Expository writing and prose on one hand, narratives and tales on the other.
A week or two ago, I read Chekhov’s Grisha to Lisa in her kitchen while she cooked1, at her encouragement. It surely has to be the shortest of Chekhov’s short stories, as its textual footprint did not exceed three pages.
It is a very pleasant and endearing story, but that notwithstanding, I made the observation at the time that the narrative, whether as a direct correlate of Chekhov’s intent or a byproduct of the English translation’s flavour, struck me as a having an unusually matter-of-fact and inertly concrete phraseology (and tone) as compared to my general expectations of a story.
Personally, I am inclined to chalk it up to a loss of authorial precision in translation, although it might behoove me to read the Russian original to gain more perspective. The effect I refer to above is not intensely perceptible, nor even especially verifiable exegetically. It’s really just a hopelessly vague intuition of mine as to the narrator’s / translator’s “mood.”
Russian has markedly different literary tendencies in narrative voice. There is a tendency to expose sequences of events with a greater investigative stoicism, as well as an eminently more liberal employment of passive voice in general speech and thought in order to emphasise the quality of events participating more “objectively” and “in and of themselves,” which seems to me to tap into a core fibre of a characteristically Russian poetic outlook.
The difference is that in Russian, it sounds “normal” to me; but if these features are grafted in an unembellished manner into English, they tend to sound rather awkward, rigid and stiltified — dare I say “bureaucratised?” — to the extent that they are not favoured devices in varieties of English-language storytelling generally thought artful.
I’ve found this to be absolutely true of my own translations, especially the hasty, real-time ones where there is no time to devote thought to the cultural and idiomatic idiosyncrasies that might be brought to bear. I recall this feeling numerous times when translating complete Russian phrases or lyrics for Lisa, spurred on by her keen and indefatigable curiosity.
At any rate, it got me thinking; aside from allusory, shadowy reproductions of Russian narrative and mythos, what is it about this descriptive account that seems so familiar? It dawned on me that it reminded me of my own attempts at writing stories, mostly for various high school class exercises requiring such and “creative writing” contributions to the newspaper of my elementary school, the illustrious Paw Street Journal of Madison Elementary.
Don’t misunderstand me; I would never purport to arrogate upon myself those qualities which deem one analogous or comparable to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in his principal area of competency, nor even entertain claims of my being an effective writer of stories or situational descriptive accounts in any way, shape, or form.
Actually, that’s the problem — I’m not. I couldn’t write a good story to save my life. It just doesn’t sound like a story.
Part of that is probably accounted for by my reading habits growing up and into hoy en dia2. The overwhelming preponderance of my voluntary reading has consisted of non-fictional expository text, typically concerned with the subject matter of history, politics, social sciences, psychology, or technology. I have read preciously little literature. Some people seem to harbour the illusion that I am well-read, and contrary to your claims, the lot of you, I am abysmally, apocalyptically, catastrophically bereft of literary pedigree. I have read very, very few classics issuing from any canonical lineage of literature. If you can name it, I haven’t read it. In fact, I have dealt relatively little with text produced outside the confines of the 20th century.
Needless to say, not a day passes that I don’t feel enourmous guilt, shame and regret for having gotten to be such a Philistine. And the insult to injury is that it’s not even that I don’t enjoy fiction or have some principled aversion to it, although I allow for the effects of a slight preferential bias. But mainly, I just didn’t get around to it somehow.
The value judgment aside for a moment, it seems fairly uncontroversial that my schooling has been in plainly expository text and prose, not in accounts of things — the sorts of things that fall into the province of tales, adventures, myths, fables, epics, legends, sagas, plays, anecdotes, etc.
But still, I’ve read enough of those. Come on, I went to public high school; that’s the trenches, and Charlie’s still going to lob certain quantities of literature at you from his artillery cannons. Helmets don’t help.
But I can’t write them.
From a front-row seat in the constellation of storylike vantage points, my stories sound the way that my drawings of most phenomena significant to humans in the natural world appear. I can’t draw people, animals, foliage - anything involving complicated gradients, transitions, contours.
Oh, contours, how estranged we are! Can’t do those at all. No internalisation of natural contours that allow for their original reproduction in drawing seems to have occured. Either that, or some sort of cognitive impairment. Hmm. Can I get on disability benefits with that?
But give me simple, rigid geometric figures consisting of straight lines or simple, uniform arcs, and I can probably sketch something passable in an art class. An introductory one. At a night school. For ex-convicts trying to rebuild their life.
I can do even 3D prisms!
If stories — elegant narratives with rich, inviting and engaging descriptions, graceful transitions, delicate nuances and intricately vivid reproductions of colloquial interaction among human actors — are pictures of people, and expository essays — rhetorical exercises, argumentation and prosaic, stolid descriptive accounts at best — are Soviet apartment blocks, then I fall in that continuum much as I do with visual reproduction.
To the extent that I can write anything at all, it is unfailingly of the latter variety.
I wonder if there is something about the psychological profile and attendant cognitive focus of the sort of people that elect for themselves a reading background through acknowledged preference — however slight — toward argumentative essays and scientific craft similar to my own… that impairs their faculty of troubadourship?
Or is it that there is no dichotomy here, and I just haven’t had much experience writing stories?
1 Quite deliciously, I might add. Praise of her culinary talents is something that easily warrants a wholly separate blog devoted solely to this purpose. For the sake of brevity, it will have to suffice to say that they are nothing short of extraordinary.
2 Although the good Lord knows I cannot remember the last time I had time or energy to read recreationally.
December 14th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
I love your writing.
Just wanted to mention that.
I don’t think a fondness for argumentative, scientific, or otherwise nonfiction writing has an inherent bearing on whether you can tell a story. The creative faculty seems to be a thing unto itself–cultivatable, sure, but I have the intuition that some people just have a knack for creating a narrative with a pleasing rhythm and style.
As far as the influence of having more poetically- or fiction-based tendencies goes… I cite myself as proof that you can be a terrible writer of poetry and fiction, but still naturally prefer *reading* those genres over nonfiction or expository writing. In other words, just because I can analyze sonnets until the melancholy Petrarchan lovers come home, that doesn’t mean that I could write a sonnet to save my hide.
Moreover, I think we shouldn’t disregard the narrative rhythm even of expository writing. A sense of organization, interesting progression of points, an elegant motion between thesis, anecdote, illustrative example…things like that… These make for elegant prose and share enough common ground with good fiction that I think “troubadourship” doesn’t need to be exclusively bound up with fiction and poetry. Academics and philosophers sing their analytical songs too.
December 14th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
I think you’re probably right. It’s just my tendency to want to generalise or infer from the academic superficie the underlying psychological and sociological factors affecting people.
You’ll have to forgive my scepticism about this, and sonnets.
I also concur that expository writing has an equally sophisticated, creative dimension. But it is one that is experienced and appreciated very differently than the one present in literaturistic narrative.