Writing about writing about writing about writing about a film about Bush
When I originally read Hitchens'
Unfairenheit 9/11, gosh, it
must have been all of 12 hours ago, I was struck by the choice of words
in one paragraph, words which smell as sweet as a very good blue cheese
that has just spent a week long vacation in a warm sock. But I must
confess that I didn't notice anything patently illogical. Shame on me!
Now Mark comes along and reads the same paragraph (see
here).
The odious vapor of insult hits him, but his logical senses are not
overwhelmed. With bloodhound acuteness he sniffs right through that
heady verbiage and smells, hmm, what is that? No, nothing
ungrammatical, the spelling is just fine, and even the punctuation is
pristine. But something does not belong. He's off! Unstoppable, he
tracks Hitchens' intentions through a forest of semantic weed and
trope, and finds in a clearing kilomeanings from anywhere... two
hopelessly confused interpretations running round in circles.
The runaway interpretations belong to the following sentences:
- To describe this film as
dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the
level of respectability.
- To describe this film as a
piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never
again rise above the excremental.
And these sentences might have been intended to convey that:
- This film is worse than dishonest and demagogic.
- This film is worse than crap.
But Libermanic decomposition, turned up to 11, so watch out, reveals:
- If calling this film
dishonest and demagogic would make "dishonest and demagogic"
respectable, then the film must add respectability to words used to
describe it, so presumably the film itself is respectable.
- If calling this film a piece of
crap would make the use of "a piece of crap" ubiquitous, then this film
is not significantly more crappy than all the other things that
would be described as "a piece of crap" afterwards. Given that many of
these things that in this hypothetical future would be called pieces of
crap are actually pretty darn non-crappy, it follows that the film is
not crap.
Wow!
Mark's analysis is pretty convincing. Yet there is, I think, a way out
of this mess. Let's look at the full paragraph in all its gory.
To describe this
film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms
to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of
crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again
rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile
crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister
exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in
seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice
masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.
One way to think about what is going on is in terms of an imagined,
implicit question. So ask yourselves this:
what is the implicit question which the
above paragraph answers?
I suggest the implicit question is a meta-question about Hitchens' own
writing, namely: how should Hitchens describe
Fahrenheit 9/11 at this point in
the article? Hitchens, in the first three sentences of the paragraph,
is not talking in general about how people should describe the movie or
what descriptors for it would be accurate. If accuracy alone were the
issue, Hitchens would not go on to talk about one description being
too obvious, since obviousness does
not suggest inaccuracy at all. No, he is talking about the words
he should choose there and then. He
answers the implicit question as if revealing his own authorial thought
processes. The first three sentences of the paragraph tell us what the answer is not, and the last two tell us what it is. Yes, in case you wondered, he considered describing the film
as dishonest, demagogic, a piece of crap and an exercise in facile
crowd pleasing but he rejected those word choices (for which we, the audience,
are duly grateful) in favor of sinsister, morally frivolous, and so on.
But the above implicit question analysis sets Mark's logic in a new
light. If the the paragraph in question is a meta-commentary on
Hitchens writing process, then what is the
discourse
he refers to in the second sentence? Why, it is none other than
Hitchens' own discourse, the article
Unfairenheit
9/11. So then the risk being run is not that discourse in
general would never rise above the excremental. No, the risk is that
Hitchens' article would consist of nothing but gutterworthy invective.
(Heaven forbid!) There is then,
contra
Mark, no implication that terming
Fahrenheit
9/11 a piece of crap would lead to anything other than
Fahrenheit 9/11 being described in
excremental terms, because the discourse in question is only about
Fahrenheit 9/11.
Let us turn now to the trickier first sentence of the paragraph. The worry Hitchens presents to us is that describing the film as
dishonest and demagogic would make these terms appear respectable terms to use
in the context of the remainder of the article.
Now, this doesn't sound like a disaster to me. But that may be because
I am not Hitchens, a master stylist, wordsman and Oxford
graduate. In fact, he graduated from Balliol, a college that long, long
ago rejected my application to study there as an undergraduate after a
positively absurd interview, so I have reason to believe he knows
something I don't. I used Google to find out just how smart with
words Hitchens is. The results are astounding. He's off the scale. At
least by his own ambitious reckoning. For example, in
this
interview he describes the title of a book of his as involving a
triple entendre. Can you imagine
the genius it would take to put three different meanings into a single
title? Yes, it's true that
Eats,
Shoots and Leaves has two meanings, but neither of them have
anything to do with the subject matter of the book. And Hitchens has
written 20 books. With more than 20 titles. Can you even
conceptualize just how many meanings that might add up to in total?
Well, I worked it out, and it's a lot. Hitchens is obviously someone
who cares about word choice. More than me. More than Mark. But I digress.
The point Hitchens is making with the first sentence of the paragraph
is a subtle one, so subtle that I wonder whether some daft editor made
it more subtle than Hitchens intended it to be. But it is just about
possible to discern what the point is. It is that Hitchens thinks
that describing the film as
dishonest
and demagogic would be a rhetorical dead-end for his article. He
believes this because, in his view, within the context of an article
that details the true nature of the film, the terms
dishonest and demagogic
would appear quite mild and commonplace, or, as Hitchens puts it, they
would be
promote[d] [...] to the level of respectability.
And as Hitchens makes clear in the final two sentences of the
paragraph, he thinks that to give the reader any less than the Full
Monty of an evaluation of the film at that point would be wrong. For if
you have read the article, you will realize that, title aside (
Holy hieroglyphics,
Batman - Unfairenheit 9/11 is a triple entendre!!!) when we
get to the paragraph under discussion, Hitchens has not yet told us
what he thinks of the film. In fact, what he has said up to that point
suggests that in some way Moore's film might be a positive
contribution, a new and much needed voice for Democratic thinking. What
Hitchens' has done is use the classic device of setting his target
up for a fall. And what is needed is a heavy fall onto spikes, to be
followed by a herd of elephants trampling the victim into
unrecognizable squishy ucky stuff. The terms
dishonest and demagogic are not
those spikes. And that is what Hitchens is trying to tell us with the
first sentence of the paragraph. Quite why he chose to tell us that, I
cannot say. But it certainly confused the hell out of my main man Mark,
about whose writing I am writing.
Mark thought that Hitchens was writing about a film about Bush, but, if I'm right, then in the crucial paragraph Hitchens was writing about the process of writing about a film about Bush. Which would mean
that in this piece I have been writing about writing about writing about
writing about a film about Bush, and am now in an infinite recursion of writing about writing about writing about.... Maybe we should all be writing about
Bush instead. Nahh! Not on your Language Log!
Posted by David Beaver at June 23, 2004 04:09 AM