'Look at This, It's Wonderful'

There’s a written nonfiction voice I find especially repellent. For the sake of convenience I’ll call it “institutional.” I encounter it most often in academic writing, but it has leaked into the larger culture.

For almost sixteen years I worked as a science writer for a university. In that time I read thousands of technical papers, usually composed in both words and equations, and laced with a highly specialized vocabulary – chemical names, for instance, or words drawn from genomics. This is understandable. Mathematics, truly, is the universal language and such papers are composed largely for fellow researchers, for some of whom English may be a distant second or third language. Such prose can be justified by its precision and universality for a select audience. It doesn’t matter if you or I as laymen can readily understand it, though the quality of such language can radically vary. I had the advantage of often knowing the authors and having access to them for questions.

What I’m talking about are papers – and books, magazine articles, blog posts -- written in the broadly defined humanities. Literary criticism, of course, has long been polluted with various fads and political eccentricities. This class of writing, like the scientific dialect described above, is assembled for a sort of ghetto of teachers, critics and students. It tends to be dogmatic, predictable and ugly, with a total disregard for readers. There’s a sad irony in critics unable to write but judging what the rest of us ought to be reading. If they can’t recognize their own mediocrity, how can we trust anything they write? What’s missing is the aesthetic dimension, the beauty of language in the hands of artful writers. In other words, pleasure for readers. In 2015, William Pritchard reviewed three books by Clive James (1939-2019) in the Autumn issue of The Hudson Review:

“More so than [Aldous] Huxley, James’s writing is consistently entertaining, thereby making him suspect to those who insist that a truly significant writer not be too entertaining. But James is never more serious than when joking, and his appeal is always to the ear as well as the eye and the mind. When he admitted recently to trying ‘not to write anything that can't be read aloud,’ he was referring specifically to his work as a poet, but the determination extends to everything he writes.”

The only objection to writing that’s “entertaining” – a highly elastic category – I can think of is pure snobbery. Why set out to be opaque and prove your own tiresomeness? Near the conclusion of Latest Readings (2016), James writes: “’The critic should write to say not ‘look how much I’ve read’ but ‘look at this, it’s wonderful.’” Or awful. Contemporaries with gifts comparable to James’ are Joseph Epstein, Gary Saul Morson, Theodore Dalrymple, Dominic Green and Peter Hitchens, and among the recently dead, Guy Davenport, John Simon, Roger Scruton and Oliver Sacks.