Paidika

Except for those who’ve spent some time in the Late Roman Republic, most people, I imagine, will be unfamiliar with the Asianist-Atticist stylistic debate. (A vivid summary appears in J. Duggan, C. Licinius Calvus’ Regimens for Sexual and Oratorical Self-Mastery (Classical Philology, 2001), 406-7. Get thee to a JSTORy.) The gist is that this debate was effectively one over ornamentation: is oratory—and, by extension, textual speech—more convincing if restrained and simple (Atticism) or flowery and ornamental (Asianism)? I don’t know terribly much about this debate and I’m not going to suppose to give any deep insights into its substance, but it strikes me that there’s some quiet representation of the same question in twentieth-century English-language prose. I recently picked up Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel—and have found it enrapturing—but its use of ornate language was genuinely striking. Consider:

I think now she must have been carved in that distant sun by stone masons who were the cynical descendants of Bernini, gouging out her like by the score, gauging with admirable accuracy the needs of fledgling pharaohs in an uncouth land.

Laurence’s language sings no less than does her story of Hagar Shipley, but it sings noticeably. “Gouging out … gauging with”; “admirable accuracy”; “fledgling pharaohs”; the text is balanced, assonant, and alliterative. Sure its proem (if I can be excused for importing that phrase) is more full-bodied than the story that follows, but it’s strikingly so nonetheless. Toni Morrison or Don DeLillo, perhaps, would write such full and heady phrases; Pynchon, that literary sideshow, might call equal attention to his verbal coloraturas. But when I think of Carver, Munro, Updike, Roth, Lydia Davis, Tom Wolfe, or Amy Hempel I’m struck on the other hand by how each finds especial praise for their spareness (Carver, Munro, Hempel) or at least avoids decorative excess. Their prose is more often notable for what it does not say.

Which raises the question of why. By comparison, we have only fragments of Calvus and volumes of Cicero. In fact, most of what we know about the Atticists comes from Cicero’s anti-Atticist passages in the Orator and Brutus. His main critique of the style is that it’s boring and people don’t remember it. I wonder. Tim Parks’ recent NYRB piece  remarks that vernacular languages have developed a certain English-inspired lingua franca, and one might wonder if English has done the same in the century since Joyce and Woolf. Is our bald, spare, hard language especially given to decorous, although not decorative, phrases? I’m undecided, of course, and my flight to Boston is about to board. But it’s something to chew on. Which I’ll be doing as I continue reading Laurence.