A thoughtful and ruefully funny Maud Newton essay that traces the connections between David Foster Wallace’s “aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I’m-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity” style of writing and blog style:
I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified. That music blog we liked was really pretty much the only one that, um, you know, got it. Never before had “folks” been used so relentlessly and enthusiastically as a term of general address outside church suppers, chain restaurants and family reunions. It’s fascinating and dreadful in hindsight to realize how quickly these conventions took hold and how widely they spread. And! They have sort of mutated since to liberal and often sarcastic use of question marks? And exclamation points! “Oh, hi,” people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.
There are those who find Wallace’s style passive-aggressive and manipulative in its very niceness (he was a Midwesterner, after all); there are those who have the same opinion of plain stylists who bury their hesitations and qualifications in epigram. And this debate among professional writers has its parallel among humanities academics: fans of the dense, clotted, unwieldy Spivak or Judith Butler sentence vs. people who long for the day when leftist political thinkers wrote clearly and elegantly, like Orwell. Defenders of Judith Butler argue, echoing Adorno (if I remember correctly), that a knotty, hard-to-follow syntax makes ideas harder for “hegemony” to assimilate; others argue that it also makes ideas harder for anybody to read. Maud Newton alludes to this debate, however obliquely, late in the essay when she writes:
At 20 I congratulated myself on my awareness of the subjectivity of aesthetic judgments, the arbitrariness of critical proclamations, the folly of received wisdom. I pored over the Deconstructionists and the French feminists and advocated, in complete seriousness, the overthrow of language. (Also, the patriarchy.) Then I went to law school and was forced to confront serious practical and ethical questions—Brown v. Board of Education, for instance, and Roe v. Wade—that managed not to be resolved by the insights of Derrida. Now, having entered and abandoned the practice of law and spent roughly a decade straddling legal publishing and the blogosphere, I’m increasingly drawn to directness, which precludes neither nuance nor irony.
For myself, I’m “increasingly drawn” to the simple sentence too—we desire what we aren’t. But if I ever start to turn that into a moral position, as some of Wallace’s detractors have done—and as some people do who attack complex philosophical stylings—I hope someone kicks me back to my senses. You can make an argument many different ways, and the mixture of temperament, ability, project- and audience-appropriateness in the choice of how to do it (which almost never, for me, feels much like a “choice”) is something neither David Foster Wallace nor George Orwell, subtle thinkers that they both were, could possibly entangle. A simple style can suggest all sorts of nuances, including a lack of certainty about what’s being said, through the use of tone or counterpoint; a complex style can sometimes be the best way to try to capture a simple emotion (given that the simple emotions often come as complete surprises to us, are birthed in muddle and emotional clutter, amid loose ends and scattered loyalties, and seem to take some of their power over us from the fact that they are whole things appearing among fragments). There are bad complex writers, and I happen to think Judith Butler is among them; there are dishonest complex stylists, like Heidegger; there are writers of ugly or manipulative short sentences, too. (A lot of bullies and liars love plain prose. They think it’s manlier.) The point is what you do with it.
