Why does current ‘literary’ style dictate the slaughtering of adjectives, the press-ganging of nouns into slavery as verbs, and the Procrustean truncation of sentences to a maximum of two lines? Why are we meant to eschew lavish application of flourishes and go straight for the ‘punchy’ sentence, until the surface of the text is stretched out to a bronzed, quivering patina?
Let me suggest: it has more to do with current Western politics than with any intrinsic literary merit.
We like to think that the perfect society is harmoniously balanced in an almost organic unison of controlled precision which allows within its fertile parameters a flowering of imagination and individuality of miraculous scope. Well… by ‘we’ I mean some sort of nebulous Capitalist idealism. Most importantly, this idealism has to at least seem ‘genuine’. It must appear to be accessible to the voting masses. It must present an honest, hardworking (yet pulled-up-by-the-bootstraps-till-glamorous) front – dependable, solid, and above all supposedly easy to understand.
It’s by no means the same everywhere. In Eastern Bloc countries the ability to keep hold of the reins of a two-page sentence without misplacing a subject or a verb can be considered the height of good breeding and education. The message of the sentence itself is of little importance in comparison. (Translations into English tend to fare badly.) In Japanese: allusion, implication and tweezer-precise application of vocabulary tower over sentence structure and grammar. In the Middle East: rhythm, harmony of sound, and an exuberant demonstration of textual erudition carry the day.
These are of course gross over-simplifications.
But next time you agonize over the last adverb or that sub-clause you simply can’t bear to annihilate, consider. What are you really saying with your sentence structure?
--- FIRST PUBLISHED AT WRITERS ABROAD BLOG JULY 27th 2015 ---