Writing Like We Talk: The Stylistic Implications

 

 

       The popular reception of Mark Twain’s writings prompted critics to view the depiction of colloquial speech in literary texts as legitimate art, enhancing realist, modernist, and contemporary fiction.  Yet such depictions require caution, for non-literary forms, when mingled with literary discourse, pose significant stylistic concerns. 

     Oral discourse, and the modes often associated with it--movies, television, and modern theater, for example--convey immediacy and emotion, characterized by pause fillers, emphatic intonations, and street slang.  Literary texts, on the other hand, connote cautious, planned, respectable language, the hallmark of intellectual society.  The polarity extends further:  composed of the best in language and thought, literature enjoys elite patrons and political prestige, such that many scholars to consider it a yardstick of culture.  However, decades of technological and cultural change have eroded the distinction between literary and non-literary discourse.  In the era of texting and emojis, steadfast adherence to literary convention risks archaic formality. 

     Knowing the forms orality takes in writing can help writers make more conscious sentence-level choices.  Quotes, perhaps the most obvious conversational marker, represent a decision to distance quoted material from the surrounding authorial voice.  Responsibility for the material, the quotes imply, belongs elsewhere.  Quotation marks, then, serve an important rhetorical function.  Employing them signifies a choice to call on outside voices, mingling a text’s literary quality with conversational elements that, depending on context, may indicate the writer’s deference to authority (and, by extension, intellectual private property) or create distance between the author and statements deemed unfit for direct association.

     To the extent that quotation marks signify extra-textual language, we may regard them as conversational.  However, not until the post-Twain era did writers develop informal conversation as a literary trope.  To glimpse the formality with which prior authors treated conversation, we might highlight the 18^th Century literary figure Samuel Johnson, whose biographer recorded conversations not in an immediate, emotional manner, but rather in planned aesthetic sentences.  Presenting conversation according to the literary standards of the day, the biographer (Boswell) eschewed the conversational markers (italics, pause fillers, fragments, etc.) that pervade modern texts.  By contrast, modern writers embrace features considered too informal by 18^th Century standards.  Italics, for example, disrupt the visual uniformity of text in a way that suggests drama and emphasis.  Pay attention to this, they convey!  Since writing offers other means of emphasis, such as placing new information at the end of a clause, italics constitute a decision to favor the immediacy of oral markers.  Beyond italics, writers might employ additional techniques.  Running words together (“whodunnit” for example) brings the hurried pace of oral discourse to a text by calling our attention not to the word but to the phonetic qualities of rapid speech.  Insofar as phonetics denote sound, foregrounding them implies a choice to create urgency via nonliterary means.  Similarly, the emotional tone suggested by fragments (i.e. “yummy!”) and the mental stumbles suggested by pause fillers (“um,” “well”), when written, bring emotional immediacy, imbuing the text with an improvised, even frenetic, tone.

     The markers discussed above present a key stylistic concern for writers.  Emphasizing a conversational tone through oral text markers often means denying the use of literate methods.  When a writer foregrounds orality to excess, so that, as with strung-together words, the text unintentionally reads like a comic book, readers may conclude the writer lacks control.   Accordingly, recognizing the features of both literary and oral discourse can help writers more fully appreciate how mode affects meaning.  Once chosen, a mode involves expectations and requirements.  Just as graffiti requires an illicit canvas, and loses its counter-culture impact if transmitted via Morse code or communicated through a TV commercial, so must writing intended as literature adhere to the expectations of the literary mode.  Here the aesthetics of the pre-Twain eras retain their value: while conversational markers can enhance a writer’s literary toolkit, they can’t in themselves substitute for literature.

Rhetoric in the Writing Classroom: Tracing an Ancient Heritage

 

 

 

 

 Mocked as uptight grammarians, more often typecast as junior-high schoolmarms than poetic personalities, English teachers, contrary to stereotype, actually continue a noble tradition whose origins date back to the Greco-Roman beginnings of Western civilization.  A scholarly anthology titled Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse explores this ancient heritage, linking today’s writing classroom with the great names in rhetoric from Greek and Roman times.  Noting the influence of such luminaries as Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian, the book traces the evolution of rhetoric through time, providing a fascinating perspective on how rhetoric and the quest for truth relate historically and inform English courses today.

     While “quest for truth” perhaps overly-dramatizes what writing students experience, Plato teaches that a spiritual element underlies writing pursued as an act of discovery.  An essay by Jeremy Golden elaborates: “the subject of knowledge. . .has as its starting and finishing points ideal forms situated in the mind of God.  The forms. . .represent the ultimate truth to be sought.”  Plato’s rhetorical forms--particularly the famous dialectic--function as yoga for the mind, deepening the awareness of dedicated rhetoricians.  The dialectic, defined as “purifying” process of refutation and re-examination, provides a strategic formula for clarifying ideas, developing arguments, and thinking critically.  Today, English teachers invoke a basic dialectic when they encourage students to write with a reader’s perspective.  Switching roles from writer-based text generation to reader-based text evaluation helps students clarify unstated assumptions and encourages a revision of content and phrasing that teachers might call “sentence truth.”

     Plato looms large not only for his direct influence on rhetoric but as a counterpoint for other thinkers who modified his ideas through time.  An essay by James Kinneavy describes these changes and their perpetrators: “on the issue of epistemology Isocrates directly opposed Plato. . .In speech after speech he inveighed against the type of theory and science represented by Parmenides and Plato.”  Similar to the Sophists, a group skilled at using emotional appeals and figures of speech to persuade audiences, Isocrates knew how style could influence jurors, and began a school dedicated to the intense practice of courtroom oratory.  Unlike Plato, he did not attribute a spiritual value to the theory of forms nor did he require true evidence to support his arguments.  Rather, the school emphasized imitation and manner, an approach which ultimately had a lasting effect on rhetoric and Isocrates’ place in history.  Says Kinneavy: “It was through these kinds of discourse, learned by an almost mechanical imitation, that most of the writers of western civilization in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance learned to write.  Isocrates, in this sense, is the father of western humanism.”  Though criticized through history for their emphasis on style over substance, the Sophists nevertheless exert an influence in the today’s writing classroom.  When English teachers call attention to model texts, literary tropes, and artistic devices (e.g., parallel structure, active voice phrasings, etc.), they echo Sophist principles that emphasize stylistic presentation.

     Other names deserve honorable mention.  The widely taught (and widely disliked) five-paragraph essay originated with Quintilian, a Roman who thought it the ideal form for courtroom oratory.  An introductory paragraph sought to win the sympathies of the jurors; a magic number of three supporting arguments sought to justify those sympathies; and finally the conclusion reminded the jury why they felt sympathetic.  Though criticized by many teachers as artificial and impractical, a form stifling to creativity and irrelevant to how actual writers approach real-world writing tasks, the five-paragraph model nevertheless exemplifies the enduring influence of classical rhetoric.  At its core, writing consists of assertion and proof, a conceptual movement from general to specific (and vice-versa), patterns the five-paragraph model emphatically reinforces.  Designed for courtroom oratory, the five-paragraph model emphasizes that writers function in partnership with an audience who expects clarity and organization.  The fact that English textbooks have devoted more ink to the five-paragraph format that any other organizational approach testifies to Quintilian’s legacy.

     The editors of the book conclude with a message for English departments in particular and academic institutions in general.  At one time, no departments existed in colleges, and rhetoric represented the main discipline.  During the Nineteenth Century, however, the Belles-lettres movement downplayed ancient rhetoric influences, advocating English studies in place of the classics.  The discipline of English severed from rhetoric (later the concern of Speech Communication) to the detriment of both.  While many attempts to re-unify the two disciplines took place over the years, not until the publication of Rhetoric:  Principles and Usage by Duhaumel and Hughes did classical rhetoric return as a subject worthy of English studies.  The challenge of rhetoric today, contend the editors of Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, is to unite disciplines previously in contention with one another, to the advantage of both.

     In light of recent instructional trends, the book perhaps offers an additional message:  proper writing instruction emphasizes the principles of classical rhetoric.  At a time when English teachers increasingly embrace identity politics, masquerading as sociologists while they discuss “positionality,” “asymmetrical power structures,” and other notions borrowed from post-deconstructionist, post-relevant discourse theory, the practical purpose of English courses increasingly diminishes.  Most students today express little interest in agitation propaganda. Juggling work, school, and family obligations, they seek not to disrupt the dominant paradigm but find a place within it.  In this regard they have much in common with the tunic-clad Athenian youth who, admiring Plato in 400 B.C., sought insight from “the good person speaking well.” 

Postmodern Nonsense Poetry: Liberation or Lunacy?

 

 

     Language poetry, often considered an offshoot of postmodern literature, occupies an obscure niche of the literary world.  The genre’s twisted syntax, mixing of registers, and grammatical ambiguities confuse readers, leading the unappreciative to complain that language poets write for an audience of linguists.  Defenders of the genre dismiss such criticism as ignorance of the poets’ true intent.  Language poetry proceeds from the assumption that “sensible” language patterns and literary techniques oppress the reader because sensible language reproduces the ideology of the status quo and its various manifestations:  patriarchy, consumerism, commodification, etc.  To liberate the individual within, readers must embrace the language of nonsense, which, according to linguist Brian McHale, allows us “to project on to the world of human culture a map for the reader to read himself or herself into. . .for finding our ‘selves’ in the hyperspace of postmodern culture.”

     The poetry of Charles Bernstein, rich with humorous nonsense, demonstrates how nonsense can function as an act of resistance.  Bernstein, whom many critics consider the leading voice of the nonsense movement, achieves his poetic aim by blurring the grammatical categories of the English language and by violating our expectations of literary cohesion.  In the resulting melee, Bernstein introduces a playful postmodern paradox, inviting the reader to construct meaning from text that constantly deconstructs itself.

     Blending disparate and seemingly exclusive discourse styles, lexical choices, and phrases, Bernstein draws on the idea, articulated in his own poetics, that a poem “work at angles to the strong tidal pull of an expected sequence of a sentence. . .giving two vectors at once--the anticipated projection underneath and the actual wording above.”  Subverting our expectation that literature cohere to a consistent theme, world, or voice, Bernstein challenges the long tradition of mimetic literature, presenting instead the premise that a text conveys meaning by our acquiescence. 

     In the poem “Live Acts,” for example, grammatical ambiguities force the reader to make interpretive choices, a process that begins with the title itself.  “Live” might function as an adjective, modifying “acts” and suggesting a theatrical moment, perhaps a stage performance in real-time.  Interpreted as a verb, however, “live” acquires a tone of command, spurring readers to embrace a lifestyle philosophy.  Depending on our interpretation, we might expect either a description of an entertainment event or a self-help treatise.  As we read further, a mishmash of different registers stumps our ability to discern a single speaker behind the poem.  Elevated and colloquial diction derives alternately from Latin and Anglo Saxon; words such as “redaction,” “somnambulance,” and “aquafloral” mix haphazardly with “hideaway,” “get,” and “cups.”  Such devices blur the boundaries between discourse registers.  “Live Acts,” placing under the umbrella of one text a range of expressive styles, contains all the speakers associated with those styles.  We have not one speaker but several, or perhaps none at all, as they seem to cancel each other out.  The reader can choose which voice--one, none, or all--to accentuate, and thus consciously participate in the constructivist process of representation.

     Where “Live Acts” calls attention to this process on the level of voice, the poem “Whose Language” invites the reader to participate in the creation of setting.  The poem, juxtaposing literal and figurative elements in a way that confuses the identity of either, presents a world that resists coherence to a sensible or expected point of reference:

 

. . .The door

Closes on a dream of default and

Denunciation (go get those piazzas),

Hankering after frozen (prose) ambiance

(ambivalence).  Doors to fall in, bells to dust,

Nuances to circumscribe. . .

 

Here Bernstein creates a metaphor--doors do not literally close on dreams--but the metaphor quickly dissolves, as its vehicle (“dream”) acquires literal qualities, since the verb “hankering” complements it and gives it an agentive role.  Normally, agentive nouns denote sentient, tangible beings--things capable of taking action.  “Dream,” in the context of “hankering,” achieves a literal, sentient quality, masking the figurative role typical of metaphor.  Rather, any figurative role it retains happens by reader consent.  It functions, in effect, as a free-floating signifier, awaiting a reader to grant it literal or non-literal meaning.  Realizing this, we might question our awareness of “door.”  Normally, the noun denotes a literal object; however, doors do not close by themselves, as the door in the poem appears to.  We know this linguistically because its position in the sentence--the noun phrase to the left of the verb--normally correlates with agent.  Thus, we cannot simply categorize “door” as the literal half of the metaphor, since it functions both literally and figuratively as a door and an agentive being.  Bernstein continues this process through the rest of the passage: “ambiance,” normally denoting something atmospheric and intangible, in this case achieves solidity--the adjective “frozen” describes it.  Similarly, the parallelism Bernstein creates between “doors,” “bells,” and “nuances” suggests some type of equivalency between the nouns---we can conclude that “nuances,” functioning as a parallel to “doors” and “bells,” also denotes something tangible, though such interpretation defies convention.

     In sum, the poem’s ambiguities--the blurring of the literal and the figurative, the equating of the intangible with the tangible--produce a world comprehended only though unconventional frames of reference.  But the unconventional proves liberating, allowing us to accept the strange sequential logic of the poem’s second sentence, “The dust descends and the skylight caves in,” which counters our normal understanding of cause and effect (we might expect dust to descend in the aftermath of a skylight caving in, but not concurrently).  Interestingly, once we dismiss our expectations of cause and effect, we realize the sentence never encouraged any in the first place--the subordinating conjunction “as” implies only that one thing happened concurrently with the other; it is our readerly expectations that force a relationship between them.  We realize that the cohesion of a text to the outside world derives not intrinsically from language but rather reader agreement.  By rendering this agreement conscious, via poems which resist unconscious assimilation to expected frames of reference, Bernstein places the reader in the postmodern position of seeing language as a meaning-making medium, rather than a meaning-containing package.

     Using linguistics to investigate the postmodern aspects of Bernstein’s poetry pays Bernstein the honor of close study.  Some might additionally investigate how language poetry violates speech act theory, particularly the maxims of relevance and manner, creating texts which subvert standard communication procedure. Others might investigate the poems phonetically, exploring what some scholars consider the poems’ musical wording.  Whatever the focus, such inquiries inevitably dwell on the linguistic fabric of the poems rather than their content, an emphasis that recognizes a fundamental aspect of the poetry:  medium provides message.  How we react to this depends on how much we embrace the postmodern relish for ambiguity, which Bernstein happily fulfills, granting multiple possibilities for play.  Thus, “Live” in the title “Live Acts” shuffles constantly between adjective and verb; “I” in the poem “Wait” shuffles unresolved between first person pronoun and third-person character name; and the metaphor in “Whose Language” continually deconstructs itself, as we decide which noun to label as figurative and which to label literal.  In the resulting nonsense, the reader finds the freedom that derives from conscious, active participation in the meaning game.

     Examining language poetry on a theoretical level proves easier than assessing the genre’s practical impact.  To say language poetry occupies an obscure niche of the literary world overstates its footprint.  The realm of anonymity in which most writers reside turns almost invisible in the neighborhood of language poets.  Most readers who discover the genre credit (or blame) academia, specifically graduate-level English programs, where the language poets’ metacognitive antics find a friendly reception among faculty heavily influenced by Derrida’s impact on discourse theory.  An enclave of the esoteric, the place known for producing dissertations nobody reads about literature few understand tends to glorify expression unsuitable for mainstream consumption.  But even English departments exercise caution in their approach to language poetry, treating it as a curiosity best reserved for graduate seminars and students versed in postmodern tropes.  For most students, such seminars mark the beginning and end of their involvement with the genre.  A small percentage might write papers about it, and of those, a select few might present at conferences.  The number of people who actually read it for fun might fill a cozy restaurant booth.  To nearby patrons, the conversation at this hypothetical gathering might well sound like gibberish.

     In my view, the failure of language poetry to gain mainstream acceptance says more about the limitation of the mainstream than the proficiency of poets.  Most readers, especially those with attention spans limited by point-and-click culture, feel little inclination for the metacognitive leap required by conscious participation in the meaning game.  Readers want texts to communicate content, and while literary texts might “tell it slant,” readers don’t want to fixate so much on the package that they can’t discern what’s inside.  Put another way, mainstream readers prefer passivity instead of partnership, message instead of metacognition.  They don’t want to render opaque a medium from which they expect clarity.  Herein lies the paradox of language poetry:  the more the genre asserts its poetic devices, the more it alienates those whom it seeks to liberate.  Artistically, the language poet treads upon a knife edge, where the appreciation of nonsense depends on the preservation of sense.  Asserting the primacy of the poem risks linguistic mayhem.  Catering to the demands of the mainstream risks a bland text incapable of provoking postmodern metacognitive partnership.  Step too far in either direction and the artifact dissolves.