Two Elements of Style

"From Letters to a Young Novelist" by Mario Vargas Llosa, in Partisan Review (No. 2, 2002), 236 Bay State Rd., Boston, Mass. 02215.

To succeed, a novelist must create a fiction that "liberates itself from its creator and real life, and impresses itself on the reader as an autonomous reality." And how does one accomplish that? In significant part through that mysterious thing called style, writes Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist and onetime presidential candidate.

A writer’s style must, in Vargas Llosa’s view, have two elements: "internal coherence" and "essentiality." Molly Bloom’s famous monologue at the end of Ulysses, for example, is incoherent. James Joyce’s "power to bewitch derives from a prose that is seemingly ragged and fragmented, but beneath its unruly and anarchic surface retains a rigorous coherence, a structural consistency that follows a model or orignial system of rules and principles from which it never deviates."

A style need not be pleasant in order to succeed. Vargas Llosa is irritated by Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s "short, stuttering little sentences, plagued with ellipses and packed with exclamations and slang," but novels such as Voyage to the End of the Night are finally hypnotic. Alejo Carpentier, "one of the greatest novelists of the Spanish language," writes in an entirely different style, rife with "stiffness" and "bookish mannerisms," yet his prose has a saving coherence. "His style has a conviction that makes readers feel that he tells the story the only way it could be told: in these words, phrases, and rhythms."

"Essentiality," the second element of style, is much harder for Vargas Llosa to define. It is easier to describe its opposite: a style that makes us "conscious of reading something alien, not experiencing the story alongside its characters and sharing it with them." It creates "a fissure that exposes all the artifice and arbitrariness that fiction depends on." Readers "realize that the same stories, told in a different way or in other words, would be better (which in literary terms simply means more persuasive.)"

Jorge Luis Borges, for example, has an unmistakable style, cold, elegant, almost intellectual, which has exerted a great, and to Vargas Llosa’s mind unfortunate, influence on his many epigones. In their hands, Borges’s style fails to ring true. "Precisely because it is essential, Borges’s style is inimitable." Gabriel García Márquez writes in a very different but no less essential style, bringing almost as many imitators to grief.

The paradox is that Vargas Llosa thinks writers can develop a style only by endlessly reading other novelists, by seeing William Faulkner develop his own style between his maiden novel Mosquitoes and his subsequent Flags in the Dust. Then they must put all this aside and search for their own voice.