It's like you've made it a goal to be embarrassingly hyperarticulate. I suppose you flatter yourself that others are not capable of writing like you; my question to you is: why do you write this way? The effort involved, just to get through one of your sentences, sometimes...! It can't be any easier to write than it is to read.
Some of your writing, the first time through, a sentence is simply impenetrable. Yet on the second read, one will be positively struck by how intricately a phrase had been turned on the lathe and machined into place. Is this good prose or bad? Such occasionally brilliant turns of phrase, so thoroughly wasted, obscured and buried. I can't think what you must be trying to accomplish by writing this way.
It should never be necessary to re-read a sentence for comprehension. For pleasure, yes! But however entrancingly you may wish to weave its branches into patterns and designs, your prose must be clear. Good prose is not a topiary maze, with meaning in the middle, a reward for those with the patience and determination to fight through. No, good prose is a fruitful orchard from whose clean limbs meaning falls easily - as if unbidden, a ripe plum plumb in the hand of your reader!
Please work on transparency, or failing that, at least translucency. Failing that, could you at least shoot for lucid? Work on getting meaning to shine out. Stop burying it under clever verbiage, making us sweat and dig for it, hoping for us to maybe belatedly ooh and ah when we finally find some.
2 comments:
I fucking hate Thomas Pynchon. With V, he ruined the pleasure of my reading for like six months while I tried to get through his shit. Sick pretentious witty bastard.
Now whether you feel this way or not about him, I am lock-step with you in that writing should be accessible and comprehensible to the vast majority of literate people (I mean "literate" literally).
In a democratic society, we need a simple artist who just tells his or her truth in plain terms, and any overt demonstrations of intelligence should fit within that frame.
I was (based on similar impressions to yours that I'd heard) totally ready to hate Thomas Pynchon! Because that's what I always hear about him: he writes prose that is dense to the brink of abstraction, to where reading it for comprehension becomes more labor than love.
So I'd kind of been dreading reading him, but I'd worked myself around to it and I went to the bookstore to pick a peck of pickled Pynchon. I was ready to bite the bullet, ready to read and read hard, and not that I went into it with pre-judgment but due to the guy's reputation I was definitely ready to hate it (or at least, disdain him).
But I screwed up on the selection. I picked up Vineland.
Vineland was pretty laid-back. I didn't mind it at all. It was a little corny in parts. Goofy, even. I was all, "what's everyone talking about? This guy's not so bad."
But apparently, it's just that I just picked the wrong book. I've since gleaned that Vineland is a far more straightforward story than the grandstanding, showboating, literary tours de force that he usually labors so mightily to put across.
DAMN IT! That means I have to read another one of his.
Well what the hell. I'll give it a shot.
Vineland wasn't so bad.
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