Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Rand & Aesthetics 13

Style in literature. Rand's remarks on literary style begin rather innocuous and vague, but quickly take on more sinister connotations once she applies them as tools of criticism:




A literary style has two fundamental elements (each subsuming a large number of lesser categories): the "choice of content" and the "choice of words." By "choice of content" I mean those aspects of a given passage (whether description, narrative or dialogue) which a writer chooses to communicate (and which involve the consideration of what to include or to omit). By "choice of words" I mean the particular words and sentence structures a writer uses to communicate them.

For instance, when a writer describes a beautiful woman, his stylistic "choice of content" will determine whether he mentions (or stresses) her face or body or manner of moving or facial expression, etc.; whether the details he includes are essential and significant or accidental and irrelevant; whether he presents them in terms of facts or of evaluations; etc. His "choice of words" will convey the emotional implications or connotations, the value-slanting, of the particular content he has chosen to communicate. (He will achieve a different effect if he describes a woman as "slender" or "thin" or "svelte" or "lanky," etc.)

None of this is particularly objectionable or particularly insightful. The main criticism that could be essayed against it is that, in the hands of a malicious critic, the importance of a writer's style could be exaggerated and used as a pretext to malign great works of literature. Many of the greatest novelists were not particularly adept stylists. These include such writers as Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, Dreiser, and Faulkner, among others.

Rand proceeds to trot out two passage allegedly describing New York, one written by Mickey Spillane, the other by Thomas Wolfe. I say allegedly because the Wolfe passage is not really a description of New York, but rather, a description of the emotions stirred up within Wolfe's protagonist by the sight of New York. Rand, ignoring this distinction, concludes: "Wolfe's style is emotion-orientated and addressed to a subjective psycho-epistemology: he expects the reader to accept emotions divorced from facts, and to accept them second-hand."

The key term here is "subjective psycho-epistemology." In Objectivism, the term subjective has the same moral connotations as the term Satan has for a Christian fundamentalist. It is indicative of the deepest, most unregenerate evil. By claiming that Wolfe's works are "addressed" to a "subjective psycho-epistemology," Rand is suggesting that admirers of his work are afflicted with this very same subjectivism, and are perhaps deserving of psychological counseling, if not outright moral condemnation. Does Rand have any grounds for ascribing subjectivism (in the disparaging sense of the word) to Wolfe's admirers?

No, she doesn't. Wolfe presents a target-rich environment for the critic, because he was an immensely talented writer who often, alas, had nothing of any great importance to say. The best he could achieve was to write very eloquently (sometimes over-eloquently) of his own trivial thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Since many young people share or can relate to Wolfe's thoughts, emotions, and experiences, they are drawn to the grandiloquent poetry in which he expresses them. There is nothing in any of this to draw the sinister conclusion that Wolfe appeals to those afflicted with subjective psycho-epistemologies. All literature, to the extent that it appeals to emotions (and what literature doesn't appeal to the emotions?), appeals to the "subjective."

Rand takes her principle to even more questionable extremes when she writes:




Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end—the means of telling a story. The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

The typical literary product of such writers—and of their imitators, who possess no style—are so-called "mood-studies," popular among today’s literati, which are little pieces conveying nothing but a certain mood. Such pieces are not an art-form, they are merely finger-exercises that never develop into art.

While Rand is correct that style is not an end in itself, this doesn't mean that "mood-studies" are not an art-form. What is a lyric poem, but a "mood study"? Why shouldn't a lyric poem (or a lyrical short story) not be a work of art? We once again are confronted with an example of Rand making sweeping pronouncements about issues she doesn't know much about and hasn't thought through.

3 comments:

  1. In light of the fact that Wolf is conveying his/his character's emotions on seeing New York, this half of Rand's statement is more interesting to me than the subjective psychoepistomology part: "he expects
    the reader to accept emotions divorced from facts, and to accept them second-hand."
    Translation: his art describes emotions he wants the reader to experience, but that's filthy because the reader didn't generate those emotions themselves. Isn't this the point of all art though, even "Miss Rand's"? "Miss rand" wants us to identify with her ideal heroes, to own their values as the correct values. But we didn't invent those either, she did.

    P.S.

    Since I've mentioned H. P. Lovecraft in connection with this series before, you might be interested to know that Lovecraft was very interested in mood studies. He wasnt interested in people so much as phenomena and conveying the mood of the cosmically outside, as he might have said.

    Non-hypothetical Blind Guy

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  2. Rand had considerable insight into her own creative processes, and since she had to see them as the apex of rationality, she couldn't conceive of anything having literary merit unless it was written (a) on subjects she might have written about (b) the way she would have written about them.

    Yet the (b) her style was limited in my opinion by, for one thing, its strongly cinematic nature, and for another, her own limitations of language. She was not widely and deeply read, at least in English literature. Despite her entire fluency, her language lacks variety. The pains she took to choosing exactly the right adjective, for example, I've always felt could have been lessened if she were simply familiar with more adjectives - not just from knowing them, but from encountering them many times in different contexts.

    Or maybe adjectives in themselves, like everything else in her canon, were either rational and worthy, or or not.

    Caroljane

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  3. Rand had considerable insight into her own creative processes, and since she had to see them as the apex of rationality, she couldn't conceive of anything having literary merit unless it was written (a) on subjects she might have written about (b) the way she would have written about them.

    You give her way more credit than any human being deserves, and what you say almost hits the mar. She thought she had insight into her creative processes, but no one really knows how the mind works and psychologists continue to discover new facts about the limits of introspection and the ability of the human mind to link objectively unconnected events.

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