By Paul West
Paul West received an award in literature this year from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His 10th Novel, "Rat Man of Paris," will be published this winter.
Published: December 15, 1985
The New York Times
A WORD is its uses, as William H. Gass shows in his rollicking conspectus,
''On Being Blue,'' although he might have ogled
''purple'' as well. Purple does seep into his bluebook, however, here
tinting some ''spent body like a bruise,'' there leaving a
''lavender thumb''-print of ''broken veins.'' In fact, as well as being a
book on the uses of ''blue'' - in talk, literature and
the dictionary - ''On Being Blue'' is a prime, up-to-date example of
purple prose, not so much a patch as it is a pyramid, a
pandemonium, a seething nuclear pile of words.
Infatuated with ''blue,'' its optical resonance and its metaphorical
range, Mr. Gass picks up samples from far and near, reveling
in the word's every appearance, teasing and inciting and delving until the
little tome glides off on its own like emancipated
lava, announcing I Am Words, I Am Language, I Am Style. The book is
elaborate without being ornate, ambulatory without being
pedestrian, and, for those whose tastes run to purple, a definite joy.
It reminds us that the almost lost art of phrasemaking
attracts the scorn only of those who have never made up a stylish phrase
in their lives, as if style had become taboo, a menace
to people, gods and cars.
Of course, purple is not only highly colored prose. It is the world
written up, intensified and made pleasurably palpable, not
only to suggest the impetuous abundance of Creation, but also to add to it
by showing - showing off - the expansive power of the
mind itself, its unique knack for making itself at home among trees,
dawns, viruses, and then turning them into something else: a
word, a daub, a sonata. The impulse here is to make
everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe
because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured
and have to be awakened with something almost
intolerably vivid. When the deep purple blooms, you are looking at a
dimension, not a posy.
Consider Paul Cezanne's famous doubt, eloquently pondered in an essay by
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French thinker. Was what
Cezanne saw, and painted, in his hand or ''out there''? Or was it in the
paint itself, the fine-ground lumps of geology he
painted with? Plump for all three, in a mood of feckless empathy. You can
see what nagged at him, as I think it must have nagged
at such masters of purple as Sir Thomas Browne, Macaulay, Joyce, Faulkner,
Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens and Nabokov. Is it
something lacking in you that makes you want, in your visionary versions
of the world, to load every rift with ore? The phrase is
Keats's. It implies that the ore in the ordinary isn't enough. He wants
ore-dinary. It's not a lack, though, but a lack's
opposite: that powerful early-warning system of the sensibilities we call
imagination, the system Coleridge called
''esemplastic'' because it fuses the many into one. SOME creative heads,
in order to see the world at all, and to find it worth
representing, need to begin by putting it in gaudy colors. More sternly,
in a mood of utmost reverence, they recognize that what
you bring to the act of perception is often just as important as what you
perceive. ''We receive,'' wrote the same Coleridge,
''but what we give.''
The gist of it all is that a mind fully deployed, and here ''mind''
includes imagination, will find the merest thing an
inexhaustible object of wonderment, itself included (in a fit of modesty,
of course). A carrot. A wart biopsied. Take the bald,
blank end of a stem from which a hibiscus bloom has dropped, and you can
feel the rough ends of the dried-up tiny tubes that fed
it - microstraws bound together by nature's clamp, like fascias, along
which streamed the fuel of display. That's how a purple
paragraph itself might start to bloom. The urge is more than the yen to
make a well-upholstered paragraph that connoisseurs will
clip and paste into albums of such things. Purple is a homage to nature
and to what human ingenuity can do with nature's givens.
Certain producers of plain prose have conned the reading public into
believing that only in prose plain, humdrum or flat can you
articulate the mind of inarticulate ordinary Joe. Even to begin to do that
you need to be more articulate than Joe, or you might
as well tape-record him and leave it at that. This minimalist vogue
depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style
can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive and so forth, whereas prose that
draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample,
intense, incandescent or flamboyant turns its back on something almost
holy - the human bond with ordinariness. I doubt if much
unmitigated ordinariness can exist. As Harold Nicolson, the critic and
biographer, once observed, only one man in a thousand is
boring, and he's interesting because he's a man in a thousand. Surely the
passion for the plain, the homespun, the banal, is
itself a form of betrayal, a refusal to look honestly at a complex
universe, a get-poor-quick attitude that wraps up everything
in simplistic formulas never to be inspected for veracity or substance.
Got up as a cry from the heart, it is really an excuse
for dull and mindless writing, larded over with the democratic myth that
says this is how most folks are. Well, most folks are
lazy, especially when confronted with a book, and some writers are lazy
too, writing in the same anonymous style as everyone
else.
How many prose writers can you identify from their style? Not many have
that singular emanation from the temperament or those
combinations of words all of them characteristic for a certain gait, a
certain tone, a certain idiosyncratic consecutiveness of
thought and image. Stone the crows by all means, but let the birds of
paradise get on with the business of being gorgeous. Even
Hemingway, who has much to do with this vogue for the flat, breaks his own
habit in certain rapturous, long sentences in which he
seems to recognize that although being alive is just one damn thing after
another, there is no ultimate sum, no total; you just
go on adding as long as you live, which is perhaps why a medieval monk,
illuminating one capital letter for months, say, was
living as full a life as Brother Busymitts, who rushed through a dozen in
an hour.
It takes a certain amount of sass to speak up for prose that's rich,
succulent and full of novelty. Purple is immoral,
undemocratic and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating
angel of depravity. So long as originality and lexical
precision prevail, the sentient writer has a right to immerse himself or
herself in phenomena and come up with as personal a
version as can be. A writer who can't do purple is missing a trick. A
writer who does purple all the time ought to have more
tricks. A writer who is afraid of mind, which English-speaking writers
tend to be, unlike their Continental counterparts, is a
lion afraid of meat.
After all, it is the mind that stages such apparently incongruous and
impossible things as making a stone talk, speaking up for
posthumous narrators and dead characters, and, as in Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's ''Autumn of the Patriarch,'' tuning in to the
collective imagination of an island's islanders as they begin to confect
the myth of its dead dictator. Mr. Garcia Marquez lets
the reader listen in on an unwieldy, ramshackle process that nevertheless
is going to get where it is going. The islanders want
an image: potent, nasty and attractively damnable, and they are willing to
lie, to fudge, to get it.
The only way of being a demiurge is to fashion a material world out of the
one already on hand, not allusively but close-up, so
much so that things the words denote seem right on top of the words, on
top of the reader too. The ideal is to create a complex
verbal world that has as much presence, as much apparent physical bulk, as
the world around it. So you get it both ways: the
words evoke the world that isn't made of words, and they - as far as
possible -enact it too. The prose, especially when it's
purple, seems almost to be made of the same material as what it's about.
This is an illusion, to be sure, but art is illusion, and what's needed is
an art that temporarily blots out the real. So,
reading Thomas Mann's description in ''The Confessions of Felix Krull,
Confidence Man'' of a delicatessen window should, for a
while, be nearly the same as staring into a comparable deli window in
Manhattan. It's when the words blot out the real, and
displace it, that prose comes into its own, conjuring, fooling, aping, yet
never quite achieving the impression that, in dealing
with an elephant, it is actually working in elephant hide. There lingers
always, just out of view, on the conjectural fringe of
vision, the fact that what's going on is verbal. The prose will not turn
to the sun, like a plant, or wither without actually
falling off its stem, or spawn tapeworms in its interior. Yet it has mass,
texture and shape. It calls into play all the senses,
and it can interact at the speed of ionization with the reader's mind. HOW
extraordinary: our minds loll in two states, ably
transposing words into things, things into words. What goes on in this
hybrid mental shuttling to and fro is something passive
but active, a compromise in affairs of scale, dimension and abstraction.
The phrase ''teddy bear'' is smaller than the toy
animal, which in turn is smaller (usually) than the big bear from the
wilds; is almost entirely flat (a printed phrase stands up
a little from the surface it is printed on); and lacks physical attributes
conspicuous in any bear. The words represent, but they
also re-present, and when the wordsmith turns to purple various things
happen. The presence of the supervising wordsmith becomes
more blatant, but the objects being presented in words have a more unruly
presence. They bristle, they buzz, they come out at
you.
Purple isn't quite onomatopoeia, whose modern meaning is different from
what it meant in Greek. Now it means making a word sound
like its referent (''hiss,'' ''crack,'' ''cuckoo''), but it used to mean
''word coining,'' which is wider. When it isn't just
showing off, purple is phrase coining, an attempt to build longish units
of language that more or less replicate sizable chunks
of Being in much the same way as the hiss-crack-cuckoo words mimic a
sound. There is language that plunges in, not too proud to
steal a noise from Mother Nature, and there is language that prides itself
on the distance it keeps from nature. Then there is
purple, which, from quite a distance, plunges back into phenomena all over
again, only to emerge with a bigger verbal
ostentation.
This plunge is almost like revisiting our ancestors. After all, words must
have begun as acts of abstract approximation, a
simultaneous closeness and removedness that nabbed the essence of a thing
in a shout, a grunt, a hiss, but partly in order to
refer to it in general. Take the word ''muscle,'' for instance, which
comes from some Roman's impression that when a muscle
flexes, a small mouse -a musculus - seems to be running underneath the
skin. We have all but lost that mouse, and I am not saying
that purple will retrieve it; it might, it might not, depending on how
much etymology the purplist has. But purple will perhaps
restore the shielded, abstracted modern reader to that more atavistic
state of mind in which the observer can imagine a
subcutaneous mouse. It is not a matter of coming up with new words, but
fiercer - of coming up with new and more imposing
combinations of words.
Purple is certainly a long way from the clinical doting on particulars we
find in the French New Novel, but is quite near to
Latin American magical realism, which is both a literary and a
sociological thing. What might seem a literary flight of fancy
exists already in part of Brazil, where birth certificates actually name
freshwater dolphins as the fathers of certain children.
Purple relishes that sort of thing, zeroing in on it or concocting it as
part of the thing it loves to make: a paste as thick as
life itself, a stream of phenomena delighted in for their own sake. And it
is not a matter of inventing something out of nothing,
for that cannot be done; everything is derivative, so there is no getting
away from what might be thought the bases of life, of
art. The farfetched always takes you home again, never mind how strained
its combinations, how almost unthinkable its novelties.
The color we have never seen, the smell we have never smelled, the mind we
have never known, can only be made from the colors,
the smells, the minds, we already know.
I am suggesting that purple prose reminds us of things we do ill to
forget: the arbitrary, derivative and fictional nature of
language; its unreliable relationship with phenomena (''cuckoo'' is close,
but ''indri,'' meaning ''look!'' in Malagasy, got
tagged on to the monkey of that name by mistake); its kinship with paint
and voodoo and gesture and wordless song; its sheer
mystery; its enormous distance from mathematics and photography; its
affinities with pleasure and luxury; its capacity for
hitting the mind's eye - the mind's ear, the mind's very membranes - with
what isn't there, with what is impossible and (until
the very moment of its investiture in words) unthinkable.
All this may sound like the latest variant of the old
Classical-versus-Romantic quarrel, and maybe it is; but, even more, it is
the quarrel between those who know what literature is allowed to be and
those who want to let it evolve. If you write in
stripped-down prose, you will probably do better commercially than if you,
as the idiom has it, indulge yourself. What's a self
for, anyway? For every hundred people with a hair-trigger response to what
they think excessive, there are a few with a
hair-trigger response to prose stripped down. The objection is
empirical, not moral. It says life is infinitely more complex
and magical than we will ever know unless we stop trying to pin down
feeling in pat little formulas or sentences so understated
as to be vacant, their only defense the lamebrain cop-out that, because
they say so little, they imply volumes.
I have heard it said that writing that ponders things in detail, takes its
time and habitually masticates its object until a
wonder leaps forth, is ''Victorian,'' no doubt because the word evokes
portly self-satisfaction or finicky dawdling. It makes
more sense, though, to think of purple as Elizabethan or Jacobean: fine
language, all the way from articulate frenzy to garish
excess. Purple, it seems to me, is when the microcosm fights back against
the always victorious and uncaring macrocosm, whose
relative immortality we cannot forgive.
A wide net will bring in such treasures as the Gass book I began with, and
the same author's ''Omensetter's Luck''; Faulkner's
purple masterpiece, ''Absalom, Absalom!''; Lawrence Durrell's witty,
crafted velvet; the mesmeric ripeness of Jose Lezama Lima's
novel ''Paradiso''; the holistic, crackling bravura of Mexico's Carlos
Fuentes; the poignant narcissisms of Juan Goytisolo, whose
prose has a cutting edge, whereas his fellow Spaniard Juan Benet sometimes
turns a sentence into a closet oratorio. There is
Dylan Thomas's prose - letters and broadcasts and stories; the erotic
skywriting of Guy Davenport; the quiet verbal accumulations
of Walter Abish; the rapturous, almost mystical fiction of the Brazilian
Osman Lins, whose exquisite formal, visionary novel,
''Avalovara,'' deserves a wider audience; Julio Cortazar, Michel Tournier,
James Purdy, Richard Howard, Evan S. Connell, Jean
Genet, Arno Schmidt, William Gaddis, the John Hawkes of ''The Passion
Artist,'' the Witold Gombrowicz of ''Ferdydurke,'' the
Thomas Bernhard of ''Correction'': they all partake of this plume, this
flambe, this pageantry of the mind. THEY tell us, these
authors, that it is headily terrifying to be alive, we have no choice in
the matter. We are like Lucky in ''Waiting For Godot,''
when that bewitching mishmash of data and names, echoes and useful things
to remember, pours from him like expedited ectoplasm.
Purplists write in appalled fascination, wondering what chemistry
prompts the style. In order to be reverential of life,
people do not have to work overtime to pin down the world outlook of the
nasturtium, but we may try to; nor must we linger too
long on the curious aroma of mulled disappointment that hovers in the
hallways of university literature departments, although we
may. We simply have to heed the presence of all our words and the chance
of combining them in unprecedented and luminous ways.
Prose is malleable, not ordained. Phrasemaking is often a humble,
almost involuntary virtuosity. And purple, whatever it may
seem to catcalling wallflowers as it flaunts by with eloquence raised to
its highest power, is bound, because of what it does so
well, to cause exhilaration. It is also bound, however, because of what it
cannot ever do, to deepen the sense of metaphysical
fear. And what it cannot ever do is start from
scratch.