NoD #125 — Belletrism of our lives

Routine newsletter: slice of life anecdote, some actual play reporting, and closure.

An encounter in prose fiction

Sipi gave me a novel last week; he’d read a book review and bought the book, and either regretted the matter, or as he told it, thought of me as somebody who might enjoy the book. It’s one of this year’s Finlandia award nominee novels; said awards are the premier Finnish book award, most well known for how everybody thinks that it’s really unfair how much such an arbitrary award affects the sales for any work that even gets nominated, not to speak of the winner.

So anyway, like the dutiful boy I am, I started reading the book. This is not a book review, I’ve yet to finish the first chapter. Rather, take this as subjective commentary on what it’s like to encounter mainstream prose when you’re not a mainstream reader. We don’t even need to talk about the book and its premise, I’m strictly about micro-level writing craft today.

The very first paragraph of the novel stopped me in my tracks, partly because I had to backtrack to actually understand what I was reading. It’s been so long since I’ve read belles-lettres purple prose, you see. Here, I’ll translate that first paragraph into English for fun and games:

The night was pitch black and quiet, the town barren as charred earth. Sparrows and thrushes had ceased their chores in the alley bushes, the thicket had quieted off its gutters of life; the petty pursuits of the hedgehogs. Darkness had burned thick onto the apartment blocks and cobbled roads, as Laimi kicked the whingeing velocipede through the town. Her shadow bucked behind, seeking to stride to the saddle under every lamp post.

The Finnish version is if anything a bit more purple still, but overall I think that captures the main points. The novel pretty much continues in this vein, at least for the bit I’ve gotten around to reading so far.

I have two specific observations about this:

Purple prose is excessively ponderous word vomit in prose. The publisher here apparently doesn’t see it, but to me that paragraph is an obvious “purple patch”, the kind of idle warm-up writing you often engage in while just beginning a scene. The author’s eye sort of wanders around a bit before they get to their topic. The book’s cover copy hints at its lively language (the Finnish is even more stylized than my humble translation) as one of the charm points, which could be why the opening hasn’t been polished more.

Topic sentence is a single sentence in the paragraph that states its topic. Insofar as one believes in paragraphization of prose (I mean, it’s art, so maybe we don’t?), paragraphs are formed from one topic each, and it’s a damn good idea to place that topic at the front of the paragraph, because otherwise busy and experienced readers like myself will be damn lost when we speed-read through a book, just reading the first sentence of each paragraph.

Based on these two humble observations, let me rewrite this damn opening paragraph here to be less annoying:

Laimi was bicycling through town. It was night, everything was quiet.

There: no delirious raving about inconsequential environment detail, and the topic sentence that the next paragraph actually continues the story with is at the front, so the reader picks up the important part, namely that there is a person named Laimi and she’s bicycling through the town at night.

What we learned here about belles-lettres

Belles-lettres is an interesting concept that I’d like to highlight here, because I think that it’s at the root of my reaction to this bit of writing here. So just a few words on that.

Present-day English uses the term “literature” to indicate artistic writing in a fairly expansive way; most writing (or even just talking) with artistic intent is “literary”, including entertainment. Notably, when the modern era industrialization of culture creation caused working class culture to burgeon in importance and visibility, the concept of “literature” in the Anglo cultural sphere ultimately ended up encompassing both low and high culture; Shakespeare is literature, but so is Robert E. Howard. Modern English actually doesn’t have very emotive terminology for distinguishing between high and low literature, at least not in comparison with some other languages.

The French term “belles-lettres” (fine literature) was apparently used in Victorian era English for the purpose of distinguishing between low and high literature, as a direct foreign-language loanword. The term and the concept are familiar in most European languages to this day. Swedish “skönlitteratur” is a direct translation, as is the Finnish “kaunokirjallisuus”. We can just say “kirjallisuus” (literature) in Finnish for a more encompassing term that works similarly to the English, but nevertheless, it’s interesting how English has apparently sort of dropped the term that means “high literature”.

The central identifying stylistic principles of belles-lettres as a mode of literary writing:
Babbling word-mats to describe visuals.
Complex-compound sentence structures intended for rhythmic reading.
Language games: unusual word choices, non-standard grammar.

This digression into language history is necessary because what I want to say here is difficult to express without the term “belles-lettres”. Namely, this: I think that the things I find problematic about that passage of prose are caused by the tradition of bellestristics in Finnish literature. (It’s not uniquely Finnish, to be clear. But it is Finnish as well.) Our understanding of how to write prose, how to be an Author of Fine Literature, involve inherent purpleness and acceptance of meandering literary expression. That’s what I see in this paragraph: an author trying hard or accustomed to writing in a “fine” style. They’re specifically trying to not write like a news reporter. That’s why it’s OK to mention hedgehogs in passing in something that has nothing to do with hedgehogs; that’s just how belletristics are done.

The contrasting stylistic counterpart to belletristic writing in modern literature is plain writing or straight writing, I don’t quite know if there’s a really common name for it in English (any more than English really has a term for belles-lettres either); Wikipedia gives me concision, which is just plain admitting that there’s no good technical term. I usually say “journalistic prose” myself. It’s an immensely important part of how low literary technique has developed over the 20th century, and you arguably cannot really write popular literature (or journalism for that matter) without mastering concise expression.

Identifying stylistic principles of concise style in literature:
Incisive, apt choice of words, focusing on clear language.
Simple sentences, well-formed paragraphs.
Linear, topical prose structure.

As most people, I’ve been reading less in my middle age than when I was a young manling. Or at least my reading has been more casual, I read less books and more news porridge and correspondences and other inconsequential things. I think I’ve generally read more web serials (it’s like a 19th century serial novel, except online) overall over the last decade than real books. And what that boils down to, ultimately: less belles-lettres, more concisely styled plain expression literature.

So that might explain why I didn’t react with delight at the attack of purple prose when cracking open this novel. I’m actually feeling kinda optimistic about the book, I really am; I’m not delighted at how its marketing seems to emphasize soap opera “I feel, you feel” content (a feature of belles-lettres tradition, that), but based on the first chapter there could be some interesting stuff in there. I’ll know when I continue with the drudgery, but I like how the first chapter just absolutely obsesses over bull cock. Lively stuff.

Is belles-lettres a worthless tradition?

This topic is often discussed in very black and white terms simply because it seems to me that most readers are fairly unipolar in their experiences and tastes: you read either high literature or low literature, not both. If you read high, then you probably read less overall, and more selectively, and it’s a part of your identity to shy away from low-brow literature, and you feel obligated to defend belles-lettres style. (Hey, “high-brow” and “low-brow” are kinda the current English idioms for this topic!) If you read low, you probably read a lot just for entertainment, and you might be intimidated or despise high-brow literature for its perceived elite status. So there’s a bit of a tendency for individuals to have a clear “side” on this stuff. Not everybody, but demographically it’s common I think.

In the real world the high/low distinction has been losing substance over the last century (arguably ever since being instituted), of course. While low-brow literature has developed plain prose into its main tool, and high-brow acculturates this fancy free-wheeling rambling belles-lettres style, high-brow culture constantly accepts seepage from popular literature. In particularly egalitarian cultural places you can basically pass for high-brow if your novel is published in hardback, giving high-brow readers the “permission” to read something essentially identical with entertainment literature. (To me it seems that low literature is basically throttling high literature to death for all significant purposes, but that’s just plain subjective historiography.)

So granting my perception that plain prose has been a huge success for literature in the 20th century, is bellestristics on the way out? Is there some value in writing in a densely textured “word-mat”? Using unique words, engaging in word games, complex compound sentences, are all clear no-nos for some light novel YA serial entertainment authorship… but that seems to be what a vast majority of readers actually wants to read.

Pot, meet kettle

Yes Petteri, I do in fact realize that I’m a fucking dirty belletrist myself. The irony of my reaction here doesn’t escape me. Here, just for funsies, have a paragraph from something I wrote myself a few years ago:

Southern and western still, towards the mountains, facing the cliffs of Kenath one finds its twin, the cliffbreak Lamorak – equal in greatness to Kenath, yet more remote still, and beyond as many tributaries of river the Great as one would care to count. The two great cliffs are apparently angled to one another, and though they are relatively close, such that the natives claim to see one from the brink of the other, they are definitely not a canyon of any kind imaginable to us; whatever the great calamity or natural process may be behind the fearful cliffbreaks that so dominate the jungles, the valley in between Kenath and Lamorak seems the work of providence, or no-one at all.

Derak in the Jeweled Swamps

That’s actually a great example of how bellestristics are not the sole property of high-brow literature; what I’m doing above is a stylistic pastiche of pulp fantasy, an early 20th century low-brow genre of American fantasy literature that was indeed characterized by a real use of bellestristic techniques. Later on low literature has toned this stuff hell the way down, but the kind of stuff I was grooving on when writing that piece damn well invented new words, used non-standard sentence structures and generally just crafted these dense word-mats of expression. Just read something in the vein of Lovecraft-CAS-Howard if you don’t know what I mean.

I don’t know why somebody else chooses to write belles-lettres, but here’s a key observation about my own audience-reception expectations: I don’t think that this kind of writing can really work well unless the reader knows how to “slow down” from the usual pace of cursory reading that works with plain prose. You need to read at like 20% of the plain prose reading speed, almost like mouthing the words, to enjoy the form of the prose. Read slowly and think about what you read. In past times and places (before the emergence of modern journalism, basically) this used to be a standard mode of literary reading, but I imagine I’m not alone in living with a foot in both realms: I can read belles-lettres, but it is possible for me to get surprised by it as well, when expecting straight narration.

For fairness, here’s the above bellestristic linguistic jungle in plain prose, like I did for my sample author earlier:

South-west from Kenath, several miles away, one finds the other great cliff, called Lamorak. The two great cliffs form a funnel-shaped valley between them, in which the Great River flows, expanding and spreading out into the marshland between the two cliffs. It is plain to see that the plateaus of Kenath and Lamorak are no canyon, being far too widely apart for such formation.

In my defense, at least my belletristic paragraph delivers relevant information (I mean, it’s relevant in the context of the ludonovella it comes from). It’s not just literally filling the page for no purpose.

Coup de Main in Greyhawk

As I’ve intimated, I have a kinda large pile of these play reports to put into the blog. Some have already fortunately been written. A more sane person would probably just call consistent campaign recording a worthless dream. I imagine that long-time gamers know what I mean here; you try to keep up a consistent record (for whatever reason; there’s a range of minor reasons why we do this), but then it lapses for whatever reason, and damn it’s hard to get back into it, because it genuinely is kinda low-value as a writing exercise. I could be writing like a wicked short story or something instead of racking my brain, trying to remember what happened in some game session last June.

Kinda resembles this whole newsletter project, both of these things are just kinda something I want to do to be consistent. They do produce benefits, but they’re more like a grab-bag of minor advantages that accrue over time, nothing large that I could point at as a clear justification for why it makes sense to put hours into this.

But enough therapy for now. Instead, here’s the real-time scheduling for our upcoming gaming, if you’d like to come join us. The game’s open to visitors, newcomers, inexperienced players, cats and dogs.

Sunday Basic session #8 is scheduled for Sunday 4.12., starting around 16:00 UTC. Teemu primarily GMs the time-slot and offers a dungeoneering-focused “Basic” style game set in the Duchy of Urnst. Rules and character stables and so on are basically compatible with the “main” game.

Monday Coup session #111 is scheduled for Monday 5.12., starting around 16:00 UTC. I’m currently GMing, and we’re doing the usual, strategic full panoply sandbox around the Selintan Valley region of Flanaess.

Coup de Main #85

Let’s copy more play reports from Coup-de-Gnarley. Back in the summer, Tuomas was GMing for us, and he wrote pleasantly detailed reports on what happened. At this point the party was kinda doing start-stop over finally traveling to the Griffon Mountain, waiting for the right combination of players to come play, so these sessions ended up practically being kinda one-shots, wrapping up loose threads and such. Last time it was fish-men, and this time, well:

Knights Temp were celebrating Brewfest and thinking what adventure to tackle next. It was decided to go back to Copperclaw mine to check if the water level in the mines had dropped sufficiently to explore it fully. The idea was to try to destroy the supposed fearspawn down there and check if the cultist had left any treasure there.

This is a callback to session #81, when the Knights first delved the mine. I personally wrote the mine off on the basis of that expedition (where I actually played myself), but for whatever reason several of the other players were kinda into clearing it out completely. Let’s see if it was a good idea:

Situation outside the mine seemed calm, nothing had changed since their last visit and descending to the tunnels revealed that the water levels had indeed lowered sufficiently to allow access to the lowest level.

Hanging a lit lantern down the main mine shaft attracted some zombies in the lower level; they were quickly dispatched with arrows. Everything looked safe, so Knight decided to use the mine lift to descend. It seemed work just fine, except the lift couldn’t bear too much weight anymore. Only Aelfstain, Thrumhall and Magnus had climbed aboard when the rope snapped and the lift plummeted down.

The lift dropped into water left at the bottom of the mine shaft and Magnus hit his head and fell on his lantern, breaking and extinguishing it. Somehow Aelfstain and Thrumhall managed to drag the unconscious Magnus to safety of a branching mine corridor before the lift sank into the waters at the bottom of the main shaft.

Nothing else seemed immediately threatening, so Magnus was lifted up with rope, banged up some more on the way. His condition proved stable nevertheless. The patient was left with couple of henchmen while rest of the Knights continued on.

Apparently there where more zombies or something similar behind a locked door in the lowest level. Constant banging started quick after the first Knights came to the level. Knights set up kill zone in front of the door and wedged it to allow only single zombie out at a time, opened the door and got grinding.

Some 16 zombies later there was silence again. Knights carefully ventured to the last corridors of the mine. They quickly spotted black goo floating on the ankle deep water of the level, and Aelfstain’s psionic senses picked up the presence of fearspawn close by. The problem was that they couldn’t spot the monster, so Aelfstain started conjuring psionic fire.

The world went black.

Something growling, splashing and bashing came at them, pummeling the first rank. Henchmen lost their cool at this point and routed in the darkness. Thrumhal, the assassin trained to operate in the dark, managed to yell out command and the Knight retreated in orderly fashion out of the magical darkness. Some exchanges of blows occured, but mostly to no avail.

Whatever was in the darkness didn’t seem eager to come out, so the Knights started throwing missiles and psionic fire into the darkness. The darkness responded by trying to touch Aelfstain’s soul (curse), but the ascetic held fast. Then Kermit played his ace and channeled Pelor’s power, dispelling the darkness and revealing the fearspawn, a big fleshy orb with maw, three tentacles and three stubby legs.

Notably, we never got into sight range of the actual Fearmother, the eldritch horror that the Illmire cult was worshipping. We meticulously murdered the cult worshipping it, but opted to bury the original monster in its lair.

Kermit encountered a teeny-tiny fearspawn earlier on his own, but this one was clearly bigger. I guess fighting the momma wouldn’t be out of the question if the party keeps training its way up, for all that these monsters are gruesomely tough.

Knights didn’t hesitate and charged immediately, cutting the creature down before it could do anything else. Anything besides erupting in spray of poisonous ichor that covered all the Knight and their fire witch went down with burns all over her body. Luckily it wasn’t very severe.

We joke a lot about the Fearmother being basically an Alien xemomorph brood queen, but damn if these critters haven’t grifted the entire xenomorph playbook note for note.

Silence again.

Stone went to collect the badly shaken henchmen, while Aelfstain and Kermit started to burn the corpse of the fearspawn with psionic fire and Pelor’s power. Rob scouted rest of the tunnels and found the treasure, chest full of gold! Like there is a guardian and treasure in here?

Knights were victorious with no casualties, couple of them need few days of rest but nothing severe.

Knights returned to Illmire to rest and to support the local economy by buying plenty of supplies for their next expedition to seek Periapt of the Dark Star, hidden somewhere in the mountains beyond the swamps.

The session ended with the dungeon in sight high in the mountains as the Knights trekked couple days through the swamp and up the mountain.

So yeah, there actually was a chest of gold down there at the bottom of the mine, being guarded by the mindless monster. The ruling theory is that the cultist were at the mine in the first place to establish a new satellite community, complete with its own Fearmother. Reacting to the extended siege of their headquarters, the cultists at the mine would then have secreted their gold stash and the feardaughter at the bottom of the mine while the human cultists either died and zombified or hurried back to join our earlier struggle at the cult’s main HQ.

Just, why the gold? Is this the cult’s main war cache intended for paying the mercenaries they’re working with? Was it being moved towards the east, and just at the mine for an accidental stop-over, or why didn’t the cult store it at their main site, under the formidable protection of the Fearmother?

The main lesson here is that where there’s monsters, there’s treasure, don’t question it. I personally have a sort of masochistic bad habit of leaning hard on setting modeling in strategic planning, even when I know perfectly well that adventure authors are just doing Pavlovian patterning, so there gotta be a reward when you kill a monster, whether that makes sense or not. So I basically end up doing what would make sense “if this was real”, when in reality my tack often doesn’t make sense when accounting for cultural D&D dumb. Sort of passive-aggressive intentional failure there.

The other players (I think Tommi and Heikki foremost?) were smarter on this and insisted on digging deeper into the mine, where I’d have just left it alone after it was verified that the human cultists had abandoned the place. The notion that the cultists would have left a treasure cache there didn’t make sense to me, so I didn’t factor it into my decision-making.

State of the Productive Facilities

I got the proof back for Muster‘s print version, and there’s some stuff that I need to fix in it before printing more copies. I guess I’ll write about that in a newsletter later, but first I have to actually make the corrections so the project doesn’t just sit fallow.

Aside from that, still writing these newsletters. I don’t want to get into anything more substantial before I’ve gotten my writing regular enough to actually get the newsletter out in time.

2 thoughts on “NoD #125 — Belletrism of our lives”

  1. Damn, I got agitated and was already writing a response in my mind, that you, my good sir, are just as verbose as any old pulpist out there, but then you acknowledged it yourself, saving me from the trouble.

    Anyway, reading fiction for me is very slow, as the only mode I really know is that slow reading where I try to catch the feeling of the writer and the words he or she is using to convey them to me. No wonder I enjoy the verbose style, but only if I can catch the feeling myself. Some books are too difficult for that and in those cases the verbose style becomes a hindrance.

    1. Yeah, I think that’s basically the issue over why belles-lettres style is falling out of favor: plain prose is readable for wide rangers of readership. In a way you could say that any belles-lettres writing paradigm is always going to be a language game, and it’s hit or miss whether the audience can get on board.

      As I mentioned in my musings, belles-lettres isn’t an exclusive property of high-brow literature, but in practical terms it is at a disadvantage in the low-brow scene in social and economical terms. A Harry Potter (particularly plain prose, basically only literature in the same sense that a newspaper is) is something everybody can read, but even something like Tolkien gets many fantasy fans to check out, the language game being too difficult and meaningless for them. Authors like Gene Wolfe or Samuel R. Delany are right out as anything but cult favourites, their notion of what it is to write literary prose much too refined for the masses. And I say this as a big fan of both of those authors.

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