mills

Clive James on Jean-Paul Sartre. I am not fond of Sartre, who defended Stalin long past the point when it was forgivable and whose language –as George Orwell noted- reflected his willingness to deliberately obfuscate the truth to arrive at fashionable ends. Making a show of his deeds after the occupation, Sartre “pretended to be brave: the single most shameful thing a man can do when other men have been brave and have paid the price. Sartre…lied in his teeth about the most elemental fact of his adult life all the way to the end, so it is no wonder that his philosophy is nonsense.”

Reading that sentence, I am closer now to understanding why James is a persona non grata in academic settings. Unafraid to suggest that Sartre was less a philosopher than a writer, and less a hero than someone living in terribly bad faith -to borrow Sartre’s language- James alienates those whose professional lives are invested in the exegetical treatment of the texts of the West (and who themselves may resent moral judgments of cowardice). Although he marshals substantial evidence to support his claim that because “Sartre’s autobiography was the last thing he wanted us to know…his philosophy was never felt, but all a pose,” it remains hard to believe. Even when we read that Orwell and Revel considered him a fraud and his work devoid of meaning, we recoil: he is part of the canon!

I struggle in the same way with James’ dismissal of Benjamin, Derrida, and their ilk, and Noam Chomsky’s famous claim that these “theorists” were all empty charlatans creates a similar sense in me: simultaneous satisfaction that perhaps what seems to be nonsense, language tricks, gimmickry, regurgitation, and outright fraud might be just that after all (and not the sacred writing it is considered in academia) and a fear that maybe, Chomsky and James and I just aren’t smart enough to get what’s being said.

And this is a key point: no one who admits to thinking such writing is nonsensical will be taken seriously by those who maintain that we simply don’t understand it. But few who take expression seriously will claim that cultural ideas require such complexity of writing to communicate! I remain suspicious, despite Jace Cook’s excellent argument, that if something is obfuscatory, it is either through incompetence in craft or deliberate intent; and if the latter, something is being hidden (or perhaps it is that nothing is being hidden).

Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg, quoted by Clive James in an essay on the craft of writing that was at once illuminating and embarrassing for me; much of it describes, with as much wit is in this sentence, the sorts of failings I detect in my prose (and, it follows, my thought).

There is often a correlation, I think, between how automatic prose is and how weak it is. For language to escape the anesthetizing effects of cliche, which weakens meaning by making words into tuned-out ambient noise, it must be novel -or at least not shopworn- in formulation. This requires effort, as does anything that deviates from normative patterns. But we should not escape from cliche by contorting language into unwieldy or inefficient forms, a mistake I make daily. James separates the various types of chaff:

“With the majority of bad writers the question [of meaning] never comes up. As Orwell points out in his indispensable essay “Politics and the English Language,” they write in prepared phrases, not in words, and the most they do with a prepared phrase is vary it to show that they know what it is. Usually, they are not even as conscious as that, and their stuff just writes itself, assembling itself out of standard components like a spreading culture of bacteria, except that most of its components are too faulty to be viable. Our real concern here, however, is not with writing too bad to matter… What troubles us is the writing imbued with enough ambition to outstrip its ability.”

I think that’s a fair description of much of what I’ve written in my life, and it doesn’t hurt to say so: there is something to be said for ambition (which I otherwise lack entirely), and it is after all only in trying that we learn to do. As James notes later, writers “must accept that one of the secrets of creativity is unrelenting self-criticism.” Without that, I suspect one has no hope of writing anything worthwhile except by accident; for this reason, it’s commendable to cringe while editing and flush when rereading one’s writing; indeed, I’m glad I dislike most of it, or it would be quite a lot worse. That said, self-criticism must not be so masochistic that we silence ourselves, unless we’ve determined that we’ve nothing to add, a rare and admirable conclusion I should probably reach more often.