In defence of postmodernism

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It has become common to blame wokeness on its supposed philosophical parent: postmodernism. As the standard narrative goes, postmodernism is the ideology that entrenched itself in Anglophone universities in the 1980s and 1990s. It talked of relativism, of the absence of objective truth, of the spectre of a pervasive, invisible power, and it was generally anti-Western. A whole generation of professors, writers, journalists and a fair few activists have subsequently been raised on this diet of postmodern thinking. And the result is a cultural elite that is wedded to wokeness.

As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay put it in Cynical Theories (2020): ‘Applied postmodernism has come into its own, been reified – taken as real, as The Truth according to social justice – and widely spread by activists and (ironically) turned into a dominant narrative of its own.’ In the Telegraph last month, Zoe Strimpel repeated this accusation, writing witheringly of ‘the postmodern mockery of truth that underpins wokeness’.

Many right-wing critics of wokeness will also talk of postmodernism as a species of what they call ‘cultural Marxism’, a term that they trace back to the early 20th-century Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. Two postmodern thinkers often come in for particular vilification in this regard. First, there’s Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), who professed that the meanings of words are forever unstable and elusive. And then, above all, there’s Michel Foucault (1926-1984), whose idea of oppressive power ideologies being invisible and ubiquitous has seemingly become central to wokeness, with its ‘safe spaces’, ‘microaggressions’ and its talk of ‘unwitting’, ‘unconscious’ and ‘perceived’ discrimination.

As Douglas Murray writes in The War on The West (2022), ‘Foucault’s obsessive analysis of everything through a quasi-Marxist lens of power relations diminished almost everything in society into a transactional, punitive and meaningless dystopia’. Elsewhere, Jordan Peterson has spoken of Derrida as ‘a trickster’ whose ‘postmodern and neo-Marxist theories’ threaten free speech. He has also talked of the ‘special contempt’ he reserves for Foucault.

For these critics of woke, Foucault’s influence, in particular, is seemingly everywhere. According to Murray, it’s through the ‘anti-colonial’ philosophy popularised by the Foucault-inspired scholar, Edward Said, that Foucault and therefore postmodernism have filtered down into woke philosophy, which holds that Western society is uniquely racist and to blame for all of today’s ills. Equally, right-wing critics of wokeness will claim that the trans movement has sprung from the postmodern contention that sexuality and gender are entirely socially constructed and therefore plastic and malleable.

If Foucault is regarded as the father of wokeness then 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche tends to be regarded as the grandfather. After all, Foucault was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche and even proudly declared himself to be ‘Nietzchean’. Nietzsche, like Foucault, also saw all human behaviour stemming from the desire for power. And he conceived of morality – good and evil, right and wrong – as the mere manifestation of the will to power. As he wrote of the ‘origin of knowledge’, in The Joyous Science (1883): ‘Gradually, the human brain became full of such judgements and convictions, and a ferment, a struggle, and lust for power developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about “truths”.’ One can see this Nietzschean sentiment at work in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975): ‘Power produces knowledge… power and knowledge directly imply one another.’

So, according to this largely right-wing narrative, wokeness is the product of a 20th-century philosophical assault on truth, objectivity and the West. And it was inspired by Nietzsche and led by several ‘cultural Marxist’ thinkers.

Misunderstanding postmodernism

There are several problems with this rather neat story. The first error is to use the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ to talk of postmodernism or wokeness. This term doesn’t really make sense. Marx himself conceived of his work as a historical materialism. It was focussed on class and the means of production, not on culture. Yes, in the 1940s and 1950s, some Frankfurt School thinkers, who sometimes presented themselves as Marxist, did focus on culture rather than class. But as Joanna Williams writes in How Woke Won (2022), their thinking ‘represented less a continuation of Marxism and more a break with Marx’.

Moreover, postmodern thinkers were broadly opposed to Marxism. Many may have been signed-up Communists in their youth (the French Communist Party dominated left-wing politics at the time), but by the 1960s they had become highly critical of Marxist politics. They rejected the idea that history was progressing ‘dialectically’ towards a communist future, or ‘telos’. And they were often hostile to the scientific objectivity and ‘Enlightenment’ values so central to Marxism. Foucault wrote that history was not the story of progress; it was but a series of non-linear discontinuities and contingencies. And Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), in his highly-influential The Postmodern Condition (1979), announced and celebrated the end of ‘grand narratives’, and with it the end of the Marxist ‘grand narrative’ of progress. Lyotard’s writings from the 1970s onwards were violently antithetical to Marxism, especially its claims to objective truth.

As for wokeness itself, it has nothing to do with Marxism. With their myopic focus on race and gender, woke activists are utterly blind to the material, class-structure of society. Today, bizarrely, it’s often conservatives who are more attuned to the plight of the working class than woke ‘radicals’. As Williams writes, ‘critics who insist that woke is simply Marxism in disguise are wide of the mark’.

More importantly, those blaming wokeness on the postmodernists overplay the influence of the likes of Derrida or Foucault. And they do so because they underplay the extent to which the woke have misappropriated postmodern thought. The great thinkers who we can reasonably call postmodern, from Nietzsche to Foucault, had none of the glib certitude, or punitive, dissent-crushing zeal that characterises wokeness. In fact, it is likely they would reject the intolerance and puritanism of wokeness.

Take Foucault. His thought and activism was marked above all by its emphasis on freedom. As JG Merquior concluded of the Frenchman: ‘libertarianism… is the best label for Foucault’s outlook as a social theorist. More precisely, he was (though he didn’t use the word) a modern anarchist’ (1). As Foucault showed in his famous 1971 television debate with Noam Chomsky, he firmly believed in liberty: ‘No matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience and oppositional groupings.’ He would likely have rebelled against the strictures and enforced conformism of wokeness, not endorsed them.

Foucault’s concept of power, especially ‘invisible power’, may have been seized upon by many woke and identitarian thinkers today. It certainly seems to inform their ideas of ‘systemic racism’ or ‘heteronormative’ power relations. But it’s a far more useful and illuminating idea than its contemporary woke misappropriation suggests.

Foucault’s concept of ‘panopticism’, which he develops in Discipline and Punish (1975), is worth examining here. This idea was named after Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a circular building with a tower at the centre from which every room, and therefore every inhabitant, is completely visible. Bentham, a 19th-century philosopher and social reformer, envisaged the panopticon as a design for a prison, but in Foucault’s hands it became a metaphor for modern society – a society in which everyone, visible to everyone else, feels a pressure to conform, to act as one feels others expect one to act. ‘The panoptic schema’, wrote Foucault, ‘was destined to spread throughout the social body’. In this respect, the parable of the panopticon can be read today as a warning, perhaps even more chilling than that of Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Foucault reminds us that oppression doesn’t have to be brutal and obvious. It can be silent, unseen and ultimately self-imposed.

If anything, Foucault’s thought lends itself to a critique of the invisible power wielded by our woke elites. Think of the way in which people feel compelled to behave in the age of social media, in which everyone is all too visible to everyone else. People fear admonition, ostracism or cancellation for not exhibiting the ‘correct’ views. And so they self-censor their sincere opinions and virtue-signal insincere opinions instead. This shows that the Foucauldian idea of an invisible power is very real.

Postmodernism vs wokeness

Rather than blame the postmodernists for wokeness, we should perhaps look to them for a means to resist wokeness. Indeed, we might even look to them for inspiration, for a means to cure our civilisation’s discontents.

If Foucault speaks to us today, so too does Nietzsche. He warned of the perils of groupthink at the behest of the herd and cautioned against man’s insatiable lust for power, often imposed with gleeful cruelty upon others. He would have certainly been critical of the conspicuous compassion of the woke, of their claims to be kinder and more caring than everyone else. Nietzsche well understood that those who talk like this are driven by pride and power. As he put it in The Will to Power: ‘If you do good merely out of compassion, you do good for yourself and not for your neighbour.’ Centuries before social media came around, Nietzsche knew why those who say ‘Be Kind’ on Twitter often behave in the most vile manner: those sure of their righteousness and goodness are always the most intolerant.

Derrida shouldn’t be derided as a nonsense-merchant, either. He reminds us of a truism that any thoughtful person knows: that the meaning of words and texts is unstable, indeterminate, open to change. Anyone who has re-read one of their favourite books, and experienced a slightly different book the second time around, will recognise this. No two readings are ever the same. And no two people read the same text in the same way.

Derrida was simply urging us never to take a text superficially or literally. He was exhorting us instead to question and interrogate language, to ask what it doesn’t say. Today’s literal-minded cancel-culture zealots, who seek to ban words and texts for being offensive, who imbue words with demonic, supernatural, voodoo powers, would do well to listen to Derrida. He reminds us that the meaning of words is often elusive, contingent, ironic, sarcastic, allegorical, hyperbolic, metaphorical and context-bound.

Even that most outlandish of postmodern thinkers, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), has something to teach us today. For instance, he appreciated like few others the role of the electronic screen in creating reality. He recognised that, in the contemporary media-saturated world, what is real and what is represented have started to become one, caught in a loop. Baudrillard would have been fascinated by social media and the way the internet has changed the way we think, speak and write – radically reshaping reality itself.

Even postmodern relativism can serve a useful purpose today. Postmodernist thinkers did indeed cast doubt on objectivity and truth. But they did so in order to ask questions. Wokeness has no interest in asking questions of objective truth. It only wants to impose answers. It wants to talk, as Prince Harry does, of ‘my truth’. Nietzsche, for one, would have ruthlessly criticised this development. After all, he deplored Christianity precisely because it preached certitudes. He exalted doubt. As he wrote in Human, All Too Human (1878): ‘Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.’ The woke today are intolerant because they are too full of convictions. They are not self-questioning enough. These pious, censorious morality-enforcers epitomise ‘the herd’ that Nietzsche so vehemently deprecated throughout his work. He would recognise their ‘bitter envy, sour vindictiveness, mob pride’.

Foucault would have been deeply unimpressed by the woke obsession with identity. He said that the identities we ostensibly assume by ourselves are actually determined from outside. He called this ‘subjectification’ – ‘the way a human being turns him or herself into a subject’. Those who boast today of being ‘genderfluid’ or ‘pansexual’ are imposing concepts, categories and words of others’ devising on themselves. To those demanding state recognition of their identity or that others use their chosen pronouns, Foucault offers a rejoinder in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969): ‘Do not ask me who I am and… to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.’

Foucault’s rejection of the politics of identity is hardly a surprise. After all, he rejected the idea of fixed, stable categories. As did other postmodern thinkers. They would be better described as Foucault himself was, as ‘libertarian’ or ‘anarchist’. Or even ‘libertines’. After all, whatever you think of Foucault or Derrida, they were free thinkers. The same cannot be said of today’s bovine, unforgiving, cult-like devotees of woke, who Andrew Doyle has rightly described as the ‘New Puritans’.

The postmodernists exhorted us to question orthodoxies. They preached scepticism, autonomy, anti-authoritarianism and liberation. Today’s woke warriors preach obedience. When it comes to dissenters, they seek only to discipline and punish.

(1) Foucault, by J G Merquior, Fontana, 1991, p154

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.

 

Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence

Literary Hub · by Ed Simon April 10, 2023 · April 10, 2023

The meter-tall stone that has come to be called the Mesha Stele, its smooth, black basalt carved some sixteen centuries before it was unearthed from the packed, red sand of Dhiban, Jordan in 1868, is arguably most important for what comes at the conclusion of all of its sentences: a period. “I am Mesha, son of Kemoshyat,” reads the inscription, “the king of Moab.”

Now displayed at the Louvre, pieced back together after a group of Bedouins protesting the Ottoman occupation smashed the stele, a visitor can see the characteristic dot of an end-stop after each word of the inscription. Though the anonymous scribe who chiseled this message nine centuries before the Common Era used the period in a way that we’d find idiosyncratic—the marks separating every individual word rather than ending individual syntactical units—it’s still clearly and obviously the same punctuation mark with which you’ll see at the end of this line. The Mesha Stele is, as such, the oldest example of writing to contain punctuation. No doubt the Moabite’s periods were used to interrupt the so-called scriptio continua of ancient writing wherebywordswouldbemergedtogetherinamannerthat’sdifficulttoread.

Profundity is often the daughter of convenience. Though this simple bit of punctuation had much the same purpose as the whole bevy of descendants who’ve since emerged—commas, semicolons, my beloved em-dashes—namely, to make the sense of reading easier, there were also a host of ancillary effects. With punctuation, a sense of the rhythm of language could be imparted, an artfulness, a lyricism, a poetry. For that matter, just as distinguishing day from night creates both, so was the first period the mother of the first sentence. A. Very. Different. Type. Of. Sentence. From. The. Ones. We. Read. Today.

Unlike the rather cumbersome and labyrinthine sentence with which I began this essay, by definition every sentence in the Mesha Stele was but a single word, and if you’re to adhere to contemporary style mavens who are nothing but partisans of parsimony, perhaps the mono-worded sentences of the Moabite stone are to be preferred. But I don’t think so.

With punctuation, a sense of the rhythm of language could be imparted, an artfulness, a lyricism, a poetry.

Within a long sentence—clause upon clause, the commas and semicolons, em-dashes and colons, parentheticals and appositions piling up—there can be a veritable maze of imagery, a labyrinth of connotation, a factory of concepts; the baroque and purple sentence is simultaneously an archive of consciousness at its most caffeinated and a dream of new worlds from words alone. No doubt my proffered example of a long sentence, with which I began this paragraph, will not appeal to every reader, which is fine, but to those who hold as inviolate that the only good sentence is a short one, I’m happy to offer an interjection that’s simply two words, the first a scatological curse and the second a pronoun.

The tyranny of the “short sentences only” set can be traced back to any number of style guides that have long proliferated in composition classrooms and editors’ offices. George Orwell in his essay “Politics and the English Language” offers among his commandments the injunction that “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” Meanwhile, journalist William Zinsser in his classic Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction advises that the “secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction… these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.”

Finally, the seemingly most iconic, most canonical, and downright scriptural of style guides—E.B. White and William Strunk’s The Elements of Style, of course—demands that a “sentence should contain no unnecessary words.” I’d suggest that Orwell, Zinsser, Strunk, and White—great authors all—are not just enraptured to an arbitrary definition of good style which consists in saying the most with the least, but that they’re very much creatures of their time, chained to the material conditions of paper margin inches and allergic to anything which seems too affected, too rococo, too aesthetic, too unmasculine.

The Grub Street Modernists who revolutionized literature according to the strictures of journalism tended towards style advice which was tellingly violent—recall the F. Scott Fitzgerald bromide about editing being the murder of one’s darlings. There is, of course, an elision of what different types of writings are trying to do. When Orwell says that we must always cut a word out, when Zinsser says that we must strip the sentence and valorize function above all else, when Strunk and White demand that all words must be necessary, they are making a philosophical argument about what matters and what doesn’t.

For the authors of such style guides, good composition is an exercise in the literal, the straightforward, the utilitarian. Certainly, there are some forms of writing for which that’s nothing but good advice, but taken to the extreme of dictate handed down from Sinai, it eliminates much of which is lush and fecund in long sentences, what is ecstatic, incantatory, and sublime about literature. At their most excessive (which is to say their least excessive), the partisans of parsimony can be Puritans, white-washing the church walls and smashing the stained-glass windows; the militants of minimalism are managers of language concerned only with the bottom line.

Most ironically, many of the authors populating the cannon are those who never cut unnecessary words, who had no particular affection for the short, staccato sentence, and shared not the rancor for adjective and adverb evidenced by the most ruthless of red pen wielding editors. Where would Don Quixote be without Miquel de Cervantes’ loquacious Castilian prose, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels without its Brobdingnagian syntax, James Joyce’s Ulysses without its ambulatory diction? In the seventeenth-century, when some of the greatest English prose was written, readers were elevated by the serpentine sentences of Lancelot Andrews’ sermons and the baroque grandeur of John Donne’s labyrinthine lines, moved by the unspooling flow of Robert Burton’s observations and the complex rhythms of that cracked archangel Thomas Browne.

“The world that I regard is my self,” writes Browne in his 1643 Religio Medici, “it is the microcosm of mine own frame, that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.” A philosophy not unlike his approach to writing, emphasizing the ways in which so much can be packed even into the relatively small world of the long sentence, and even more importantly, the sense of high-wire playfulness that can attend writing and reading such prose. Three centuries later, the cult of the short sentence would tell students and writers to disregard everything that is moving, effective, and most of all frivolously playful in the work of writers such as those.

As part of a parallel process, Michael Chabon (no slouch at long sentences) noted in his introduction to the anthology McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales that canonical literature written before the 1950s includes “the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, or the macabre; the sea adventure, spy, war, or historical story; the romance story.” The eclipse of genre fiction’s respectability in the mid-century as it was supplanted by the Iowa MFA/The New Yorker­-style literary “moment of truth” story is not dissimilar to the ways in which the baroque became disdained in “good” writing. Chabon argues that by the literary standards of the last few decades, much of our canonical literature would be consigned to the genre shelf, including “Poe, Balzac, Wharton, James, Conrad, Graves, Maugham, Faulkner, Twain, Cheever.”

Something similar, but in many ways more insidious, accompanies the advice that the best sentence is always a short sentence, for if that were really true, we’d have to abandon Andrews, Donne, Burton, and Browne, not to speak of Cervantes, Swift, Joyce, and so on.

For the authors of such style guides, good composition is an exercise in the literal, the straightforward, the utilitarian.

Despite the orthodoxy which elevates the short sentence above the long, there are no shortage of authors who did and do remain committed masters of the baroque form. Cosmopolitan Vladimir Nabokov with a 99-word sentence in Lolita, learned W.G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn composing a 107-word line, prophetic Margaret Atwood with a sentence of 111 words in The Handmaid’s Tale, incandescent Virginia Woolf’s 116-word sentence in Mrs. Dalloway, elegant Salman Rushdie, whose The Satanic Verses has a 165-word sentence that still feels as light as if you were falling from the sky. Then there are the purposefully contrarian long sentences, the avant-garde writers who push at the extremes of prose like an athlete seeing how far she can run or a mountaineer pushing herself to climb higher.

Irish novelist Mick McCormick’s 2016 Goldsmith Award-winning Solar Bones, a first-person narrative about a spirit returned on All Soul’s Day and written as a single sentence which pulses like cosmic background radiation, or Lucy Ellman’s gargantuan 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport consisting of the stream-of-consciousness ruminations of an adjunct history professor and composed of a single undulating sentence that goes on for a stunning thousand pages. More conventional literature has its own share of gorgeous long sentences as well, of course.

Examine a characteristic sentence from the British novelist Zadie Smith’s appropriately named On Beauty. Describing the liturgy of the year’s final season, Smith writes that “This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody’s world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams.” 43-words, nine clauses, a single semicolon. Not a massive sentence per se, but one which violates much of the common-sense advice about simply getting to the point.

What makes Smith’s prose so impactful is precisely the not-getting-to-the-point, especially considering her subject about how time both contracts and expands during the doldrums of the holidays. Smith is a writer who deploys an admirable sense of almost-biblical parallelism; the sentence is a sterling example of how symmetrically balanced clauses (“rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams”—note the alliteration between the first word of each clause) has an innately pleasing sense to the ear. Infamously maligned by The New Yorker book critic James Wood as a “hysterical maximalist,” part of what makes Smith’s sentences so pleasing is this sense of her lines being a repository of so-much-of-a-good-thing, of being filled to the brim with delight.

Not that delight need be the only the emotion engendered by a long sentence, for as Kiran Desai shows in this example from The Inheritance of Loss (which is itself an absurdly beautiful novel), the frenzied piling up of words and imagery can be a convenient mimesis for the anxious mind in process. Here she describes how one character:

…knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous.

Every semicolon in Desai’s sentence could be replaced by a period, but how much would be lost in that transformation? The semicolons linking all these clauses together into one long sentence encourage a breathless narration in the mind, a character quickly thinking through the implications of their train of thought. By the time the reader gets to the fifth and sixth clause, there is the overwhelming sense of the character (as represented through the narrative vantage of free indirect discourse) at odds with himself, all of those “nevers” in the penultimate clause, and then in the final one the rushed smooshing together of nouns in “child-dog-yard,” a damning contrast of the difference in concerns between suburban Americans and those in Desai’s native India, a concern which at least in this excerpt never needs to be didactically stated.

The Turkish Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk is a master of the Byzantine approach to prose, as in his novel My Name is Red, where in 127 glorious unspooling words he writes of how:

We were two men in love with the same woman; he was in front of me and completely unaware of my presence as we walked through the turning and twisting streets of Istanbul, climbing and descending, we traveled like brethren through deserted streets given over to battling packs of stray dogs, passed burnt ruins where jinns loitered, mosque courtyards where angels reclined on domes to sleep, beside cypress trees murmuring to the souls of the dead, beyond the edges of snow-covered cemeteries crowded with ghosts, just out of sight of brigands strangling their victims, passed endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leathers works and stone walls; and as we made ground, I felt I wasn’t following him at all, but rather, that I was imitating him.

True to the sentence’s conclusion, this is a sentence which takes command, which directs its reader by virtue of its own twisting logic into not just a description of a similarly zig-zagging perambulation, but indeed almost the experience of it as well. There are many mansions in this house, each clause seemingly a window into a strange fabulism, a portal into multiple parallel universes. Genies in ruins and angels on mosques, ghosts, highwaymen, dervishes. Each clause could be a novel unto itself, the very Arabesque narrative structure of the sentence almost a frame tale for an anthology of stories never told but only gestured at. In its maximalist decadence, Pamuk’s sentence is more than an assemblage of clauses linked by comma and semicolon—it’s a universe.

A profoundly spatial sentence, for the rhythm of the sentence itself seems to mimic the steps of the character following his rival, the jingle-jangle of one foot after another echoing how a word always follows its immediate partner. Annie Proulx, among America’s most adept long-sentence writers (yet also a honed minimalist) does something similar in this sentence from “The Mud Below,” collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories:

But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the pain on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Mexican cafes behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.

Hardly allergic to adjectives, Proulx still isn’t a writer who is exactly languid with her descriptions; nobody would describe her prose as purple. Proulx’s excess in this sentence isn’t necessarily an accumulation of rich descriptions (though the description is rich) so much as the sonorous quality of words themselves. Close Range is poetry because Proulx is an author who doesn’t just love language, but can clearly choose an arrangement of words because they’re beautiful.

The sibilant alliteration of “steering them through scabland and slope,” those recurring guttural g-sounds in “grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts,” the slinking m’s and n’s of “midnight motel entrances” so melancholic that they sound like turning off the dusty backwoods road itself. If a short sentence is a snapshot than a long one can feel like a movie, Pamuk and Proulx writing a whole screenplay between the capital letter and the period, the reader welcomed to traverse that same landscape with the narrator. All beautiful prose is indistinguishable from poetry, enjambment is merely an issue of typography.

There is an ethical difference between the sentence which is easy to read and the one which demands your attention.

Examine another consummate and beautiful long sentence that exhibits the qualities which make the maximalist approach so appealing, which can imitate the feeling of being a person moving through space (though admittedly not from a contemporary author):

In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were busy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top towards the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drunk of sarsaparilla.

107 words and one period; six commas, and ten adjectives, all to say the equivalent of “In a nice town Stuart stopped for a drink.” And yet, obviously, the beautiful sentence and my anemic translation don’t at all say the same thing. What exactly makes the sentence beautiful? That within those 107 words the author has created not just an entire world, but an entire manner of feeling, precisely by pilling those clauses upon clauses and words upon words. So many of them are, from a strictly literal perspective, completely superfluous. But as with music, it’s the rhythm and melody of the thing which gives it its power.

Consider the incantatory repetition of words as the author lets the sentence ramble on as if you were viewing the very landscape which it describes from a car window, those transitions from lawns to orchards to fields to pastures to the sky, the way in which the geographic features themselves become bigger and bigger until terminating with the cosmos itself. Then there is the phrase “In the loveliest town of all” with both its initial fairy-tale evocation and the way its repetition recalls somebody losing their direction mid-thought only to wrangle it back again.

Finally, all that build up for the concluding clause, this vast descriptive tableau terminating in the main character stopping to enjoy that folksiest of carbonated beverages. There is charm and wit in a sentence like this that would be absent if every extraneous word were ruthlessly cut. Thank God the author didn’t follow their own advice about the preferability of short sentences; this excerpt is from E.B. White’s Stuart Little (unironically the greatest novel about love from the twentieth-century).

Within the long sentence then there are certain things which can be accomplished that are impossible with its shorter partner; admittedly, there is a difficulty in reading a long sentence sometimes—all of those twists and turns, the convoluted syntax and piling on of word and imagery, comma and semicolon, clause, clause, and clause—but in the wrestling with such prose there is the possibility of the reader as much as the writer working towards a conclusion, in finding the meaning within the sentence itself; for, it must be said, there is an ethical difference between the sentence which is easy to read and the one which demands your attention, which in fact forces you to pay attention lest you get lost; this difference shouldn’t necessarily be understood as a claim that the long sentence is innately morally superior, but in demanding that a reader really grapple with a line we catapult a volley against the gods of this world (or the algorithms of the internet, the same thing) who valorize the short and bullet pointed above all else; in elevating the occasional joys of the long sentence, there is a an acknowledgement that sometimes the short sentence is the easy one, the small one, the insignificant one, but it should not be said that the long sentence demands the capitulation of the short, for what makes writing enjoyable to read is often the contrast between the gargantuan and the miniscule, just as music is built upon notes and rests; perhaps what’s self-indulgent in the long sentence (and certainly it can be that) can also be passed along to the reader, so that such expansive prose is better understood as a gift, or better yet as a secret; then, of course, there are the things which only the long-sentence can convey, that sense of motion, of movement across a landscape, or of the interior mind making its own wafts and wavers; finally, if there is any radicalism in the long sentence it’s this—the embrace of artifice, ornament, decoration, and excess, is resistance against base utility and the razor-sharp scalpels of those obsessed with bottom-lines, whether executives or editors—it is to give oneself over to the immaculate daringness of superfluous beauty. That’s all.

 

Ogden & Hardwick's Everyday Enigmas - Public Books

publicbooks.org · by Ruby Ray Daily · April 13, 2023

A few years ago, when my son was still a baby, a knock came at the door. I picked the baby up and answered it. A young woman, clutching some pamphlets, greeted me with a formal speech: “Good afternoon, ma’am. Do you ever feel that it is so hard to know how to be happy?” It took a second to register such an unexpected question. But almost before I could understand what was happening, I knew my answer. I was happy. At that moment in my life, I did not suffer from the problem so pervasive that this young woman—a missionary peddling a religion I knew little about—could presume to cure it in strangers. Just being asked the question filled me with the euphoric certainty of my own happiness.

But certainty did not equal clarity. I couldn’t have told the evangelist how to be happy, any more than I can tell you now when I stopped being quite so undeniably so. “Euphoria” comes from the Greek “to bear well,” a meaning related to the sickroom. A euphoric patient is one for whom the treatment is working, who has been pulled out of danger by drugs. I wasn’t on drugs when this stranger came to my door, though I probably still had some remnants of the oxytocin high that comes from days full of nursing. I had “borne well,” if you can call it that. After several miscarriages, I’d held out long enough to bring a high-risk pregnancy to completion. Having been on bed rest for 18 weeks due to a cervix deemed (to use the clinical term) “incompetent,” I was also happy about being allowed once again to stand up, walk down the hallway, and open my front door.

I recalled this moment while reading Emily Ogden’s book of essays, On Not Knowing—not only because her essays also feature babies, miscarriage, and unexpected encounters with strangers, but also because Ogden writes about the ways we come to understand experiences we cannot explain, or, perhaps better, how we never quite understand them. In short essays on mothering, poetry, sex, and animal husbandry (among other topics), Ogden muses on daily encounters with a world that remains stubbornly unknowable. And in a new biography of the book’s avowed literary inspiration, 20th-century author Elizabeth Hardwick, we learn that literary genius is another subject that resists easy explanation.

Ogden begins by explaining her project as a kind of domestic apocalypticism: “The world burns, yet the fire is not bright enough to read a map by. Nor am I mostly reading. I am still sweeping the dirt out of the corners and intercepting my children’s arms half-way through the act of smashing a glass on the stone ground.” To carry on performing domestic labor as the world ends is not to ignore that the world is ending, but to notice all the parts of one’s life that will end along with it.

Ogden likens this noticing to watching the minnows dart about as the Leviathan looms, borrowing an image that fuses Elizabeth Hardwick and Herman Melville. There’s a clever toggle built into Ogden’s title and chapter headings. While the chapters appear to offer guidance and expertise (“How to Give Birth,” “How to Listen,” and so on), read in tandem with the book’s title, they simultaneously undermine such insights (“On Not Knowing … How to Give Birth,” etc.). Likewise, the book purports to be about ignorance (or, as Ogden prefers, “unknowing”) but ends up performing that same sleight of hand as Ogden disclaims her knowledge but nevertheless displays considerable erudition and insight. She describes herself as focusing on “moments of heightened experience”—birth, sex, sexual violation, and brushes with death among them—that nevertheless don’t resolve themselves into enhanced knowledge. That we might be different, better after encounters with the sublime, is the idea that comforts us. But Ogden refuses the commonplace belief that our most extreme experiences educate us, a refusal that is at times unsettling but ultimately liberating.

Sometimes we don’t want the answers we seek, even if we devote our lives to asking the questions.

Ogden returns to images of collective life (schools of fish, flocks of birds, even her conspiratorial twins), but the observation of that life feels lonesome. These essays are not about joining collectives but about witnessing them as a solitary onlooker. Each essay guides the reader through a series of successive interpretive steps as if watching Ogden turn an idea over in her mind. Like Hardwick’s minnows, Ogden’s writing can be hard to hold on to, though the experience of its movement is largely pleasant. Her metaphors have a way of spinning off into the literal, recto to verso to recto, until they become richly overdetermined. Those minnows, for example, are the trivialities of quotidian life, but they are also, well, little fish, and a few pages later they are the first uncertain feelings of a fetus kicking.

Highly allusive, the essays recur to a handful of literary and psychoanalytic authors (among them Dickinson, Emerson, Adam Phillips, and D. W. Winnicott), but the primacy of the book’s twinned epigraphs goes to Melville and Hardwick, two writers whose work is also threaded throughout the book. (Ogden is an academic specializing in 19th-century American literature.) From Melville, she takes the serendipity of an unexpected image, the delightful density of his descriptions—of, say, a baby whale’s umbilical cord getting tangled in a ship’s ropes. The Hardwick references are all to her semi-autobiographical novel, Sleepless Nights (1979), and one senses a formal influence at work. Hardwick’s novel and Ogden’s essays can both seem miscellaneous, replete as they are with images, references, and locales. (“If I want a plot,” Hardwick once quipped, “I’d watch Dallas.”) But a perspectival center unites these otherwise disparate things; the reader is grounded by the focalizing intelligence that gathers the fragments into a composite whole.

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Tender Gossip: Darryl Pinckney’s "Come Back in September"

By Bruce Robbins

Hardwick has come in for renewed attention in the last few years, thanks to the republication of her remarkable essays: a decade after her death, The Collected Essays (2017) appeared, and NYRB Classics has just released The Uncollected Essays (2022). She is a major figure in Kate Zambreno’s 2012 work of memoiristic scholarship Heroines (Semiotext[e]). Another recent book of literary-inflected personal essays, Christina Lupton’s Love and the Novel: Life After Reading (Profile Books, 2022) also uses Hardwick as a touchstone.

Why Hardwick, and why now? What draws these critics to her writing? For Ogden, Zambreno, and Lupton, it is no doubt Hardwick’s careful sifting of personal experience with literary insight, along with her resistance to ready answers. (“Literal ‘understanding’ is not always the whole aim of an author,” Hardwick writes.) It’s not enough to say that Hardwick is a useful avatar for autotheorists. There are plenty of those to go around. She is, more specifically, a figure who couches sharp critical insight in a looser, fragmentary form.

Readers drawn to Hardwick (or noticing this attention to her work) may be compelled to learn more about the woman behind the criticism, the Lexington native who grew up flirting with jockeys and ended up cofounding the New York Review of Books. Cathy Curtis’s A Splendid Intelligence is the first biography of Hardwick to appear, and it evinces some of the challenges attendant upon telling the story of her life. Hardwick is an uncongenial subject of biography, not least because she was no fan of the genre. She called biography “a scrofulous cottage industry,” which needs “some equity between the subject and the author. And serious, incomparable reflection.” It’s not at all clear that Curtis meets Hardwick’s own standard for a biographer, though the resulting book will still appeal to readers eager for glimpses into her private life.1 Although Hardwick herself wrote a biography of Melville (published by Penguin in 2000), Curtis points out that it was unconventional, “largely a literary analysis with topical chapters rather than a conscientious chronicle of the life.”

I found myself wanting that version of Hardwick’s own story—a critical biography that could illuminate her writing as she did the writing of so many authors she respected and admired. Hardwick’s writing has garnered fans for her uncompromising judgment and incomparable style. Susan Sontag, a friend of Hardwick’s and no slouch when it came to style, wrote of her “beautiful sentences, more beautiful sentences than any living American writer” and claimed Hardwick knew “virtually all there is to know about adjectives.” (Now there’s a blurb.) Like Melville, Hardwick can also be startlingly funny; I laughed out loud at her description of her toddler’s “sturdy, manly sense of humor that moderates somewhat her common-sense bias.” One reads Hardwick and asks, How did she come to write like that? This biography offers few answers.

Those who don’t already admire Hardwick’s writing likely know her from her marriage to poet Robert Lowell. It is at times a lurid story. A masterful poet, Lowell was also bipolar at a time when treatment was (as it still can be for many) uncertain and inconsistent. During manic episodes, he could be cruel to his wife. (“Everybody has noticed that you’ve been getting pretty dumb lately,” he told her during one episode.) While she worked to keep their household together, ensure bills were paid, and oversee his care, he would call her family to tell them he never loved her. His mania often coincided with brazen affairs; friends, colleagues, and even doctors sometimes suspected Hardwick of jealousy when she tried to get him help. When he finally left her after 20 years of marriage, he wrote a collection of poems—dedicated to his new wife, Caroline Blackwood—that excerpted his ex-wife’s plaintive letters to him and (perhaps the worse betrayal) fabricated others without noting the difference. The Dolphin was condemned by friends like Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, but it also won the National Book Award. (In a published review, Rich called the book “one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry.”) Years later, Lowell and Hardwick reconciled. Visiting her in New York not long after, he took a taxi from the airport and died before arriving. Summoned by the cab driver, Hardwick rode alongside Lowell to the hospital, knowing that he was already dead.

Curtis opens the biography with a tantalizing author’s note, cautioning (but also promising) readers that the book will include “only as much information … as is necessary” about Lowell to tell Hardwick’s story. Readers familiar with Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights will recognize this gesture; there, the narrator figure, clearly drawn from Hardwick’s own life, has a husband referred to only obliquely. (He is called, in the epithet of the cleaning woman, “the Mister.”) Her friend the writer and critic Mary McCarthy remarked that Lowell’s absence in the novel left “a sort of black hole in outer space … which is poetic justice.” But despite Curtis’s disclaimer, the biography includes an utterly conventional amount of Lowell (whom she calls by his nickname, Cal). The tumultuous relationship between the two writers makes up the bulk of the volume.

Reading this biography alongside Ogden’s book of essays, I found myself wanting to know more about how Hardwick wrote; I felt that writer-reader’s desire to learn more about process and craft. Curtis includes some hints, mostly from Hardwick’s published writing on craft, but she seems herself uninterested in exploring further what was clearly a challenging subject for Hardwick. Mostly, Curtis seems to find Hardwick’s writing overly difficult—too dense with allusion, too fragmentary, too idiosyncratic in its critical judgments. At times she suggests that it is out of step with our moment (a strange claim for a biographer presumably appealing to the reader’s sense of relevance).

“You are always confronted with the limits of yourself, your knowledge, your ear, your character,” Hardwick writes. “And for that reason, writing is a very daunting activity and it will not make you happy.” This sentiment, familiar to any serious critic, puzzles Curtis, who suggests that anyone who wrote as much as Hardwick must have enjoyed it. She later compares Hardwick’s critical investment in stories of “long moral causality” (she was drawn to Middlemarch, Hedda Gabler, Clarissa) to contemporary cancel culture. The comparison yanks Hardwick’s ideals about writing down to earth with a thud.

I recognize that my question—How did she come to write like that?—is without an answer. If Curtis had offered a ready formula for critical perspicuity, for impeccable style, I’d have been just as unsatisfied. Ogden reminds us that sometimes we don’t want the answers we seek, even if we devote our lives to asking the questions. And with her collection of essays, she also suggests that the better way to get to know Hardwick’s writing might just be to follow her lead.

1. See also Darryl Pinckney’s funny and moving memoir of his time as Hardwick’s student, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan (Macmillan, 2022). ↩

This article was commissioned by Leah Price. Featured Image: Still Life by Eugene Landry, Oil on canvas. Photograph by A.Davey / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)