The New Prolixity
I’ve been wondering whether the various examples of what I am going to call ‘the New Prolixity’ mark a school, or perhaps even a dominant style in contemporary prose, or whether it’s just a few disconnected texts that happen to share an approach and which I happen to have encountered in a bunch. I’m taking about that kind of prose in which the sentences are long and slow — not the baroque inventive sprawling superstructures of, say, Pynchon, but a more shapeless, everything-including-kitchen-sink spooling on, a style of many quotidian details detailed exhaustively. I am talking for instance about Knausgaard, and the major, rather surprising success he has had with his interminable My Struggle. Although actually my thoughts were catalysed by reading two rather different books recently that happen to share a similar stylistic approach: Jon Fosse’s The Other Name: Septology 1–2 (translated by Damion Searles: Fitzcarraldo 2020) and Anuk Arudpragasam’s Booker-shortlisted A Passage North (2021). Fosse writes sentences like this:
‘Slow style’, it has been called. When he was a teacher at the Creative Writing Academy in Bergen, Norway, back in the 80s (when one of his students was a young Karl Ove Knausgaard: Fosse appears in book 5 of My Struggle) he recommended a defocus-the-will, let-it-flow praxis when it came to writing. ‘When I was a teacher,’ he later said, ‘I would tell my students that you should think — concentrating on technique and so on — both before and after writing, but not during the writing itself. Write, don’t think: that was my constant advice.’ [This is translated by David Smith, and I’m quoting it from his article, ‘Write, Don’t Think: Fosse’s Boathouse’].
Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness’ has always struck me as remarkably artful, actually, where I find Knausgaard slippery and tedious to read and even Fosse, praised by many as the best of living novelists, not much easier. Knausgaard, by writing so obsessively about himself and his ego, gifts his readers an easy out: we can dismiss his big novel, with its archly semi-ironic Hitlerian title, as a mere goulash of narcissism in which are floating myriad orts and scraps of wearyingly overcooked quotidian details. Fosse is more spiritual, more religious, and his prose is more a cloud of repetitious mundanity in the guise of a transcendent cloud of unknowing. Here is Fosse’s most famous English translator, Damion Searls, praising him:
I think of the four elder statesmen of Norwegian letters as a bit like the Beatles: Per Petterson is the solid, always dependable Ringo; Dag Solstad is John, the experimentalist, the ideas man; Karl Ove Knausgaard is Paul, the cute one; and Fosse is George, the quiet one, mystical, spiritual, probably the best craftsman of them all. But it’s harder to show what makes his music work. Prose doesn’t have hooks, and Fosse’s incantations are as unexcerptable as Philip Glass symphonies or Béla Tarr tracking shots. Here is an opening, a fraction of the first sentence of Aliss at the Fire:
I see Signe lying there on the bench in the room and she’s looking at all the usual things, the old table, the stove, the woodbox, the old paneling on the walls, the big window facing out onto the fjord, she looks at it all without seeing it and everything is as it was before, nothing has changed, but still, everything’s different, she thinks, because since he disappeared and stayed gone nothing is the same anymore, she is just there without being there, the days come, the days go, nights come, nights go, and she goes along with them, moving slowly, without letting anything leave much of a trace or make much of a difference, and does she know what day it is today? she thinks, yes well it must be Thursday, and it’s March, and the year is 2002, yes, she knows that much, but what the date is and so on, no, she doesn’t get that far, and anyway why should she bother? what does it matter anyway? she thinks, no matter what she can still be safe and solid in herself, the way she was before he disappeared, but then it comes back to her, how he disappeared, that Tuesday, in late November, in 1979, and all at once she is back in the emptiness, she thinks, and she looks at the hall door and then it opens and then she sees herself come in and shut the door behind her and then she sees herself walk into the room, stop and stand there and look at the window and then she sees herself see him standing in front of the window and she sees, standing there in the room, that he is standing and looking out into the darkness, with his long black hair, and in his black sweater, the sweater she knit herself and that he almost always wears when it’s cold, he is standing there, she thinks, and he is almost at one with the darkness outside, she thinks, yes
On it goes, building layer upon layer of past and present, ancestors and loved ones, until you are immersed in that world and the prose conjures luminous glory flashing past like Blakean angels. Maybe it is convincing to say that Fosse is the only writer whose book has made me weep with emotion as I translated it. [Damion Searls ‘Pure Prose’, Paris Review June 9, 2015]
I haven’t wept at the Fosse I have read (which isn’t very much Fosse to be fair) which I daresay says more about how withered and desiccated is my English heart than it does about Fosse’s skill as a writer.
Really, I’m not competent to discuss Fosse, and don’t propose to do so here, though I will only note (I’m sure it casts me in a bad light) that this style of prose irritates me, as poison ivy reddens and makes bumpy the skin. I object to the ‘jotting things down as they occur me’ logic of it, the way it brings the writer ghostly before us, describing his man standing and looking out into the darkness with his long black hair (ocularly perceptive hair, that) and then it occurring to him that this guy is wearing a black sweater and then suddenly thinking ‘oh yeah, the sweater she knit herself’ and bunging that in too. Searls would I’m sure be horrified by the yahoo-ness of my reaction. For him, Fosse’s endlessly on-spooling prose, its repeated repetitions, it small set of endlessly recycled referents (physical appearance, clothes, weather, buildings, furniture) is as precise and exacting as a Wallace Stevens poem:
Fosse writes pure, repetitive, musical phrases in a stripped-down vocabulary; Knausgaard doesn’t. But while Knausgaard’s essay moved between several different large topics, with personal reflections and autobiographical anecdote and philosophy and criticism mixed in, it never felt like there was a writer somewhere organizing and orchestrating his material to present it to me as a reader. The experience was more like mainlining the subject matter itself, whatever the topic was and however the writing moved from one topic to another. This time the reason why you can’t see for yourself is because the essay was withdrawn before English-language publication, but this intimacy, this directness of contact, is what readers of My Struggle love. Somehow his writing, the total opposite of Fosse’s, was just as pure. Fosse’s is pure poetry, Knausgaard’s is pure prose. The difference between lines and sentences, between poetry and prose in a technical sense, is simple enough, but that’s not the interesting distinction. Poetry, I came to see, is visionary world-creation, an eruption of transcendence; prose is communication, interpersonal, horizontal … Prose shares, poetry transports. Prose connects, poetry creates.
I’m not sure that’s right, actually — I mean, as a general description of the respective operations of prose and poetry — but I’ve probably done enough now in terms of displaying my ignorance of contemporary Norwegian writing, so I’ll leave Fosse alone. I would just suggest that, even if it is possible to write this style well, it’s certainly possible to write it badly, and that this is by far the more common thing: to don boxing-gloves, scoop custard from your bucket, throw it at the wall and claim the result is better than Pollock. I can see that such a style might be incantatory, immersive, a flow — but what I generally find myself reading is lazy, diffuse, dissipating text. Rubbishy, vulgar, boring, self-indulgent books, frothed up with self-regard, as if length correlates with value and length must never be confused with density.
I’m being overly harsh, I know. But I do feel that New Prolixity, as a school of writing, is a dangerous trap for the weaker writer, exacerbated by the fact that writing on a computer is much more facile, just practically speaking, than (say) writing on a page of paper with a pen. The words just come tumbling out, and there they are on the screen: they even look, thanks to the wonders of word processing, like a finished page of a printed novel! Should we revise? Nah.
James E Miller has speculated that the Jamesian ‘late style’ was a consequence of the master moving from writing with a pen to dictating to a typist, something he started doing with What Maisie Knew in 1897. And so his circumlocutionary anti-rhodomontades spooled out, and so the rat-tatting efficiency of his mechanic amanuensis pinned them easily to the page. The easier it became to empage the words, the more orotund and elaborate and lengthy the sentences grew. I wonder if that’s true.
Some of these thoughts have returned to me upon reading Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North (2021). Reading it took me two goes. The first time I picked it up, I slid off the pages and parked it, because it’s written according to the tenets of the New Prolixism. But I had another go, and this time I made my way through the whole thing.
It’s a novel in which not much happens, at least in terms of narrative. The protagonist Krishan, living in southern Sri Lanka, learns that the onetime caregiver to his grandmother, a woman called Rani, has died in the north of the island (she fell down a well and broke her neck: one of the questions the novel addresses is whether this was suicide or not, although Krishan is unable to discover whether it was or wasn’t). Krishan takes the train from the south to the north, watching the landscape slide past, remembering earlier episodes from his life, and sometimes summarising for our benefit books and poems he has read — the Periya Puranam, The Cloud Messenger, scenes from the life of the Buddha — at great length. Eventually he arrives in the north and attends Rani’s funeral. That’s pretty much the whole novel. Here he is arriving in the north:
It was a little past four in the afternoon, the light softer now and more diffuse, the intensity of the day’s heat beginning to wane, and standing by himself in a corner of the garden Krishan was observing people gathered in Rani’s house for the funeral, somewhat unnerved, after his long and meditative journey, by how quickly he’d found himself in this place so different from his point of origin, this setting that, despite conforming to all his abstract expectations, had nevertheless manages to catch him off guard, the sense of calm, peaceful self-containment he’d felt on the train remaining with him on the two quiet buses from Kilinochchi, and it had persisted too on his long walk from the bus stop, as he made his way slowly along the network of paths that ran through the notably deserted village. The properties on either side of the lanes were marked off by low fences of dried palm fronts thatched together with wire and rope, most of them fronted by small well-cultivated gardens, each with its own little vegetable plot and an assortment of trees — drumstick, banana, coconut, curry leaf, as well as others he couldn’t identify. [Passage North, 209–10]
All hail the mighty Comma Splice, god of the School of Neo-Prolixity!
I originally planned on reading the novel earlier this year, when it was longlisted (and afterwards shortlisted) for the Booker — I read most of this year’s longlist, as you can see here, although in the event I didn’t get around to it. But I’ve read it now, and it is good, though it took a while to tune-in to Arudpragasam’s style. Is it a Knausgaardian prose, or a Fossean poetry, do you think, the passage I have just quoted? Is it liable to make you weep?
The last eighty pages of this 300-page novel give us every little detail, slowly, about how Hindus cremate their dead (for Krishan, a Buddhist, this is all new), from the performances of grief by the relatives, to the materials that make up the pyre, down to the dead woman’s hair catching alight and her eyeballs melting as the flames grow. As he watches all this, Krishan remembers seeing a documentary, years before, about two suicide bombers engaged in the Sri Lankan civil war: two young Tamil women, talking happily to camera about their impending mission.
At the time the novel is set this war has been over for more than a decade, and is a matter more of history than memory for Krishan — though his father was killed in it, and (we learn) Rani lost her sons. Indeed, it is a major point of the novel that this war, its trauma and consequences, marks everything that Krishan sees, everywhere he goes, all he thinks, even though he was too young, when it was happening, to be part of it.
Much of the novel is taken up with Krishan’s memories of a former lover, Anjum, a political activist who left him because he wasn’t politically engaged enough. His memory of the documentary about the two Tamil girls (which memory comes to him at the funeral) is also a memory of him urging Anjum to it, so they can watch it together — which they do, smoking a shared joint. The girls are glad they are going to their deaths: either they will blow up the bombs they carry, or if that fails they will take cyanide to avoid falling into the hands of enemy.
The film, whose name he could no longer remember, was not much more than an hour long, and though it had been made by a filmmaker from Denmark or Norway or one of those other northern European countries that were hard to distinguish, it had been devoid of the false benevolence common to so many British and European documentaries of violence and suffering in former colonies, devoid of the knowingness or righteousness so easily conjured up in such materials. The film’s narrative centered around the life of a twenty-four-year-old woman named Dharshika, who he could still vividly recall, a woman who was, at the time of filming, an active member of the Black Tigers. The Black Tigers were the elite, much-feared division of the Tigers who specialised in carefully planned and meticulously executed suicide missions — from assassinations of political figures to bombings in public spaces to small but devastating attacks on Sri Lankan army and navy bases — and it had been clear watching Dharshika talk and move over the course of the documentary, that there was indeed something elite about her too. It was if she had in some way been divinely ordained for her role, not just because of the severe beauty of her appearance, her sharp, almost haughty features and darkly lustrous skin, but also because of the penetrating steeliness of her gaze and the certainty of her posture, the conviction with which she spoke about the brutality of the Sri Lankan government and her readiness to fight and die to protect her people. [238]
Norwegian might well be Arudpragasam’s sly nod to the Knausgaard/Fosse style I suppose, although the slackness here (filler like ‘in some way’, ‘almost’; the overfine distinction between ‘an hour long’ and ‘not much more than an hour long,’ the use of cliché like the ‘steely gaze’) doesn’t evoke anything very poetic. There are twenty pages of this: Dharshika’s family history, ‘her best friend Puhal, the other main subject of the documentary’, and Krishan and Anjum watching the documentary and talking about it afterwards. They know the girls are long dead, and they discuss whether their single-mindedness was a kind of cruelty, or something more noble, even an escape from a caste-ridden and sexist society.
The two women were then asked about what friendship meant to them, for Puhal turned her head away, causing Dharshika in turn to laugh. It was clear from their smiles that the two friends hadn’t discussed their relationship with each other explicitly before, perhaps because it was more natural for such matters to be negotiated through gestures rather than words, perhaps because the impending approach of their deaths in the form of an as yet unknown mission made discussion of their relationship seem futile. Friendship for them, the two cadres told the camera, their expressions quickly turning serious, meant sharing in each other’s happinesses and sadnesses, and it meant helping and supporting each other in whatever practical ways they could, though of course they were prepared to separate, they hastened to add, if one of them had to be transferred to another location. The discussion then turned from friendship to the subject of betrayal, the gravest offence a cadre could commit, one that the Tigers punished with execution, Krishan knew, even when there was little certainty about the allegation. The two women tried to justify the harshness of the punishment, explaining that the Tigers were fighting for the good of the people, that if a single traitor could, by sharing military information, put the entire cause in jeopardy, then it was better the traitor be shot than the movement and the people be endangered. Looking at the interviewer Dharshika then added, apropos of nothing it seemed, that if someone were to tell her that Puhal had betrayed the cause, if the accusation were to be firmly proven, that she herself wouldn’t hesitate to shoot her best friend. A look of uncertainty passed shadowlike across her face as she said this, as though she herself was surprised by what had come out of her mouth, and falling silent she looked away from the camera, as if she’d spoken too quickly and needed time more time to consider the hypothetical situation on which she’d just pronounced. She looked down at the reeds in front of her, then turned back toward the camera a second later and nodded her head gravely, as if to confirm that her initial instinct had indeed been correct, that she would indeed kill Puhal if she betrayed the cause. Puhal, who’d been looking out over the water all that while, turned and regarded Dharshika, who raised her head and looked into the distance to avoid her gaze. There was a period of long silence, in which only the gentle sound of the water lapping against the banks and the faint buzzing of dragonflies in the background could be heard, Dharshika continuing to pluck bits of leaf from the plants in front of her, examining them distractedly in her hand, shredding them, and letting them fall. [246–47]
This is better, I think. One of the themes of the larger extended passage from which this (long, I know) extract is taken is Krishan remembering his worry that Anjum was cheating on him, not with another man but with another woman; and perhaps for that reason it put me in mind of Proust (that’s one of Marcel’s torments during his time with Albertine, of course). But this prolixity isn’t Proustian prolixity, I think. There’s something rather more sophisticated in the Proustian pli, a sinuous and beautiful intricacy of aesthetic effect that matches the complexities and profundities of his matter. Arudpragasam, in this passage, is saying something simple — about the beautiful ordinarinesses that underpin friendship, and then about the way friendship can accommodate silence and even hostility — in a prolix, comma-plagued, lengthy over-elaboration. But then again, perhaps that’s the point. It may be that A Passage North is as prolix as it is in order to say something about what is not said. Perhaps it is true that the more words people speak, the more they chatter, the less they are saying. That the phatic element in language increases in proportion to the sheer amount of gabbling. And, more than this, it may be that saying nothing very much in lots of words is — actually — a way of saying something important about nothingness. The rather sweetly observed silence into which Dharshika and Puhal stare, at the end of the passage I’ve just quoted, is an in-the-moment quietude that ‘speaks’ to their own futures: early death, and its nothingness. What can we say about that profound and, ultimately, ubiquitous matter? The more we say, the less we are articulating any meaningful insight into it; but because it repels articulation doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about it. A lengthy purely phatic discourse, perhaps, says more, precisely because it isn’t really saying anything, than more laconically and polished words do — if only because prolonged phatic chatter, howsoever empty of content, still sustains human interconnectivity. It is, very often, the current of community, of meetings and beings-together, of family or friends or other groups reaffirming their interconnectedness by talking about nothing very much. That’s life, and if at the heart of it is something substantively or conceptually null — death — the fact of the chatter, of the connection, talking and listening and bonding, is, actually, the valuable thing.
A Passage North has quite a lot to say about the Sri Lankan civil war, the harm it did and the continuing harms of its legacy, and also about death, both in terms of physical mortality and in terms of the deaths of relationships. Perhaps the New Prolixity is the right idiom for that topic. I’m not sure.
In a fine essay, David Kurnick reads James’s ‘late style’ in terms of a kind of capacious universalism. He analyses some representative passages from Wings of a Dove, and picks out ‘certain obvious features (less generously, mannerisms) of James’s late style’ amongst them ‘the use of appositives and inversions, the almost Germanic deferral of grammatical closure’. But he also notes ‘the striking verbal similarities that hold across the whole cast of Jamesian characters … speakers, addressees, and subjects are distributed over the entire social landscape of the book. But these quite different characters address each other in almost indistinguishable patterns, and they laud one another with adjectives that seem interchangeable (“grand,” “beautiful,” “wonderful,” “delightful,” etc).’ He goes on:
This uniformity will hardly be news to any reader of late James, but it has largely escaped critical commentary. I think this is so because that stylistic uniformity requires us to think about James’s interest in collective forms of being, while our dominant critical paradigms have seen James primarily as a writer of individuals. I’m thinking particularly here of Peter Brooks’s justly influential characterization of James as a chronicler of the “melodrama of consciousness”. Both parts of Brooks’s term tend to obscure the collectivism of James’s stylistic imagination: read as a melodramatist, James appears as a painter of stark characterological oppositions; read as a novelist of consciousness, James appears concerned to trace incommensurate perspectives. Both James’s moralism and his perspectivalism, in other words, imply a poetics of division and differentiation. … But as the above examples make clear, the style of James’s writing actually interrupts the operation of this paramount Jamesian formal principle, inundating the drama of moral and perspectival difference in a bath of stylistic indistinction. We might thus venture that one thing Jamesian style wants is to replace the differentiating energies of the drama of consciousness with an equally compelling vision of collectivity and universalism. [David Kurnick, ‘What Does Jamesian Style Want?’, The Henry James Review, 28:3 (2007), 215–16]
I wonder if something like this applies, more broadly, to the New Prolixity? Is it a hospitable, capacious, embracing kind of style, designed to speak through specificity (the individual experiences of Fosse’s aging painter Aisle, or Knausgaard’s puppet-self, or Arudpragasam’s Krishan) into something universalising? I wonder.
