TWO
The Museum
“Tufted Titmouse, including Black-crested Titmouse”
(Parus bicolor)
“Northern Shrike”
(Lanius excubitor)
A field guide, in its stand on truth, presentation, scene, cast, thought, and language, fits the classic stand on the elements of style perfectly. Its implied model is one person presenting observations to another, who is in a position to verify them by direct observation.
The reader is not in a library doing research, but in the field looking and listening. Since the field guide assumes a scene in which the reader is in the field, it cannot be written in a style that requires study or rereading. It strives to be brief and efficient. It seeks to present the birds it describes specifically and precisely enough for the reader to recognize them.
The writing in a good field guide is certainly the product of deliberation and revision but sounds like ideal spontaneous speech, as if an accomplished companion in the field wanted to tell you something. There is a symmetry between writer and reader: although the writer knows more about the subject than the reader, the reader would know exactly what the writer knows had he seen what the writer has seen in the past. And the guide’s purpose is to put the reader in a position to achieve that parity.
The writer needs nothing from the reader. The writer’s purpose is purely the presentation of truth. Neither writer nor reader has a job to do. The writer writes and the reader reads not for the sake of some external task—solving a problem, making money, winning a case, getting a rebate, selling insurance, fixing a machine—but rather for the sake of the subject—in this case, the birds—and for the sake of being united in recognizing the truth of this subject. The writer takes the pose of full knowledge, since nothing could be more irksome to someone in the field than a passage clotted with hedges about the writer’s impotence.
The entries in the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Region, come as close to classic style in its pure form as anything we have found. In classic style, the model is one person talking to another to present something they both can perceive. A field guide does not perfectly coincide with that model since it is writing, not speech, and the two people are not literally together, but otherwise it fits the classic model closely. Field guides are particularly remarkable for their unfailing refusal to draw attention to their prose. A phrase such as “not as tame or confiding” in the presentation of the tufted titmouse or a sentence like “Unusual among songbirds, shrikes prey on small birds and rodents, catching them with the bill and sometimes impaling them on thorns or barbed wire for storage” in the presentation of the northern shrike is a masterpiece of expression, but refuses to acknowledge that it is anything other than the one inevitable way to present the subject. The prose suggests the same clarity and inevitability as the complex and wonderful but unambiguous and uncontrived presence of the species it describes. There is no more suggestion of deliberation or effort in writing about the tufted titmouse or the northern shrike than there is in seeing one. Writing is assimilated to seeing. There is no more struggle in writing than there is in seeing.
The passages in the Audubon Field Guide assume without hesitation that of course the reader is interested in birds. All details are presented at an equal level of importance. The entire passage is in close focus. The entry for the hairy woodpecker notes that it destroys insects such as wood-boring beetles, “which it extracts from holes with its barbed tongue. Like other woodpeckers, it hammers on a dead limb as part of its courtship ceremony and to proclaim its territory.” The speaker shows not the slightest diffidence or embarrassment about reporting that the call note of the hairy woodpecker “is a sharp, distinctive peek,” or that the western meadowlark and the eastern meadowlark “are so similar that it was not until 1844 that Audubon noticed the difference and named the western bird neglecta because it had been overlooked for so long.” The writer takes the stand that he is simply presenting truth and is being neither cute nor partisan when he reports that “The song of the Western Meadowlark is often heard on Hollywood sound tracks even when the movie setting is far from the bird’s range.” There is nothing self-conscious in his matching of language to thought, so there is no hint of fear or shyness in the way he puts his vocabulary to work in descriptions, such as the following account of the western meadowlark’s call: “rich, flute-like jumble of gurgling notes, usually descending the scale; very different from the Eastern Meadowlark’s series of simple, plaintive whistles.” The speaker never overshoots or undershoots, but always hits his mark. The tone is as it must be. There is nothing for the writer to be defensive about.
“Dragoon Tie”
An actual scene is unclassic when the writer wants or needs something from the reader. The classic writer never explicitly argues for the reader’s agreement, never overtly solicits a reader’s vote or ostensibly engages in salesmanship at any level. He does not write to convince his reader of anything or to lead his reader to any action; he does not write for any practical purpose at all. He is simply presenting an interesting truth. It may be that certain judgments or actions must fall out as a natural consequence of this truth, but in such cases, truth alone is sufficient to ensure the judgment or the action.
Writers in professional or business worlds who want something from readers normally use practical style. Technical manuals, sales pitches, political arguments, undergraduate essays, computer instructions, op-ed pieces, and the great range of prose that attempts to get our attention so it can push us and pull us is typically written in at least an attempt at practical style.
There are reasons for this. When someone wants something from us, we are not necessarily disposed to listen, and certainly not disposed to listen to every detail. Practical style is designed to allow skimming and to excuse the reader as much as possible from having to make an effort. If the writer knows that the reader is plowing through hundreds of similar documents, is weary and perhaps even bored, is skimming the writing and for reasons of either incapacity or disposition simply cannot be made to pay attention to the details of the writing, practical style is almost a necessity.
Yet classic style can be extraordinarily effective in cases where the actual scene conflicts with the model scene of classic style. Classic style is a general style of presentation and can present absolutely anything. Adopting the model scene of classic style can have the effect of distracting the reader from the actual scene by suggesting the much more pleasant and distinguished model scene assumed by classic style. This substitution, all alone, can accomplish the writer’s actual purposes at one stroke. In the model scene of classic style, someone is simply presenting truth spontaneously, succinctly, and informally. If this model scene can hide the actual scene—which involves some potential conflict of interest between writer and reader, or some reason the reader might not care to give her full attention voluntarily, or some effort by the writer to apply pressure to the reader, or indeed anything other than full disinterested participation by writer and reader in the truth of what is being presented—then the writer has accomplished his goals not by achieving them but rather by assuming a scene in which they are already achieved.
The most persuasive of all rhetorical stances is to write as if one is not trying to persuade at all but simply presenting truth. The most seductive of all rhetorical stances is to write as if of course the reader is interested in what is being presented, as if the issue could never possibly arise. In general, the best rhetorical stance, if one can get away with it, is to speak as if no rhetorical purposes are involved. Properly adopted, this stance accomplishes at the outset the actual rhetorical goals: the reader is interested and persuaded without ever stopping to realize that any effort has been made to interest or persuade her. This rhetorical strategy can be remarkably effective in situations where practical style or oratorical style is more common. It is also much more pleasant than the labor of practical or oratorical style. It flatters the reader by making her an equal, and relaxes the reader by making her part of a disinterested conversation about something really interesting.
Classic style judiciously used to mask practical goals can bring distinction to its subject, its writer, and its reader. The reader plowing through one hundred memos written in practical style may welcome being addressed in classic style, which adopts the stance that reading it is not part of anybody’s actual job, but rather something that the reader is interested in and would have no reason to resist.
The exhibit presenting the Smithsonian dragoon tie is an example of classic style used to sell something, but it has one glaring flaw that shows the difference between classic style and practical advertising style. The phrase “our exclusive” is wrong on two counts. First, the classic writer speaks for himself. He does not acknowledge that he is speaking as the mouthpiece of an institution. Instead, he is having a conversation with an equal. Second, the word “exclusive,” although it technically means that the tie can be bought only from the Smithsonian, comes from the lexicon of sales, and calls up immediately in full force the model scene in which a seller is trying to sell something to a customer.
However, if the phrase “our exclusive” were simply replaced with the word “this,” the result would be a passage in classic style. It pretends to be speech. Its purpose is to present an interesting truth. It takes the pose of full knowledge. Someone is simply telling you something interesting about what you are looking at. Everything is in close focus. It assumes a symmetry between writer and reader. Although skillfully written, it refuses to draw attention to the prose. A phrase like “as did the cavalry,” which is an extremely felicitous and understated way of presenting the historical situation in a brief and unforgettable parenthesis, is used as if it came to the writer without deliberation. Of course the reader is interested in the tie, its details, the image on the tie, the materials out of which it is made, the history surrounding it. It follows naturally that the reader might want to have this tie. That the writer is actually trying to get the reader to do something as vulgar as buy the tie is never allowed to surface.
A single revision, substituting “this” for “our exclusive,” turns this passage into classic style. “This” and “our exclusive” are both instances of what syntacticians call “determiner phrases.” The substitution changes nothing at the “phrase-grammatical” or “text-grammatical” level but changes the style, demonstrating that classic style cannot be defined, or distinguished from other styles, by listing its “phrase-grammatical” or “text-grammatical” features. Consequently, a writer cannot be taught classic style by being taught to follow certain patterns of “phrase grammar” or “text grammar.” That is why this book is not an instruction manual in such grammatical procedures. Rather, it is a presentation of the concept of style, the elements of style, and the classic stand on the elements of style. The reader who considers the classic stand will come to see, for himself and through the demonstrations of this museum, that some surface features may derive in certain cases from the classic stand on the elements of style. But these surface features do not constitute the style.
We include this exhibit to suggest the ease with which classic style can be used to present anything. Because classic style is a style of distinction and was used by its seventeenth-century French masters usually for aristocratic concerns, it might mistakenly be thought of as somehow reserved for aristocratic subjects. Quite the contrary. The first exhibit is a front-page report about a current event, the landing of Hurricane Andrew on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. The writer takes the pose of full knowledge and assumes that of course the reader is interested in the subject. All details are in close focus: “Known locally as Acadiana.”
The second exhibit is the opening sentence of an anonymous brochure about everyday medical problems. The writer writes as if his subject must manifestly be important to the reader, as if he is talking about the mystery of the Holy Ghost or the irregular evolution of great wine. “Actually” presupposes that the reader is of course already interested in this subject.
Perception has some basic patterns. In one of the most fundamental, we orient to a stimulus and then inspect its finer details. The eye is structured to serve this pattern: our peripheral vision is not very sharp, but it allows us to pick out what we want to pay attention to; we then orient our heads so as to bring the stimulus into the central area of the retina, or fovea, which is a more sensitive receptor, suited to inspecting fine details.
This perceptual pattern is basic not only to all our senses but also to our understanding of abstract concepts. We think of conceptual inspection as structured by it: we pick out a concept, orient to it, then inspect its finer details. This is why we routinely say things like, “Let us now turn our attention to the bond market,” or “He would have seen what was going on if he had bothered to look around.”
Since classic style presents a subject to its reader, it is not surprising that it has an affinity for basic patterns of perception and inspection. Often, the classic writer will view her task as getting the reader to pick out a particular abstract subject, orient to it, and then pay attention to its finer details. It is not uncommon for a classic passage or sentence to mirror this pattern at the grammatical level. When a classic passage gives us a title—The Tufted Titmouse, The Northern Shrike, The Dragoon Tie—followed by text, we can understand it immediately through this image schema: the title lets us pick something out and orient to it; the text will present the fine points.
The first two sentences in this exhibit are structured by this basic image schema of presentation. Conceptually, each wishes to present a subject—the ancients or physics—and then to make a fine observation about that subject. Grammatically, each sentence first refers to the subject and then makes a predication specific to that subject.
The use of this image schema will not ensure a classic style. Suppose these sentences were, “The ancients wished to acquire glory” and “Physics has a history of trying to explain reality.” Both of these sentences orient the reader to a subject and then try to pick out a detail. Both take a pose of full knowledge and avoid distracting hedges. Both have as their model scene one person talking to another. Both are patterned on voice rather than writing. And so on. But they are deficient as classic prose, because classic predication involves fine conceptual distinctions, articulated in a precise vocabulary.
Classic presentation lives and dies by fine conceptual distinctions. The distinctions drawn in our first two exhibits, by Michael Murrin and Richard Feynman, appear to have been carefully chosen. Both convey the impression that to be able to make these fine choices and careful conceptual distinctions, the writer must have acquired a vast wealth of knowledge. They do not draw attention to the learning of the writer, and they do not assume that the reader would have failed to see these truths if he had the writer’s experience, but they do convey the impression that these presentations can only be made after a great deal of personal experience, although only the appropriate truth, not the experience, is presented.
The first two sentences of this exhibit risk trying to state the essence of something immensely complicated. Each needs its refined observation. Lacking it, they would be no different from such sentences as “In the ancient world, everybody believed the gods decided everything,” or “Sex has a way of making you feel good”: texts that express shallow knowledge or repeat clichés without authority.
The third selection, from Richard McKeon, is disorienting even though, using conventional stylistic checklists, it is not easy to see why. Manuals of usage usually discourage the passive voice, but putting this sentence into active voice will not make it easier to read. McKeon, the model for the Chairman in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, often wrote prose that, like Jeremy Bentham’s, had to be solved rather than read. Some people thought the quality of his writing helped to create his reputation—narrowly based but tenaciously held—for profundity. When a philosopher is difficult to read, some readers ascribe the difficulty of his literary style to the difficulty of the subject. They expect to encounter thoughts inaccessible to ordinary thinkers in language inaccessible to ordinary readers. Feynman thought he could make quantum mechanics accessible to general audiences; McKeon could make The Hound of the Baskervilles as inaccessible as quantum mechanics. But whatever readers may think about the quality of his thought, reading a few pages of McKeon generally leaves them feeling as if they have been caught in a whirlpool. The reason for this feeling of vertigo is that McKeon was one of those rare writers whose sentences do not respect normal patterns of human perception. This one seems to invite us to understand it through the normal perceptual and conceptual pattern of orientation to a clear subject and then investigation of its fine details, but the reader who tries to understand it in this fashion will find that the subject of presentation never seems to settle down. The sentence seems to ask for repeated orientation with no inspection of detail, giving it a peculiarly confusing circular figure.
Classic prose is a window to its subject. This subject is never displaced by the writer. When the subject is a tufted titmouse, a dragoon tie, Hurricane Andrew, physics, the ancients, or anything that could not possibly be mistaken for the writer, the distinction is simple. When the subject is an event in which the writer has had a part, the distinction is subtler. This distinction is standard in classic literary journalism, in which the writer often reports a scene he experienced: presenting his own role may be part of presenting the scene. When A. J. Liebling writes about learning to eat in Between Meals, he does so from the experiences of a young American university student sampling Paris restaurants instead of going to class. When Twain writes about life on the Mississippi, he does so from the experiences of a boy raised on the Mississippi who imagined becoming a pilot on the Mississippi and who in fact became a pilot on the Mississippi.
Twain the boy and Twain the cub pilot are part of the subject; they are not displaced by Twain the writer. We do not start reading a book that purports to present life on the Mississippi and soon find ourselves mired in a discussion of the psychological turmoil undergone by the writer as he tries to recollect his youth before the Civil War.
When a classic writer presents his own experience, it is neither private nor merely personal. The experiences Twain presents are not private: had you been there, you would have seen what he saw, and his purpose is to put you in a position to see exactly that. It is only accidental that you cannot now visit antebellum Hannibal, Missouri to see for yourself. Similarly, these experiences are not merely personal. You are expected to recognize the truth of childhood ambition he presents and to confirm it from your own experience, or from other people’s reports.
In this way, Twain the writer and Twain the possessor of entirely personal experiences are never allowed to displace the subject—life on the Mississippi. Twain the boy and Twain the steamboatman are part of that subject and are presented as such.
Twain was a deeply opinionated man, and in some of his books he argues with an unclassic interest or aggression, but Life on the Mississippi is a work of classic disinterest and disguised assertion. The writer takes the pose that life on the Mississippi is interesting and it occurs to him to tell you about it, spontaneously. He writes as if there is nothing to argue about, only truth that the reader will of course recognize once put in a position to see it. In the wicked little history about explorers and priests, Twain passes off his assertions as mere observations. At his best, Twain is a complete master of such disguise, as in the following passage, which actually argues that those who send an invading army cannot understand at a distance what it is like to be invaded. Twain neither asserts nor doubts his central thesis. He simply presents the manifest differences in outlook between Northerners and Southerners:
The classic writer is distinguished by the fineness and accuracy of his sight. Often this sight is literally visual—as when Tanizaki picks out the detail of the left hand in the portrait of Terukatsu. Classic style extends the domain of sight to include all things that are perceptible through the senses or through reason. Tanizaki moves seamlessly from observing the visual details of the helmet, breastplate, and tasseled baton of command to observing the invisible: dignity, severity, formality, and uncomfortable stiffness; conventionally heroic posture; and the cultural and historical frame. We cannot see heroism, cultural moments, or severity in the same way we can see a hand, but classic writers assume that we see them in the same way. The truth Tanizaki recognizes and presents is conceived as public: anyone not blind looking at the painting can see the hand and its unusual distension, once it is pointed out. Similarly, anyone not mentally blind can see the cultural frame, the heroism, the stiffness, and the severity, once they are pointed out. Truth is self-evident; the classic writer need only present it accurately for the reader to recognize and verify it.
Truth is pure, eternal, not contingent. Jefferson’s sentence hangs there like a star. It is true that his sentence is a response to a particular occasion, but he chooses to meet that occasion with something that does not depend upon occasion. What he expresses is grounded in something that was always there and that will always abide: we are endowed with it by the Creator. It is bedrock, not the result of a process. It is not achieved. It is unalienable and so cannot change.
According to Descartes, truth is not only eternal and independent of any occasion, but also potentially available to anyone—there is no principle of exclusion from knowing truth; there is only natural defect, the mental equivalent of being born blind. Being persuasive does not depend upon special techniques available only to an elite, such as the literate, the educated, the urban, the wealthy, the French. Jefferson agrees that truth is democratic. That is why he can view these truths as “self-evident,” able to be seen by all. A Breton farmer who never went to school and cannot even speak French can be more persuasive than a Parisian professor of rhetoric if his thinking is in better order.
Both sentences express a global optimism. Truth will triumph ultimately and for the most part locally. This optimism is typical of American classic style, as an American cultural attitude.
Pascal, like Jefferson and Descartes, implies that truth is universally accessible: to see it is to recognize it. Who is it that is made to believe truth in Pascal’s sentence? The answer is anybody to whom it has been shown, anybody at all, provided that person has a full human endowment. As in Jefferson and Descartes, the perception of truth is independent of social status, education, wealth, or any other qualification. It is not exclusive. What are the local occasions upon which truth can be shown so as to be perceived? What are the particular circumstances under which it can be shown so as to be perceived? The answer is any occasion at all and under any circumstances whatsoever: truth and its perception are not contingent.
The perception of truth is immediately and completely convincing. A trick can be seen with your own eyes and still not be believed. You can see some things that you are convinced cannot possibly be true, a mirage in the desert, for example. There are many things one can see while still being suspicious of sham. But truth is not like this. To see it is to know that it is truth.
To show truth is automatically to persuade. Truth carries its own sufficient force. In this way, truth is inhuman: it is absolutely self-sufficient; it cuts through all human deficiencies; it needs no help from human beings. All it needs to be perceived is an unadulterated human presentation. As in Jefferson, truth is self-evident once shown.
Truth is perfect. It can gain nothing by being perceived. It is therefore disinterested. It has no motive for deception. It cannot present itself falsely because it does not present itself at all. Self-presentation is for human beings. Human beings are not completely visible; we come with packaging. The package is always shaped by human contingencies, temporary interests, and personal desires, and is therefore suspicious. But truth has no package. Any package given to it is false.
What underlies Pascal’s statement is the notion that appropriate prose or appropriate presentation is a window: one can see right through it to truth. It is possible to get the presentation wrong, so that truth is not shown, and therefore people do not see it. The window can be warped or dirty or smoked or blocked and thus be a kind of false package. This is a failure of presentation, not a failure of truth. Truth is never deficient in force or power.
Truth cannot fail any test. It can only be misperceived and mishandled. But nothing is lethal to it. It is immortal. It survives any attempt to deface it. The instruments of perception can be perverted, as can the means of presentation, but truth cannot be perverted or even touched by such corruption. It is independent of human purpose. No one can be so perverse as not to recognize truth once it is shown, though anyone can refuse to look at it or refuse to present it.
It requires discipline, but anyone can present truth, and it often is presented. When it is presented, its effect is complete.
Blake’s sentence seems a good deal like Pascal’s. Stylistically, it introduces a small unexpected sophistication: truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed. A plain style version of this sentence is “Truth can never be told and not be believed.”
Blake’s sentence introduces a refinement, a qualification, a meditation on the plain version. It introduces a pivotal conceptual refinement in simple words, transporting the assertion to a level of sophistication that the plain style shuns. Such an introduction of simply expressed conceptual refinement is characteristically classic, so Blake’s sentence looks classic.
It is not. In fact, it is stylistically ambiguous. The case is complex and unresolvable. Upon consideration, Blake’s sentence can be seen to wobble, but the channel between writer and reader is incomplete; the reader cannot even be sure that Blake meant it to wobble. Ostensibly, it seems to present truth as eternal, knowable, not contingent, of no particular occasion. But if we look closely, it might appear to express something quite different. It never says that it is possible to tell truth so that it can be understood at all. Such a view undercuts the classic premise. Blake’s sentence makes the premise contingent upon a precondition that might or might not be fulfilled. The sentence is unclassic not because it contradicts the classic view about truth, but rather because what it presents is fluid. It can alternate between the classic and an unclassic view. What is unresolved in this fashion cannot be classic.
Blake’s sentence is like a Necker cube: it contains two different figures, and we can watch it shift back and forth under inspection. It is not eternal. It is not stable. It cannot be stabilized. It looks classic, but that appearance is deceptive.
These two passages, by two of the founders of French classic style, are complementary expressions of the prototypical classic stand on truth, which, in this tradition, is more compelling than any invention and is the natural object of unobstructed human intelligence. Invention requires artifice. Truth, which carries its own conviction, can dispense with sophisticated rhetorical or poetic artifice; it needs only to be presented clearly. Human intelligence recognizes truth naturally. Artifice misleads—that is its purpose. It does so by blunting the natural human sensitivity to truth, and in doing so weakens our natural capacity to perceive what is true.
Truth, then, is natural, powerful, and sensitive; the language that presents it best draws no attention to itself. When we talk about someone’s personal style, or the style of someone’s prose, we often refer to conspicuous attributes. When La Bruyère talks about writing “naturally,” he is thinking about a style that is anonymous in the way nature is anonymous. The format of a modern book is more natural in this sense than a codex, because, when open, a book is bilaterally symmetrical, as is the human body. A duodecimo book “fits” the hands, and while the modern book is a style of setting out a written text, it is so “natural, powerful, sensitive” that only a textual bibliographer, a binder, or an archivist is likely to be aware of it as a style of presenting a written text.
Classic style is like the form of a book; it can be noticed, but it is not conspicuous. It fits truth the way a book fits the hand. If we can imagine a machine or an extraterrestrial, with no knowledge of the human body, trying to design a format for presenting written prose to human readers, we have an image of La Bruyère’s concept of the writer trying to be natural, powerful, and sensitive in the absence of truth. The mechanical or extraterrestial design will be no more natural, powerful, or sensitive to a human reader than a duodecimo volume would be to an intelligent creature with the body of an oyster.
Madame de Sévigné, one of the supreme French masters of classic style, had an exceptional literary education. She read Latin and Italian in addition to French and admired many styles of writing. She loved the allegorical epics of Tasso and Ariosto, as well as the classic prose of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Retz, and her close friend Madame de Lafayette. But poetry, in her view, is not a good model for the portrayal of the real virtues of a real king, because poetry “improves” the truth. In seventeenth-century French usage, poésie meant “invented story” as opposed to “true story”: its distinguishing characteristics were artificial ornament and exceptional invention. She therefore deplores the fact that Louis XIV has no one to record his victories except two poets who acted as historiographers royal in 1678 when he took Ghent, even though one of them was Racine and the other was Boileau. Madame de Sévigné is not rejecting figural forms of thought and language—metaphor, metonymy, simile, narrative, symbol, various forms of condensing and crystallizing—which are generally indispensable in thought and language and have a central role in classic style when they serve the presentation of truth. She is rejecting rather their use as embellishment, adornment, and artifice meant to “improve” truth. For Madame de Sévigné, poetic ornaments are appropriate for talking about Roland or other heroes of epic and romance, but contemporary reality needs nothing more than a pure, clean, straightforward style. Any ornament would just distract attention from truth, which needs no help, just an unimpeded view.
The passage from A. J. Liebling follows his account of the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 as he experienced it from an infantry landing craft. The style is recognizably classic. Its model is conversation, its occasion is informal, its tone is relaxed, confident, and unhedged, and it takes the pose that it is presentational rather than argumentative. It actually makes many strong assertions, concerning what D-Day was really like, the nature of institutional reporting, and the reliability of interchangeable mouthpieces who speak from something other than local knowledge and according to the agenda of their institutions. But these assertions are disguised as mere presentations of what would have been evident to anyone present on the little craft.
The passage supplies the accidental information that a reader cannot be expected to have: what “large” means in measuring an infantry landing craft, the number of the crew, the way Liebling was accommodated on board. But there is no gratuitous display of arcane military knowledge unnecessary to the narrative. Nothing is merely the product of the observer; nothing depends on being able to share the writer’s personal construal of the evidence; everything depends on being able to share the writer’s position.
The anecdote is a reporter’s reflection on reporting and rests on a contrast between a description without authority and an experience that Liebling can stand behind. Just as the real artillery salvo drowns out the recording of one on the radio, so Liebling’s experience, which he shares with the officers on board the landing craft, drowns out the account of the Normandy invasion as related from a radio studio in London. The force of the anecdote depends upon the position of the writer; the details are marshaled to put the reader in the same position, so he can see for himself what the writer relates.
As befits conversation, the sentences follow one another in a sequence that seems natural and inevitable, but this is a very efficient narrative. On reflection, it is a miniature masterpiece of construction. The complete narrative is a figural argument for Liebling’s view of news reporting as set against the B.B.C’s. It contains within it, perfectly positioned, a miniature version of the same figural argument—the drowning out of the B.B.C’s canned account by the real thing. The global figure of the passage and the local figure of the salvos mirror each other like macrocosm and microcosm. Both figures work by giving the reader a highly imagistic narrative from which he will certainly draw the obvious point. Yet the entire passage sounds spontaneous and conversational. The writer has done all the work invisibly, and the prose does not draw attention to itself or to the writer’s work.
Classic style used in this way is not in the least restricted to eyewitness reporting. The passage from Dodd we treated in “The Reader is Competent” works in just this way. It includes a wealth of facts and scholarly machinery, but it presents them as accidental information that merely needs to be supplied to the reader in a sufficiently clear fashion: the reader will then make, with Dodd, the inevitable observations. Dodd’s passage, like Liebling’s, sounds conversational, confident, unhedged. This appearance of confidence comes largely from the way the writer introduces facts and citations with perfect clarity: neither the facts nor their relations to each other are fuzzy. The way the components stand together is fully formed: the writer knows exactly the relationships he means to present.
Janel Mueller’s passage on Sir Thomas Elyot appears in her book on late medieval and renaissance English prose style. The passage is unclassic, not principally for local reasons—the side issues that bury in obscurity the figure structuring the passage, for example—but in its conception of scene, cast, and subject. It is a summary of evidence, but assertive and defensive rather than disinterested. The writer presses for agreement while defending from objection and attack, as if the scene and cast were adversarial, not conversational. If the writer obscures what she has to say as she goes along, it serves a strategic purpose: in the end there will be no clear interpretation to which the reader might respond. This style is best suited to juridical scenes and casts, where winning is everything; it is normally incompatible with the obligations of scholarship. The confusion of scene in Mueller induces an obvious strain, resulting in a conflicted form in which bits of scholarly evidence, vague in themselves, are imprecisely connected to each other, and sometimes not connected at all: “Given our present state of knowledge, even as advanced by Elizabeth Eisenstein’s study of the printing press as an agent of cultural change . . .” Scholarly asides are scattered at random, offering the decor of erudition without the justification of scholarly argument.
Liebling, who writes about what you can see and hear, and Dodd, who writes about the most abstract concerns of textual editing and historical interpretation, both write as if the subject they are presenting has a clear existence independent of the writer or the writing. Mueller, on the other hand, writes as if her subjects depend upon the writer for their very existence: Elyot’s encounter with “the resurgent Scripturalism of the 1530s and 1540s,” “the context in which he worked,” the nature of the “cultural and historical currents” that “energized” that context. That may be why the word “clearly” in the phrase “the context in which he worked was clearly energized by cultural and historical currents that encompassed considerably more than the issues of doctrine, religious practices, and ecclesiastical sovereignty dividing Protestants from Catholics, exacerbated as these issues were” rings false. Clearly? To whom? Could it be clear to just anyone who reads Elyot’s “letters and writings”? Could it be clear to Elyot himself? Apparently not. For the author appears to be disagreeing with Elyot’s claims. What he did should be construed, she says, in a certain way, namely “as evidence running with rather than against the momentum of a larger ideological movement.” And it should be construed this way, she claims, tautologically, because it is precisely what he did. The “evidence” she offers is “presented” as dependent upon her “point of view,” and the particular view of the evidence that gives it force is not described in a way that would allow the reader to adopt the writer’s perspective. Only the conclusions from that perspective are offered, in a manner so obscure as to place them beyond challenge.
Even though there is an ostensible presentation of evidence in the passage on Elyot, the evidence depends entirely upon the writer’s disposition. A skillful practitioner in this style can deflect questions about the validity of such evidence, but in this case, there is a marked strain in trying to establish with precision relationships among abstractions that are themselves shapeless and indefinite. In consequence, the whole passage betrays an understandable anxiety that even the writer might lose sight of her own subject. She must reassure herself that what she is talking about is real, that it matters, that her understanding of it is both defensible and significant, and that the reader is interested. It is not surprising that her anxiety is communicated to the reader.
In mathematics, whose normal subject is precise relationships between abstractions, such problems are rare. The objects, while they are abstract, are as definite as infantry-landing boats, and the evidence for the relationships is precise and publicly accessible in a way that the direction of “the momentum of a larger ideological movement” never can be. The borders of such an ideological movement are not public and definite the way the borders of an isosceles triangle—or the dimensions of the wardroom on an infantry landing craft—are. The strain evident in the passage on Sir Thomas Elyot’s career as a vernacular writer is the strain of attempting to talk about imperfectly formed conceptions of invented relationships between indefinite abstractions as if they had the precision and public accessibility of square roots or the complement of officers on a Landing Craft, Infantry, Large. Dodd, because he has thought through thoroughly and precisely the relationships and abstractions he wishes to present, can do so as if he were Liebling writing about one boat bobbing in the lee of another. Classic style is perfectly suited to presenting abstractions, but the classic writer, having thought out the features and borders of abstractions, presents them confidently, without recourse to hedges, contortions, and obscurities that undercut a reader’s ability to judge the writer’s conclusions for himself.
This passage on the introduction of artillery in sixteenth-century warfare and its effect both on large abstractions such as “the traditional mode of warfare” and on tangible things such as walls and fortifications, in addition to its social consequences—things that in other hands might become “the direction of cultural and social trends energized by the complex of military developments”—is organized by one short point at the beginning and a complementary one at the end. Everything between them is a careful expansion of the first point, at once supporting it with illustrations and examples and preparing the way for the concluding point. Although this passage of just two hundred words contains references to eight people and four cities, as well as allusions to actual fortifications, to plans for new defenses, and to four decades of fighting in two places (one specified, the other not), in addition to the citation of one epithet and an aside on its later repetition, each of these elements occupies a well-conceived place in the discussion. None of them seems awkward or arbitrary. The erudition does not seem gratuitous or strained; it does not obscure the figure that organizes the passage or obstruct its easy flow. The complexity and obscurity of the subject are not offered as a tacit justification for a complex and obscure presentation.
The story of the story of the thousand and one nights is perhaps untellable. The cultural provenance of the tales—indian, Persian, and Arabic—is perhaps irrecoverable. The manuscript traditions of the originals are a nightmare that makes the legendary textual problems of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus look trivial. The constitution of the work—which tales belong to it, or at least which tales belong to which versions of it, and in what order—is fundamentally unsettled. It was disseminated through Europe in the eighteenth century through a series of famous translations whose history is at best complex and subtle, at worst unknown.
These impediments to knowledge might paralyze any writer who allowed his style to be influenced by doubts about his capacity to perform. Additional impediments could plausibly be found in the cultural and personal situation of the writer. Jorge Luis Borges was an elite twentieth-century Latin American classic writer, a librarian, a famous erudite, and male. The Thousand and One Nights, by contrast, comes from traditions that are not elite, not privileged, not scholarly, not twentieth-century, not white, not European or Latin American, and not male: the transmission and perhaps creation of the tales were largely in the hands of women. They were subversive tales recognized as such in their own time, intentionally politically incorrect not just for our age but for their own: they present an onslaught against the very notion of ideological engineering as an effective response to the complexity of human affairs. These tales were introduced to Europeans by English and French men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Borges, confronted with this sea of difficulty and separated culturally and personally from the origins of the tales and their translators, nonetheless adopts the classic pose. He presents truth that is generally available. In principle, it could be confirmed by anybody, regardless of cultural identity. He conceives of and presents his subject as existing independently of the writer. He presents it to a competent audience in prose that itself is never allowed to become a subject of the writing. There is a symmetry between writer and reader: like Dodd in considering the textual history of the Fourth Gospel, Borges assumes that in principle anybody could learn what he has learned, and would then see just what he sees. Although Borges is dealing with large abstractions—orientalism, quality in writing, the reception of a text, happiness, the flavor of the eighteenth century, innovation and glory, blame, and extraordinarily complex cultural patterns—he conceives of them as clear and exact. They are as highly defined and visible as cut crystal. None of them depends upon the writer for its existence.
Anything can be presented in classic style, including the cultural and historical situation of the writer and reader, when these are part of the intended subject. Borges presents our situation as twentieth-century readers as part of presenting the truth of these translations and their history. But such matters never displace the chosen subject and never interfere with the performance. Although a classic writer could take as his subject ways in which cultural, historical, and personal situation might make writing impossible, or at least hard, his actual writing would never betray any evidence of the difficulty of which he speaks. He would present clearly, simply, intelligibly, and assuredly the truth that it is impossible to write clearly, simply, intelligibly, and assuredly. He would take the pose that the reader will share his recognition of the truth that it is impossible for the reader to share his recognition of anything.
The passages by Root and Friedländer are classic; the passage by Steiner is not. The difference has nothing to do with the nature of the subjects they treat, but with how those subjects are conceived. Root and Friedländer treat their subjects with a clarity and exactness that makes them appear to be entirely independent of the writers. Steiner treats her subject in a way that makes it dependent upon her for its existence as well as for its expression.
Root treats food and language while Friedländer treats “interrelationships”: food is available to the senses, “interrelationships” to abstract thought, and language to both, demonstrating that classic style is not determined by the nature of its subject. Root says something absurd while Friedländer says something we can all confirm, demonstrating that classic style is not determined by whether what it says is actually true.
What Root says is assured, relaxed, conversational, and classic. It is no less classic for being wrong. The supposed aboriginal “purity” of French in the Touraine is an enduring fairy tale that withstands all contradiction—the shop sign in Tours, for example, that announces “Le Fast-Foud”—and any claim that modern French cuisine has its roots in the Touraine will provoke outrage from approximately Sens to the southern limit of the Lyonnais. The claim of a relationship between the qualities of a cuisine and the qualities of a language—and, of course, the linguistic qualities Root refers to are qualities of a style, not of a language—must be regarded as doubtful. Many great chefs whose dishes are subtle, clear, and precise speak in a style far removed from that of Pascal and Madame de Sévigné. But Root is not seriously making claims about a relationship between cuisine and language. He is rather offering the disguised assertion that cuisine—as well as literary style—is an important mark of a culture.
Language and cuisine, even if both are limited to their modern French varieties, are large and indefinite domains here confidently subsumed under a deeply entrenched ontological metaphor and so treated as “things” more or less on the order of Friedländer’s strawberries. Friedländer, the third director of the great Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, liked to start with evidence of a primary sort—actual pictures—and subsumed his abstractions to this model, treating them as “things” so clear and exact that it is almost impossible to remember that they are abstractions. He noticed, with characteristic mordancy, that a theorist whose abstractions could not clearly and in detail be separated from his discourse produced students who, like their teacher, invariably saw only what they expected to see, whereas connoisseurs like himself whose abstractions were conceptually independent of their discourse regularly encountered pictures that contradicted all their expectations about the painting of particular times and places.
Steiner’s procedure is just the sort of thing that raised his skeptical doubts. Her passage, as it reaches its crescendo, is more and more speculative and impossible to verify by looking at what Friedländer would have regarded as common evidence, particular literary texts and paintings. The classic writer, no matter how abstract his subject, will present it as so sharply defined in itself and so independent of the writer as to count for all of us as a “thing,” with the implication that any one of us will see the evidence for it if only we are placed in the appropriate position. Steiner’s passage, by contrast, is fundamentally unclassic because it rejects any responsibility on the writer’s part to present its subject as a “thing” independent of the writer. On the contrary, the amorphousness of her subject, its dependence upon her for its existence, and the lack of a symmetry between what she and her reader might be able to see as evidence are valued in her writing as marks of the writer’s brilliance instead of the writer’s incompetence. The final dance of abstractions between “sign systems and their texts” and “the overall essential homonymity and synonymity of semiosis” that contains the “structures” of literature and painting has lost contact so completely with anything available to classic style as to suggest that Steiner’s gifts are at least partly oracular. Root is vulnerable exactly because he has presented something so precise and open to our own verification that anyone who has the good fortune to learn both French and French cuisine can challenge him. Steiner, wrapping her speculations in a rhetorical mantle whose most conspicuous colors are those of jargon, suggests she knows things that the rest of us do not, and so avoids root’s vulnerability, but at the risk of claiming for herself a kind of supernatural sight and insight. She suggests she has entered into deep mysteries unavailable to the sort of person who might observe that while painting and literature are not in all respects similar, they can be compared, and that a general inquiry into the subject will yield the not surprising result that painting and literature are similar in some ways and different in others.
Both of the selections from La princesse de Clèves come from a scene in which the princess is attempting to persuade her husband on his deathbed that she has not been unfaithful to him. Although she is not disinterested, the scene remains classic because the princess—an exceptional character with a disciplined and religious devotion to truth—is governed by a respect for truth and not by her interests. We include these passages because they illustrate the classic conception of truth and because they explicitly connect that conception of truth to persuasion.
The conviction that truth persuades easily even when it contradicts appearances almost certainly belongs to Madame de Lafayette herself, not just to the narrator of her most famous novel. It is not a view idly held by a naïve person. Madame de Lafayette was an intimate of Henrietta of England, Louis XIV’s sister-in-law, and enjoyed exceptional access to the king. Although the details remain obscure, she was actively involved in political questions—exceptionally so for a woman. She lobbied the French court on behalf of the dowager duchess of Savoy and, through her, kept the French informed of Duke Amadeus’s secret policy decisions. After the death of Henrietta in 1670, she retired from court citing ill health, but powerful members of the court continued to visit her in Paris for years afterward. She dined at the king’s table in 1672 to celebrate the treaty of Versailles, and retained a strong influence with his minister Louvois. She had seen dozens of reputations made and destroyed by intrigue and had an extraordinary sense of how powerful an apparently disinterested presentation could be. She had a reputation for respecting truth and for despising people who, from weakness, tried to evade unpleasant truths.
The kind of persuasion that interested her most was the persuasion of private conversation. It happens, as in the passages cited here from her novel, that prejudice, interest, or passion may prevent truth from being accepted. But in her conception, as in the princess’s, truth is naturally persuasive, so much so that even against appearances, it will carry conviction with any unbiased listener. It was this principle upon which she built a career that any modern political lawyer or lobbyist could envy.
We would naturally suspect the scene of being unclassic, because the princess is clearly interested, but she takes the classic pose that the highest and governing motive is truth, whatever immediate pressures she may feel. As she says, “J’avoue que les passions peuvent me conduire; mais elles ne sauraient m’aveugler.” ‘i admit that passions can lead me, but they do not have the power to blind me.’ We cannot control our interests—we lack the power always to be in a situation of disinterest—but those interests do not have to govern our actions, even if it takes an extraordinary discipline to discount them. Ordinarily, we do not trust someone who claims to be acting apart from his interests. It is for this reason that Madame de Lafayette has taken such pains to establish the exceptional fidelity to discipline in the princess as a character. Once the character has been established both by summary and by event, it is possible to believe that despite the pressures of interest, her actions are governed by the classic motive of truth. This motive, despite the temptations of self-interest, can govern the actions of anyone willing to submit to exceptional discipline. When a reader is persuaded that someone who could be affected by self-interest is in fact acting on truth, the classic concept that truth, no matter how unlikely, carries its own persuasive force can have an overwhelming effect.
Persuasion in the classic conception is the mere establishment of a classic scene in which truth definitively supersedes all actual or possible motives of interest. A speaker in a situation of interest who can establish this scene through whatever means has overcome the countervailing presumption that people are always governed by interest.
In general, it may be true that people are governed by interest, but it does not follow that everyone in all cases is governed by interest. The classic writer governed by truth belongs then to an aristocracy—an aristocracy open to anyone willing to submit to the discipline of classic style.
There is an unargued assertion within Hodges’s sentence, although one that is not controversial: in his lifetime G. H. Hardy was one of the best mathematicians in the world. There is also a tacit claim here that is a little more pointed: great mathematicians may be quite ordinary in other respects. Finally there is a disguised assertion that neither homosexuality nor atheism is an abnormality, either in such special populations as great mathematicians or in the population at large.
Both Hardy, Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at Cambridge, who died at seventy—a year after a botched suicide attempt—in 1947, and Alan Turing, convicted sex criminal sentenced to a hormonal “cure,” who committed suicide at forty-two in 1954, lived in a time and place that regarded both homosexuality and atheism as shocking abnormalities, neither of which ordinarily was associated with any form of eminence.
Hodges, who is both a mathematician and an active critic of the medical model of homosexuality, gives a devastating selection of examples illustrating British concepts of homosexuality in Turing’s lifetime and the effects they had on the lives of homosexuals. His book certainly encourages some ways of thinking about the subject and discourages others, but it does so by using resources of classic style. The power of the book derives not mainly from overt argument, but from the invisible argument of presentation.
This sort of invisible argument attempts neither to show the inadequacies of other opinions nor to offer explicit support for its own. It depends almost exclusively on showing the reader where to look. Hodges, in this passage, seeks to place his readers in a certain perspective; he asks them to line up “homosexual atheist” with “great mathematician.” There are people who might be so horrified by “homosexual atheist” that the last thing they would think to associate with such a description is “great mathematician.” But Hodges neither pontificates nor condescends. He speaks as if, of course, his reader knows, as well as he does, that an atheist homosexual can be an ordinary Englishman as well as a great mathematician.
At first the passage from Bertrand de Jouvenel may seem to be similar to the passage from Hodges. Jouvenel, like Hodges, asserts rather than engaging in grinding step-by-step argument, but the assertions are not just presented as truths that the reader will recognize as a matter of course. Jouvenel’s writing is not tortured, but it does not have the ring of spontaneous speech, either. His assertions are made as if they were the beginning of an argument, even though no argument follows. The passage departs from the model scene and cast of classic style. The scene is not a conversation between equals; it is the scene of professor to sophomore. The writer prides himself on having come through difficulties to the wisdom he has earned and asks his readers to accept what he says because he knows more than they do, not because they can verify what he says by sharing his perspective. What he says is plausible and well expressed, but it is really a form of pontificating. The style is not classic, although the sentences are fine, and lead to a nice, if unearned, generalization.
The chronologically earliest of the five brief texts in this exhibit was written in the seventeenth century, the latest in the twentieth. Written in different cultures, for different purposes, even in different languages, they appear in quite different sorts of works, yet they share a family resemblance. Each is built around a fine but “simple” and—once formulated—inevitable distinction.
They all take the stand of noticing, as if casually, something that the reader too can notice, once his attention is properly directed. The reader has the pleasure of being able to “verify” what each writer claims, although in each case there is a refinement of commonplace observation that amounts to novelty.
Wilde suffuses his most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest, with the attitude that plain style’s conception of truth is fundamentally wrong. He takes the central verbal cliché of plain style—truth is pure and simple—and refines it. Oakeshott, although not working from a specific verbal cliché, similarly introduces a conceptual refinement, one transforming crude polar categories into degrees along a gradient. Geertz takes two clichés of ethnography—to expose is to reduce; to see normality is to miss particularity—and recasts their terms into a specific and refined four-way balance. La Rochefoucauld takes conditions normally conceived of as distinct—belonging to a category versus striving to belong—and observes their inseparability in the case of becoming established in “the world,” where appearance is so nearly everything that careful imitation of a social state is an effective way of achieving it. Pope, a master of the phrase that illustrates its own meaning, reconsiders the crude opposition of force to grace and makes the fine observation that they share a common source in conciseness.
Neither Geertz nor Pope explicitly rejects an established verbal cliché, but each tacitly rejects a conceptual commonplace without making a fuss about it. Geertz implicitly rejects the notion that to expose a culture is to make it like all the rest, and Pope actually demonstrates that grace and force are not mutually exclusive. In each case, the effect is something like that of a brilliant move in chess; it was there all along and seems inevitable once made, but to see it in the first instance requires an uncommon refinement of perception.
The thought expressed in this passage has three steps. They are schematically identical. In each, an activity is located and then linked to its source in a different activity. There is a sentence expressing each step. Each of these sentences inherits the schematic structure of the thought, as in “You imagine what you desire.” Paired activities are expressed as paired clauses—“you imagine” and “you desire”—and the conceptual link between paired activities is mirrored in the linguistic link between paired clauses.
These three steps are not independent, but are ordered as a temporal sequence in which the product of one step serves as the source of the next. The grammatical structure mirrors this conceptual sequence: three sentences of the same grammatical form occur in linear order; the clause referring to the product in one sentence serves to refer to the source in the next.
Shaw’s passage—with its precise and detailed combination of schematic images—is the result of conceptual and linguistic work, but the work is not exhibited. Reading the sentence is like watching a champion gymnast perform a routine on the parallel bars. Obviously the gymnastic performance is the result of previous work, but only the achievement is exhibited.
The achievement is final. In the classic view, thought comes first and language is sufficient to express it. Any problem of expression has an exact solution in the language, and this solution, once found, will appear to be obvious, perfect, and definitive. The writer knows when he has finished revising.
Perfection of phrasing in classic style is assumed to follow from precision of preceding thought. The classic writer draws precise conceptual distinctions and locates exact conceptual relations until the analysis is finished. He then expresses the result of this analysis. Its schematic conceptual structure is mirrored in the schematic linguistic structure. Often, the result appears to be something like a mathematical formulation.
In classic style, the goal of analysis is truth in its most efficient form consistent with accuracy. Expression, carrying the elegance that comes from compressed energy, is like a perfectly tuned stringed instrument: the strings are taut to exact degrees to correspond to exact pitches that stand in exact relations to one another. The pitches and their relations exist before the strings are tuned. Each string is tuned to a pitch and the results are judged by comparison to this pre-existing reality. A musician tuning an instrument is not finished until everything is exactly right, but once it is exactly right, there is simply nothing left to do.
Similarly, in the classic view, the thought exists before the expression, and the expression is judged by comparing it with the pre-existing thought. In writing a sentence, a writer knows when he has it exactly right, after which there is nothing left to do.
Shaw’s sentence knows when to stop because it expresses a complete analysis. It might be contrasted with the following passage—written by an editor for the influential journal he edits—which isn’t over even when it is over.
Classic style is not exclusive. A writer’s position or status cannot make her a classic writer, or bar her from becoming a classic writer. An undergraduate at a junior college wrote the following classic passage in her discussion of the spatial form of Rembrandt’s Old Man with a Gold Chain:
On n’est jamais si heureux ni si malheureux qu’on s’imagine.
[One is never so happy or unhappy as one thinks.]
This juxtaposition of classic French texts—from chemistry, philosophy, and the observation of human behavior—very nearly speaks for itself. While everyone is endowed with reason, everyone’s reason is compromised by self-deception and self-interest. Classic thought depends upon finding a way, through discipline, of avoiding these frailties and avoiding, too, pride at having avoided them. This is of course impossible.
Classic style lends itself to the expression of a complete temperament in a single statement. People who do not like this style think of this feature as a narrowness, a sameness that falls into routine or self-parody; people who admire the style think of its aphoristic character as a consistency that is something like integrity. Barthelme’s sentence is much more than a statement or an observation. It is the expression of an attitude toward life. It is like the autobiography of a temperament in miniature. Its subject is central to the temperament in question—the self, conceived as a sort of cage. Naturally, someone in a cage would like to get out, but the first clause assures us there is no escape. Curiously, this situation leads neither to despair nor to passivity but to action. For, “with hard work and ingenuity,” the victim of selfhood can achieve if not the ideal goal then the most desirable practical alternative. It is a rather bleak picture of the world, but one in which there is a surprising reason to value effort and skill.
This temperament is at odds with the temperament found in Jefferson or Descartes, neither of whom begins with a restriction on basic human possibilities. Temperaments of resignation similar to Barthelme’s can be found, however, in a few notable classic French writers of the seventeenth century. La Rochefoucauld, for example, assumes that there are fundamental restrictions on basic human possibilities: self-knowledge is unavailable and the knowledge one has of others, if correct, always reveals them to be acting from self-interest. La Rochefoucauld’s maxim “On n’est jamais si heureux ni si malheureux qu’on s’imagine” (One is never as happy or as unhappy as one imagines) expresses a temperament resigned to unalterable restrictions on human possibilities.
Barthelme’s thought is globally structured by a schematic movement to a goal, in two impulses: a failed step toward an ideal goal—marked as impossible—and a subsequent step to a substitute. The first impulse is desire, the second, acceptance. The second impulse is interrupted right before it comes to its expected end by a consideration of the unanticipated and quite difficult requirements for attaining this inferior but possible goal.
The sentence imitates the schematic form of the thought it expresses: it moves directly toward a goal to be rejected (escape) and then moves from the rejected goal toward the available goal (distraction). Grammatically, we expect a participle to follow “can be.”
But the sentence takes an unexpected grammatical detour, through a parenthesis. This grammatical detour creates a sense of the distraction to which the end of the sentence refers.
Inserting the parenthesis “with ingenuity and hard work” into the final verb phrase destroys the symmetry of a radical version of this sentence: “The self cannot be escaped, but it can be distracted.” Adding this nuance suggests a distinction between the fantasy of escape and the arduous work of distraction. Escape, because it is impossible, is not burdened with conditions. Distraction belongs to a different order of things, an order neither so desirable nor so uncomplicated as the order of fantasy.
In the classic view, truth comes with structure that is part of its meaning and is preferably to be inherited by its expression. The structure of expression is therefore, by this inheritance, meaningful—two grammatically equivalent expressions can have different meanings. Let us consider two such expressions:
The first has a schematic structure of derailment, delay, distraction, and arduousness in reaching a goal. It inherits this structure from the thought it expresses. The second does not have this schematic structure. The difference is only a nuance, but the nuance is indispensable.
Classic style is highly attentive to nuance, and as a consequence is highly sensitive to the schematic structure of expression. In the classic view, nuance is neither arbitrary nor decorative; it is meaning. Nuance is recognized through discipline and precision and can be lost sight of through carelessness. Classic style lives on fine distinctions. However fine they may be, their significance is absolute. Two things that are almost the same are in fact different, and classic style was invented as an instrument for presenting such careful discriminations.
Classic expression presents the simplest accurate result of analysis. It presupposes that an analysis has been completed, and it is distinguished by expressing the result in the simplest accurate form. The thought locates exact distinctions, exact relations, exact objects and forms; the expression presents this analyzed array. The expression is clear and simple as the truth, but no clearer or simpler. Barthelme’s sentence is classic in expressing a precise analysis. It does this clearly and simply without blurring the fine distinctions indispensable to the thought.
These two sentences, here set out as prose, are the first two lines of a twelve-line poem. Although Larkin uses conventional poetic forms of meter and rhyme, he imparts to his poetry the sound of talk—casual, spontaneous, conversational. His best poetry not only aspires to, but achieves the condition of classic prose.
His first line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” sounds like a conversational observation; the words seem to be as commonplace as the thought, but they unobtrusively give vitality back to the cliché they express. The observation crystallizes a vast and indefinite history of personal experience without incorporating any of it, and the reader is expected to be able to confirm the truth immediately from her own experience.
His next line, “They may not mean to, but they do,” sounds like an afterthought. In fact, it is an example of the writer doing all the work invisibly. Larkin deliberately avoids the surface brilliance of classic writers such as La Rochefoucauld, or Shaw, or Wilde, preferring instead the maximum understatement of his capacity and labor—on a casual reading, their very existence can go unsuspected. These lines are however a deliberate presentation after the writer has done quite a lot of invisible work. Try any alternative—“your mum and dad fuck you up even if they don’t mean to,” for example—and see how flat and unmemorable this unforgettable little text becomes.
We can begin to see how careful and studied this passage actually is, despite its deceptively casual presentation, if we consider Larkin’s choice of words. A moment’s reflection will establish that your mum and dad are not the same as your mother and father or your mommy and daddy or dad and mom. The phrase “mum and dad” is a set phrase used to refer to parents as they inhabit a particular role with respect to their children. A native speaker of English, particularly British English, knows exactly when and under what circumstances to use this phrase, but the amount and variety of this knowledge is vast. It is the perfect phrase for referring to parents in Larkin’s text because it is precisely in their capacity as “mum and dad” that they “fuck you up.” The language has supplied a perfect phrase for crystallizing the extraordinarily complicated normal history wherein parents not deficient as parents nonetheless routinely, predictably, and inevitably debilitate their children. “They may not mean to, but they do.”
Profanity is almost never encountered in classic prose, exactly because the usual reasons for using it are unclassic. It is rarely a precise instrument of presentation and often has the effect of slurring or smudging an observation. The nonstandard “mum and dad,” the vulgar “fuck you up” exceptionally in this text fit their subject precisely. As a result, the expression itself, while disguised as commonplace, is unstridently memorable and undeniably certified by the culture whose artifacts are these phrases.
When La Rochefoucauld wrote his description of Madame de Chevreuse, Theodore Dreiser had written no novels, there was no Marxist political rhetoric, the landscapes of northern New Jersey were unexplored by English professors, there were no souvenir shops in airports, there were no airports. He and Robert Martin Adams are each saturated in local knowledge of a certain kind, but they live in different worlds and speak of different things. Yet their observations share a great deal if we consider not what they have to say but how they arrange what they say.
Each of them builds carefully to a point, a point known from the beginning but reserved and prepared for so that it will achieve its maximum effect without seeming to be forced. Each of them assumes a pose of abundant and assured experience from which he speaks. They succeed in turning away the normal temptation to question their unargued judgments because they do not betray any anxiety by overstatement. Adams is disarming in suggesting that he is familiar with not just this kind of ugly but other varieties as well. It is as if the question of these things being ugly is settled; he is concerned only to make sure he has placed them in the right category of ugly.
La Rochefoucauld succeeds in suggesting that he has a wide acquaintance among women, some of them attractive, others talented or ambitious, none of them quite like Madame de Chevreuse. Both La Rochefoucauld and Adams speak from a secure haven. Adams is not threatened by the bleak and eternal ugly he delineates; La Rochefoucauld will not be enlisted in any of Madame de Chevreuse’s projects. Their position of safety suggests that they have no urgent interest in getting their readers to believe what they say, and this implicit claim is supported by the structure and tone of the sentences themselves.
Adams’s sentence has a musing tone to it and certainly his own expression has not been invaded by any variety of the ugly. La Rochefoucauld is not eager to say anything negative about Madame de Chevreuse; there is a tone of appreciation and equity to his description. The proven danger of associating with her does not subtract from her attractive qualities, which are abundant andnot commonly united in a single person. Consider how different the effect would be if he had said, “Even though Madame de Chevreuse was beautiful, intelligent, . . .”
While neither of these sentences expresses the least doubt and both make positive, unshaded judgments that might court a reader’s resistance, they distract resistance by making the sort of fine distinctions that are the expression of serene, unrushed judgment. Such distinctions cannot be made casually; they are the result of work, observation, testing—something like research. None of this effort is allowed to show, however, in the expression; even the writing is made to sound easy. Neither writer suggests that he has considered ways of disarming a reader’s impulse to question, although each of them has anticipated problems and devised solutions.
Although each word has been carefully weighed and carefully placed, the finished sentences suggest spontaneous speech. It is only on reflection that we see how impossible it would be for someone spontaneously to say something so complex and perfect. (Almost any change in either sentence would be a change for the worse.) Neither writer wants to suggest that what he is doing is work. That is why so much work has gone into getting this writing to suggest speech; writing suggests effort and work, persuasive writing suggests strategy. To make writing imitate speech is a great deal of work and yet the happy phrase that is just right and suggests that it is just right simply because it is true can happen in conversation—usually after a lot of forgotten false starts.
All these shared characteristics are what makes it possible to see these sentences as stylistically similar, even though they do not share a subject or even a language.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in a New York Times review of Toni Morrison’s essay Playing in the Dark and her novel Jazz, cited this sentence as an example of the essay’s style, which he contrasted with what he called the poetry of her novel. He expressed disapproval of “the style she employs to make her points.” His tacit and conventional assumption, almost an enabling convention in journalism, is that style is completely separable from thought. Morrison, accordingly, should have presented her thought in a more immediately intelligible style. This is the same assumption that underwrites the many programs for correcting prose by giving its surface a final jiggle to shake out blemishes and clots.
The difficulty in Morrison’s sentence lies not in its surface but in its thought. The image-schematic structure of the sentence—spatial movement along a path from location to location—is basic and classic. Here is an immediately intelligible sentence formed on that image schema:
Combined with this image schema is a basic metaphor: ideas, beliefs, and institutions—which are not physical objects and which do not move—can be understood metaphorically as physical objects that do move; different states are metaphorically different locations; transformation is metaphorically movement from one spatial location to another; the history of an idea, a belief, or an institution can be “followed” by “tracing” visually the “path” “traced” by its “movement” in historical time. Morrison’s sentence and the sentence about Christianity are equally built upon this union of metaphor and image schema. But the sentence about Christianity is immediately intelligible while Morrison’s is not. The difference lies in the conception of subject.
Classic style conceives of its subject, whether concrete or abstract, as a publicly available “thing” clear and distinct at all levels—from anatomy to fine detail. This cultural “thing” can be acknowledged by any competent observer who looks at it. Its existence is independent of the writer’s conception and certainly independent of the writer’s prose. A subject conceived of in this way as a “thing” fits nicely the image schema of spatial movement and the metaphor of change as spatial movement.
Even if a reader cannot offer any precise description of Christianity, and may be barely able to distinguish it from Buddhism, it will be acknowledged by most likely readers of The New York Times—and certainly by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt—as if it were observable in the same sense that the statue of Huey Long on the Capitol grounds in Baton Rouge is observable. “American Africanism,” unlike Christianity, calls attention to itself as an abstraction precisely because it does not have the sort of agreed-about borders, however imprecise, that a concept needs before it leaves the status of special conception intelligible to special audiences and becomes a vulgar cliché indistinguishable for rhetorical purposes from a planet whose path can be traced.
A similar difficulty attaches to the three stages of American Africanism’s history, all of which are unfamiliar abstractions, none of which has general currency in contemporary American culture. “Medieval Europe” is also an abstraction, but it has general currency; a reader of The New York Times can be expected to accept such an abstraction as definite and legitimate even if that reader’s image of medieval Europe is completely featureless, since such a reader will believe he could, so to speak, look it up. “The rhetoric of dread and desire” does not enjoy a similar standing, so that the lush and fully blossomed existence of American Africanism in the rhetoric of dread and desire is an existence that cannot be accepted as a matter of course.
Morrison is not offering arbitrarily difficult descriptions of what can be described in “another style,” that is, more accessible language. She is talking about special concepts without common currency whose very existence depends on her thought. As a result, the passage features an asymmetry between writer and reader that marks her style as unclassic. A writer presenting such a subject in classic style could not trace a movement before establishing the reality of American Africanism down to quite fine details, so that the reader can accept it as a “thing” he can experience. The model scene would have to be substituted unobtrusively for an actual scene of persuasion, and the classic writer would have to persuade his reader that she can accept American Africanism the way she can accept the planet Venus, and that the path of American Africanism can be traced the way an astronomer can trace the planet’s path. The abstract nature of the subject is no impediment to such a conception: a cultural historian like Chastel, a connoisseur of old painting like Friedländer, a New Testament interpreter like Dodd, a mathematical physicist like Feynman, an observer of the emotions like Madame de Lafayette, and an observer of society like Madame de Sévigné can present the most abstract matters in the most abstract fields as if they were talking about statues, strawberries, or the evening star.
The passage from A. J. Liebling describing the statue of Huey Long may seem at first glance to have nothing in common with the passage from Toni Morrison. Morrison is talking about a cultural abstraction and its sequence of change; Liebling is talking about a static statue that anyone standing at Huey Long’s grave can see. The juxtaposition of these passages may suggest an attempt to illustrate the advice of so many writing manuals to be “concrete,” and to avoid abstractions. It is, of course, impossible either to think or write without using abstractions, so like most scattershot advice, the mantra “be concrete, avoid abstractions” is generally useless in practice. The mantra is nevertheless at least remotely related to a sound observation about style, in the way, for example, that the phrase “you can’t be certain of anything” is related to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Liebling’s description of Huey Long’s statue turns on concepts about American culture in the 1920s and 1930s that are as abstract as anything in Toni Morrison’s passage and are at least as personal to Liebling as anything Morrison says about the movement of American Africanism is personal to her. The stylistic difference between them rests on how they treat those abstractions. It is easy to feel excluded from Morrison’s vision of American Africanism because she does not choose to conceive of her subject as a “thing” that anyone can verify. As a result, the abstract nature of her concepts is put into relief, and she leaves the reader with the choice of either accepting what she says or considering it, to a greater or lesser degree, an arbitrarily personal vision.
Liebling demonstrates a typical classic elision from what is easy for any reader to see for herself—the statue—to his highly personal interpretation, based on abstract cultural and ethical concepts. He never says that anyone else can see the cultural matrix into which he places the statue; he treats that matrix as a matter of course and suggests that its finest details can be delineated by anyone who was there. As a result, it requires deliberate analysis to realize that while anyone can verify the existence of the statue and the inscription on the scroll (“Share Our Wealth”), the interpretation that has been slipped between the description of the statue and the description of the scroll can be seen by no one who does not agree to accept Liebling’s reflection as a thing. This agreement, Liebling recognizes, requires persuasion, but he never explicitly acknowledges a need to persuade. Instead, he addresses his problem by artful juxtaposition and tacit assurances that what he supplies (whether fact or interpretation) is as reliable as what is right there in front of him and—accidents of time and place aside—can be right there in front of you. Consider the comparison between “Share Our Wealth,” the slogan actually carved on the scroll, and “Every Man a King,” which Liebling cites as another of Huey Long’s slogans. The second slogan is nowhere to be seen at the gravesite, but it is one of Huey Long’s best-known lines. Liebling’s claim can be verified by anyone who checks the relevant sources. It is only an invisible step to treat the interpretation as something that can be verified in the relevant sources too, and it is a classic technique to distract the reader from observing that the relevant source in this case is the writer’s imagination.
This passage, a single sentence of 142 words, is almost impossible to understand at one reading. Although it comes from an essay ostensibly meant to be a speech to Parliament, it does not model itself on speech and distances itself self-consciously from any possible model of conversation. It has no image schema indicating a clear direction or a goal. It is in every way unclassic and offers a striking contrast to the most conspicuous style of French prose contemporary with it.
It would be tempting for any contemporary writing consultant to offer a sort of over-the-counter prescription for improving this sentence if it were not for the fact that it occurs in a major seventeenth-century prose text that has been studied and admired around the world for over three centuries. Such a writing consultant would place a premium on clarity and would suggest effective means of rewriting the entire Areopagitica so as to make it easier to parse. But Milton would have viewed these revisions as a complete destruction of his mature and accomplished style, and he would have been right.
Clarity is a prime virtue within classic style or practical style, and it is easy to begin judging other styles by the standards of one of these general styles, especially for writers who actually use one of them on a regular basis. Classic style, like practical style, encourages such judgments by making a tacit claim to being a universal style. But this claim is deceptive. Neither classic style nor practical style can suit Milton’s purposes because his model scene is not the scene essential to either classic or practical style. In this way, this passage resembles Samuel Johnson’s opening comments in his “Preface to Shakespeare”: both Milton and Johnson write in mature and consistent styles completely incompatible with either classic or practical style. The model scene behind classic style is conversation, with the result that it tends to come in discrete units, intelligible when excerpted. The model scene behind the Areopagitica requires a display of ostentatiously orchestrated erudition. This scene places the highest premium on gravity and allusion—not on clarity. Far from depending on a model of conversation, it is not even modeled on English speech; it is modeled on written Latin. The influence of Milton’s model scene upon his style is such that an excerpted passage may be nearly unintelligible, but there is no reason for Milton to view this as a fault. He does not mean the Areopagitica to live through pithy excerpts, and he most certainly would suffer from using a style that looks as if it is easy to parse or conveniently packaged into easily digested bites. To rewrite the Areopagitica in the style of La Rochefoucauld or A. J. Liebling would be to ensure that the reader Milton is addressing would immediately brand it as trivial.
Socrates in the Apology expresses a touchstone of classic style, as if it were a fundamental priority of all style: “If you hear me defending myself in the same language which it has been my habit to use, both in the open spaces of this city (where many of you have heard me) and elsewhere, do not be surprised.”
He explicitly refuses to adopt the mannered style of the courtroom, and he implies that there is something artificial and dishonest in that style. He adopts as his model scene conversation, voice, spontaneity. As a result, it is easy to excerpt from his speech discrete, intelligible units of discourse. The Apology is, after all, with a very minimum of glossing, perfectly intelligible today in translation to audiences in Oregon or Ohio or Hong Kong, audiences who know absolutely nothing about the conventions of Athenian courtrooms at the beginning of the fourth century B.c.
By contrast, imagine a speech by an Athenian orator whose main goal, unlike Socrates’, is to win his case. Contemporary readers in Hong Kong or Ohio cannot, of course, imagine any such thing in detail. The specific good moves in such a speech would go unnoticed or function as barriers to understanding in much the fashion that Milton’s elaborate syntax and classical allusions do in the passage from the Areopagitica. It would be impossible to “correct” Milton’s style (or the Athenian orator’s) without understanding the scene that helps define his style as well as he does. Only a few specialists in seventeenth-century English parliamentary history have any such knowledge today, and it is not obvious that any of them now knows how to address the Parliament that Milton wished to address as well as Milton did himself. No general principle (“Omit needless words,” for example) can ever supersede a specific knowledge of such elements of style as the scene and cast that help define a style, for only they can indicate which words are needless.
This passage from Alan Greenspan, as reported by The New York Times of 20 April 1992, is certainly not an example of classic style, but it is a definite style and a cultivated one. Since it is above all a spoken style (meant, however, to be read in newspaper accounts), Mr. Greenspan refers to it as “an incoherent mumble.” Its virtues are just the opposite of classic style’s virtues, and performances in this style should not be confused with the speaker’s general level of articulateness. It is not a style of obfuscation as it is sometimes claimed to be, for its speaker is not hiding a conclusion or a point that he actually expresses buried in all that confusing verbiage. It is rather a style of gridlock, expressed in a manner that is built around images of contradictory and asymmetrical motion and a shifting kaleidoscope of qualifications. It is not, like classic style, a general style; it is a special style deliberately deployed by the relatively few people in positions like that of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, whose powers are vast and whose words are carefully studied for hints of what they are likely to do. If the passage is pored over carefully, it gives no hint about whether Greenspan will or will not lower interest rates, whether he has made up his mind on the subject, or even whether he agrees that lowering interest rates will have the effect that the senators think it will have.
For powerful directors of policy forced to testify in public, the virtues of classic style can be disastrous. The protocol of congressional hearings requires that the respondents appear to respect the committee, so people like Alan Greenspan cannot say, “I’m here because I have to be here, but I’m not telling you anything.” The unusual circumstances of this scene require the successful practitioner to give the impression that he or she actually may have said something of substance, and to avoid at all costs inviting any further clarifying questions of an obvious sort. If Greenspan had said, “I think we’ve already lowered interest rates enough, but we are monitoring the situation continually and it may be that at some point it will make sense to lower them further. I will do what I think is indicated at the appropriate time, and that may not be what you think is indicated,” he would have made his essential points much more clearly, but at an unacceptable cost. It is unwise for him to indicate to the senators in a clear fashion that he will do what he thinks best and will be unaffected by anything they think, nor does he wish clearly to rule out what they suggest since it is against his interests to indicate either that he will or will not lower the interest rates and equally against his interests to give any indication about when he will make up his mind. The hypothetical revision is clearer certainly, but it invites unwelcome questions: Then you have ruled out, for the moment, lowering interest rates? Under what future circumstances will it make sense to lower the rates further? What are you watching as an indicator that the current rates are too high?
All of these questions must be warded off because he really does not wish to give any indication of his future course of action. Various markets would react to any hint he may give of what he is likely to do. In the circumstances, “While I’ve indicated to you previously that we may well have, probably do have, enough monetary stimulus in the system to create that . . .” is in every way superior to “I think we’ve already lowered interest rates enough.” The statement is so filled with qualifications and so indefinite even with respect to its effective date or what it is talking about that it says absolutely nothing about what he may do while seeming to offer a concession. “While I said x at some point in the past,” leads the audience to expect “I say y now.” That is not the actual sequence, and what does follow is so much at odds with what is expected, and so entirely shapeless, that it is not immediately clear that there is actually no concession. Everything is done to leave doubt on later analysis even that he still thinks enough has been done now “to create that” (create what? the exasperated reader says), since the whole phrase is framed by “I’ve indicated to you previously,” and does not offer the expected symmetrical statement about what the speaker is indicating now. Greenspan uses subtle verbal resources to avoid the unhedged present indicative and to erase any momentary appearance of stable assertion: modals, ambiguous reference, adverbs of doubt, locations of events in an indefinite future or an indefinite ongoing present.
This passage and a consideration of the special requirements of its exceptional scene can serve as a reminder first, that what is a vice in one style can be a virtue in another and second, that there are not merely two styles, good and bad, but many styles, some general, some highly specialized. Almost any English composition teacher would say that this passage “needs revision,” and may go on to suggest what is wrong with it. In fact, there is nothing wrong with it. It is a virtuoso performance of stonewalling disguised as incoherence. There is nothing sloppy about it. It is not unplanned. It is deliberate in its contradiction of the expected symmetrical and directional image schema whose expectations it frustrates with exquisite skill. It is a performance as precise as a cat’s walking though a chaos of objects on a messy desk without disturbing any of them.
English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection.
The attitude of the memorandum from Princeton University Press might come as a surprise to readers of the guides and handbooks used in English composition courses, where questions of capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and usage seem to constitute not just the most conspicuous surface aspects of writing but practically the whole subject. The reason for this common misordering of priorities is precisely the conspicuous nature of these accidentals. That is why Thorstein Veblen suggested in a classic work of sociology that spelling is meant to indicate a form of social distinction based on the leisure to learn an arbitrary and inefficient system. Such things as the pronunciation and spelling of place names often serve as a marker distinguishing the local population from outsiders. A distinguished American theologian who pulled off a highway to ask directions to Beloit, which he pronounced in the French manner (bell-wah), was quickly informed, once the laughter died down, “Beh-LOIT, buddy. You’re in Wisconsin now.”
Accidentals hardly enter into the elements of style at all, but they can cause any amount of mischief unless they are well managed because they indicate the writer’s knowledge of etiquette and protocol. The idea that dictionaries and handbooks control these questions is a common misunderstanding. Dictionaries and handbooks try as hard as they can to keep up with the practice of a vaguely defined set of speakers who together determine prevailing limits of taste in such matters. Dictionary editors are in the same position as individuals who do not wish to be conspicuous in the wrong way. But unlike many of these individuals, the editors understand that they are observing a contest in social influence, not recording—much less defining—a correct position.
In Lulu in Hollywood, Louise Brooks, who must be the best writer among all the sex symbols of the silent screen, explains that she became painfully aware of her Kansas accent because it made her sound provincial in New York. She encountered a Columbia University student at the soda fountain of a drugstore she frequented and flattered him into becoming her speech teacher. In her own words,
Louise Brooks was no doubt right to think that in New York in the 1920s a femme fatale could not go around saying “kee-yow” instead of “cow,” but consider how wrong she is to think that she had acquired “unlabeled” English. She had merely dropped an unfashionable label for one that was more suitable to the image she sought to project. Even if we leave her native Kansas out of the question, how would her New York soda jerk’s “clean, unlabeled English” sound in Baton Rouge, Louisiana? Fort Worth, Texas? Chicago, Illinois? Or even across the bridge in Brooklyn?
The same social principle applies to many conspicuous aspects of language, none of which determines style. Consider the disappearance of the word “Negro” from contemporary American usage and the currently tenuous position of its successor, “black.” At what point was “Negro” archaic usage and who decided the question? Certainly not American dictionaries. They merely surveyed current usage until they determined that the change had become general. The same phenomenon is going on today with the term “black,” which itself may soon become archaic in general usage to be replaced by either “Afro-American” or “African American.” The competition between these two terms will be decided by how quickly one of them is generally adopted.
All such competitions induce anxiety in many writers and speakers because the “wrong” choice can make a speaker or writer look ridiculous. For this reason there is always a market for self-proclaimed language gurus, and every bookstore has a shelf of etiquette books that pretend all these questions are settled, although inevitably these books often disagree with one another. Publishers and their technical staffs are under no illusions; they know there is no authority outside of the social hierarchy of native speakers and writers. They also know that while accidentals can cause mischief, no degree of mere correctness can possibly constitute a style and too much anxiety about accidentals can compromise one. There were plenty of actresses in the 1920s who never had to substitute “cow” for “kee-yow,” but none of them projected the image that Louise Brooks did. She would have ruined that image, moreover, had she betrayed anxiety about getting it right.
Misunderstandings on this subject sometimes extend to people who have exceptional power to influence usage. The New York Times and The Washington Post gave coverage to Thurgood Marshall’s decision to use the term “Afro-American” in a written opinion he filed in 1989 as an associate justice of the United States Supreme court.
First the eminent jurist explained his motives: “I spent most of my life fighting to get Negro spelled with a capital N. . . . Then people started saying black and I never liked it.”
Then he revealed how greatly he underrated his own authority: “Justice Marshall said he chose Afro-American rather than African American, now gaining currency, because ‘Afro-American is in the dictionary and the other one isn’t.’ “
Classic style, in the hands of its master practitioners, can be distinctive without appearing to be personal. Its implicit claim is that it does not depend upon the writer’s personality for its effects. Sainte-Beuve points to this feature of classic style in comparing two great French writers, Montaigne and Pascal.
It was, of course, the French educational bureaucracy in the nineteenth century that made Pascal’s style something like “law” and decided that he had not merely demonstrated the powers of a style but “established French prose.” Still, the apparent paradox—the claim that Pascal’s style is individual yet available to everyone and even more or less obligatory—is a consequence of the classic stand on truth, presentation, scene, cast, thought and language. Pascal is a reasonable model for pedagogical purposes precisely because his style is a general one. While no student is likely to achieve Pascal’s level of mastery, the great usefulness of his style as a model is precisely that it is possible for almost anyone to achieve a working competence without needing either Pascal’s exceptional abilities or his exceptional passion and sense of purpose. What is personal to him lies outside the style, for his principal achievement, on this view, is more in the nature of a discovery about writing than a written expression of his own thought. Classic style disavows superior powers of introspection or exceptional personal insight or exceptional personal commitment; it never abandons the implicit claim to be merely presenting what the reader, once properly situated, can verify. Its seventeenth-century French practitioners employed the style in a variety of literary forms: in personal correspondence, in books of maxims and moral portraits, in at least one notable work of fiction, and in the memoir literature that is a feature of seventeenth-century French prose. The memoirs of both La Rochefoucauld and his rival, the Cardinal de Retz, share all the essential marks of the style. While their observations are unmistakably their own, they never ask the reader to accept what they say on the strength of something that can belong only to them. Like all classic writers, they do all the work, they do it invisibly, and they suggest that, accidents of opportunity aside, the reader could do precisely what they are doing. As one nineteenth-century editor of Retz put it,
In Mimesis, the Romance philologist Erich Auerbach offers a series of virtuoso stylistic analyses of the type known as explication de texte. The passages he has selected are arranged in a chronological sequence beginning with Homer and the sacred scripture of ancient Israel and ending with selections from Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. In keeping with the subject of his book, whose subtitle in its English translation is “The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,” the sequence of passages he discusses is conceived as an evolutionary progress of representational styles that depend increasingly for their effects on an evident asymmetry between writer and reader in their model cast. Here the classic style of Retz and Pascal is seen as formulaic and superficial compared with the next element of the sequence—the inimitably idiosyncratic performance of Saint-Simon, whose representations of individuals at the court of Louis XIV are incomparable not merely for their individuality and complexity but also for the drama of the writer’s performance. Saint-Simon’s prose is not a window but something like an acrobat’s high wire, a platform for fantastic feats obviously beyond the reader’s competence and just barely within the writer’s. The writer is not so much competent as he is pushing the limits of his art, his language repeatedly tottering on the edge of syntactic incoherence but frequently achieving striking results that have the air of being part inspired genius, part happy accident.
Auerbach’s claims for Saint-Simon are grounded in a conviction that the truth of human existence is very far from clear and simple; it is rather unknown and unknowable to any one individual, but reveals itself in historical processes, the dialectic counterpart of the individual projects that, seen as a sequence, unwittingly and progressively reveal what we know of human truth.
When historical particulars are seen not in the classic perspective as occasions for the revelation of eternal truth but rather in this romantic perspective as moments in the unfolding of a truth progressively revealed in history, classic style of presentation can be compared unfavorably to romantic styles of representation. This is exactly what Auerbach does.
His comparison of classic and romantic styles predictably reverses classic values. Its opening note is the preference for inspiration over rational order: the unpredictable insight that occurs in the very act of composition is preferred to the classic pattern of thought preceding speech. For a romantic like Auerbach, deliberate thought as a principle of expression guarantees a superficial and false vision; inspiration in the course of writing is a badge of authenticity and truth: “Everything that occurs to [Saint-Simon] in connection with his subject, he throws into his sentences just as it happens to come to mind, in full confidence that it will somehow fit together in unity and clearness.” For Auerbach, it is not a demerit that Saint-Simon may not see this unity and clearness, that he may merely serve as an inspired conduit to make it available to a future reader.
Classic style values the order of rational analysis as being reliable and not idiosyncratic; it distrusts the order of sensation and emotion as being unreliable, idiosyncratic, and often demonstrably wrong. Auerbach inverts this scale of values:
This preference for following sensation as it brings unpredictable glimpses of truth is sensible on the romantic view that truth is elusive and never to be seen whole. If truth will not sit still for rational analysis, but comes only in suggestive fragmentary vision, then the writer must always write in fear that at any second whatever fragments of it have come to him will slip away. This intermittent and unpredictable pulse of revelation produces a romantic urgency to capture both the sensation and what it may suggest. This model is unthinkable in classic style, since truth is fully visible to any competent person and cannot slip away. Classic truth can never evaporate. As a result, classic presentation is characterized by calm and ease—a calm and ease that for Auerbach is a hallmark of complacency and self-deception.
Auerbach conceives of the truth of human nature as consisting of “profondeurs opaques”: perception of truth will necessarily come in exceptional fragments at exceptional moments to exceptional people. It will come when the observer does not expect it. Saint-Simon, for example, in the middle of a conversation with the Jesuit, Père Tellier, is seized, according to Auerbach, by a revelation of “the essential nature of any strictly organized solidaritarian community.” This conception of truth is of course entirely foreign to classic style. On Auerbach’s view, it is a sign of integrity for a writer to present fragments of opaque profundities incompletely perceived as they offer themselves to the individual genius. On the classic view, such a presentation can only be definitive proof of failure. In classic style, the expression is a presentation of the result of thought. Writing that does not meet this description is incompetent by classic standards, but superior for Auerbach:
In the classic view, this judgment is simply unintelligible because the evidence offered to support the claim seems to be evidence against it. This judgment has, in the classic view, the same logic as “Guesses are better than accurate knowledge because they are more personal.”
Individual genius as Auerbach describes it consists of fragmentary and unpredictable visions. The writer cannot control them. Anything that can be controlled in a rational fashion is superficial artifice, not profound truth. Genius is charismatic—blessed with prophetic, inspirational moments of vision, much as E. B. White was momentarily blessed with a glimpse into the nature of time as he recorded his impressions of the girl riding her horse around the circus ring. Neither Saint-Simon nor E. B. White can count on such revelations. They may never come to these writers again; they may never come to the reader at all. What is virtue for Auerbach is egoistical delusion for classic style.
Jane Austen’s unforgettable presentation of Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice—regular and deliberate as it is—will inevitably appear to be on Auerbach’s scale of values facile and superficial.
From the classic perspective, the virtue of Jane Austen’s presentation is that once she has shown you where to look, her appraisal of Mr. Collins can be independently “verified” by any reader (just as it is by her characters). Saint-Simon gives a virtuoso presentation of Père Tellier and recounts his insight into the nature of the Jesuits, but while someone else might be able to verify Saint-Simon’s presentation of the Jesuit of horrible physiognomy, no one else could follow the route from the physical description of one Jesuit to the revelation of the essential nature of the order. This route from the impression of one individual to a presumed knowledge of a whole community is precisely what Jane Austen means by “prejudice.” Pride and Prejudice turns on the representation of Elizabeth Bennet’s repentance for having followed this route to self-deception. What is revelation in Saint-Simon is prejudice in Jane Austen.
Mimesis is a fable about the evolutionary history of style in which later steps in the process are necessarily superior to earlier steps. It is possible for Auerbach to see a particular writer such as Saint-Simon as an almost miraculous mutation exhibiting the shape of the future: “In his level of style, Saint-Simon is a precursor of modern and ultra-modern forms of conceiving and representing life.” Truth, for Auerbach, is not the property of an individual, indeed not essentially available to individuals: it resides in dialectical process—the historicist actions of epochs rather than the historical actions of individuals. The value of the individual writer consists in his degree of participation in that dialectical process. The individual genius of a great writer, then, consists in his seeing through immediate persons and events to the truth of the evolutionary historicist progression. Saint-Simon’s excellence consists exactly in his being the first to glimpse a higher stage of epochal truth, as Auerbach remarks in his analysis of Saint-Simon’s presentation of the duchesse de Lorge:
On such a view, it is possible for Auerbach to place agency in epochs and their sequence rather than in individuals; to write, for example, of the “ease and pleasantness that appealed to the taste of the time,” as if times have tastes, rather than individuals. In Auerbach’s formulation, an earlier taste is necessarily a less adequate taste. Although earlier tastes may survive into the future to be contemporary with later tastes, they will occupy lower levels on the historicist Great Chain of Adequacy. Auerbach implies that, luckily, the taste for ease and pleasantness lies now in our evolutionary past; it is nearly unimaginable for us now—who live higher on the evolutionary scale of style—to understand the tastes that previous styles created.
Since Auerbach’s measure of stylistic maturity values writing to the extent that it penetrates through local and individual human purpose to historicist truth, he naturally discounts the individual purposes of writers as impediments to the representation of truth. The more a writer includes and the less he selects according to his own purpose, the more likely it is that his writing will touch upon those truths that are essentially beyond him. The less he allows his writing to be controlled by “precogitated” individual purpose, the more likely it is that truth will work though him as its conduit. The result, in Auerbach, is a principled blindness to the individual purposes of writers he regards as superficial in comparison with Saint-Simon. Pascal’s presentation of a Jesuit in the first of the Lettres provinciales, for example, is in the service of classic polemic; Pascal has no need or reason to present a rich and randomly detailed description of an individual Jesuit. But for Auerbach, Pascal’s principle of presentation, efficiently governed as it is by his immediate purpose, makes it unlikely that truth, which always lies beyond local purpose, will work through him.
Pascal, like all classic writers, speaks for himself; writers that Auerbach admires hardly speak at all; it is the historical age that speaks through them. The voice of Auerbach’s individual genius is not his own; it is the voice of Hegelian historical progress.
Since Auerbach’s history presumes to know and to reveal the one ultimate purpose of writing, it can value one style absolutely above all others. Learned and inclusive as Auerbach is, his history is an ideological justification of the universal superiority of that single style, one that has not yet nor ever will be fully manifest in any text by any writer.
Classic style, a general style suitable for presenting the truth of anything, conceived as discrete and self-contained, has no continuing evolutionary history. It can be found in its perfect form in Thucydides, in Madame de Sévigné, in Jane Austen, in A. J. Liebling. It is not the style to which all previous writing aspires. Classic style is one style among many mature and consistent styles. Its virtues follow from its particular stand on the elements of style. They include the clarity and simplicity that come from matching language to thought on the motive of truth. Other styles have other virtues.
clan shows Terukatsu sitting cross-legged on a tiger skin, fully clad in armor with a European breastplate, black-braided shoulder plates, taces and fur boots. His helmet is surmounted by enormous, sweeping horns, like a water buffalo’s. He holds a tasseled baton of command in his right hand; his left hand is spread so wide on his thigh that the thumb reaches the scabbard of his sword. If he were not wearing armor, one could get some idea of his physique; dressed as he is, only the face is visible. It is not uncommon to see likenesses of heroes from the Period of Civil Wars clad in full armor, and Terukatsu’s is very similar to those of Honda Heihachir
and Sakakibara Yasumasa that so often appear in history books. They all give an impression of great dignity and severity, but at the same time there is an uncomfortable stiffness and formality in the way they square their shoulders.