Middlebrow Literary Fiction on Substack

The forests are full of monsters

“The Auraist” is a Substack written by Sean McNulty.

“The problem The Auraist aims to solve,” he writes, is to find “the most stylishly, most humanly written books,” ones that are “beautifully” written, that aren’t put together by authors who are, in the word used by Rob Doyle, “lazy.”

“Expect a high tolerance for literary showing off,” McNulty writes under the heading “Criteria for our picks,” and he offers the following list of examples:

Jean Toomer, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, mid-career Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Lockwood, Megan Abbott, James Ellroy, The Red Riding Quartet, The Vorrh Trilogy, William Gibson, Consider the Lobster, The War Against Cliché.

He’s especially interested in “a rare kind of writing is that which combines linguistic facility with a quality that’s so unusual there doesn’t seem to be a widely agreed name for it, but which is sometimes called grunge or scuffed.” In that kind of prose “the writer has the confidence not to keep editing to an ever finer polish, but to do the opposite, to undercut their own polish with faux-sloppiness.” For that he gives another set of examples. “This combination of facility and scuffedness,” he says, can be found in:

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Riddley Walker, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, Jesus’ Son, The Man Who Walks, House of Leaves, and Kick the Latch.

There are two ideals here. The first is more fundamental, since the second depends on it. Personally, I don’t see much connection between Nabokov, say, and Gibson, but the overall outlines of the canon are clear enough: McNulty is interested in prose that might attract words like “lapidary,” “polished” (which are largely the same thing), “lyrical,” “precise,” or “meticulous”—perhaps with “faux-sloppiness” thrown in. It’s an ideal that has a history that goes back to late twentieth-century North American writing produced under the increasingly professionalized and uniform expectations of the MFA degree. Its advocates sometimes anguish over that, but more often this style—and the value given to style altogether—is an invisible sine qua non for professional advancement, reviews, and literary prizes, which McNulty names as The Auraist’s sources.

I would like to read more widely, and I would like writing to be more adventurous.

Since McNulty mentions Woolf, it’s pertinent that several Irish writers have recently taken up the challenges posed by modernism—not only Woolf’s but often Joyce’s, and in particular the sometimes pitilessly but precisely clipped language of Ulysses. I’m thinking of Mike McCormack and Eimear McBride. Her recent book, The City Changes its Face, is built out of small-scale fights with Ulysses:

Quick shift my stiffened body into his brought cold. Let the curtain drop and the streetlights maraud where it wills beyond the pane—wide beyond and across those civic realms where all, but we, reside. Even to where I saw earlier’s white sky through. Above the leant chimneys and further off too to where the tube must be. [p. 3]

This is close wrestling with a style that’s been around a hundred years, and already it is nearly beyond the shore of the writers and prizes McNulty takes as exemplars. (McBride won the Goldsmiths Prize—I mention that because not all prizes bend toward the same canons.)

One way to go farther afield is to include writers that don’t just “scuff” their prose but actually undermine it, make fun of it, or try to destroy it. “Martha hates it when I shape my sentences,” the protagonist of William Gass’s novel The Tunnel says. “She says it doesn’t sound sincere.” If you substitute “true” or “honest,” you’ll be getting close to the worlds of Beckett, who ghosted English partly to get away from the “everything” of Joyce’s style, or Paul Celan, who tried to pulverize German in order to keep writing it. “Style” isn’t going to be the right word to use for writers who attempt to hobble or ruin the language they choose.

And how about constrained writing, where the “style” is actually a result of multiple operations, in which arbitrary rules are imposed on ordinary prose, turning it into something so distorted that the author’s original narrative might no longer be legible? Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual was written using over 40 self-imposed constraints—words he had to put in every chapter, even if they interrupted or suspended the stories he was trying to tell.

On the floor, everywhere, the remains of the party: several odd shoes, a long white sock, a pair of tights, a top hat, a false nose, cardboard plates in piles, or crumpled, or lying singly, laden with left-overs—tops of radishes, heads of sardines, slightly gnawed lumps of bread… on a low table, various empty bottles and an almost entire pat of butter in which several cigarettes have been neatly crushed; in other places, a whole assortment of small triangular trays with various morsels still in them: green olives, roast nuts…

And so on for another page. The problem with reading passages like this for “style” is that a reader will be aware that some of the endless details are constraints Perec required himself to include, and others aren’t. “Bread” could be one, but so could “triangular,” or even “several.” It is not possible to be wholly sure even if you consult the scholarship, because Perec added extra constraints and broke his own rules so often. The result is writing where the word “style” is removed from its usual place as the author’s coveted possession and given to random or unknowable rules, which return a text that is partly not a “humanly written book.”

Then there’s writing that is so taxed by rage or anger that “style” is just the rhythm of its throat while it yells. I think of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Arts of Dying that way. She had control of several styles, but when she was writing about women’s wrecked lives the writing became choked and impulsive. (The photo is Bachmann, from this site.) In Malina Bachmann’s narrator loses control of her story and her sense of self and others, and it would be unpleasantly pedantic to talk about her “style” or “strategies.” Thomas Bernhard is so full of venom against his fellow Austrians that his characters can just rant until they run out of space or the book ends. The Prince in Gargoyles makes a speech that ruins that book’s structure by not stopping. Like the author, the Prince in Gargoyles despises most things he has ever experienced, and he is uncharitable even about the ways the people he doesn’t like die.

“There are people,” he said, “who die with the greatest decisiveness and are decisively dead once and for all. I too would like to die like that. But most people die vaguely, vaguely to the eye and vaguely to the brain. They are never dead. No matter what we amuse ourselves with, we are always preoccupied only with death,” he said. “That is essentially human,” he said, “that everything takes place in death.”

Bernhard has a famously recognizable style, but to talk about it you risk becoming the sort of optimistic bureaucrat of art that he so hated.

I’m making three points here. First, there are any number of styles out there to be emulated or avoided. The word cloud of stylistic criteria that gathers around literary prizes, “scuffed” writing, MFA writing, George Saunders’s empathetic prose, David Foster Wallace’s bleeding-edge word choices, and McSweeney’s often mannerist variations on those themes—is actually just a small subset of mainly North American Anglophone writing. McNulty’s two introductory lists are measurably middlebrow in relation to literary fiction. “Mid-career Cormack McCarthy” is especially telling because it omits the savagery of Blood Meridian and the echo chamber of the later work.

The Auraist’s sample lists align well with the world of literary prizes and writing advice here on Substack, but they are a walled garden in comparison to the wildernesses beyond. The infantile hysteria of Witold Gombrowicz, the jagged edges of Christine Brooke-Rose, the collages of David Markson, the alien hallucinations of Flann O’Brien—the forests are full of monsters.

The second point is that “style” itself should be a suspect category. It is determined by ideals that appear to be simply true or good, but need to be understood in particular historical and cultural contexts. If we lived in a century or a culture before modernism, there would likely be norms to follow (Cicero’s, Quintilian’s, Su Shi’s, Liu Xizai’s) but since the advent of literary modernism, there aren’t. In the absence of consensus, “style” tends to be the name of a conservative practice justified by institutions and the market.

And so—the last point—if you focus on your writing style you are apt to mistake the effect for the cause. Anger, frustration, skepticism, fetishization: those are feelings that bring style along the way a dinghy might be carried in a flood. Substack is a big place, and I’ve only been here a little while, but it feels too safe. If we’re going to take writing seriously, let’s open the gates.