{"id":1124,"date":"2015-11-17T13:21:36","date_gmt":"2015-11-17T11:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1124"},"modified":"2015-11-17T13:21:36","modified_gmt":"2015-11-17T11:21:36","slug":"the-writers-view-on-style-a-passage-by-r-l-stevenson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2015\/11\/17\/the-writers-view-on-style-a-passage-by-r-l-stevenson\/","title":{"rendered":"THE WRITER\u2019S VIEW ON STYLE: A PASSAGE BY R.L. STEVENSON <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was planning to write a post today on what I have seen and heard in the recent XXXIX AEDEAN conference (11-13 last week) but this needs a bit of careful thinking I have no time for today. Unexpectedly\u2013because it often happens that I end up writing about something that I never thought I would consider\u2013I have woken up with this urge to write about R.L. Stevenson. I have already written plenty about the text by him which I teach every year, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde<\/em>, but today I\u2019m dealing with something quite different: the article \u201cA Note on Realism\u201d (1883, Magazine of Art<\/em>), included in the volume Essays in the Art of Writing<\/em>, which you can download from https:\/\/ebooks.adelaide.edu.au\/s\/stevenson\/robert_louis\/s848aw\/index.html<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This is a passage I have often used in class, as I did yesterday (forgive the long quotation):<\/p>\n

Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character from end to end\u2014these, which taken together constitute technical perfection, are to some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage. What to put in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable riddle to propound.
\n<\/em>
\nTo begin with, I find it a great pleasure to read texts about the craft of writing penned by the authors themselves. I would make it compulsory for all kinds of literary work to carry a writer\u2019s comment in the style of the director\u2019s comments on the DVD and Blu-Ray editions of films. Interviews would also do. I miss very much the many presentations by writers the Barcelona British Council used to offer, because they gave me the chance not only to collect autographed books but to hear authors discuss in person the tricks and challenges of their trade. At one point I asked the British Council whether we could edit a volume with the transcriptions of these presentations but the task was so gigantic that we soon abandoned the idea. I was at the time fascinated by the series of volumes offering interviews with major writers published by the Paris Review<\/em> (now online http:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/interviews<\/a>). I still am.<\/p>\n

Anyway, back to Stevenson. Consider what he says: talent (i.e. \u201cpassion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour\u201d) is innate but style, the \u201cmark of any master\u201d can be learned and even \u201cimproved at will\u201d. He speaks next of working on \u201cthe just and dexterous use of what qualities we have\u201d to reach \u201ctechnical perfection\u201d which is, in his view, \u201cto some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage\u201d. I may be misreading but my impression is that Stevenson is here over-optimistic in the sense that, correct me if I\u2019m wrong, but \u2018industry\u2019 and \u2018intellectual courage\u2019 also depend on inborn qualities. <\/p>\n

Let me rephrase this: if a writer is born with talent that amounts to 80% of what is required to become a \u2018master\/mistress\u2019, the 20% that depends on hard work will also depend on their having the required innate capacities to make the best of their talent. Inborn talent + limited ability to develop style = not a master\/mistress (or an oxymoron). And the other way round: if a writer is born with a 20% talent for producing good writing, there is no way s\/he can \u2018learn\u2019 the remaining 80%, as acquiring skills cannot compensate for limited innate talent. Or, as Stephen King argues, creative writing courses can help only if you already have a natural talent; ergo, only those with a natural talent are in a position to complement it with the \u2018industry\u2019 required to polish it into producing outstanding writing. <\/p>\n

Stevenson does not seem to think that there is a direct link between the inborn talent and the subsequent industry (unless I misunderstand him) because he apparently thinks that the hard work he does on his texts should have similar results for all writers, which is not the case. His style is not a \u2018natural\u2019 product in the sense that, as I taught my students yesterday, he wrote Jekyll and Hyde in a six-day fever but spent then six weeks re-writing the text. This re-writing, the search for style and \u2018technical perfection\u2019 which he describes in the passage is what makes the work outstanding\u2013both, I\u2019ll insist, depend on inborn abilities. The ability to reach \u2018technical perfection\u2019 can be improved but not learned from scratch and much less in the absence of inborn talent. Now, what exactly causes some individuals to be naturally inclined to producing good writing is a mystery. Perhaps one day scientists will discover that it is a mutation.<\/p>\n

The features that Stevenson describes as contributing to \u2018technical perfection\u2019 will surely remind you of Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s Twice-Told Tales<\/em> (1842) and his defence of \u201cthe unity of effect or impression\u201d (he\u2019s actually discussing poetry). \u201cThe true critic\u201d, he writes in defence of the short story, \u201cwill but demand that the design intended be accomplished, to the fullest extent, by the means most advantageously applicable\u201d. This is what Stevenson seems to bear in mind when he writes that \u2018technical perfection\u2019 consists of \u201cthe proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character from end to end\u201d. <\/p>\n

This was useful for me to remind students that Victorian writers who serialized their work for as long as it could find an audience (Charles Dickens) or those forced to fill in a three-decker (Anne Bront\u00eb) could not afford the luxury of trimming their texts as both Poe and Stevenson recommend. It seems then that both the short story and the novella (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde<\/em> is one) clashed with the novel in this sense until the one-volume novel became the norm (in 1894, when Mudie\u2019s and Smith\u2019s refused to distribute three-deckers). The famous designers\u2019 rule that \u2018less is more\u2019 (according to Wikipedia adopted in 1947 by minimalist architect Mies van der Rohe but first found in Robert Browning\u2019s poem \u201cAndrea del Sarto\u201d of 1855) also applies, then, to Literature. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde<\/em> is, in that sense, an absolute masterpiece\u2013whereas the other novella I teach, Heart of Darkness, would be by Stevenson\u2019s standards in need of some pruning for its verbal flamboyance.<\/p>\n

I agree wholeheartedly that trimming and pruning are essential tools for good writing\u2013no matter how frustrated I feel every time I am asked to reduce my articles\u2026 The mystery, then, is why the current dominant trend in fiction writing is not the pared-down text that Ian McEwan is so fond of but the sprawling series. I wonder what Stevenson would think of Martin\u2019s A Song of Ice and Fire<\/em>, now reaching its sixth volume and nineteenth year as I do wonder how Martin values style\u2026<\/p>\n

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just remember that I check them for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be available. Follow on Twitter the blog updates: @SaraMartinUAB. You may download the yearly volumes from http:\/\/ddd.uab.cat\/record\/116328. See my publications and activities on my personal web http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/
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I was planning to write a post today on what I have seen and heard in the recent XXXIX AEDEAN conference (11-13 last week) but this needs a bit of careful thinking I have no time for today. Unexpectedly\u2013because it often happens that I end up writing about something that I never thought I would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,18,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde","category-general","category-victorian-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}