A Pulchritudinous and Yet Pugnacious 'Defense' of Purple Prose

By Vincenzo Barney

Dear Republic,

‘Purple prose’ is for some reason one of these topics that has been getting stirred up around the ‘Stack, so ROL thought it would be funny to have a kind of ‘embodied debate’ on the subject. With very little hesitation, we turned to the purplest prosodist we know, the one and only Vincenzo Barney. Vincenzo, by the way, recently had the literary scoop of the (new) millennium with his Vanity Fair piece. ‘Minimalism’ will have its turn here as well.

Thank you to Emma Alpern for her generous mention of The Republic of Letters in New York Magazine. If you were wondering, we are “an intriguing upstart literary magazine.”

-ROL

A PULCHRITUDINOUS AND YET PUGNACIOUS ‘DEFENSE’ OF PURPLE PROSE

I have been subpoenaed by the Republic of Letters to make a spirited defense of “maximalism” and “purple prose,” two arbitrary and meaningless pigeon holes I’ve supposedly been smoked out of by both “critics” and “fans” since my debut into the wet swaddling blanket of American awareness last Christmas. How I’ve come to occupy two hideouts at one time I leave to quantum physicists and imbeciles with double vision. But do gather round children of this century, for you are now 25 years old, old enough in fact to hear what I have to tell you: “purple prose,” “maximalism”… they do not exist! No! They are but the phantoms and faeries of intellectual children afraid of the shadows that fall across their room when all the blue light is turned off and the smartphones put to sleep. They are the ghost stories of those delicate temperaments who must consult astrologers before reading prose that breaks with serf idiom and go into “professional writing” out of emotional consolation; who schedule emergency appointments with a team of therapists after confronting violations of the “rules of writing,” “rules” at which they’ve labored so hard that they deserve to be followed.

Never forget, it is the mediocrity who first came up with applying “rules” to art, for something with rules, the middling intelligence reasons, can be “learned.” Rules, too, must have rule-breakers for the rule-follower to define themselves against, or else the rule-breakers must be invented. In the 21^st century these delinquent phantoms meant to strike fear in the heart of the fragile undergrad is the “maximalist” and the “porphyrophile!” But these are ghosts, nothing more! Martha, look under your bed: that is not a “maximalist” laying in wait but good ol’ Thomas Pynchon, a joint-rolling genius! Check your closet little Matthew: that shade of shadow is not quite “purple” (more like indigo), but rather the unique color harmonies of Vladimir Nabokov, another genius who merely wishes to engage you in a round of chess! See? These “purple maximalists” are merely harmless artists of exceptional talent, gregarious geniuses who have gathered in your bedroom out of the greatest concern for your artistic well-being, keeping chaste and dutiful guard over your sleep in secret only out of the deepest respect for your American sense of privacy!

Now, when one is given an inch, I consider it bad manners not to take a mile. So because I have been asked to treat my opinions as a subject, it would make me a hypocrite of decorum not to enlarge the scope to myself as dashing exemplar. As you can see, I am already off and running. The use of the “I,” in these occasions, becomes very self-hypnotic. You are getting sleepy…

To date, I have had one piece of consequence published. Do not worry, I was born in 1995 and so long as modern medicine and personal genetics hold (and the prophecy of more than one palm reader, I’ll have you know), I will live as long as the century and enjoy exponential consequence. In other words, get used to me. It has been foretold.

Size does matter. (What a transition! How does he do it?) And at first sight my above average length piece for Vanity Fair was categorized by its above average length and then dismissed (for what else is the purpose of categorizing?) as “maximalist.” What can I say – the paid professionals publishing me found my vanity fair, and liked my writing so much that they asked me to write more of it. Its length, therefore, was less maximal than contractual. But of course it was not just the length, but the style, the very sentences, that next fell under unlettered scrutiny. It was, according to the colorblind, too “purple.” And just what exactly was the color purple doing in the black and white typography of a modern magazine these squinting, outraged third-raters wanted to know!

Now, “purple prose,” or, let us shorten it for the sake of brevity: “pee-pee,” was once, as I understand it, used to deride floridly one-dimensional descriptive writing. In other words, its target was cliché. But my sentences were not cliché because no one had attempted them before. And if the colors they gave off in their speed and verbal virtuosity were of the purple spectrum, then I must say with all attempted modesty that they are shades of purple that pale to the violets and hyacinths and heathers of our language’s greatest purplists: Joyce, Nabokov, McCarthy, Amis – the only writers worth reading and judging oneself against this end of the color spectrum.

I’ve taken three paragraphs, which in my original draft was one engorged Proustian page pushed to its maximum, to revisit my first victory over philistinism (don’t worry, a future campaign is around the corner) because it shows the degeneration of our culture’s color perception, from the dark candescence of indigo that lit the 20^th century to the sallow color of wilt that dulls our digital lessness. As man’s powers decline, he takes the language with him too. Thus, “pee-pee” is now dowsed by miniature territorial dogs upon any writing that attempts to describe the following: weather, times of day, mountains, climates, landscapes, women, clothing, physical beauty, temperature, skies, stars, color, shadows, light, darkness, the infinite shadings between, etc. My attempts in these domains are still to this day viewed as “bizarre” by newspapers located in the very country where our language was born and, even though my sentences are definitively “incomprehensible,” some Americans are penetrating enough to understand the only thing worth understanding about them: that they are also “immoral.”

I had not known that style, descriptions of an Arizonan monsoon, could be judged on moral grounds—or that moral grounds are superior to aesthetic ones—but this is one of the great Protestant innovations of my country. No one, the saying goes, has ever lost a dime underestimating American intelligence.

In the wake of such “purple” overtures made by myself, professional and irate non-entities took to Twitter and opinion pieces to declare that they should have been given the story, the desert, and the woman because they would have achieved a much more tepid, lukewarm and predictably overwrought moral portraiture (emotional morality being the only extra dimension allowable to writers who really want to soar across a phone screen), employing all the while the officially sanctioned, government subsidized “rules of writing.”

What is rule-based writing you ask? It defines itself, quite sadistically I think, as clear, intelligible prose. In other words, my supposed opposite. This is the showdown I had walked into at high noon, all 28 American years of age: my overlarge violet pistol against a cavalcade of water guns. Complex vs. simple. However, there is someone else hiding in the saloon who put us all up to this charade, and they should be standing before me now. But as there is nothing more artistic than dying for no reason, and as I’ve been asked in this duel to draw first, I will oblige. But if this really is my final sunset, I know I’m not allowed to describe it but I think I’ve earned the right to describe the world it’s setting on. I will talk very loud so the culprit in the saloon can hear me. I know they’re listening.

After a spirited pause.

The town doesn’t look big enough for the two styles—descriptive writing vs. simple writing—only to bystanders with no depth perception. I like clear prose, and it is pleasing to be drawn through the genius New Testament cadence of Hemingway, or to rapidly descend the Col de Galibier’s of Houellebecq’s best novels. Cormac McCarthy wrote in both complex and simple modes. Both are styles. But credentialed, “rule-based” writing is something different, though it pretends synonymy and convinces the poor and the vulnerable. This type of writing, in fact, is not a style.

Let me explain.

Writing is a visual art: its purpose is to move the eyes across the page. The problem is that today much of it is written to move the eyes across search result pages, in three seconds flat. This heinous fact has become so nonchalant as to hardly register as understanding or awareness.

Register this: in the early 2000s, Google co-opted the entirety of magazine traffic and began to sell ads against it without investing a single cent of their own into human content. Gone were print advertising and large magazine budgets, the gold that bought magazines their golden age. The next shoe to drop was equally hideous: to stay alive, much of print journalism that hadn’t simply vanished or retreated to die slowly online could no longer prioritize writing for humans in order to gain visibility and subscribers, but for the tasteless algorithm Google uses to rank its ad-infused search results instead. This is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Harbor a prejudice against it, dear reader. For born of it was the insidious one-line opening “paragraph,” and destined for obsolescence were voice, nuance, length, development, style – things computers cannot assign value or relevance to.

At the very same time, the pipeline toward publication in novels and magazines (which was once merely, in Eden, that unteachable thing Adam and Eve named “talent”) was being consolidated and put downstream of school children. Yes, at a millennium old, the English-language canon was found by bureaucrats to be delinquent in its transcripts and sent by schoolmarms, bizarrely, to college. Rather like hogtying Zarathustra and putting him in kindergarten.

Enter the MFA from a trapdoor stage left, with its tantalizing bill of goods for the impoverished, lonely and undiscovered young writer: after two to four years of “learning” the guarantee of lackluster publication or, in the absolute worst-case scenario, a tenured teaching position and six-figures of student debt; and all you have to do is stop using adverbs, write according to a rubric, get to class on time and listen patiently to the critiques of 5-15 randomly assorted 22 year-old mediocrities. The audience of the novel was relocated from the general public to the young, aspiring hack. But this is the big time boy, so pony up the dough! Voice, imagery, style, vision – those complex archaisms, they’re gone, they’re impossible, they’re bad writing! The only thing that matters is rushing a reader through your piece with as little friction (and thus, fiction) as possible, like an advertisement. And the reader will like it because it was as painless as not reading at all. That’s what a reader wants, right: not to read at all. What a relief, to be an artist, verified with a degree and hard-earned debt, without having to engage in the difficulties of artistry!

Is it a coincidence that no one employing these rules has ever written anything that will be remembered? Pray tell, does it not strike you as odd that for 500 years none of the translators of the King James Bible, nor Shakespeare, nor Milton, nor Joyce, Nabokov, McCarthy followed any rules of writing nor jotted any down, but apparently left such an elevated task to the namelessly subpar whose “rules” demand that the styles and language of our masters not be attempted?

I have floated the term “publishing-industrial complex” in pieces before, and here it lands. These two rivulets of drool: style dictated by the economic blockade of technofeudalists and style dictated by schoolmarms (some bogus Nicene Creed of inanity!), merged into a fuming cloaca of inhuman mediocrity which the young aspiring writer must trudge through to reach the promised delousing station of the MFA, where they are promptly grabbed by the ankles by scolds and shaken upside down until hundreds of thousands of dollars of unforgivable loans fall from their pockets. Thus writing became, and it gives me no pleasure to cite Baudrillard, a simulacrum of writing. Style became an economic factor dictated by the artless.

The only reason generative AI technologies like ChatGPT have a snowball’s chance of replacing mainstream professional writing is because mainstream professional writing has been devolving toward the vapid, voiceless, informative “style” of algorithmic writing for three decades. It will only get worse for magazine budgets and writing itself as Google’s AI search generation pre-empts readers from clicking on human content by aggregating, summarizing and plagiarizing magazine content in its bland, error-riddled tonelessness. How any of this is legal or worthy of our society speaks only to the anti-social technogarchs that anti-bullying laws have allowed to rule us, and to the automatons who consider it the height of existence to be no more in life than the economic factors of these manchildren.

These economic factors on the other side of this “debate” who call themselves, vestigially, “artists” and “teachers” and “humans,” will be remembered not for anything to do with the creation or midwifing of art, but for being the ancestors who ushered in the end of art. Who, having more parity with artlessness than art, espied annihilation on the horizon and said, “I recognize you brother, come hither.” Doing their best to do it in (remember, it took 23 stab wounds to kill Caesar, and three hours for him to die—three hours on the senate floor which from the right pen would flourish a brilliant artwork; I see it, perhaps, as a short, three act play blending Camus’s Caligula with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot), they fly into talentless, undynamic melodrama when someone contradicts them by coming up with a new way of describing lightning: the stitchless threads I made race through thunderheads, the rain I bade shimmer through the sheerest rainbows… Ah, I miss the desert.

Well, I hope I have cleared up some confusion and introduced some new and intriguing ones into the mix. Like Oscar Wilde, I live in fear of not being misunderstood. What I have meant to get across, in a “clear” and “minimalist” form reads like this: that style no longer exists in mainstream writing; that the definitions of “maximalism” and “purple prose” have developed radically, amnesiacally, in reaction to this three-decade devolution of the state of mainstream writing. These terms do not remember what they once meant, and I am now tired of parading them around in their quotational escorts. In fact, I have run out of the security personnel required to handle them off the premises, and they keep wandering back onto the page. So I will take you onto an altogether different plane of intimacy where such demential ghouls cannot tread. Trumpets please.

Light falls, then rises on pearly gates. Voice is first heard as if coming from clouds. Trumpets being unavailable, an out of tune bugle blasts.

I was asked here, the implication was, to defend my style of writing. The style, the color of writing that interests me most, the color that it is my artistic destiny to attempt and defend, is ultraviolet, and its invisible presence and translucent outline I will always stand behind, merrily blurred and curved by the event horizon of its bent light. What I mean is a style of writing that merges on the furthest bleeding edge between pure melodic pleasure and comprehensibility. A demi-impressionistic mode, a style that makes knight-leaps beyond the visible margins of the page where only the frontiers of quantum physics can follow them. Joyce showed with Finnegans Wake that our language could be written in staves, in pure non-representational music. Readers often approach this book incorrectly, with skeleton keys written by bored professors as if it were a very complex crossword puzzle. The novel’s enjoyment, instead, is musical and works by music’s abstract implication alone, revealing through original blends of the English language a hitherto invisible canon of imagery, hidden behind the suddenly sunshot, see-through drapery of the unconscious. Non-representational, remember, does not mean incomprehensible. But any meaning or plot one claims to discover therein one ought to keep to oneself, courteous not to interrupt the performance.

This style, however, is not so much ultraviolet as intraviolet: beautiful, but self-referential.

What Nabokov did was something special and ultraviolet: his best sentences show that this melody can be captured representationally, to adorn plots. So far in literary history only at the level of the sentence, the phraselet. At his best (Lolita, Ada), and at Martin Amis’s best (London Fields, The Zone of Interest), their sentences achieve a synonymy between sound and image that could stand alone as pieces of music. Such a style occasionally calls for intelligence on the part of the reader. It calls for intimacy with the English language without the hindrance of intimacy coordinators and without being filmed in the act. For a writer it calls for mutual adoration. The proof of the mutuality of your and the language’s ardor is the child you create, and creativity often requires spirited, virile repetition.

Art is the place for sovereignty and iconoclastic individualism. This is why history is one of the greatest forms of art. Art, against all the attempts of the publishing-industrial complex, exists in no state of governance, no state of politics, nor the fleeting ethics of whichever era of perishable modernity one is randomly born into. In art, power is another word for talent, and posterity alone shall judge you, not your contemporaries. It is the place for invasions and coups, beautiful murders and assassinations on senate floors, immaculate conceptions and child kings, adulterous queens and emperies, small seaside republics that drown gazing at their own glittering harbor-front reflections, aged democracies making last stands on sunny hills, drunken elephants marching over dark purple mountains, the pure white tunics of Christ and Caesar sunk up to the tint of their gorgeously betrayed blood, unjust wars and Olympian interventions, golden age demigods who after centuries of bliss choose to die in the afternoon by passing into deep, consuming sleeps. In art, the practitioners of parricide and incest are blessed, and the true artist is an endless Oedipus striding in the fields of Colonus. One must transgress the boundaries of nature to be transcendentally absorbed into them, which is the definition of deification, the welcoming of posterity.

An arbitrary age’s temporary politics, ethics and the like have no place in dictating the course of such adventuring, unless one wants to condemn their art to temporality. Such mortal concerns are better left to those of the agile and overdeveloped thumbs of Twitter, permanently clutching phones the size of the average sporting male’s fouling piece.

Bugles fade, someone trips over an unused harpsicord, clouds lift.

In other words, colorblindness is good for democracies but bad for describing sunsets. My opponent’s solution appears to be: don’t describe the sunset. This to me is the real “purple prose,” the empurplement of strangulation.

Is this true, opponent? Are you colorblind and gasping for air? Do you see a difference between clear, concise writing and the rule-based, the technofeudal-based? To you, kind sir or madam, whose bullets I have attempted to pluck from their chambers, you may now draw your weapon. I would have written you a longer letter, but I didn’t have the time. Instead, I have given you the artful opportunity of being able to draw second, but fire first. Don’t squander it.

Vincenzo Barney is a writer and Vanity Fair contributor. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and his muse Augusta Britt, a story he broke last year. Barney graduated from Bennington College in 2018.