Analyis I: Low Style
I expect to see values blossom. I expect to see prose be prose. Prose, relieved of extraneous, unrelated values must return to its only purpose: to clarity to enlighten the understanding. There is no form to prose but that which depends on clarity. If prose is not accurately adjusted to the exposition of facts it does not exist—Its form is that alone. To penetrate everywhere with enlightenment.
—William Carlos Williams, Spring & All
As students of literature we often forget that the prose that we find truly exceptional, the prose that’s “crackling-with-voltage,” as the late David Foster Wallace once described good writing, only accounts for fewer than 5% percent of the writing that actually exists, has existed, or will exist in this world. The other 95%, such as the manual that came with your refrigerator, your high school algebra textbook, or the “INSTRUCTIONS FOR CARE” tag on the inside of your clothing (these are only examples) etc., is unremarkable. But, this kind of writing can be said to have a different goal entirely: “clarity.”
Claritas. Clarté. “J’ai sur-tout à la coeur la clarté,” said Le Brun. Clarity is essential to what rhetoricians since Cicero have labeled “low” or “plain” style, which aims only to teach or inform the reader—nothing more. Because low style aims to teach, it must always be delivered in clear and simple language, unadorned and unornamented by figures of speech; it is a prose that is highly transparent, so that the thoughts shine through the words used to represent them. Claritas means brightness, distinctness, but also glory or fame—that which is clear shines forth.
Low style has a very particular stance toward truth, thought, and language: the truth is objective and can be taught or communicated, thought can be clearly represented by language, and language, so long as it is clear and simple, can represent truth and thought. This stance necessarily establishes what Chris Holcomb and Jimmie Killingsworth in Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition call ‘footing,’ or the way the author is oriented in relation to the reader. Low style, by conveying thoughts or objective truths in simple language, positions the author squarely in the ‘sender’ category, and the reader in the ‘receiver’ category, a dyadic model of communication. While the most readily available example is in fact an actual teacher who, for example, authors a textbook, or lectures in class, and therefore is in a position of authority, low style does not essentially position the author hierarchically above the reader: we can just as easily think of a member of a committee or business team delivering a report written in plain style to his or her colleagues—a much more symmetrical footing.
A far more useful analytic for me than simply consulting scholars and rhetoricians (and there are a lot to consult) has been signal and noise. Plain style privileges signal and has a strong allergy to noise, noise in this case being just about everything I’ve come to cherish in literary texts: figures of speech, allusion, complicated schemas, and tropes. While it may make use of these things, it makes use of them sparingly and always with an ear for what is common and idiomatic in a language. The explanatory metaphor, for instance, is a trope that is well at home in both teaching and in textbooks, but if it is too complex or relies on a vehicle that falls outside the intended audience’s common frame of reference, it runs the risk of being unclear. (“Runs the risk,” because it’s a well-established idiom, doesn’t). Similarly, if the prose is weighed down in flowery, ornamental language, it noisily draws attention to its own noise, and the signal becomes secondary, unclear, and in some cases lost entirely. Plain style then is a style devoted to the pure dissemination of signal, with an eye towards teaching or transmitting that signal to the reader. A simple affair, right? Not even close.
In my low style piece “Objet Trouvé I: The Nautilus” the first in a three-part style “suite" of found objects, I chose to write about the nautilus, a beautiful and strange cephalopod that for me is highly evocative and overdetermined by the connection it has to my father. Because of this emotional charge, it proved difficult to write about sans noise, the very thing I would normally rely on to write about such a thing. In earlier drafts of this piece, I reduced the threat of noise by keeping myself entirely out of it—there were no personal pronouns—which, I reasoned, would preclude writing about any of the personal associations I had with the subject. I approached the nautilus like an amateur marine biologist, as objectively as I could. Because this approach can lead to merely listing facts, like an aimless encyclopedia entry, I began by grounding its history here, in the Pacific Northwest, signaling from the beginning that I was a Pacific North-westerner simply writing to other P.N.Wers about a strange artifact off our coast:
Most Pacific North-Westerners don’t know that this area was once home to a very, very old fish. A fish that could be over 33.9 years old. That number probably calls to mind pre-historic sharks and other large predators, but the Nautilus, no larger than 11 inches in diameter, could fit in your hands.
Here, as well as throughout that early draft, I tried to use verby, actively voiced, lean prose—all hallmarks of plain style. Holcomb and Killingsworth note that while well-executed plain style may use adjectives, adverbs, and “almost totally avoids figures of speech,” it uses these linguistic features sparingly and with an eye towards transparency. But, let’s be honest, who, after reading this introduction, would want to read this thing? Not I. The problem with following this minimalist regime is two-fold: 1) it’s a rather superficial interpretation of the conventions of low style and severely underestimates its potential for engaging the reader; 2) prose written like this is incredibly dry and mind-numbingly boring.
The solution to this problem can partly be found in what David Foster Wallace called “elegant variation,” which functions at the paradigmatic level, and what H & K call “deviation(s),” which can occur at the sentence level or at larger structural units, like the higher-order enabling conventions that delimit each style (the particular stance a style takes towards truth, for instance). As I was studying examples of plain style, I was drawn particularly to the highly engaging prose of the physicist and science popularizer Brian Greene. Greene challenges our notions of effective science writing; he has a genius for handling arcane topics in science with intelligible and engaging prose, thereby effectively translating those topics for his lay readership. He does so through his use of elegant variation, and by deviating from the genre conventions of science writing. Compare how I introduced the Nautilus in my first draft with how he opens his piece on the strange origins of water: "Morning dew and roaring falls inspire poets. Hurricanes and typhoons wreak devastation. Melting glaciers and rising tides challenge us all, even in an ever more thirsty world."What are poets doing in a piece of science writing? Why is there so much parallelism? Shouldn’t there be jargon and needless nominalizations? Greene’s work succeeds precisely because he deviates from stylistic norms of science writing, which is notoriously noun heavy and obtuse. After reading Greene, I rewrote my opening paragraph, this time with an eye out for my reader’s attention:
Have you ever seen a nautilus? Probably not—most people haven't. (And no, I'm not talking about Captain Nemo's ship). But I'm willing to bet that you have seen an octopus, if not in person then at least in a Disney cartoon or on the Discovery channel, when the Discovery channel had actual educational programs and not just reality TV shows.
And there you have it. It’s not perfect, but I’d say it’s a little bit less top heavy. There’s humor, or at least an attempt at it. And like Brian Greene, I chose to deviate from the norms of science writing by including more familiar, and less technical, references. But the job of low style isn’t to be funny or make references to popular culture, it’s to teach. I wanted the reader to learn something about the nautilus after having read this piece. Given the relative obscurity of the nautilus (I don’t see anybody picking out the nautilus at their local seafood market), this proved to be a challenge. Following Greene, I decided to impose a schema of parallelism on the piece, a negative or comparative analogy if you will: "The nautilus shares many anatomical similarities with the octopus, such as tentacles, eyes, and a siphon for jet-propulsion and respiration, but this is where the obvious resemblances end."
Taking this analogy as a cue, I wove this parallelism throughout the whole piece: “Like the octopus…unlike the octopus,” “while the octopus has…the nautilus has…,” and so on. While Greene’s use of parallelism in his introduction is so evenly distributed across the syntactical units of his sentences that it really should be called an isocolon, my parallelism is not that exact and is instead intended to give guideposts to the reader throughout the piece; while I’m introducing a new and strange animal, I make sure that the octopus, an animal with which the reader is likely familiar, is always close by, providing a familiar in to an unfamiliar subject.
I have found parallelism to be an invaluable tool, not only in plain style, but in just all styles. Not only is it pleasing to our ears and eyes, it’s also critical for sense making. It adds cohesion and strength to an otherwise complicated subject. Another stylistic method of building cohesion is the “know-new” principle, where known information comes first in the sentence, followed by new information. I use this method while explaining the nautilus’s eyes and siphon and comparing these organs to those of the octopus:
While the octopus is known for its keen eyesight (some species even have color
vision), the nautilus, with its simple pinhole eye, is as good as blind, instead
relying on its strong sense of smell to navigate its surroundings.
Given their poor sense of sight, olfactory organs, such as the two tentacles closest
to their eyes, are essential as they navigate the ocean.
The nautilus’s poor sense of sight, which I explain in the first sentence, is placed in the first sentence of the next paragraph, in which I explain their method of jet-propulsion. Now, it may be objected that the “know-new” principle is more a matter of arrangement or logos, but can we really, in the last analysis, separate style from logos? If, as Jonathan Swift famously said, “proper words in the proper places make the true definition of style,” then arrangement, both on the level of the sentence and at the level of the paragraph, is as much a stylistic choice as a logical one.
To show just how much I’ve consciously deviated from the norm of science writing, here’s the definition of the sub-class Nautiloidea from the Oxford Dictionary of Zoology:
A subclass of cephalopods which possess a multi-chambered, external shell composed of calcium carbonate, which is siphunculate (see siphuncle) and may be coiled. The gill structure is tetrabranchiate. Simple sutures are produced by contact between the internal septa and the shell wall. The subclass includes the oldest cephalopods, first recorded from Late Cambrian rocks. They diversified and became common throughout the Palaeozoic but were greatly reduced at the end of this era. Further diversification occurred in the Mesozoic but the group dwindled again in the Cenozoic. There are more than 300 extinct genera and one extant genus, Nautilus, which dates from the Oligocene.
Sure, there are some familiar words in there—it’s not hard to picture a “multi-chambered” shell. But mostly, this definition simply points to more jargon: the Nautiloidea have a shell that is “siphunculate” and have a “tetrabranchiate” gill structure. And while the definition is probably perfectly cohesive in the eyes of a zoologist, most readers (myself included) probably don’t understand how the “simple sutures” of the third sentence connect back to the gill structure mentioned in the second—in other words, if the “know-new” principle is at work here, it is only for those who are in the know.
In “Objet Trouvé I: The Nautilus” I’ve tried to do the work of translation that I find so magisterial in Greene’s work and so clearly lacking in other science writing. To be sure, my work is nothing compared to Greene’s, but I feel that I have succeeded in many of the goals I had for this piece, such as not falling into sentimentality when describing the nautilus, an animal so precious to me, and not falling prey to the overly jargony, obtuse prose often found in science writing, and if I’ve achieved these goals, it is only through the conscious deployment of stylistic choices.
Analyis II: Middle Style
If, as Edmund Burke once said, ‘a clear idea is another name for a little idea,’ then the three levels of style must be a very large idea. The middle style, though, is a little idea. It can be clearly and consistently defined as halfway between the high and low style, whatever we think those extremes to be.
—Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose
There were three stooges, three ages of man according to Titian, and three movies in the Star Wars trilogy—calm down, I’m talking about the original three. The best things, we are told, come in three. When we arrange two premises and a conclusion in a set of three, we get that trusty old logical form, the syllogism, but when we exclude the middle we commit a logical fallacy; we can live a life of excess or of meekness, but the middle state, Alexander Pope reminds us in his “Essay on Man,” is preferable: “He knows to live, who keeps the middle state/And neither leans on this side, nor on that.” The triadic hierarchy seems well-equipped to order any set, including the always unruly act of communication. The low-middle-high style distinction, Richard Lanham points out, is a bit self-serving: so long as we find a middle between the extremes of low and high style, we can safely analyze middle style. Thus, in its simplest form, middle style would be simply negatively defined: not low style, and not high. But this means it’s difficult, if not impossible, to talk about middle style in isolation. (I know I’m stating the obvious here, but it’s an important problem to deal with). Consider the qualities of Sanders’s “Settling Down” that H & K highlight to illustrate middle style:
-“He draws attention to important words by repeating sounds…”
-“He makes use of striking imagery”
-He gives his sentences a more definite, striking shape”
Additionally, they praise a certain “cleverness of language” in Sanders’s well-executed middle style. With the exception of the repetition of sounds, I wouldn’t consider any piece of writing worth its salt if its author didn’t at least try to do some of these things. And cleverness of language? I’m sure that even the authors of textbooks on the most arcane subjects have enough respect for language to inject some wit into their work (in fact I’ve read some delightfully clever textbooks) and I would certainly have a hard time being moved by any oratory that lacked it. The problem here is that rather than identifying any specific species, as well as the traits corresponding to these species, in this genus of style, H & K have simply listed some traits of style in general: it’s a bit like saying that humans are organisms with some skin, two eyes and a heart. So are Neanderthals, but you don’t see them going around making movies as great as the original Star Wars trilogy.
Another approach is to do what Cicero—and most of the rhetoricians following him—did: identify styles by what they aim to do. Low style aims to teach, middle style aims to delight, and high style aims to move the audience. Does that solve our basic problem of categorization? Hardly, but it’s the best we got, and it will have to suffice for my purposes in this essay.
In my low style piece, I aimed (mostly) to teach the audience something about the nautilus; in my high style piece, I aimed to move the audience to consider both the fragility of their relationships and the fragility of the species of the nautilus, which may one day become extinct due to over fishing. And in my middle style piece, I’m still talking about the nautilus, but my aim is somewhere in between teaching and moving (although, if I’m to honor this rather arbitrary spectrum, I would say my piece leans much closer to moving than teaching). Genre distinctions lend slightly more clarity to the matter: middle style, we’re reminded, is the style du jour for most non-fiction and “creative non-fiction” coming out of this country, whose favored form is the essay. Just as it’s hard to imagine a good piece of non-fiction not resorting, at least in part, to telling a story, it’s hard to imagine any example of middle style not using at least some story telling. (In terms of examples that illustrate this point negatively, one must only think of lyric poetry, which is not non-fiction and almost never resorts to narrative). In “Objet Trouvé II: The Nautilus, Representation, Memory,” I try to tell a story about a painting of a nautilus shell that my father gave to me when I was a kid, and to do so through pleasurable (or delightful) language. But what is delightful language? Is it, as H & K claim, merely the use of repetition, striking imagery, well-crafted sentences, and wit? Again, these things show up in most good writing more often than not, and sometimes in some not so good writing by mere chance or accident. (I'm thinking here of pretty much every speech ever by Sarah Palin, which often include striking uses of rhetorical devices and neologisms so surprising even Sir Thomas Browne could find pleasure in them). Thankfully, H & K painstakingly elucidate two tried and true ways of making language pleasurable: schemes and tropes. (Notice the repetition of 't' sounds? Unfortunately, what is in some contexts pleasurable can be simply annoying in others). Like in my low style piece, I've tried to incorporate different forms of parallelism throughout my middle style piece, but whereas parallelism was primarily used to build cohesion in my low style piece, here I try to use it primarily for pleasure.
While the best things usually come in threes, in my middle style piece they come in twos: "I am standing in...I am looking at," "Tony Hawk and...Harry Potter," "broken or half-broken,"—all of which, of course, is filtered through two eyes, both mine own and the nautilus's. The second paragraph, in particular, is entirely obsessed with the phenomenon of two things looking at each other: me looking at the nautilus shell, and my father looking back at me through its shell (and if we add back in the actual nautilus itself, we're right back at three). While I stay away from the mere repetition of sounds by avoiding alliteration, anaphora and epistrophe, I repeat words according to plóce, which is when a word means something slightly different each time it is repeated: I talk about the "pinhole eyes" of the nautilus, and then in the next sentence, the "eyes of time;" I call the nautilus shell miraculous, in the sense of its being strange or singular, and the miracle of seeing my father's eyes in its shell, in the sense of something defying the normal laws of physics. This polysemy is present even when I'm talking about the very obvious phenomenon of looking or seeing. When I ask, "have you ever seen a nautilus" I am asking both if the reader has seen the actual animal the nautilus, and if they've understood what they've seen, such as in the expression "I've seen what those people can do," in which the speaker rarely intends to mean that they have actually seen a certain group doing something, but rather that they understand the potential for some group to do some thing.
Another way to talk about this polysemy is the difference between a figurative use of speech and a literal use of speech. Figures of speech, or tropes, are classically associated with delightful speech. The nautilus shell, as I explicitly point out, is both a synecdoche for the nautilus (a part of the whole standing in for the whole by means of habitual association), and a metonymic figure standing in for my father (something that I have habitually associated with my father). Now of course, the nautilus shell is only habitually associated with my father by me, which doesn't really qualify it for the status of a metonym, but this is why I make this connection explicit in the piece. There is also a bit of mise-en-abyme going on here, because this figure of the nautilus shell begins to take on a metaphorical meaning of its own: the fetishization of this object comes to stand in, more generally, for the way we memorialize loved ones through the objects with which we habitually associate them. I'm trying to move from a very particular association (the nautilus with my father) of mine to a universal association (any object with any person who has passed away). I try to reach this universal, in part, by trying to teach the reader something; namely, something about grief and memory. I hope that the reader, after having read my low style piece, will know enough about the nautilus that I can focus on things other than its anatomy or means of propulsion, and instead delight, as I have, in the experience of gazing at this strange creature.
Analysis III: High Style
Of all the traditionally recognized styles, Richard Lanham says in Style: An Anti-textbook, high style “chooses specialized or unfamiliar or highly resonant words and puts them into careful patterns of balance, antithesis, and climax.” Add to that its predilection for “the ornaments of sound (alliteration, assonance, rhyme), puns, the whole range of metaphor and simile, the pleasures of repetition and restatement,” and you get a style that is primarily about noise and only secondarily signal, a style that Lanham calls “opaque.” If prose is a window onto the world, then high style is focused on the glass itself, rather than on what’s outside. This does not mean that the signal fades away; to the contrary, in a well executed piece of high style the noisiness of the piece strengthens its signal. Noise in high style makes the signal more highly resonant and affective. It’s not that the signal fades away in high style, it’s that both the reader and the writer’s attention is on the composition itself.
For Americans, the paradigmatic example of high style is Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. One could find this speech online and pick out at random an incomparably impressive example of high style. Here’s what I found:
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
There are many schemes and tropes at work here, so I’ll only focus on a few. There are the three repetitions of “one hundred years later,” (the best things come in threes), which working in terms of both style and substance: the parallelism is stylistically pleasing, and the repetition puts emphasis on the fact that one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, racial inequality still exists. Then there are the metaphors: “manacles of segregation” and “the chains of discrimination,” “island of poverty…vast ocean,” and “corners of American society.” King is speaking to an audience that is just coming to terms with racial inequality, and as such, he must defamiliarize the status quo by way of metaphor—visceral, powerful metaphor. And yet, though these stylistic features are noisy, King’s call for racial equality is not lost on us. King’s speech is so effective because it moves us, it compels us to want to create a better America. This ability to move the audience is one of high style’s greatest strengths. That is why our best oratory makes use of it. When it is successful, all the old prejudices about sophistic rhetoric fade away, and when it is unsuccessful, we are quick to quick to label it mere “rhetoric,” or if you’ve studied rhetoric, mere “sophistry.” This is the risk of using such an opaque, noisy style; if there is nothing underneath the surface, if there is no signal, then the result is hollow deception.
The fear of sophistry was never far from my mind as I was writing my high style piece. Had I written something that was genuinely moving? Or had I simply put on a good show? Or could it not even be said that I put on a good show? Rather than answer those questions directly, I’ll simply present a few of the strategies I used for this composition and explain why I think they work.
Taking my lead from Cicero, who proposed movere, (to move) as the aim of high style, I tried to move my audience. Unlike King, whose goal was to move his audience to action, my goal was to move my audience emotionally. I begin with a parallel construction that draws attention to the shortness of time: “in a few hours…in a few days…in a few minutes.” Similarly, to demonstrate the fleetingness of life: “come…and leave…come and go…” These slightly varied repetitions, along with the two repetitions of “like,” create an echo, as if one is in a room with a high-vaulted ceiling.
The topic, of course, is my father’s death, and to give the piece some much needed depth, I turn to a poem about the nautilus that I’ve been fond of for some time. This poem introduces an extended metaphor for the fragility of the human body:
By the end of the poem, the shell, which was once a beautiful “ship of pearl” is actually an impediment, “a low-vaulted past” and in shedding it, though it dies, the nautilus, much like a Christian who believes the body is a mere stop-gap before the afterlife, gets the high-vaulted Heavens.
The nautilus, like the human body, is fragile, always at risk of being cracked open. Like Annie Dillard in “Death of a Moth,” I don't’ want to lose sight of the actual nautilus, even as it becomes a metaphor for my father’s death, so I go to great lengths to note that the nautilus is in danger too, and in fact, even as I am re-reading this, I’m not entirely sure if this piece is more about my father or more about the nautilus, because both have become so entangled by my memory.
In the last paragraph, after having carefully anchored the piece in exteriors (bodies and shells), I move to the interior, which is what I know I must ultimately write about. In the last three sentences, I try to get at what could be waiting inside us, once we have shed our shells:
Inside, the nautilus’s chambers are arranged in a perfect logarithmic spiral. I’d like to think that while our bodies perish, there remains something ultimately unknowable and transcendent in each human, something we call soul. Inside each of us is a miraculous spiral, many-chambered and precious in each pearlescent moment, but it is a terminal spiral, an ever-widening, madly turning spiral, whose terminus is the very stuff of the spiritus mundi, the numinous and supralunary world, the dome more vast than any our bodies will ever know.
I intentionally chose words like “transcendent,” “soul,” and “miraculous” for their resonances, hoping that context would be enough to save them from abstraction and cliché. It is the last sentence, however, where I am using my most self-conscious language: the structure of the sentence is meant to enact what it is describing—it is supposed to spiral out, in a sense, like Yeat’s maddening gyre, from the center of the miraculous spiral, through outer reaches of our atmosphere, and into to the heavens. I have tried to pay the utmost attention to both the sound of this sentence and to its weight, and if it fails, I hope it goes out with a bang rather than a whimper.
Analysis IV: Classic Style
Knowing truth is as much a part of the equipment of a classic writer as knowing how to play the violin is part of the equipment of a concert violinist. Is it possible to play the violin? Can that question occur to a concert violinist? Could there be such a thing as a concert violinist if it were not possible to play the violin? Could there be such a thing as a classic writer if it were not possible to know the truth?
—Thomas and Turner, Clear And Simple as the Truth
We live in a Postmodern age, an age in which, if we are to believe academics and members of the intelligentsia, truth is fractured and fragmented, ultimately unknowable, and in many cases, an outright lie channeled through innumerable hegemonic discourses and generated by the competing interests of complex set of multinational agents; as Lyotard famously proclaimed, the time of steady and reliable metadisourses is long gone.
It is an age in which hedging and endless qualification in both academic and mainstream prose pass for critical acuity, when simply admitting that you don’t know something somehow makes you a more rigorous thinker, and perhaps more egregiously, simply admitting to the complexity of a problem absolves you from exploring those complexities. Complex, intellectually satisfying writing wasn’t always like this, argue Thomas and Turner, and it doesn’t have to be like this now. The classic style, so out of step with the styles associated with postmodernism, is difficult but attainable, their book tells us, if only we are willing to take some things on faith.
This seems a tall order, but in fact, we do it all the time and in every style. Classic style, like all styles, has a set of “enabling conventions” that allow us to perform these styles in the first place. What we have to take on faith is nothing more than the precondition for the style itself—if that seems like it verges on tautology, that’s because it does. To write about the truth, we have to first believe in the truth of what we’re writing. “The classic attitude,” Thomas and Turner argue, “is thus both foundationalist and universalist—local events, properly observed, will always disclose universal truths as their foundations” (29). That the truth can be known and easily communicated is one of the hallmarks of classic style. The paradigmatic example of this is Descartes Discourse on Method, (The Meditations, a work that would greatly complicate Thomas and Turner’s thesis, is notably absent from their book). The very point of the Discourse on Method, one could argue, is to give the reader a no-bullshit set of tools with which they can discover scientific and philosophical truths on their own. Descartes writes about complex philosophical controversies without even mentioning them, as if he’s just discovered these problems and is explaining his solutions to a friend in casual, colloquial French. Descartes, unlike the philosophers with whom he is covertly arguing, assumes the reader is competent enough to understand his system; because the reader is rational, the inferences he makes will be readily available to anybody with a modicum of intelligence. That we think, and therefore we are, is as clear and simple as the truth.
If this epistemological stand is the primary enabling convention of classic style, then the converse is true of postmodern styles. In order to write in a postmodern mode full hedging and qualification, we must take the opposite enabling convention—that truth is unknowable—on mere faith. Similarly, low style, middle style, and high style all have sets of enabling conventions. To deliver a piece of oratory in high style without first believing that that truth can move your audience would not only be an act of bad faith, it would be unconvincing and therefore unsuccessful as a piece of oratory. One can hardly imagine Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech being successful if King didn’t believe in the basic premises of the civil rights movement and, perhaps more importantly, that his speech could move the audience to collective action; if King’s speech were written today in a more postmodernist tone, perhaps it would have to be called “I Have a Dream, I Think, Or Perhaps It Is Not Really My Dream But That of Another Martin Luther King Because Multiverse.” You get the idea.
Despite Thomas and Turner’s classic-style-is-for-everyone optimism, however, I did not find it even remotely easy to write in classic style. In fact, it may just be the most challenging style I’ve ever tried to work in, and even after numerous revisions, I find my demonstration of it ultimately unsatisfying. This is in part due to the fact that despite its versatility as a style, hardly any contemporary American writers are using it in their prose—a caveat Thomas and Turner readily admit more than once. The scarcity of examples in our culture makes it a difficult style to absorb passively—I have a far better idea of what low style is because I’ve read a textbook or two in my lifetime. The same goes for middle and high style, as well as academic prose. While these categorizations of style are not without their flaws, there are still enough straightforward examples of these styles in our own tongue and culture to get an idea of what they are about. Thomas and Turner do present examples of American writers working in this style, but they are far outnumbered by European—and especially French—writers, and it is telling that one of the strongest examples of classic style in the US is from the Declaration of Independence, and not even the whole document, at that.
Even after I felt I had absorbed an adequate amount of classic style, I still had trouble finding a suitable topic. Thomas and Turner claim that classic style can be used to write about anything, and that even if the writer picks a less than desirable topic, the classic writer never hedges:
There is a third sort of hedge that classic prose omits, which
we will call hedges of worth. The classic writer spends no
time justifying her project. The classic writer does not
compare its worth to the worth of other projects. A classic
writer will write about milk, for example, with no indication
that there can be a question about the worth of writing about
milk, no indication that the reader could entertain any doubt
about the worth of writing about milk.
While this example of writing about milk may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, it does present an invaluable lesson about hedging to the postmodern writer: if you can avoid it, then avoid it. Even after acknowledging the wisdom in the no-hedging rule, I had major doubts about my chosen topic. I wondered if in writing about the Stradivarius, something with which ~1% of the population was familiar, and an even small percentage of people care about, could I still present the reader with a universal truth? Could I make the readers see the glory of the Stradivarius, clearly and simply? I had all these doubts and many more as I began to write about the Strad.
But exactly 0 of these doubts made it in to the final draft of my piece. While surely bluffing, I jump right into the topic, without caring about whether or not my topic is trivial: “As I was listening to a local classical radio station, a version of the Elgar cello concerto played by Jacqueline Du Pré came on.” My intention here was to try to do scene-work and to anchor the topic without any hedges. Thomas & Turner, in their discussion of the presentation of classic style, stress that the classic stylist writes as if they had just discovered the topic and decided to write on it. Similarly, when discussing scene, they note that classic style is modeled on one person speaking to another, casually (yet perfectly) presenting their thoughts. With that in mind, the beginning of my piece is trying to imitate as closely as possible a (admittedly boring) conversation with a friend. I have just heard the du Pré Elgar concerto on the radio and would like to say some things about the Stradivarius she played, my ruse goes. The rest of this opening paragraph is meant to anchor the cello, and specifically this cello—du Pré’s cello—as it can be heard during the performance of this concerto. I describe the sounds (double-stopped chords) and how strikingly clear they are, and how unclear they could be on any other cello (I happen to know this from experience, but one could gain the same knowledge by searching “Elgar Concerto” on YouTube and watching videos of amateur cellists). It isn’t until the end of this first paragraph that I offer up what is definitively a judgment: “Du Pré’s version of the Elgar concerto is as Dionysian as it is Apollonian, made of equal parts Eros and restraint.” While this certainly gets into the realm of subjectivity, I hope that because the judgment is sufficiently anchored in the cello itself, it is read as a natural inference—something anybody listening would notice.
The rest of the piece deals with the specific qualities of the Stradivarius which make it unique, and I found this to be a very difficult area to write about in classic style. Can one really write about such a rare object without deferring to at least some expertise? I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t. Here is where I had to consciously deviate from Thomas & Turner’s classic style. I did so, however, with an eye on the present. One problem with the classic style is it doesn’t really make sense in the modern age: there’s just too much readily-available information out there for the reader for us to assume that they can’t Google whatever it is that is in question. If I limited myself only to what is observable in the Stradivarius, with no reference to specific information, I would have nothing to write about. The reader—any reader—will likely never encounter a Stradivarius cello in the wild, but that’s ok, neither have I. Nothing that I say about the cello can be intuited or verified a priori, but it can be easily looked up.
All of this anchoring is meant to lead up to the one big inference in the piece, the bit of easily verifiable truth: some things just get better with time. But I’m careful to not to just go out and say that, because it seems to me that classic style argues from behind, so to speak, if it does argue anything at all. If it does argue, it does so through inferences that are presented by the writer and easily re-presented by the reader. I try to present the inference that the Stradivarius is better than mass-produced cellos because of how it has aged when I say:
Ironically, it is the mineral preservative that was originally applied to these instruments over three centuries ago that has degraded their rare Spruce, but because of this degradation their wood has become more porous, the quality necessary to produce their deeply rich resonances. That resonance is more than a mere formal property—something audible and quantifiable. That is time itself resonating.
I feel that it is fair to assume that the reader—any reader—gets it, but I am less sure that this demonstrates other parts of classic style; namely, that it demonstrates what Thomas and Turner describe as perfect performance. The suggestion that prose written in classic style could seem spontaneous, simple, unrushed, euphonic, nuanced, clear, and perfect all at the same time is enough to make a writer quit writing and finally take that full time position their boss has been offering them at Starbucks; it is, to my mind, impossible, and while certainly noble, an ultimately ridiculous and paralyzing goal for any piece of writing. Unless you are prone to speaking in full paragraphs that sound like something Pascal would have written in his Pensées, it’s unlikely that you can create prose that mimics casual conversation and that is crackling-with-voltage at once. Nonetheless, I give it my best shot in the penultimate sentence:
To play one these instruments is to mark the passage of time; to hear one of these instruments is to hear time itself unfold, beginning above the bridge and terminating at the end-post, into the ground and into the grave of cellists past and future.
“To play…to hear,” “beginning…terminating” and “cellists past and future” are all attempts to bring some structure to thought that doesn’t sound too forced, but which nicely encapsulates my thought. I’m sure tried to present the truth about the unique sound of the Stradivarius, but I’m less sure that anybody will listen.