With no small amount of difficulty I’ve read my way to the middle of a certain book, and now I want to vent.
You know that style of writing, the one that tries to capture the way that people really think by stringing together long, breathless sentences that take one idea, repeat it one way, repeat it another, offer an example and then they’re off, off again in a flow of verbiage that’s just so intense, so difficult to actually read that it must be literary, and every second or third sentence is just like that – you know that writing style?
What are the Charter implications of making it illegal? Just, you know, hypothetically.
Yes! and it also seems that the theme gets weaker and weaker and the plot thins — and you are into the book 350 pages and start questioning if it is worth the time to finnish. Ughhhh.
I can only guess as to what book you are reading that has provoked such angst, but I think this phenomenon stems not so much from a desire to “write the way that people really think,†because only those with severe mental disorders think this way, but rather, as you say, to seem “literary,†as some of the most admired, and dare I say most difficult authors are in the habit of writing long sentences, such as Proust, who is often thought to be the record holder for long sentences, or Joyce, who apparently wrote a sentence in Ulysses that runs on for 40 pages, or even Gaddis who ignores the very rules of time and space, allowing his characters to enter and leave scenes without explanation and to speak throughout his work without attribution with a complexity and arbitrariness that cannot be successfully navigated by the reader even with a Global Positioning System, and whose work is surrounded with much debate particularly as regards whether good literature should be “accessible,†that is easy to read like the typical fare found at the supermarket checkout stand or marked by a gold seal proclaiming inclusion in “Oprah’s Book Club,†making it the kind of literature written by what Corrections author Jonathan Franzen calls “contract writers†because they respect the implied contract of readability that he feels exists with the “reading public,†or whether writing is in and of itself an art that is the sole province of the writer/artist and that the failure of the reader to “get something out of the work†is an indication of laziness or ineptitude on the reader’s part, which is, of course, an elitist point of view and, well, I think you get my point.