the 18th and 19th centuries. Certainly the latter was the century of consolidation of what we call and understand as literature, but that doesn’t mean that we can reduce it only to its more domesticated manifestations.
To put it bluntly: We can’t always read the same texts and authors that everyone has already read and that we absorb almost by social osmosis.
Take a reading group as an example. If its function is to make known, let’s not think that this is limited to making contact with the works. Additionally, let’s also think about understanding them, getting to know them, generating knowledge from reading literature – this almost heretical attitude for today’s world, in which that which does not entertain should not be included in the list of the arts, but should be relegated to the scientific sphere.
On the contrary: Literature makes us know and generates knowledge, even if it’s just the tiniest grain of human existential knowledge.
From Literature to Litterature
This can only be seen in the challenging works of the 19th and 20th centuries, in that great drama of language that has come to be called style. Style is not reducible to beautiful phrasing, precious vocabulary, well-behaved rhyming – the disobedient dog is just as much a dog as the one at home and perhaps reveals more of its canine nature to us than its tamed and obedient sibling.
Because style responds to the anguish and shame of running out of words from using everyone’s language so much, which, because it only lets everyone speak what is common to all, is no longer anyone’s language and doesn’t give the world a minimally true (honest, sincere, fair, adequate) image.
Style is an answer with a question’s flavor: how to speak, with what words, in what way, when all learned and internalized language seems unfair and plain false? The writer, author, producer – not of content but of a writing – finds themself in this struggle to invent a language.
If we read the same authors over and over again, we will only reach a nation of two or three authors who are repeated to exhaustion. However, in view of the flood of works translated into Portuguese and their immense consumption, their much higher sales than national titles, we are heading for a worse situation.
Indeed, we’ll lose even the usual big names and we’ll be buried under rubbish literature – litterature, this mass of entertainment made with words, which sells a lot and fills the video reviews of booktubers and bookstagrammers (and the fact that they are video reviews should already denounce how far we are from the world of the written word that originally engendered literature).
Understand me well: I enjoy erotic fiction, science-fiction, detective investigations, but I also understand the value of Julian Ríos’ Poundemonium, Jacobo Fijman’s Red Mill, Paul Celan’s Schneepart, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Beckett’s uncertain narrators, Raduan Nassar’s Cup of Rage, Salim Miguel’s Submerged Voice, Adolfo Boos Jr.’s Quadrilateral, Herta Müller’s Leaning King, the diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus (who owed nothing to Lispector, contrary to commonplace comparisons; just check out the two volumes of Brick House).
The Invention of (a) Language
Inventing a language doesn’t just mean playing inconsequentially with morphemes, phonemes and syntactic arrangements. Although even that is on the wane these days, we no longer produce in terra brasilis great ungrammatical jokers like Manoel de Barros (in poetry) and Salim Miguel (in prose). We have to lower our heads to crooked ploughs, pretending that they satisfy us with their 5th-grade anthropology and 1930s sociological realism that even Graciliano Ramos had already surpassed in S. Bernardo and, more famously, in Barren Lives.
Art, as I said, is contact with the Evil (with a capital E) that inhabits us and that we know inhabits everyone, the underlying impurity that prevents us from any delirium of purity. This contact doesn’t come in the form of a cure, a remedy for our guilty conscience, but as the communicable form of this conscience, the act of taking this knowledge seriously and to its ultimate consequences.
That’s why literature is not a cure, but a treatment, more psychoanalysis than medicine: It can’t remove this inhuman Evil from us, it can only help us to admit it exists within and without, and have the words to say it, find it, identify it and get to know it.
Style Is Thinking about Literature in Terms of Breaking
Style is that breaking, that restlessness, that touch with the less-than-human – or the more-than-human, because angels also showed themselves in fearful visions – that hardness, that difficulty, whether due to excess, as in the Babel-ish languages of the last Joyce and Julian Ríos, in the suffocating encyclopedism of Joseph Heller and Pynchon, or due to an almost quiet void, as in the crystallized figures of Mallarmé, the failed repetitions of Beckett, the reticence of Ungaretti or the silence into which the final poetry of Pizarnik and Celan fall, or even the absurd figures of word and gesture of Kafka, Ionesco, Novarina.
Therefore, style is not a function of entertainment, but of the just formulation of a language capable of telling the existential truth, anguish and joy, in their proper measures, not a cosmetic varnish to tolerate the intolerable, but the opposite, the very living flesh of the poet transformed into transmissible matter, the vicarious experience that can be made of this exposure.
The Subterranean Tremor
Style is also this subterranean tremor (or that light descending from the heavens) that molds language towards something simultaneously below and beyond expression, because a good short story or a great novel doesn’t matter because of the real (or imagined) death of one of the author’s relatives, but only because of the death that can be experienced through reading that text.
As I said, something below expression: Literature concerns us all, it touches us, it reaches us, and if we can identify with the characters and narrators, it’s only because it carries, in its language, characteristics, marks that produce a personality, a psyche, a subjectivity.
Beyond expression: It’s that world of interactions between characters, feelings, associations between events, between words, between events and words that we can’t summarize no matter how hard we try.
It’s that singular narrative consciousness that seems to surpass us in every book, because language carries, hidden in its womb, the accumulated wisdom of everyone who has ever spoken it and written it, like a great collection or archive of all the humanity that has inhabited that language.
And here’s an improvised example, in the form of a flash fiction story.
An Example: “Cavemen Poetry”
The gang saw an ant’s leg, neglected, in the bush. It was very important to us. The leg was still moving. I’d say that this leg, which was despised and still moving, was looking for the other part of its body, which should be nearby. I think the rest of the ant, at that time of the Sun, would already be inside the anthill being mourned. Or maybe the rest of the body was looking for that disregarded leg. No one saw what caused the body to split up with the overlooked leg.
A few people were passing by, on that piece of land, and nobody saw the despised leg. We all went looking for the main chunk of the ant.
Because, come to think of it, the rest of the ant was the despised leg. We went to the riverbank, but all we found were bits of green leaves carried by new ants. We then realised the new ants carrying the leaves on their shoulders were going to the anthill to attend the memorial service for the other part of the ant.
But we decided to take a dip in the river instead.
Style, Thinking, Literature
In this way, we can understand that art is a public space in the fundamental sense of the word: a space where everyone can enter, where everyone can collaborate and where everyone is equal in the fact that they are different from each other.
For this reason, because it is radically public, art is language, because human languages (and all other languages) are based on this general and open, unrestricted participation. Language, therefore, brings about another kind of thinking that isn’t the mathematical-representational thinking of the techno-centered mentality – be it the operator of a law office or the operator of a backhoe loader, both reduced to a pre-thinking position.
Rather, language – art – remains irreducible to this bureaucratic logic and opens the door to the non-identical. In this, perhaps, art does what is popularly called “humanization” – the sole function of art, but one which deserves some other better name (fairer, more appropriate, more correct, more just) than this.
Perhaps the dehumanization or inhumanization of the human, because language is the place where everything comes together (and disperses), where human attention throws itself into the world and tries to bring it back in the same way that it pushes it away by naming it. The world is given (and taken away) by language.
Style, thinking, literature.
Language.