Consider this selection from a
hypothetical mystery story:
The bar was close to empty, and I
wasn’t sure whether or not it was empty in a glad-to-see-you kind of way. The
bartender looked sidelong at me as I entered.
“Something
I can do for you, friend?”
That
was one mystery solved.
The
preceding passage is, if I may, pretty good. It says a lot without using a lot
of words. Evocative without being descriptive, it pretty well conforms to the
ideals of American prose since Hemmingway.
Now let’s dissect the bird. The narrator doubts whether he will be
welcome in the bar. Upon his entry, the bartender’s greeting is chilly and
sarcastic, indicating that the narrator is not, in fact, welcome. The text
mirrors the narrative: by omitting descriptive phrases like “he hissed” or “he
asked sarcastically” or descriptions of the bartender’s expression, the reader,
like the narrator, must rely on his wits and social acuity to a certain extent
if he wishes to unpack the pronouncement’s implications (although those
implications are fairly unambiguous).
That’s all cool – for a contemporary American reader. A contemporary American
reader would be familiar enough with retail procedures to know that it would be
considered extremely rude to greet a customer (or anyone really) with “Something
I can do for you?” Likewise, such a reader would know that native American
English speakers never use the word “Friend” in that context when they are
speaking with a real or potential friend. Addressing someone directly as “Friend"
is actually interpreted as openly hostile by many people.
But non-native, non-American, or decades-distant future readers may not
grasp these schema. To them, the “solution” to the “mystery” may at first seem
that the bar is friendly, and they
may be confused when someone’s nose gets broken or something. What we initially
valued as straightforward, unadorned prose turns out to be a complex dirty
trick on a reader who actually takes the words at face value.
It is often quite convincingly argued that the “text” emerges as the
effect that words have on a reader irrespective of the author’s original
intent. However, all but the most ridiculously pretentious of the proponents of
such interpretive frameworks agree that the author should try to get his point
across as effectively as possible. Though a reader brings his own experiences
to bear on any final reading of a work, I can’t imagine many writers who wouldn’t
be (perhaps quietly) disappointed to hear that a reader interpreted a book,
scene, or line completely differently than the author had intended.
In reality, the fewer words we use to get our point across, the more we
rely on intersubjectively shared assumptions and experiences to be understood,
and the more we exclude those from different social and cultural positions. Or,
more correctly, the less different someone has to be before they are
excluded. Obviously, an author isn’t
writing for everyone – at the most fundamental level, not everyone reads
English. But as writers, we have to ask ourselves, how many people do we wish
to exclude?
“The grounds are nice, I suppose,”
he intoned over a neat Bruichladdich, “but run by an old Dulwich boy? Well, I
suppose they at least have some standards.”
“The grounds of the club are nice,
I suppose.” He stepped to the bar to tip a bit of Bruichladdich into a tumbler,
eyeing the ice bucket distrustfully. “But I can only chuckle when they call it ‘exclusive’.
The president went to Dulwich for heaven’s sake. Ah well, it’s the public
school set at least.”
“I do like the grounds at Kensington
Men’s Club,” he said as he nursed his glass of Bruichladdich, his favorite
scotch, and coincidentally one of the most expensive. He never took it with
ice, as in the view of most who enjoy scotches of that caliber, both the
intense cold and the water from the melting ice conspire to deaden the nuances
of its flavor. “But I can only chuckle when they call it ‘exclusive’. The
president went to Dulwich for heaven’s sake. I suppose it should be enough that
he’s a public school boy, but Dulwich isn’t exactly the most prestigious.” His
father had instilled in him from a young age that breeding was everything, and
that the best way to judge breeding was by school. From time immemorial it
seemed, an education at a public school (as the finest independent boarding
schools in England are called, perhaps confusingly to Americans) had been a
prerequisite to accessing the highest echelons of British society.
Which of these three versions of the exchange are better? Well, “better”
is a loaded word, but certainly the first is nigh-incomprehensible to someone
who isn’t wealthy, or at least British. When we write, and when we avoid
wordiness and thus rely more heavily on cultural assumptions to be understood,
we say to those outside of our own cultural milieu “keep out”. This can be
oppressive, as in the above “royalty only” passage, or it can be revolutionary,
as when Chicanos speak proudly in their own voice without shame. But even then,
it is important to realize that some readers are being shut out. Maybe you want
that. I don’t know.
The point I’m trying to make here isn’t that we all need to write like 19th
century dime novels, but rather that a writer needs to keep in mind the
sometimes unexpected ways concision can restrict his readership. Many of the
most compelling tales of even just fifty years ago are virtually unknown to many
modern readers who would absolutely love them, were it not for the unexplained
references to contemporary figures and events, colloquialisms, and other
cultural assumptions that may have made them resonate clearly with readers at
the time they were published, but make them opaque now.
You know, unless you don’t want
anyone to ever read anything you write, in which case just do whatever, I
guess.
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