Decorum as a concept means “not offending”, “good taste”, and all that.
And decorum in writing is a completely different concept.
And all it means is that the content should suit—the style should suit the content.
It has nothing to do with good taste.
No writer worth anything is bothered by good taste.
What is good taste?
It’s a shallow consensus of a certain kind of right thinking individual or group of individuals.
It’s measuring what you’re saying to how you’re saying it and tremendously foundational
principle for writing.
And the experimental writer will, of course, instinctively transgress against these rules.
But you’ve got to realize that all your guide ropes are being jettisoned, and the
goodwill of the reader is not infinite.
It’s usually very high as you open a novel but if you mess around with the reader at
your whim that goodwill is very quickly used up.
Stream of consciousness—even Joyce has a very low success rate with it.
You have to be a genius to write stream of consciousness, and even the supreme genius,
Joyce, wrote his long novel —he spent 15 years on Finnegan’s Wake—which is flat
out unreadable.
And even Ulysses, only about 25 percent of Ulysses works.
And I’ve come more and more to the conclusion that if it’s social realism, your writing,
and it obeys—it means the novel is a sociable form.
And the writer is like a host and the reader is like a guest.
And if you, when you visit a Nabokov novel it’s as if he has given you his best chair
nearest the fire and given you his best wine and given you his full attention in the most
tactful and sensitive way.
If you went around to Joyce’s house you’d find the address didn’t exist.
And you would find some sort of outbuilding where Joyce lives, and that he wouldn’t
be in, apparently.
And then you would shout for him and eventually, a figure would appear, and he would talk to
you in a language you’d never heard of before.
And instead of giving you a delicious dinner, as Nabokov does, Joyce would give you two
slabs of peat around a conger eel and some repulsive drink he’d made himself.
To leave social realism—and I’ve done it, and most writers do it a couple of times
in their career—is a great statement of arrogance and introversion, and there are
huge risks involved in leaving the path of social realism.
And writers will be tempted to do it every now and then, and sometimes you can bring
it off.
But you say goodbye to all those—all the etiquette of social intercourse which governs
the novel, as it governs all our dealings.