The Discipline of the Difficult Word
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been poring through William J. Rolfe’s nineteenth-century notes on Romeo and Juliet for the Literarium, trying to turn his dense Victorian scholarship into something a modern reader can understand without a Latin dictionary and footnotes for each footnote.
Initially I’d written the reader to just use the footnotes verbatim but when I tested that out I found they made the experience even more difficult so I thought I’d rewrite them… A sentence or two per note. How hard can it be?
Quite hard, as it turns out.
Rewriting it requires you to work out what it really means.
Sometimes even though I understood each individual word in a note and still had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Who were all these other people he was quoting or comparing his conclusions with? What did L.L.L. and cf. actually mean? Shall I just watch Taskmaster?
It meant I had to stop. Read it again. Look something up. Read the line in the play. Read the lines on either side of it. Then go back to the note and discover (sometimes) that Rolfe was making a perfectly valid point about something I really had overlooked.
You can’t write a clear explanation of something you don’t understand.
(I was going to write something here about Richard Feynman famously saying something like: “if you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it” but after looking up the actual quote found that he didn’t say it at all. He did, apparently, famously note that if he could easily explain his Nobel Prize-winning work to the average person, his work wouldn’t have been worth a Nobel Prize – so maybe the whole premise of this article is nonsense.)
All this has reminded me of something I wrote about years ago, after a friend suggested that good writing meant avoiding using the same word twice. Find a synonym, he said. Keep things interesting.
I disagreed.
My point was that words which sort of mean the same thing don’t necessarily do the same job.
Mary stood, alone, at the orphanage door.
And:
Mary stood, forsaken, at the orphanage door.
One tells us she’s on her own. The other suggests that someone has abandoned her. We’ve changed one word and introduced a whole new reason to be unhappy.
Poor Mary. She was only waiting for the bus.
I was thinking about this from the writer’s side at the time. Choosing the right word rather than a vaguely similar one from a thesaurus.
Rewriting Rolfe has made me think about the other side of the arrangement: The reader has to notice.
We live, now, atop an ocean of text. Every year adds more novels than a person could read in several lifetimes, and that’s before you count everything else competing for the same attention -articles, emails, posts, comments on posts, articles about comments on posts. On that ocean, the only sensible strategy is speed. You skim for the gist. You let a sentence spray over you and trust that the overall shape of the paragraph told you what you needed.
The gist of some writing is useful. It tells you whether an email needs answering or if you should go and see that movie about that thing. Or even if the world is about to end because that idiot did that stupid thing over there.
But it can also persuade you that you’ve fully understood a sentence when you’ve merely recognised its meaning.
Shakespeare, as it turns out, is spectacularly troublesome. Years and years ago I confidently told my flatmate (who was studying English and, I think, Dancing) that Shakespeare was rubbish, modern writers were all much better because they’d all learnt from the juvenile graspings of all these “old masters”. He tried to explain about subtext. I didn’t listen.
The first spoken line (excluding the prologue which was not always in the play) contains “carry coals”. I know what carry means. I know what coals are. I could quite happily read past it with an of someone, well, carrying some coal.
Except that the expression used to mean putting up with insults or humiliation, and colliers were looked down on… which changes what the characters are saying to each other.
Without the note, I haven’t just missed an interesting historical detail. I’ve misunderstood the joke.
And once that has happened a few times, I start becoming suspicious of my own understanding. Why that word? Is he being sincere? Is this another joke? Why has the joke suddenly turned nasty?
These seem like good questions for a reader to ask.
I think this is part of what makes Shakespeare worth persevering with. Not because everyone needs a collection of Elizabethan insults, although I can see the appeal (festering codpiece has always been a favourite) and certainly not because struggling through something old is automatically good for you.
It’s the realisation that finding something which looked out of place actually makes sense. Sometimes sharp, funny, important sense which enriches the writing in a way that transcends the fiction.
People in books often do foolish things. They forgive someone who doesn’t deserve it or takes offence at an apparently harmless remark. They make decisions which, to the reader, are obviously going to end badly.
More often than not, especially if I haven’t read anything by the author before, I tend to think it’s a misjudgement. (Sometimes it is. Characters do occasionally behave like idiots because the plot needs them to be in the cellar to find the macguffin)
Usually though, I’ve missed something. A fear, a misunderstanding, a small piece of wounded pride. Something the writer foreshadowed while I was getting the gist.
I should be a little slower to blame the writer.
Of course, there is a limit.
“Perhaps I haven’t understood this yet” is a useful thought. “This must be brilliant because I can’t understand it” is not.
I don’t think a reader owes an author unlimited patience and sometimes you’re just not ready for a piece of writing. I started (and failed) to read Slaughterhouse 5 at least twice before one night I read it all at once and declared it to be the greatest novel ever written. And I still haven’t got past the first few pages of Naked Lunch…
But if every sentence requires an expedition to the reference section, or some experience I’ve never had, eventually the effort of working out what’s happening becomes greater than my interest in finding out.
Which brings me back to footnotes.
A good note can make the difference between those two things. It can give you that extra bit of information you’re missing and let you get back to the play.
That’s what I’ve been trying to do with these rewrites. Explain the expression or untangle the reference. Give the reader enough help to understand the line without making them lose track of the scene.
Occasionally that means spending half an hour working out how to write twenty words.
I had hoped this would make me faster at editing.
Instead, it seems to be making me slower at reading.
Perhaps that is an improvement.