In an essay in the Times Book Review yesterday, William Deresiewicz discusses language—English, in particular, and the persistent tension generated by people who are inflexible prigs about “Correct English.” He compares this with “Standard English”—the modern effort to standardize usage to help stabilize the language for the long haul, but allowing for creativity and innovation. His main point is that “the genius of English is an oral one.” Thus, written language that deviates from spoken language is, he says, a sign of something rotten. (Stuffy, disingenuous writing he identifies as a symptom of class anxiety. We’re rather inclined just to call it bad writing.)
We couldn’t help applying his idea to what’s on our pillow at the moment. Melville’s Moby-Dick is dense with antique language, neologisms, solecisms, alternate spellings, and just plain overwritten sections that threaten to send a modern reader to the nearest harbor with a Barnes & Noble and a Starbucks. (Extra credit: How would Ahab have felt about Starbucks? No cheating.)
There are no “problems” in Moby-Dick. There are lots of “problematical and paradoxical predicaments ,” if you follow us. (For example, throughout the novel, Melville uses the construction “ye” as a Quaker affectation meaning “you.” As an article, “ye” is a pseudo-archaic misreading of the word “the.” In old and middle English, “the” was sometimes spelled with the letter thorn, a rune that looks a little like a “y” in handwritten texts, but is still pronounced “th.” Not to confuse the matter too much, but a Quaker would morelikely have said “thee” and “thou” for “you.” A construction like “Ye Olde Candy Shoppe” is just wrong. Oops, now we’re being priggish about it.)
Personally, we think this gassiness gives the book some character. It was written before the standardizers came along, and even if its main point is not to twist the language itself, like, say, James Joyce fifty years later, it certainly feels breezy and free and would, if published today, be considered experimental—not unlike Thomas Pynchon’s last novel.
But we didn’t wish to drag you, dear reader, into an academic discussion about whether language is animal or mineral. We had two small issues with Deresiewicz’s essay. First, the idea that our best novelists have been great by virtue of their ability to write like people speak. He says our “literature is greatest when hueing closest to speech (Chaucer, Wordsworth, Dickens, Joyce). It is no accident that our greatest author was a playwright.” Now there is much to disagree with here, not least of which is that we’re pretty sure people didn’t speak like Dickens wrote—other than in Dickens’ dialogue. And even that conceit is problematic(al). Any writer who has tried to transcribe an interview tape knows that if you wrote exactly the way people speak, it would be unreadable.
More important, we can think of dozens of writers of the finest vintage who don’t write the way people speak. Take two American extremes—Faulkner and Hemingway, the poles of exposition. Faulkner hardly wrote a sentence that can be read in one breath, while Hemingway had the opposite approach, atomizing the language, almost as if one sentence were unaware of the next. Today, Cormac McCarthy is a sort of post-modern incarnation of both. His dialogue is Hemingway, his narrative description is Faulkner, and he is probably the finest living writer of the langage. None of these dudes write the way people speak. (Instead, they write the way people hear, and there is a huge difference.)
And that’s our point, really. The spoken language and the written language are two very different things, with their own assets and liabilities. If that were not the case, poetry would cease to exist, and we’d be working in radio.
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