Once upon a time, writing and articulate speech were reserved for an aristocracy that knew how to use words, back when thinking was conceded to be important, and essays and fiction were not so much convoluted as rich in a level of detail that signified in turn a level of reflection appropriate to complex topics. Such oratory and literature was understood to enhance our ability to seek and find deeper, more nuanced meanings. Back then, when writers sat in drafty great halls, dipping the tips of their quills in ink, our literary mentors—people like Laurence Stern or George Elliot, or more recently, Henry James or Virginia Wolff, following I suspect the example of Proust and his beautifully woven memory webs, never mind Joyce who is widely admired but seldom read—engaged in well-wrought exchanges and wrote with respect for the other’s ability to understand subtler shades of meanings, their delicious ironic wit often eliciting subtly approving laughter instead of the guffaws one hears these days from the morbidly obese watching sitcoms and stupid videos.
Depth of meaning and the detail sufficient to invoke it have their place, I think we all agree, when we describe the natural world. At every level of existence down to the sub-atomic, at the level of the rudest, most primitive forms of life, we find the building blocks for all existence and the complexity that has evolved, one thing linked to another in a structured network impossible to have foretold and equally impossible even in retrospect fully to comprehend, the mechanisms by which it has all been produced remaining largely in the dark despite advanced scientific tools and the breadth of government-financed research in cooperation with academic institutions, corporations, and a vast intelligence establishment; in the natural world, that is, there is a degree of detail that the most erudite prose could never hope to emulate, yet we do not hear philistines whining about the complexity of existence, do we? or mathematics? or quantum physics? Oh no, but we do hear them, oh, we do, we hear them complain in the snide tones of barely pubescent teens, in those irritating middle-school voices of resentful entitlement, about the depth and complexity of written and spoken expression beyond their limited understanding.
Publishers today market and deliver products—not books, products – to that invincibly ignorant demographic. As a result they only publish works written in simple sentences. Never more than seven words, I have been advised, in a single sentence, never more than two syllables in a word. Aim not at the ninth grade level of the Wall Street Journal; aim at the fourth grade level standard in the trades.
I surrender.
I will get with the program.
From now on, I will write simply. I will use words at a fourth grade level. I will write short stories—very short stories—using very few words. Maybe then the whining will stop, and no one will ever be able to say they don’t know what I mean.
