*This is an unused portion of a longer chapter on Nietzsche vs Postmodern Style
As
both a writer and a teacher of writing, Nietzsche had a professional interest
in the causes of bad writing. On the basis
of that interest, one can imagine him reading some postmodern prose, if only to discover, describe and diagnose its tendencies. This section glosses a few things that
Nietzsche identified as bad writing. Many
of them are exhibited by postmodern prose.
It also looks at a few of his many remarks about the causes of bad
writing.
I have already noted (*earlier in this chapter) the postmodern ‘rage for originality’,
its love of difficult talk, its disdain for clarity, its resort to ‘boneless
generalities’ and its wish to appear paradoxical. Each of those trails leads to bad writing. Another route to bad writing lies in the habit
of elevating style above content, which is inevitable with postmodernists
because their school rejects the signified.
Another cause of bad writing is the elevation of a reformatory
morality above standard practices in prose, which is endemic to postmodern
theory. In addition to these and other
larger trends, there are many smaller tendencies in the writing that help in
their own ways to make postmodern prose insufferable. Among these, one may observe the habit of
placing
Darkness and excessive brightness side by side. – Writers who in general
are unable to express their thoughts with clarity will in individual instances
take pleasure in employing the strongest, most exaggerated designations and superlatives:
thus producing a light-effect like torches on confused forest pathways. (HH 204 complete)
Perhaps
Derrida feels like he can see better when he contrasts against ‘absolute’ this or
that, or against what is ‘simply’ this or that – perhaps he grasps something by
means of a too bright imprecision.
Insignia of rank. – All poets and writers enamoured of the
superlative want to do more than they can.
(HH II 141 complete)
Contrasting
against superlatives might indicate a high degree of aspiration. It might also indicate a
Two Horse Team. – Unclear thinking and sentimental emotionalism
are as frequently united with a ruthless will to self-assertion, to ascendancy
at all cost, as is a warm benevolence and desire to help with the drive to
clean and clear thinking, to moderation and restraint. (HH III 196 complete)
Postmodern
thought would be unrecognizable without its ‘sentimental emotionalism.’ As for self-assertion, well, it is easy to see
how postmodern prose writers work to promote the who, that is, themselves, through
their how, that is, their style.
The inflated style. – An artist who wants, not to discharge his
high swollen feelings in his work and so unburden himself, but rather to communicate
precisely this feeling of swollenness, is bombastic and his style is the inflated
style. (D 332 complete)
An
inflated and bombastic style using exaggerated expressions to feed swollen
moral feelings to the audience and thus ascend to tenure and honors – how postmodern
is that?
Another factor lurking behind the morally charged prose
of postmodernism could be what Nietzsche identified as the
Chief reason for corruption of style. –To desire to demonstrate
more feeling for a thing than one actually has corrupts one’s style, in
both language and all the arts. All great
art has, rather, the opposite tendency: like every man of moral consequence, it
likes to arrest the feelings on their course and not allow them to run quite
to their conclusion. This modesty which
keeps the feelings only half-visible can be observed at its fairest in, for example,
Sophocles; and it seems to transfigure the features of the feelings when they
present themselves as being more sober than they are. (HH III 136 complete)
Corrupt style lets the feelings
predominate. In contrast, Nietzsche admires
‘the economy of the great style: keeping our strength, our enthusiasm in
harness’ (A, Preface). The great style uses
strength and enthusiasm, but is not their voice. Feelings
are badly inflated in the land of PoMo prose, so inflated that understatement
is ineffective there.
After the Greeks. – Knowledge is at present very much obstructed by
the fact that all words have, through centuries of exaggerated feeling, become
vaporous and inflated. The higher level of
culture that places itself under the dominion (if not indeed under the tyranny)
of knowledge has need of a great sobriety of feeling and a strong concentration
of all words; in which matter the Greeks of the age of Demosthenes have preceded
us. All modern writing is characterized
by exaggeratedness; and even when it is written simply the words it contains
are felt too eccentrically.
Rigorous reflection, terseness, coldness, simplicity, deliberately pursued
even to their limit, self-containment of the feelings and silence in general – that
alone can help us. – Moreover, this cold manner of writing and feeling is now
as a contrast, very stimulating: and in that there lies, to be sure, a great danger. For biting coldness is just as much a stimulant
as a high degree of warmth. (HH 195 complete) [i]
Like Nietzsche’s moderns, our postmodernists also produce
writing ‘characterized by exaggeratedness.’
Nietzsche’s remedy against this bad writing habit: ‘Rigorous reflection, terseness,
coldness, simplicity, deliberately pursued even to their limit, self-containment
of the feelings and silence in general.’
Each of these goals is anathema to postmodern reading and writing, which
thrives on exaggeration, passion, wishful thinking, rigid moralism and overindulgence
in writer and reader alike.
Why are postmodern writers in love with overstatement
and exaggeration? Many factors might contribute
to it.
Excess. – The mother of excess is
not joy, but joylessness. (HH II 77 complete)
Mistrust of oneself. – Mistrust of oneself does
not always go about shy and uncertain but sometimes as though mad with rage: it
has got drunk so as not to tremble. (HH
II 80 complete)
Belief in oneself. – In our age we distrust everyone who believes in himself: in former ages it sufficed to make others believe in us. The recipe for obtaining belief now is: ‘Do not spare yourself! If you want to place your opinions in a believable light first set fire to your own house!’ (HH III 319 complete)
Joylessness, a rage that numbs,
and a will to be admired unto the point of self-immolating – each of these might
account for a share of the excessive in postmodern prose. And remember,
Of vain old men. – Deep thought pertains to youth, clear
thought to age: when old men nonetheless sometimes speak and write in the manner
of deep thinkers they do so out of vanity, in the belief that they will thereby
assume the charm of enthusiastic youth, evolving and full of hope and presentiment. (HH II 289 complete)
Is there a factor of pretending
to be young in PoMo prose? Possibly so. Ecclesiastes says, ‘The more words, the more vanity’
(6:11).
Finally,
on the matter of human weaknesses and their contributions to bad style, consider
this:
Style
of superiority. – Student-German, the dialect of the German
student, has its origin among those students who do not study yet who know how
to attain a kind of ascendancy over their more serious colleagues by exposing
everything that is masquerade in education, decency, erudition, orderliness, moderation,
and, though employing terms belonging to these domains just as continually as their
better and more learned colleagues, do so with malice in their eyes and an
accompanying grimace. It is in this
language of superiority – the only one original to Germany – that our statesmen
and newspaper critics too now involuntarily speak; it is a continual resort to ironical
imitations, a restless, discontented, furtive squinting to left and right, a German
of quotation-marks and grimaces. (HH III
228 complete)
Redirected:
Style
of superiority. – Postmodern style, the dialect of the postmodernist,
has its origin among those students and writers who do not study yet who know
how to attain a kind of ascendancy over their more serious colleagues by exposing
everything that is masquerade in education, decency, erudition, orderliness,
moderation, and, though employing terms belonging to these domains just as continually
as their better and more learned colleagues, do so with malice in their eyes
and an accompanying grimace. It is in
this language of superiority – the only one original to Germany – that our
politicians and journalists too now involuntarily speak; it is a continual
resort to ironical imitations, a restless, discontented, furtive squinting to left
and right, a style of quotation-marks and grimaces.
There is another passage through which one can deepen one’s appreciation of the
connection between the style of superiority and the style of postmodern prose. Just think about recent French uses of German
philosophers (especially Nietzsche and Heidegger) and all this has brought about.
German and French literature. – The misfortune for the
German and French literature of the last hundred years lies in the fact that the
Germans left the French school too soon – and that later the French entered
the German school too soon. (HH III 94 complete)
As
Nietzsche sees it, the French school of philosophy became ‘the school of skepticism’
and a display case for the ‘charms’ of skepticism (BGE 208). Lamentably, they acquired from the Germans not
only idealist metaphysics, but also bad writing habits (i.e., Hegelian obscurantism)
with which to perpetuate their school of doubts. Thus did the school of skeptics recently
beget a pantheon of Hegelian-Wagnerian obscurantists. Meanwhile, had they studied the French more
deeply, the Germans may have learned to write better sooner, and to meet Hegel
with prose that very clearly deserved to stand above his.
If the Hegelian-Wagnerian arts of excited moral
wheel-spinning, or style-crimping weaknesses of human nature, or the German
‘style of superiority’ are actual historical roots of the torture we have all come to know as postmodern prose style,
Nietzsche is on record describing and critiquing each of those roots.
[i]
Nietzsche warns against allowing the cold and dry to become a too often used stimulant,
and thus an invitation to cold and dry beastly ideals, cold and dry lack of
repose, cold and dry addiction to tension.
The fact that the cold and dry can be a stimulant, however, suggests that
it can be used to remedy the vice of emotional writing, reading and listening that
Nietzsche sees as a delayer of the search for knowledge.
Cold books. – The good thinker
counts on readers who appreciate the happiness that lies in good thinking: so that
a book distinguished by coldness and sobriety can, when viewed through the right
eyes, appear as though played about by the sunshine of spiritual cheerfulness and
as a true comfort for the soul. (HH II
142 complete)
