CLARITY IN LITERATURE
Language has two functions: it evokes and it communicates. Its one function is to make us feel; the other to make us see. In the one function it acts by suggestion; in the other by definition.
Language as used by the creative artist tries to make us feel — tries, that is, to make us respond to the emotion, the situation, the condition, or the object it evokes. Language as communication is the medium of the critic, the philosopher, the report writer, the technical "describer." Its business is to explain and describe. It makes us "see."
The 18th century1 in both France and England was the great century of see-ers in literature. Descart was the father of clarté in French prose, and the tradition descends through his disciple, Malebranche, through Saint-Evremond and La Rochefoucauld, to Voltaire, Montesquieu, Vauvenargues, the Encyclopedists. In England, prose took on firmness and clarity in the terse elegance of Dryden, the forerunner of Addison and Steele, of Swift and Defoe (Defoe the essayist).
Critics and essayists, all of them, definers, men who stressed the communicative in language and developed it to such an extrordinary brilliance that for the time it seemed to absorb all language. Not one really creative work was produced in that period; and even when, toward the end of the century, the revolt came, the prestige of that prose held on and influenced the creative work that followed. Out of it we get a bastard form like the novel of ideas — that is, the [digression]1 about the subject for a plastic progression into the subject.2
This was evidently a confusion of values. In informative writing, the center of interest lies in the material itself. In creative writing, the interest lies in the development of the material toward conditioning our responses. One is an end in itself, the other is a function. The quality that makes for perfection in one does not necessarily apply to the other. The qualities that made for perfection in the communicative prose of the 18th century made for frigidity and deadly formalism when try-applied to creative writing. The writing of Edmond About was such an attempt in French. Students in French are still forced to read fragments of his stuff. Shaw's work shows the bad result of this confusion; so, to an extent, does Meredith's. We cannot think of anything which possesses so completely as their work, the feature of unnecessity.
Paul Valéry's work can serve as illustrating both communicative and evocative writing. But never mixed. Essays like those on la Crise de l'Esprit and Adonis have perfect clarity and precision. There is no ambiguity, no loose ends of thought. Everything is caught up, every detail adds a facet of meaning. His evocative writing, on the other hand, is full of evasions, of nuances, of ellipses, and veiled meanings. Often our responses are conditioned by the music, the stress, and hesitancy, and rush of syllables, as much as by the words. When, for example, in the description of water, the fall and lift of syllables takes on the beat and cadence of the sea, one wonders if the sea-sound of the music has not more immediate influence on our emotions than the rather inadequate words. And one wonders if in creative writing the rhythm is not often at least as important as the words.3
In giving the effect sleep should not the rhythm be sleepy, full-voweled, and slow-cadenced, and to give dance must not the words quicken and dance?
Words are often only counters of speech worn smooth and flat with use, with none of the old image, the old boldness and suggestiveness, sticking to them. The 18th century created many stamp-words and narrowed others down to stamp-meanings. The whole effort of the Neo-clarticists has been to make language a string of counters; ie. a mechanism for facile conclusionizing. Very often the creative writer of today feels that many of his words, instead of richly conveying emotion, actually muffle and deaden it. They are simply chunks of dead language breaking the current of his relation to the object. Instead of conducting they insulate. Using them the writer has an unhappy frustrated feeling of not getting at the object, of missing its immediate flavor-richness.4 It is because they have narrowed down to their more explanatory sense. That was a false direction. The clarity of evocative writing is not that of communicative writing. Language as the artist uses it is a matter of flavor. The technician's language is a matter of precise exposition, a definite communication of mechanico-precise ideas.
In creative writing, clarity is not a matter of making clear statements. It is a matter of being immediate — of catching the flavor of the object, not its mere outline, but its fullness, and meatiness, its density, and heat, and solidity.
It is not something to be got by definitions. It is to be got by selection and juxtaposition of words and material, through rhythm, through tempo, through contrast, through the allusiveness and suggestiveness of words and images. Not just any juxtaposition or any rhythm, but each adapted to its function. Every detail and every expression is to be subordinated to direction. Good writing is always deliberate. There is one clarity demanded alike from the evocative and the communicative writer — clarity of conception.
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1 "The age of prose and reason" the academics call it.
2 Information enters into nearly all creative writing, but not purely as information. It enters as a means of conditioning the reader's response to a given situation (as when a writer uses description to carry out mood).
3 As in this passage from a modern writer: "He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refectory every time he opened the flaps of his ears. It made a roar like a train at night. And when he closed the flaps the roar was shut off like a train going into a tunnel. That night at Dalkey the train had roared like that and then, when it went into the tunnel, the roar stopped. He closed his eyes and the train went on, roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it roar and stop and then roar out of the tunnel again and then stop."
4 Editorial Note — Observe, following, the stress upon the object and the direction.
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