'The Very Empire of Connotation'

“[T]he partisan of parsimony sees prose as a vehicle for meaning and nothing more, even if their feigned rhetoric-of-no-rhetoric is in reality one of the oldest rhetorical gambits there is.” 

I have a taste for two seemingly mutually exclusive schools of prose that may not be all that different after all. Naturally, I favor the aphoristic clarity represented by Jonathan Swift, as in a Tatler essay from 1709: “There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense.” If a writer is most concerned with banishing ambiguity and making himself promptly understood, that's the way to go. Despite the just-the-facts,-ma’am approach, this too is rich prose, which has more to do with density of meaning simply stated than with subject-verb-object desiccation.

 

And then there’s the more obviously stylized prose we call baroque. In our post-literate literary world, this approach is sometimes dismissed as elitist, confusing and self-indulgent. Its exemplar is Sir Thomas Browne, as in Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658): “But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.”

 

“Partisans of parsimony” will object that the language is stilted or inflated: “Nobody talks that way.” Yet, by Browne’s standards, the sentences are perfectly transparent, true to the era that gave us the King James Bible. Such prose, when matched to meaning and context, draws us in as co-authors and invites readerly collaboration. We linger and ponder. And remember that among the writers most often cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, Browne ranks seventieth. He is cited nearly eight-hundred times for the first usage of words, and not all are obscure or strictly medical or scientific. Browne gave us, among other things: approximate, carnivorous, coma, computer, electricity, exhaustion, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, holocaust, jocularity, literary, locomotion, prairie, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior and veterinarian.

 

Ed Simon in “Punic Encomium” talks up the latter approach to prose composition, and Browne is his object lesson. (I learned of Simon’s essay from Mike Juster.) “[T]he mavens of MFA programs and the nabobs of newsrooms,” Simon writes, “have long pushed the ornate out of style. Author Ben Masters explains that, ‘Embellished prose is treated with suspicion, if not dismissed outright as overwritten, pretentious or self-indulgent.’ And not just overwritten, pretentious, and self-indulgent, but in a word, purple.” The first example of a purple writer in the negative sense who comes to mind is William H. Gass, who is nobody’s idea of a collaborator with his readers. Gass is far from stupid but he’s strictly a showoff, regurgitating his Thesaurus. Counter examples are A.J. Liebling and Cynthia Ozick at their best.

 

There’s plenty in Simon’s essay to question but in the end he is celebrating our grand inheritance of English. This reader revels in his dismissal of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (1919; rev. 1959), and Orwell’s preaching about prose in “Politics and the English Language” (1946). Simon offers “a counter-manifesto, a new style-guide for those who’d choose the gnomic over the obvious, the esoteric over the mundane, the allegorical over the literal,” in the form of six proposed rules. All are worth considering. Style is so personal a matter, think about them and run them through your own blender before serving. These are not laws but suggestions. For instance, in Rule #2:

 

“Prefer not the short word for its brevity, but rather choose the appropriate word. Remember that every word with its etymology, its history both spoken and hidden, its network of correspondences both seen and unseen, its branching central nervous system of dendritic connection to the rest of language, is the very empire of connotation.”

 

Simon is an inspired moralist at heart, as in Rule #6: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” Any self-aware writer who works daily to write better, to be more interesting and less “barbarous,” can revitalize his love of words reading Simon.