More about pretentiousness

http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2009/06/ethics-and-enthusiasm.html

“Motherfuckers” equals “bastards” equals “arseholes” equals “ponces” equals “pretentious”.

I can smell that word in the air from a mile off. Pretentious. It’s probably my least favourite word in the whole discourse of critique. In a review that aspires to be no more than a compatibility assessment for populists it basically translates to “smarty-pants”, stands as a marker of a philistine grudge against the audacity of ambition. “You think yer so big with all yer dictionary learning and la-de-da long sentences!” In a review that aspires to greater things it basically translates to “you’re trying to look clever, but failing”, and stands as a marker of that which it accuses. Which is to say, the moment you project that spectre of hollow intent onto a writer, on the basis of your inability to glean meaning despite a work’s blatant complexity, (the charge of pretentiousness implying a sense of show-offery,) the moment you assume that this is an absence in the text rather than inability to perceive what’s there on your part, you are claiming an intellectual eminence that unpacks to empty flummery. You can try to excuse it as shorthand for various types of tangible problem — mannered prose or gauche symbolism, for example — but with this lazy stopgap term you are not really addressing the flaws you perceive in the text, but rather mumbling and waving at the signpost of a word which can be applied to a text only in an act of transference, which conventionally signifies a projected flaw in the writer. You are still painting a fantasy into the negative space of your reading rather than delineating the positive space of the features that mark it out. The fact that you didn’t mean to just makes you look even more of a simpleton. Sorry.

Again: Have you ever used the word “pretentious” in a review? Come on, hands in the air. You know you have. Thing is, we all use it informally, as lazy shorthand, as presumptive dismissal, in one sense or other. I’m sure I’ve used it in talking about other writers’ works and probably will again out of laziness and ill-considered frustration, though given the veiled quality of the insult I’d rather be plain-spoken and just say, “poncy”, “arsey” or “wanky” if ultimately I’m playing j’accuse. It’s probably the veiled quality to the insult that irks the most when it’s levelled at you, the sense that personal slight is being passed off as criticism of the text, that the person using it may themselves be blind to their own presumption, so cocksure of their own nous that it simply never occurs to them they may just have missed the fucking point completely. And so they wave a hand in the air and say “pretentious”, a hand with a gun in it. Pretentious. Poncy. Arsey. Wanky.

There's plenty of that sort of projection in reviews. Sometimes it's meant as hyperbole. Sometimes it's a figurative turn-of-phrase. But as much as writers have to learn not to take it personally, sometimes there is a blatant personal insult, an impugning of motives. Any reviewer who crafts a fanciful narratives characterising the writer as some sort of hack or charlatan is waving that gun in the air...

I really try to hold back on the criticism of thinking something pretentious. Some stuff really is though. Some nonfiction at least really is dishonest. Some is really only pretending to be objective and just hiding it's actual biases behind a pseudo intellectual facade. A couple of examples: Thomas Sowell's Vision of the Anointed, which is just rightwing propaganda, funded by a rightwing thinktank, Sowell gets paid to push rightwing arguments. If he quit doing so he'd no longer be getting a paycheck. Vision of the Anointed is a dishonest book which contains a lot of statistics trying to support rightwing arguments against government intervention, etc. It's an insulting book in that these lies are so slapped together he must have had a very low opinion of his intended audience. The appeal of the book is that he sounds intelligent while making arguments that are roughly the equivalent of Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Hannity. Rightwingers mention this book in trying to claim that the right is just as smart as the left. What's strange is that one big argument of the book is that the left is a bunch of arrogant elitists hence the title. You'd think he might then adopt a folksy tone..? No, instead he tries to show how he's just as smart. It ends up seeming so damm pretentious because despite the language adopted, the ideas are just so pitiful. Anyone with a political clue can see right through it.

Another example of obviously pretentious that comes to mind would be "H. G. Wells at the End of His Tether" by I don't know who, he doesn't deserve to have his name remembered. Buying this book was a mistake. Of course it's good to read points of view that differ from my own. But I think I've pretty much heard all the rightwing arguments. They're on TV 24/7 (unlike the left which is censored). This is a book (not even a biography really) that pretty much consists of a sentence about the far left utopianist views of H. G. Wells followed by a paragraph consisting of the conservative personal opinion of the author. And the conservative arguments are just the tired old crap you hear on FOX news.

I mistakenly bought the book because the title really suggested to me a person sympathetic and empathetic to Wells. The last book Wells wrote was called, "Mind at the End of its Tether," which was a very sad unhappy thing Wells wrote. It did occur to me such a title (H.G. Wells at the End..) might instead be someone poking fun at Wells but, that would be so vile, so mean spirited in view of the final Wells book, I thought surely no rightwinger would go that far.

I was wrong about that. The title and the book amount to pissing on Wells' grave. It is one of the most vile and mean spirited books I've ever read. I would suspect the author had some secret jealousy of Wells, like Wells stole his lover or something except they never even met. And the author tries to hide what looks a lot like just hatred by adopting a psuedointellectual tone. Clearly psuedo as the author isn't intelligent enough to even understand a lot of Wells' ideas or his state of mind. He gives ridiculous summaries of Wells' books. The very book the title of his "biography" is based on he only gives a couple of sentences about at the end which amount to, "it's incomprehensible and stupid."

It's pretentious because the stilted language adopted isn't remotely necessary for the crude ideas it contains. It's just a cover to try to appear scholarly and objective when actually he just hates leftism. But a pitiful attempt at that. It's so bad it doesn't deserve me or anyone bothering to write about it.

But I was just curious, does anything ever deserve the criticism of being pretentious? Yes, some things definitely do.

But probably the majority of times that I'm starting to think: "Pretentious!" Maybe not.

"The problem with you smart people is... you think you're so smart."

I hate that people get attacked simply for being intelligent and I hate to think that I also probably do that to some others. Probably I do though. The question is where is the line? Where is someone being pretentious and where is it just my own damm problem that I'm too stupid to follow them?

If it's fiction, people can write however the hell they want. One can write "beautifully" and if that means that they're hard to comprehend, oh well. I, for example, couldn't comprehend a lot of Joyce's Ulyesses(sp) (although I was trying to read a good bit of it at an awful Jimmy Buffett concert) but I never for a moment thought it pretentious.

But for nonfiction I think the question is, "Are the ideas really so complex that such use of language, etc is necessary?"

People all the time try to make themselves/their ideas seem more important/get taken more seriously by really trying to sound smart.

...a problem with the above is the divide I've made between fiction and nonfiction. From pulpish escapist fantasy fiction to nonfiction there is varying degrees of relevance to real life. All of it can be (is to some extent) getting at The Truth. And Truth does matter. More Truth equals less suffering and thus worrying more about sounding smart then making your ideas easy to understand equals causing additional suffering and is thus ultimately an immoral thing.

I was essentially saying above though that in fiction a person is free to not give a damm and just enjoy what amounts to pure escapism, where sounding "beautiful" can be the primary goal and if no one really understands a point, whoopee.

Why would this be OK? Because there maybe just isn't any meaningful Truth/understanding contained within it that's really going to lead to reduced suffering in the world. Perhaps all it's got going for it is a very short term escapism which in large part relies on "beautiful" writing. But such is either rare or practically doesn't exist at all.

If it's worth anything at all there should be some useful truth within it. And a person may feel that the unique Truth in their writing is contained in part within the unusual use of language they're using (which others may just find hard to understand and totally miss the intent of.)

OK I really don't know about the fiction/nonfiction divide with regards to being pretentious. I suppose I'm wrong and there isn't really any meaningful divide but I just can't happen to think of any examples of pretentious fiction at the moment*. In theory fiction could be just as pretentious. The thing is that instead in fiction it's usually just that the ideas are so paltry it just doesn't even matter. As opposed to worrying about being pretentious it's just boring. For it to reach pretentious it would first have to manage preachy (IOW actually have some ideas that aren't so universal thus they can be noticed as actual ideas (thus preachy), which one can then either successfully or unsuccessfully communicate thanks to the usage of pretentious or unpretentious language).


*Has any rightwinger ever thought Golding's Lord of the Flies was pretentious or preachy?