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The Prose Problem and “The Books”
Your damned nonsense can I stand twice or once, but some-times always, my God, never.Svatislav Richter, to the second fluteat Covent Garden
People have thought
prose style many things—persua-sion or mere music,duty or pastime,ornament only,theman himself.It has been left for Americans to think it aproblem:the National Problem,the Communications Prob-lem.From time to time,we castigate our daily speech,but itis for written utterance—for prose—that the true jeremiadsare reserved.These are hard to assess.Prophets ofdoomrarely confess their prejudices.And for the American prosescene the prejudices are many,and probably inevitable.As anEnglish commentator put it:“On subjects like America andProse one’s mind cannot be made a blank”(Geoffrey Moore,“American Prose Today,”p.351).It is easy enough for the language teacher to deliver him-selfofunarguable pronouncements,especially ifthese revealhis calling to be crucial,unvalued,and underpaid.Languageprovides the medium ofconscious life,and language teach-ers ought often to point this out.Iflanguage becomes truly unexpressive,we indeed become a mob.With so much atstake,it should not surprise us that the epithets for currentAmerican prose (and the educational procedures that createit) are quick to damn.Jacques Barzun’s summary phrase“Black Rot”may stand as example.Yet the world has most
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often been arthritic in its utterance.Whether our historicalsituation,our prose problem,emerges as truly more severethan that ofother times or other countries,no one,with any hard evidence at least,can at present judge.This problem,like so many ofours,seems unprecedented.No other coun-try has ever considered skill in prose composition essentialto good citizenship and has tried to teach this skill to a ma- jority ofits citizens.The citizens ofno other country have,so far,undergone so heavy a verbal saturation by the media.The scope and magnitude ofour problems,their now-or-never fundamentality,vastly increase the pressure on themeans—ultimately language—through which they are tobe expressed and perhaps solved.At the same time,our processes ofeducation—and thetheories that underlie them—have been undergoing dislo-cating stresses unequaled in the West since the Reformation.We do not know how much ofwhat we loosely call “commu-nication”is written,how much oral,or what the relationshipbetween the two kinds is.We possess no calculus ofmisun-derstandings.“Failure ofcommunication,”our cant term forall occasions,often masks simple vacancy ofmind.A studentwrites on an examination paper,“Abuses in the Church trou-bled Martin Luther beyond belief.”Does the fault lie withlanguage or the mind? We have no way ofmeasuring the effi-ciency ofour schools in teaching good prose,for there are noagreed upon standards ofgood prose and no standard of teaching accomplishment to measure against.Furthermore,the problem ofprose—so large,so central—introduces fundamental questions.What exactly 
is
com-munication and how does it take place? What do we
mean
Style: An Anti-Textbook
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by clarity? How may we separate clarity from special inter-est,from attempts to persuade,or from correctness? Goodprose takes time.Is it always worth it? Does clear writingreally make for clear thinking? Are the criticisms ofmodernprose directed at clarity or at elegance? Does elegance,oreloquence,improve the communication ofconcepts? In anincreasingly oral technology,will we need written commu-nication at all? On the electronic screen,will words take sec-ond place to images? Finally,ifwe are in a crisis ofutterance,is it
civilization
that is at stake,or only the joy and pleasurethat literate people take in language?The problem ofprose,all this is to say,does not at pres-ent admit ofscientific (quantitative) resolution,or even of scientific address.We do not know even the magnitude oftheproblem.As a Welfare Department spokesman once elo-quently complained,“We’re in a position where we’re really not sure ofwhat kind ofa situation we’re in.”Humanists willhasten to add that such a problem should not—by its nature,cannot—profitably endure scientific scrutiny.You may agree,but it is hard to find the agreement reassuring.It leaves usin a shady universe oftentative hints and heuristic guesses.One would like to know at least the boundary conditions of the problem.All that we have now is a growing sense ofmud-dled language,public and private,in which “like”appearsevery third word and everyone says “You know?”but nobody knows.To so vaguely defined a problem,one can scarcely speakofa coherent national response.But there has been that kindofactivity which begins to define a problem,ifnot to solveit.It has come through the schools and colleges.No one need
The Prose Problem and “The Books”
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