How Did We Get Here?

This long series on style was kicked off by the growing discontentment within some parts of the PulpRev over the current style of invisible prose currently used. So, before I start defending the indefensible this week, let's take a look at how English fiction prose got to its current state. And, like most of the social upheavals of the past century, this change has its roots in the 1920s. Tom Simon explains:

In fact, the most successful experimental writer of the 1920s and thereabouts is not even recognized as experimental anymore, because his experiments succeeded too well. That was Ernest Hemingway. The essence of his genius was to apply ‘telegraphese’, the compressed and allusive language of the transatlantic cable reporters, to the short story and the novel. Look at any of Hemingway’s novels side by side with his contemporaries, such as Fitzgerald, Woolf, or Joyce himself, and then with a randomly chosen bestseller from any later period up to the 1980s or thereabouts. You will probably find that Hemingway’s language is much more like the latter-day bestseller than any of his contemporaries. They were still writing the self-consciously ‘bookish’ language of the Victorian novel, allowing of course for the changes of dialect over time. Hemingway wrote a compact and elliptical language that showed more than it told, and hinted at more than it showed, and derived its patterns of grammar and diction from spoken rather than written English. Few later authors could equal the pith and force of Hemingway’s style, but they imitated it as well as they could, until it became the default ‘transparent’ style for even garden-variety commercial fiction. Heinlein’s enormous reputation as a science fiction writer rests partly on his being the first writer to successfully apply the Hemingway technique to SF.

In short, it's Hemingway's world, we all write in it. But the trend towards "patterns of grammar and diction from spoken rather than written English" did not start with Hemingway. Like all American fiction, it finds its roots in the Romantic age's return to nature. Prior to them, written English was dominated by the fashion of layers and layers of clauses--hypotaxis. Unfortunately, the trend towards spoken English in prose has been accompanied by the drive towards realism in fiction and the subsequent decay of rhetorical devices in prose. Somehow, reflecting what people actually say turned into reflecting what the People say, even though no version of the People actually resembled the man on the street.

Curiously enough, Hemingway's style is an outgrowth of poetry: From reading Rudyard Kipling Hemingway absorbed the practice of shortening prose as much as it could take.  It mixes "'declarative sentences and direct representations of the visible world' with simple and plain language." But what is unsaid matters, too:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
—Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon

One could easily say that the prevalent style is a mimicry of Hemingway's simple and plain language divorced from Hemingway's discipline. For while there is an app to teach the mechanics of Hemingway's style, his iceberg theory of composition is usually honored in the breach.