Compos Mentis

On My Style

(Ed's note: Since high school, I've kept notebooks which I jot down any thoughts I get from time to time. Today I was sitting in a cafe in the bookstore in town, and wrote this. Since it has a lot of bearing of my mindset since coming to Oxford, I thought you might be interested in reading it. If you don't recognize someone I mention, either go out and read them, or just forget about it. I think I put enough information about them so that you can figure out enough about them.)



Most if the time, in fact, I don't think I have a style. I write essays, yes, and those essays just seem to me to be an outlining of the facts. I don't imagine how anyone could distinguish my writing from any other. I suppose one could proceed negatively. I try not to use jargon and restrict my use of technical terms to a minimum. If there is a question, I err on the side of readability, even if it costs me technical accuracy. On the other hand, I do not believe that my writing is marked by any sort of poetic beauty. This seems unjustifiably unfair because I write an unfair share of poetry. I believe writing poetry does improve prose. It has certainly helped me notice rhythm and the way words sound, but when I write essays or fiction it doesn't seem to come across.

All of my dabbling, of course, might be part of the problem. I write these essays, essays for credit in the university, poems, and so far several short stories, and half of a novel that I realized that I couldn't finish because it was merely background for the novel I am currently writing. In the back of my mind I also have ideas for longer works of philosophy and history, for which I currently have only notes. All of these require different voices; unfortunately, it seems to me that I sound pretty much the same in all of them. For someone less stubborn, the obvious answer would be to figure out which one I am best at, or prefer the most, and focus on that. I cannot. I cannot abide the thought of becoming a specialist. My curiosity gets the better of me, and when it allies itself with my ambition I find I am caught. It goes beyond writing. Not only do I want to be a philosopher, historian, poet, novelist, and essayist, I also want to be a world-renowned classical guitarist, composer, athlete, mathematician, chef, juggler, yogi, and lover to the extent that Tribolet will replace Casanova as the common designation for the profession. However, it is perhaps in writing where I still have furthest to go, so I worry about it the moist.

It is interesting who I model my ideal writer(s) on. Using the list above, I want to write philosophy like Bertrand Russell (his style, not his mentality or approach), to write history like Gibbon, poetry like T.S. Eliot (or, on some days, like Milton), novels like Umberto Eco, and essays like Barthes. Sometimes I think I would be better off defining what I want by who I don't want to imitate; in that case, it would be: Hegel, Suetonius, Donne (though I love him), Hugo, and Montaigne. I fear that the only way I could come close to achieving that kind of diversity of style is to be struck with dissociative personality disorder.

There are questions that come up naturally here, too. Why would I hope to write in the style of Russell when I disagree with so much of his thought? Isn't there a connection between style and message? Is it reasonable to want to write history like an eighteenth century historian? Then there is the problem of Eco. I find his novels read very much like his philosophy and his essays. They have similar sentence structure and similar pattern of reasoning. Yet, I don't want to imitate his philosophy or his essays. Moreover, his style is tinged with post-modern irony. He has an incredible way of using intertextual methods in his work. As a result, his works are less clear, less in the 'realist' tradition than Russell, certainly, and even Barthes when compared to say, Lacan or Derrida. If I had to pick a novelist who I could imitate in the 'realist' tradition, I could choose Dostoevski, or any other Russian novelist. This is one of the hardest things for me to overcome, should I achieve what I am hoping, because so far I have written fiction the way I write essays, and at this point I am unclear about how I would incorporate what I like of Eco's style into my own. I suppose I could just credit it to a level of maturity in his writing: he was decades older and a far more experienced writer when he first worked on The Name of the Rose. Not to mention that he was far more well read. Perhaps I should read more Joyce, whom Eco cites as being the source of his style. Of course, Joyce was a published author at my age.

The only solution to my problem, I know, is just to continue to read and to continue to write. That way, I will learn what works and what doesn't. It already has, in fact; I can't help but wince at some of the things I wrote even three years ago. Sometimes, though, it brings pitfalls. I'm reading Lacan's Ecrits, and am overwhelmed by his broad knowledge. I suppose I should be excited, to realize that it is still possible to be a generalist (of sorts) today. After all, that's what I want, right? Instead, I felt buried by the weight of all I still want to learn, discover, and write, and I feel, even now, that I don't have enough time to do it all. I suppose, though, I should just add one to my list: I want to write lectures like Lacan. As for the rest? I suppose I should cheer up. After all, Rimbaud had only written about half of his poetry before he was my age. I still have time to catch up.

posted by Emmett @ 10:09