The-Opportunity-Presented-by-Hyphenated-Prose

  I'm reading David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. Among its idiosyncrasies: footnotes extending multiple pages (and meta-footnotes); a dense set of storylines being juggled and mostly only meaningfully crossing at the end; dark humor and serious pathos meandering into each other; minute details cross-referenced 500 pages from each other, and never again; run-on sentences usually in list form (like this one), often reaching trance lengths; abbreviation of oft-repeated proper nouns, even names of people; and (this is the important one) a propensity for breaking with syntactical rules when slang (often his universe's own) would serve it better. Haspelmath details intra-word morphological structure across languages, whose set of rules in English Wallace breaks when he sees fit. Frankly, it works; he conveys meaning by dancing around the rules in an intelligible way. It is easy to see how a less deft author could get this wrong. My question, then, is how much liberty should an author get with the consecrated rules underlying his medium?

  With respect to word morphology, to be fair, Wallace doesn't transgress to an extreme degree. His most common move is to invent compound words bridged by a hyphen; in the course of a few pages, these include "terre-batu-fest", "video-capable", "C.T.-impression", "crib-railing", and "there-feeling". The meaning in each is intuitive and terse, probably more so than would be available otherwise. In most of these cases, and all mentioned here, he takes advantage of the common English language mechanism noted by Haspelmath of noun-noun compound words wherein the first noun, the dependent, describes in an obvious way the second noun, the head. Inventing terms like this is relatively common in normal English, and, if done right, a subtle but effective artistic technique.

  For a work to be good, it has to be understood; of course, it also has to be... good. So long as the rules the author introduces are understandable and serve some compelling purpose, they can be effective. Arnold Schoenberg and Duke Ellington thought that good art continually introduces less consonant structures, at each step reaching a higher rung of consonance; a piece consisting of the same note being hit interminably would bore. They refer to this concept as The Emancipation of the Dissonance. Similarly, to blindly adhere to the rote, easily comprehendible rules of English would be to give up on one avenue of potential creative expression (and to be fair, by no means, of course, must it be explored). The task, I conclude, is to use English rules as a starting point; there is no important distinction between creating meaning conventionally (plot development, unique voice, etc.) and defining structures, or words, or punctuation marks.