Magnifisyncopathological

Financial Times: Pause celebre

The semicolon "signals that you're not expressing a singular thought", explains the prolific cultural critic, Chris Lehmann. "It signals that there's tension, that there is some contradictory evidence - and you [have to] sort of trust readers to be able to deal with that, which most editors don't and many writers don't." Menand locates this fear of complexity in the idea that language should do no more than hold up a mirror to the world. "If you subscribe to linguistic transparency, there's a bias in favour of simplicity," he says. And the thing is, millions of Americans do subscribe to linguistic transparency having studied The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, a professor of English at Cornell, and The New Yorker writer E.B. White. As Yagoda notes in The Sound on the Page, Strunk and White's "implicit and sometimes explicit goal is a transparent prose, where the writing exists solely to serve the meaning, and no trace of the author - no mannerisms, no voice, no individual style - should remain."

Lehmann connects this impulse to realism, "the most stolid literary innovation that Americans can claim in modern fiction, which is all about the faithful representation of reality without ambivalence, self-doubt, without writerly flourishes really of any kind".

"It's more a distrust of ornament," says Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? - How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. "[The Victorian] period is so discredited and the semicolon is an automatic marker of a disgraced genteel style."

It may seem bizarre to read so much into a stop on the page, but the semicolon is a pause for ambiguity, amusement, complexity, doubt, and nuance. If writing lacks these "genteel" qualities, can we be all that surprised if it is either as dull as a computer manual, or as demagogic as a soapbox on Hyde Park Corner? Perhaps it is not a surprise that stylish writing now has the whiff of radicalism - or, more aptly, that radical writing, in a stunning rebuff to the theory-bearing academic left, is now self-consciously stylish. Thomas Frank's book has sold more than 500,000 copies in hardback - an astonishing feat for a progressive political screed that was mocked in the dourly mainstream New York Times. For his muse, Frank turned to the sumptuous prose of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution.

"If I were linguistic emperor," says Michael Tomasky, who recently took over as editor of the unabashedly liberal The American Prospect, "not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we'd all be writing like Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides; reading one of those Carlyle sentences can sweep me along in its mighty wake and make me feel as if I'm on some sort of drug. What writing today does that? Some, maybe even a lot, in the realm of literature; but not much in non-fiction, alas."

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2005.

If language isn't supposed to reflect reality and truth, then what the hell ought it reflect?

Quotes from the current Wikipedia entry on Carlyle:

[Carlyle's] Sartor Resartus was intended to be a new kind of book: simultaneously factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical...Sartor Resartus was initially considered bizarre and incomprehensible...For Carlyle, chaotic events demanded what he called 'heroes' to take control over the competing forces erupting within society...As soon as ideological 'formulas' replaced heroic human action society became dehumanised.

[...]

This dehumanisation of society was a theme pursued in later books, such as Past and Present, in which Carlyle contrasted life in a Medieval monastery with modern society. For Carlyle the monastic community was unified by human and spiritual values, while modern culture deified impersonal economic forces and abstract theories of human 'rights' and natural 'laws'. Communal values were collapsing into isolated individualism and ruthless laissez faire Capitalism, justified by what he called the "dismal science" of economics.

These ideas were influential on the development of Socialism, but aspects of Carlyle's thinking in his later years also helped to form Fascism.