“[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.
No comments:
Post a Comment