So, Hemingway versus Baudelaire, who would win?
Well, fairly obviously, it would be Hemingway
because he'd have the elephant gun.
But our broader point here
is to consider the differences between
Hemingway's approach to literature
which would be called the Attic approach to writing
and Baudelaire's
which would be called the Asianic approach to writing.
Now, the Attic approach to writing
it's very blunt.
It contains lots of blunt, paratactic sentences.
And I'll be explaining what a paratactic sentence is
in a few minutes, but basically, it's...
You have no words there that are decorative.
You explain exactly what it is that you mean to say
and you don't decorate that in any way.
That is a paratactic sentence.
That is the Attic approach to writing
as enjoyed by Hemingway, and it's very much admired.
Some people have even said
that that is the only approach to proper writing
that people should follow
to keep everything as sparse as possible.
Now, I agree that sometimes
the Attic approach to writing can be great.
I don't personally like Hemingway
because, frankly, I find him a bit butch
but that's perhaps just me.
Whereas the Attic approach of Richard Brautigan
where he's using that blunt...
sort of sparse
tough-guy approach
to something which is actually kind of absurd and fantastical
then it works really, really well.
Now, I'd have to admit
that the other kind of writing, Asianic writing
is the stuff that I am more heavily biased towards.
What Asianic writing is
you decorate it all like a wedding cake.
You use every trick at your linguistic disposal
every single way of influencing and affecting
and drawing the reader into this perfumed spell
that you are casting with your language.
This puts me in mind of the decadent writer
Théophile Gautier
who defined what decadent writing was
and decadent is certainly a form of Asianic writing.
Gautier said that decadent writing should be unafraid
to borrow from the most ancient mythologies
at the same time as stealing from
the most modern technical vocabularies.
Now, I think that this is really, really good advice.
You have the whole of literature at your disposal.
You can take from The Epic of Gilgamesh
and from the latest issue of New Scientist.
You can take your ideas from anywhere
and I think it's a really good idea
to combine them in this luscious broth.
Yeah, alright, you can perhaps take it a bit far
you can go over the top
but that is a matter of learning to control yourself.
But I would still say that
yeah, the Asianic approach is definitely
my favourite approach to literature
as you can probably tell from some of my trailing sentences
that go on for pages.
Now, one thing to use
in order to create this wordy spell
over your readership
would be the Ancient Greek figures of rhetoric.
What the Greeks did, they noticed the various...
things that people could write or could say
that would have a unique effect upon them.
And they were clever enough
to actually go through all of these things
and give them names.
These were the figures of rhetoric
things that could improve the persuasiveness of your speech
that could make it sound more sonorous and lovely
to the persons listening to it.
And there is a wonderful book
that I have learned a great deal about rhetoric from.
It's by Mark Forsyth
and it's called The Elements of Eloquence
How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase.
And there are dozens of forms of rhetoric
that he goes through in here.
I could mention a couple of them.
There is...
There was parataxis
that I was talking about a while ago.
Now, what parataxis is...
He has them here coupled with hypotaxis
which is a different thing
but in his opening words, he talks about parataxis.
"Before we get to hypotaxis
we've got to go through parataxis.
Parataxis is like this.
It's good, plain English.
It's one sentence. Then it's another sentence.
It's direct. It's farmer's English.
'You don't want to buy my cattle?
They're good cattle. You don't know cattle.
I'm going to have a drink.
Then I'm going to break your jaw.
I'm a paratactic farmer.
My cattle are the best in England.'"
Now, that is parataxis.
That is short, blunt sentences
perfect for the Attic approach to language.
Another interesting facet of rhetoric
another interesting flower of rhetoric, if you will
is synaesthesia
which is the art of...
actually receiving one sense
in terms of another sense
like hearing colours, for example.
And there was a wonderful example of synaesthesia in here
which was from the author Raymond Chandler
who, while writing in the blunt and paratactic
crime genre of tough private eyes
he thought that it was perhaps useful
to introduce an element of sheer poetry, of sheer rhetoric.
And so he came up with the memorable phrase...
"She smelled like the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight"
into the middle of his grim, gritty detective narrative.
And that is a beautiful use of gorgeous poetry
in an otherwise stark narrative.
Another form of rhetoric
which will probably be familiar to you
is something called hyperbaton.
Now, what hyperbaton is, basically
is words in wrong the order putting.
He explains it like this.
"Hyperbaton is when you put words in an odd order
which is very, very difficult to do in English.
Given that almost everything else in the English language
is slapdash, happy-go-lucky, care-may-the-devil
word order is surprisingly strict.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven.
It was about a green, great dragon.
He showed it to his mother, who told him
that you absolutely couldn't have a green, great dragon
and that it had to be a great, green one instead.
Tolkien was so disheartened
that he never wrote another story for years."
Now, those...
That's just two of the innumerable forms of grammar.
The last one, hyperbaton
obviously, the most famous advocate
in this universe, or any other
of hyperbaton would, of course
be Yoda from Star Wars.