'They Knew More Then Than I Do Now'

More than forty years ago a newspaper editor warned me that the average American reads at a fifth-grade level and will stop reading a sentence if it exceeds fifteen words. Whether or not these statistics were accurate, his point was clear: Keep it simple, keep it brief, make Hemingway your stylistic ideal, not Faulkner. Define your terms. Don’t assume readers will understand your more arcane allusions (Who's “Faulkner”?) or rarified vocabulary (“Rarified”?). Ever since I’ve tried to remain sensitive to the uncertain nature of audience. We can never know precisely its identity, what readers know, and what constitutes “arcane” anyway. 

Not long ago I made a passing reference to Spinoza in a post and a reader wrote to say he didn’t know who that was and had to consult Wikipedia to find out. My reaction was mixed. I assumed the identity of the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher was sufficiently well known not to require a footnote, Likewise, I further assumed that once a reader learned his identity, he would dig a little deeper in order to learn more about the author of the Ethics. My reader, instead, basically accused me of making a snobbish faux pas.

 

A counter example: earlier this week another reader in an email referred to “brackets.” The context was no help. Why was he referring to an article of punctuation? I wrote back, confessed my ignorance and learned that “brackets” refers to college basketball, a subject about which I know nothing. Nor am I interested in pursuing it. For my reader it is a subject of intense interest.

 

I can’t think of an infallible rule to resolve this dilemma. On the one hand, I don’t wish to insult readers by reiterating what seems obvious (“Montaigne, a French writer”). My impression is that my readers are a rather intelligent bunch, often well-read and inquisitive. This is a site that advertises itself as “a blog about the intersection of books and life.” It’s not Twitter. On the other hand, I don’t wish to lose a reader because I’m being too obscure. Arthur Krystal addressed this situation in a 1999 American Scholar essay, “What Do You Know?” (collected in Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, 2002). He asks:

 

“Whence came the defiance required to face down facts, to regard with impunity what formerly was part of a traditional humanities education? A number of possible explanations come to mind: the decline of literacy; the ascendancy of technology; the recondite nature of modern science and the increasing specialization of all disciplines, including the humanities; the fall of the public intellectual and ‘man of letters’; the difficulty of texts that seek to explain why reading is so darned difficult; the popularization (and concomitant simplification) of ‘great’ writers; and the fact that many educators have no problem with putting quotation marks around the word great, even when referring to Shakespeare.”

 

Reading literature assumes a balance of confidence and humility on the part of the reader. You agree to read a text that may be alien, sophisticated, difficult. It may challenge your understanding and previous assumptions and exceed your present knowledge. At the same time, it’s an act of faith, especially if the writer is previously unknown to you.

“Inadequacy, of course,” Krystal writes, “can be rectified; the real problem is knowing whether one actually is inadequate where knowledge is concerned. Express dismay that I don’t know the title of the latest self-help book, the name of the hot new rock band, the CEO of some huge corporation, the capital of Mississippi, and my head remains high. Not my bailiwick, I respond cheerily. I don’t need to know that.”

 

Krystal doesn’t claim to supply an easy resolution. Ignorance can be a goad to learning while insulting and angering others. A reader needs to know what’s important to him. Krystal defines some of my my perplexity:

 

“With the exception of a few noted men of letters, we do not know the dead writers, and if we do, it’s a toss-up whether we know more than they did. Whenever I go back to Montaigne, Robert Burton, and Samuel Johnson, it occurs to me that they knew more then than I do now, despite my knowing them.”