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It’s always been my opinion that writing should be unobtrusive, in the same way that acting should be unobtrusive. What do I mean? Well, if I go to see a play or a film, or am watching a TV programme, I want to forget that I’m watching make-believe. Unless “breaking the fourth wall” is part of the action, I don’t want to be reminded that the people I’m watching are only acting.
I feel the same way about writing. If a piece of writing is too self-conscious, if it’s basically shouting “Hey, look at me. Isn’t this a fine piece of writing?” I lose interest. There are exceptions, of course. Who could doubt the beauty of Nabokov’s prose, or that of Bruno Schultz? But on the whole I prefer the underplayed, more subtle approach.
It was quite satisfying for me, therefore, to discover that Trollope was of a similar opinion. In The Book of Victorian Style he is quoted as saying:
“I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one observes. I am not sure but that the same holds true for an author’s written language.”
This book on style caught my eye in the library. It has a boring title (what? no subtitle?) and a boring cover to match. But its contents more than make up for these deficiencies (if, indeed, they are deficiencies: I think some book covers try way too hard). It’s fascinating to see the minutiae studied.
I haven’t finished reading the book, but one thing in particular stood out for me. In a chapter titled “Kipling; and”, the author Daniel Karlin writes:
“The feature of style I would like to examine is the use of the semicolon followed by ‘and’.”
Eh? Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I am a great fan of Stephen Potter’s One Upmanship books. Potter was, amongst other things, a lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, and one of the things he likes to lampoon is academia.However, until I happened upon this book I’d always thought that one particular section was wildly exaggerated, to the point of having no basis in fact whatsoever. In the section on Litmanship, defined as the art of knowing about English Literature without actually reading any books, he describes ways of writing (in an examination) an answer to a question about the line from Shakespeare:
“Who keeps the gate here, ho!”
Potter writes:
“ Show you are Versed in the Language of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
and go on like this: Who... here, ho! ‘Who’ is here, I think, the indefinite (= ‘He who’), and not the interrogative pronoun, as is implied, for instance, by the punctuation, ‘Who keeps the gate here? a ho!’ (Oxford Shakespeare), and ‘Who the gate here, ho?’ (Cambridge Shakespeare). ‘Who keeps the gate’ is periphrasis (=‘Porter’) of a kind usual in calling to servants or others, attendance but out of sight. Cf. Henry VIII. V.ii.2, 3: ‘Cran... Hol W waits therel’ Cf. also Beaumont and Fletcher, Maid’s Tragedy, Viii: ‘Lys... Summon him, Lord Cleon. Cleon. Ho, from the walls there!’ and Jack Straw (Hazlitt’s Dodsley, V.396): Neighbours, you that keep the gates.’
This last gambit, shortened by two-thirds from [our] Arden Edition of Shakespeare, needs training, even if every single reference is made up. ”
Delicious!
Well, I’m sure that Karlin’s analysis is very insightful, and I’m very much looking forward to reading it (and the other essays in that book).
But you can see Potter’s point!
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