what does it mean, though?

against overwritten, nonsensical prose

A couple of weeks ago on his Substack feed (I’m sorry, I hate myself), Times writer James Marriott reported that he’d been playing around with generative AI, asking it to produce book reviews in the style of different reviewers, and found it distinctly impressive. ‘Quite amazing,’ he wrote. ‘I think you could submit writing of this standard to a magazine and get published. Took three seconds.’

The writing in question was a review of The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis, a book I have not read. I have no idea as to whether the review is accurate. But what I do know is that it is borderline incomprehensible, drowned in what at first appears to be intelligent language that would nevertheless be instantly rejected by any good editor. Here is just part of one paragraph:

When Martin Amis published The Rachel Papers in 1973, at the age of 24, the novel was received as a dispatch from the precociously self-aware frontier of the English novel—a clever, cold-blooded debut dressed in the anarchic tones of youth. It announced a talent not so much emerging as already armoured: technically alert, linguistically omnivorous, and philosophically caustic.

Like much of ChatGPT’s output, you could skim over this and be forgiven for thinking that it was exactly what it purported to be: a pretentiously-written review for one of the broadsheets (Marriott does not reveal which reviewer he asked it to ape, presumably because that reviewer would have every right to be pissed off). However, if you direct your attention to what it actually says, questions arise. The metaphors are mixed and the language is tautological. Even where you could make an argument for the phrasing, the context undermines it: there is simply too much vagueness to get away with it. Take the extract above. How does one dress in a tone, exactly? What does it mean for a talent (not even the prose, nor the writer) to be ‘linguistically omnivorous’? And ‘already armoured’ is posited as in opposition to ‘emerging’—but emerging does not suggest ‘unarmoured’ at all. It suggests—well, that it is emerging. Not yet established.

After several attempts to read this, what came to mind was that scene in Family Guy where Peter tells his wife and kids that he ‘did not care for The Godfather’ because ‘it insists upon itself.’ This is a phrase we use all the time in my house, as my partner and I mock each other for attempting to construct a critical basis for something we just didn’t like. ‘It insists upon itself’ is a perfect distillation of language that attempts to evoke critical analysis but actually is just pure pretentiousness (and is one of the few Family Guy bits that remains really funny).

Later, the generated review describes Amis’ prose style as ‘both effervescent and effortful’. ‘Effervescence’ is a sort of bubbly, vivacious liveliness, a playfulness and inherent ease; ‘effortful’ suggests a straining, physically arduous task, or when used to describe writing tends to mean that it is laborious and try-hard. So is his prose bubbly and full of life or is it exhausting itself with its own efforts? You could describe ‘effervescence’ as a sort of effortless energy, which in fact is the complete opposite of being ‘effortful’. I’m not saying that you can’t use these terms together—of course, you can juxtapose conflicting descriptions for effect—but at some point, by painting something in completely opposite terms, you fail to describe it as anything at all. You’re just gesturing vaguely with a lot of words, overwriting to account for the fact that there is nothing underneath it. And this is what the ChatGPT output does sentence after sentence. It is, in fact, effortful.

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The reason I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Marriott’s post is not that I really care about whether the output of ChatGPT is good or not, or even whether a professional journalist genuinely thinks this is ‘amazing’ writing. Rather, my concern is that this weird veneration of prose that is overwritten to the extent that it confuses its own meaning seems to be happening in the fiction world, as well. We appear to believe, currently, that cramming sentences full of totally incomprehensible phrases, using a wildly baroque writing style, is inherently ‘artistic’. I keep seeing books lauded as ‘beautifully written’ wherein the writer consistently uses thoughtless descriptors that gesture at nothing, and I have read a number of books of late—including those by some of the world’s biggest and best-paid authors—that have made me stop reading and actually say, out loud: but what the fuck is that supposed to actually mean?

This isn’t to make a point about style, which is personal, and highly contested. A lot of genres lean towards the wordier, and when people are writing into a particular time or class or literary canon, they might also be more loquacious than is strictly necessary. And what is necessity when it comes to prose, anyway? We aren’t all Hemingway, stripping out all words that could be considered inessential (though I agree with Stephen King that the road to hell is paved with adverbs).

It isn’t even to talk about what offends me, as a reader, because this too is personal, and in my case somewhat indefensible. If you’re a writer (and especially if you’re an editor), you of course think about word choice and syntax more than the average joe. You’ll also have a secret pocket of hates that you would never bring out in polite society, because to care so much about such things makes you both a pedant and an insufferable prick. But still, you’ll have them (it pains me that people use ‘disinterested’ when they mean ‘uninterested’ (technically it means ‘unbiased’), and I despise almost every instance of the word ‘bodily’, as it is usually completely superfluous: ‘I threw him bodily’—as opposed to what, metaphorically?). To the same end, you’ll have a list of rules that you will readily, repeatedly break with next to no reason; mine is my atrocious use of semicolons, which I scatter about with total abandon (and when I’m told off, I simply point to Hilary Mantel: as she writes in Wolf Hall, ‘there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon’.)

Instead, this is to talk about bad prose, from a technical perspective. Prose that is striving so hard to be beautiful or literary or to appear wise that it actually fails in its primary role, which is to communicate something clearly to the reader. It’s worth saying that again, because it is often forgotten: the point of writing anything is to communicate something to the person who picks up and reads your work. You are writing words down because you want to convey meaning to your eventual reader. If it doesn’t do that, it doesn’t matter how lush or gorgeous it is, because it isn’t actually saying anything. It slides over the brain, posturing relentlessly and still failing to get even the briefest foothold, making no concrete impact. As Stephen King puts it, ‘the reader must always be your main concern; without Constant Reader, you are just a voice quacking in the void.’