It’s not always fun and games here at the camp.
Oh no.
A recent example of this would be the annual raft race, held just a couple of weeks ago, when one of the counselors had the brainwave of rubbing pigs’ blood into the bindings of an opposing team’s raft and letting 200 piranha loose in the lake.
A funny prank, sure, but try telling that to the parents who collected their kids only to find that their little darlings were now a couple of inches shorter and are only capable of communicating by screaming the phrase “The tooth-fish, the tooth-fish; mummy make them stop!”
The lawsuits are stacking up as I speak.
I mention this incident only to show the way that things don’t always run smoothly here and so prepare the way for a note of dissent. I feel the strong and urgent need to register my disagreement with one of the columnists from the last issue of Camp Horror. Or at least to offer the opposing side of the pretty one-sided argument that was offered up. That it was the same counselor who sabotaged my raft and is responsible for my three missing toes and my recurring nightmares of carnivorous sushi has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Nothing at all. Honest.
You see, last time round, the “style vs. storytelling” chestnut was roasted on the campfire and served up for us all to chow down on, but when I checked my napkin, only the “storytelling” side of the debate had been roasted, the “style” half was still uncooked and indigestible. I want to put that right, in the interests of enlightened debate.
First off, I have to say, that I think this whole argument is an artificial and unnecessarily divisive one. “Style” and “storytelling” are not, nor have they ever been, mutually exclusive terms. Nor is there any reason for us to lay down our allegiance at the foot of either term. I can see no comprehensible reason for driving a wedge between the two. I enter into this debate only because I feel that us so-called “stylists” deserve to put our own side of the story over.
Now here’s a fact that needs to be laid out: all storytellers are stylists. You choose stripped down, story-driven, “invisible” prose and that’s a stylistic choice. It’s a style. It’s a choice. And it doesn’t always sit easily with people who think the function of literature is something other than just “entertainment”.
Some of us do.
Now don’t get me wrong, I like to be entertained when I read, of course I do. If I get thrills and chills from the book I’m reading then it makes me feel good. But if that’s all I get from a book then I go away feeling strangely empty.
You see, I’m a little cranky when it comes to the things I read.
If I want entertainment with no deeper commitment required then I’ll watch the glass teat or catch the newest Hollywood blockbuster at the multiplex. But if I read a book then it’s because I expect something a little more substantial. Of course I do. The commitment I make when I wade into someone else’s 300+ pages, the actual investment of time, means that I have certain expectations that, if not met, make me an unhappy camper.
Literature is, and always has been, about more than surface thrills. The function of any art form is to make us see the world in a way that we haven’t thought of before; to make us look at the world anew, to provide a means to understand that world —and our own position in it— in a fresh and original way. So I like my prose to be more than a screenplay in padded out form. I like metaphor and allusion; depth and insight; subtext and imagery and allegory; and I like —dammit!— a style that befits the work.
Let me explain that last phrase, for it is one of the most important factors in any literary work. It’s the interdependency of form and content that I’m referring to: the necessity that the story should be told in a manner that actually and actively supports the narrative. You see, for me, that means that the stylistic choices writers make to tell their story are integral to that story. If the two basic elements —story and style— don’t match up, if they jar, if they seem artificially thrown together, then the reader is being shortchanged. And the writer is shortchanging him or herself too, for growth as a writer comes from experimenting, and taking risks; from stretching the limits of their abilities and imaginations. That’s where we find our edges; right out on the limits of what we are capable of.
There’s a lot of prejudice about the word “experimental” when it’s used to describe literature and it stems —I believe— not from a reader’s informed, critical evaluation, but rather from taking the easy path with regards to our reading habits. You see, we’re being brow-beaten, as a culture, to reject notions of cleverness and erudition as surplus to requirements in this disposable, fast-food, fast-thrill, surface over substance world. Well excuse me, did I miss a godamned meeting or something? When did being clever become such a bad thing? We’ve got brains that we already criminally under-use, and now someone’s telling me that the little we do use is too much? That because I prefer works that challenge me I’m suddenly satirized as an academic more interested in literary “vivisection” and intellectual masturbation than I am in good stories?
Sorry, again the two ain’t mutually exclusive. And I’d rather my intellectual aim was too high and I wasn’t quite hitting the target, than settle for paddling out the lowest common denominator bilge than makes up the majority of what passes for horror fiction these days.
Writing used to be about writing; stories were what we wrote because people felt happier with a linear thread to give the words a semblance of a point. Writers though, surely by definition, are as much about the process of writing as about the end result of their efforts.
That’s why they’re called “writers”, not “storytellers”.
They write.
Sure they tell stories, but it isn’t the most important aspect of what makes us writers. The telling —which includes this boogeyword “style”— is just as crucial to this most wonderful of equations.
And I believe that we have a responsibility to maintain a sense of the historical and sociological contexts that we write within. If we only read one style of fiction (and yeah, I guess I’m saying if we just plump for the easy reads) then we limit ourselves to one kind of writing. And the bland literary landscape that would spring from such a calamitous descent into anti-intellectual fiction writing would be a dry and arid one indeed.
As a writer I strive to create well-crafted phrases that are unlike any written before. Phrases that captures an impression, an image, a thought, a philosophical point, a nuance, a shadow, a reflection, in a way that no one’s ever come up with before. Story for story’s sake is not the be-all and end-all of this great undertaking we call writing, it’s just a means to carry the stuff that really matters.
The funny thing is: “Invisible prose” doesn’t even exist as an entity, it never has. It’s always visible. This is NOT semantics: it’s an axiom. What we mean when we use the term is “easy to read” prose. If a writer tries to use a more complex prose style this is often, unfairly, pigeonholed as “experimental”, but just as “invisible” really means “easy”, “experimental” is simply a way of saying “more difficult”.
Now I like more difficult fiction. I really don’t agree that it is simply “showing off” as I was gnomically informed last issue; indeed, I believe that it is with more complex prose styles that good horror writing rises above the “pulp” label the genre’s been saddled with since its early days, and becomes a literary form that allows writers and readers to engage with the big questions that underpin our existence.
Now if we can accept the assertion that the function of art is to help us see the world in a slightly different way, then we should also be able to see that one of the potent ways in which a writer can make this happen is by using techniques that seek to defamiliarise the reader from the book they are reading. One of those ways is the manner in which we tell the story. If it means making the work a little more difficult to read then it’s a small price to pay for the ultimate effect. It certainly isn’t “deliberate obscurity”, or an attempt to wow “jaded critics” and win “literary awards”; but rather a way to fight against the insidious dumbing down of culture that is eating through all our cultural artifacts like a pernicious cancer of stupidity. It’s actually getting so bad that we’re thought to be “weird” or “pretentious” if we demand more of our reading than surface thrills; if we want to think while we’re reading.
This is the blatant anti-intellectualism that underpins the column I read last time around. The prejudicial language the columnist used to condemn those that took chances in pursuit of their art was tabloid-style “telling us how to think”; if we dare to step outside of the narrow path of “invisible prose” then we are “fighting against our readers”, we are “accepting the academic’s deconstructionist approach to literature and writing to please him”; we’re “snobby”, “pretentious” and only trying to show how clever we are.
I beg to differ.
This idea is rooted in the brutal misconception that it is sales figures that determine how successful a novel or story is. Well, sorry, I write because I love the genre in which I work and am unprepared to compromise my “style” because I think it may affect how many units I shift. I work in the horror genre because I believe it is subversive, confrontational and deals with the transitional grey shadings of human morality that most literary forms don’t touch; not because I think it’s an easy way to sell shitloads of books. I write horror stories because it allows me to deal with BIG ISSUES, and I believe that fiction should be judged on its literary merits, not on how many books the work sells.
Are sales figures the final yardsticks for measuring artistic endeavors?
I think not.
Ask Van Gogh. Ask Lovecraft. Ask Poe. Did the comparatively poor sales of their works deter them from stamping their unique and original visions upon the collective consciousness of the world? Of course they didn’t. They wrote and painted because the things that they had to say, the things they had to show us, were too important to be left undone just because they weren’t bestsellers.
Three great stylists. Imitated into parody now, but fresh and original then.
So I’m never going to shift as many fiction dispersal units as that guy who writes “invisible prose” over there. I can live with that. I was never in this for the money, always in it for the love and respect of the genre. I’ll keep reading my stylists, for they make the world a richer, more beautiful place. So I’ll keep my Harlan Ellison, Peter Straub, William Burroughs, Jonathan Carroll, Chuck Palahniuk, Ramsey Campbell, Richard Christian Matheson, Joe R. Lansdale, Clive Barker, HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allan (yep, that’s how it’s spelt) Poe, Ray Bradbury, Franz Kafka, Alaisdair Gray, Ian Banks and all the other beautiful stylists who make this genre more than just a beige-bland, homogenous one.
I don’t want to be thought of as a “Great Thinker”, but I see nothing wrong with being a “thinker”. I’d rather be remembered as someone who tried to be true to his inner visions and used a prose style he thought to be appropriate to those visions than as someone the general public found to be “an easy read”.
Keep reading, and don’t limit yourself to books that provide nothing but simple entertainment. It’s a funny thing that a lot of us have forgotten, but the more work you put into a book, the more you get out of it.
Now I’m out of here. See you next time.