Writing with Clarity

Comments here may be infrequent over the next few weeks as a new chapter, nay volume, of life begins. And there'll be more about that before long, I suspect. But in the meantime, do read Stanley Kurtz's pointed comments on the academic left's obsessions with obscurantist prose. This is an old conservative standby, but Kurtz does a good job with it.

I tend to agree with this critique in general (and you can always point to the Alan Sokal Social Text hoax as the prime example of the left's obscurantist tendencies gone utterly awry), but would probably classify fewer writings as incomprehensibly muddled than some conservatives. When writing about abstract art or modern theater, for example, it's sometimes necessary to write in a manner that, at least initially, seems difficult, even inaccessible. Abstract notions, I think, demand something like abstract prose, at least when describing them, and this prose won't always be generally accessible--much like how detailed economics and policy writing isn't always instantly accessible to the masses. The trick (in interpretive/critical writing anyway) is to bring those ideas into clarity and accessibility on the tail end. So, don't deny the ambiguities and vague ideas, but then use those to point toward meaning (or lack of).

Alternately, you can point to material like the dramatic theories of Artaud which you might be able to dismiss as sheer nonsense, but are also lit by a fairly undeniable linguistic power. He's not always clear, and in some passages he's downright impossible to understand, but that doesn't mean there's not something of value there, that there's no use reading his work and making an attempt to pull some stable, concrete ideas from it. None of this is to argue with anything that Kurtz wrote, or even to suggest that I think he and I would differ much on the principles involved, just to say that, just as there's a liberal tendency to snidely dismiss material that's too accessible, there's an opposite conservative tendency to push away material that doesn't deal with absolutes and concretes in quite as firm a manner as we might like.

Addendum: On the other hand, there are a solid number of conservatives willing to engage in exactly the sort of difficult, somewhat inaccessible writing I'm talking about. Take, for instance, Steve Talbott, whose essay "The Language of Nature" in the new edition of The New Atlantis (unfortunately not yet online)--the quarterly journal of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where Kurtz is employed--contains the following wonderful line:

When we crucify the world-text upon a scaffold of grammatical logic, the resulting corpse presents its own fascinations, but these are not the fascinations of the original meaning; they are only a shadow of it.

This is not entirely impenetrable, but robbed of its context, it is certainly daunting, and even in context, it's a sentence that may appear imposing to some readers, and will require rereading by many. However, it's actually a very good sentence in a remarkably insightful essay about how the current scientific approach to nature denies its content and meaning in favor of diagramming its structure in an abstract mathematical manner.

I had no idea that sheets cost the same as a small BMW

The NYT Magazine profile of Tom Stoppard is, if less than enlightening about the man as a playwright, fairly smart in terms of dissecting the mystery of Stoppard as a man. Writer Daphne Merkin lets us know that “Stoppard strikes me as an inveterately bookish man, one more passionately taken up with the life of the mind than with his aversion to being mistaken for a Serious Issues kind of playwright would indicate,” which strikes me as rather similar to what Robert Brustein recently wrote about Samuel Beckett: “That this most solitary and unengaged of writers should have chosen the most social of the arts as his favored medium is also anomalous.” Now, as then, this strikes me as no surprise. Drama is very much the art of breaking down and critiquing relationships, and it makes sense that those most successful at it are thoughtful outsiders. Shouldn’t we expect those who are especially gifted at faking human interaction to be wily introverts?

And of course, this being the New York Times, Merkin is obligated to gush over Stoppard’s European refinement:

Stoppard seems to be a man of discerning and somewhat rarefied tastes; he writes with a fountain pen (no Uniballs for him) and has a house in the French countryside to retreat to when he’s not in London.

I believe it is true that nothing makes an NYT reporter swoon like fountain pens and French country homes. (That's you, Judith Warner.)