About Writing. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ “competent” prose, but who need someone to point out why their “competent” efforts are so often empty or worthless. The essay has occasioned a barrage of recent attacks. But the best I can say for them is that most of the essays I have read are notably more muddled than Orwell’s. What these academics are muddled about is why Orwell’s bit of eminent good sense does not turn students who can’t write into thinkers who can. They fail to see that their students have not read enough, while Orwell’s piece is addressed to people who have read too much—specifically too much of the wrong thing, and in the wrong way.

      When the writing of literary theory is bad (and often at the general academic level it is), what usually makes it bad is something Orwell’s essay points to—what Orwell calls “operators” or “verbal false limbs,” which save the writer the trouble of “picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad the sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry” (130).

      Often when graduate students find themselves having to write about a difficult passage from, say, Flaubert or Heidegger, which is developing a point (or, more usually, a portion of a larger point) that the graduate only dimly understands, again and again I have seen one or another of them break the passage up all but arbitrarily and put “On the one hand he writes” in front of the first part and “But on the other hand, he says” before the second—or, indeed, any other possible verbal limbs that effect the same suggestion of symmetrical contrast—establishing the idea that a single passage outlining a development actually expresses contrasting or contradictory ideas. The rest of the student’s paper—or section of the paper—will cite other examples of one or the other of these “two contradictory ideas,” sometimes through the medium of a shared word or phrase or sometimes just through hazily similar notions.

      Only yesterday morning, while marking a Ph.D. preliminary exam, I found one such false contrast—not in the student’s answer but in one of the questions posed by a colleague: “D. H. Lawrence called the novel ‘the bright book of life.’ Contradicting this, however, he also said that the novel was the receptacle of the most subjective responses to the world. Choose three novels written between 1850 and 1950 in which subjectivity is fore-grounded and discuss them in terms of the formal techniques the writer employs to present or invent the modern subject.” The fact is, there is no contradiction between the novel’s function as ‘the bright book of life’ and its presentation of subjective responses to the world—since subjective responses to the world are part of life. It’s far too limited a reading that would assume “the bright book of life” referred only to the object world around us. The relation is one of “as well as,” not one of “contradicting this.” The point is to understand how B follows from A, not how it contrasts with it. But such careless articulation often suggests to someone whose critical lens is not highly focused that the discernment of such “contrasts” represents “close reading,” or that finding contrasts that aren’t there is the way to trace out some “problematic” or “aporia” (Greek for “contradiction”) in the passage, when all it does is sow confusion on top of misunderstanding. One can write clearly about complex notions. Those complexities still require concentration, repeated reading, and careful articulation to get them clear.

      Orwell discusses this process in the context of political journalese, in which the commentator will use “the appearance of symmetry” to set up conceptual antitheses where no antitheses exist. But today this is what makes three out of four graduate student papers (not to mention too many “higher thoughts” from the already securely tenured) reaching after the heights of theory flounder off into fogged failures of logic, leaving their works all-but-pointless exercises in verbiage.

      Again, it’s professors, journalists, graduate students, and critics who do write for others who need Orwell’s piece—not undergraduate students who don’t.

      I am a lover of the verbal sensuality and conceptual richness of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Michel Foucault (1926–84), and Jacques Lacan (1901–81), just as I enjoy William Faulkner (1897–1962), John Cowper Powys (1872–1963), and Charles M. Doughty (1843–1926). I delight in reading them and rereading them, in teaching them and teaching them again; and I enjoy equally John Ruskin (1819–1900), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), and Walter Pater (1839–94).

      Still I think, basically, Orwell is right.

      Another fine and informative book for people who write regularly and understand the mechanics of writing is Jacques Barzun’s Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers (1975; revised 1985). Rich in the history of words, the book is particularly good at explaining why some mistakes are, indeed, mistakes. Here’s an analysis from Barzun’s book that dramatizes particularly well one of Orwell’s points, using the example “They said they had sought a meaningful dialogue on their demands, which, as they made clear before, are non-negotiable.”

      Meaningful is usually quite meaningless. Does the writer mean productive, fruitful, satisfactory, fair-minded? It is hard to say; the word dialogue is too vague to suggest its proper epithet, and taken together with non-negotiable, it lands the writer in self-contradiction; for what is there to discuss if the issues are not subject to negotiation? The only tenable sense is: “They faced their opponents with an ultimatum.” This result is a good example of the way in which the criticism and simplifying of words discloses a hidden meaning.

      Barzun’s chapter on frequently confused words is far more thorough than, say, the one in the ever popular Strunk and White (The Elements of Style, 1959), and it lets us know something about the history of those confusions, which are often more complex than they appear. “Restive,” for example, does not mean restless—or at least up until the Second World War, it didn’t. It was the adjective from “rest” and meant fixed, immobile, or stubborn. Now it means almost anything. Barzun points out how the poor use of words by careless writers makes writers more sensitive to the language less willing to use them for fear of being misunderstood. Barzun’s book is not a remedial text. It’s another grown-up text for grown-up writers.

      Other works that I have found useful and stimulating include the essays in W. H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand and Forewords and Afterwords; William Gass’s Fiction and the Figures of Life and The World within the Word and Habitations of the Word; Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination, Every Force Evolves a Form, and The Hunter Gracchus; and Jorge Luis Borges’s Other Inquisitions and This Craft of Verse; as well as Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s The Lord Chandos Letter (1902). This last is a fictional letter from a young Renaissance writer, presumably to Sir Francis Bacon, explaining why the twenty-eight-year-old young man is giving up literature. If you are feeling discouraged, Hoffmannsthal’s text is all but guaranteed to make you want to get back to writing. Also a turn-on in two very different modes are G. E. Lessing’s Laocoön and Laios Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing.

      As well, I’m a fan of E. M. Forster’s 1927 meditation Aspects of the Novel. We’ll get to that one shortly.

      In his astute and useful essay “On Writing,” Raymond Carver says he doesn’t like tricks, cheap or otherwise. Yet the creation of a certain order of particularly vivid description is a trick. (I discuss it in two essays, “Thickening the Plot” and “Of Doubts and Dreams.”) It is one of the many tricks that, in his own writing, Carver generally eschews. While he was an extraordinary creator of moving and poignant miniatures, and while his descriptions are always adequate for his own narrative purposes, few would cite him as a master of description per se.

      Yet the “trick” I speak of was used by Flaubert and Chekhov and the great American short-story writer Theodore Sturgeon. Buoyed by a raft of other descriptive planks, Joyce uses it particularly effectively in Ulysses and “The Dead”; all Virginia Woolf’s mature fiction relies on it more or less heavily, as does Richard Hughes’s, Harry Matthews’s, William Golding’s, Vladimir Nabokov’s, John Updike’s, Lawrence Durrell’s, William Van Wert’s, Gene Garbor’s, Antonia Byatt’s, Robert Coover’s СКАЧАТЬ