Down these mean streets ...

[Paul Nightingale]

David Morris asks a reasonable question:

> 
> --- Paul Nightingale <isread at btopenworld.com> wrote:\
> > Signifiers sliding all over the place.
> 
> Please, Paul, can you stop using this jargon and sink to a less
"precise"
> language, somewhere near to common parlance?  If it's any good it
should
> not be
> only for the refined.  How remote do you wish your audience to be?
This
> jargon
> has always seemed to me to be a shield. Please make it not so.
> 

Where one critic hacked rather ineptly, and the other somewhat more
astutely but to the same end, all of which I think I'm entitled to find
irritating and non-productive, you phrase your opposition in the form of
a question that many have asked, often with the best intentions.

However, it's the way you construct the question that I find most
revealing. Your use of the terms "sink" vs "refined", and "common
parlance" juxtaposed to "remote audience", "jargon [as] a shield" ...
all suggest that you're accusing me of some kind of elitism, that my use
of language, the choices I make ("jargon") are designed to exclude
participation. And it is an accusation: the status of the jargon, its
role in determining a low-level of participation aren't, it seems, in
doubt.

Hence the rhetorical devices you employ are designed to put me on the
defensive. A rather more sophisticated version of, when did you stop
beating your wife? What dyou mean, you've never beaten her? You must
prove the non-existence of beating!

Scare-quotes (in recent days over-employed, I feel, to attack me - but
then I'm quite shameless, I would say that) are used to surround one
word, "precise"; this is because you don't really mean 'precise', you're
not suggesting that I write clearly, you mean the opposite, insofar as
'precise' terminology can be said to obfuscate. Therefore, by inference,
it doesn't really matter how 'precise' my explanation/defence, anything
I go on to say will only further confuse, and therefore confirm the
low-level of participation. Again, it's left to me to prove
incontrovertibly that I'm not to blame for non-participation.

But you are polite, for which I'm grateful; and the question itself,
since it is asked so frequently, is one that must trouble many people.
For that reason I do take it seriously. I might easily blame the
education system. We teach children what modal auxiliaries are, because
it doesn't require them to think. This is an apple, not an orange - go
away and learn that for homework, there's a test tomorrow. But we don't
teach them what signifiers sliding about are. OK - I do blame education
(as a rather more inflammatory construction).

I go back to my earlier point about the anti-intellectualism of such
charges. In this country (Britain) it's all wrapped up in traditional,
little-Englander Europhobia, particularly Francophobia. Ideas start at
Calais. What happens on your side of the water might well be another
matter.

However, this particular imagined community is concerned with reading
Pynchon. Not many people read his books. I don't know how many he sells,
but  not many people read them, I suspect. I lost count of the
(hardback) copies of M&D I saw in second-hand shops over here, circa
98-9. It had been remaindered and 'proper' bookshops were selling it off
cheaply, which might explain why people bought it, got to page whatever,
then dumped it. The town I was living in at the time prides itself on
being cosmopolitan with a thriving cultural life. So they read Nick
Hornby and Ben Elton. If they're feeling really adventurous they'll opt
for Margaret Atwood.

So I'm inclined to think not many people read Pynchon. Do we accuse him
of elitism? Of course not. And before you jump in here to confuse the
issue, I'm clearly (I know how much you like that word) not comparing
myself to P. We read P because it's worth the effort. Similarly, we seek
to understand what might, on the surface, seem difficult ideas ... not
because it's the way I write, but because thinking is a good idea, even
if they don't teach too much of it in school.

It would never occur to me to accuse you of being stupid, David. Only
you can explain why you're prepared to invest time in reading (and one
imagines, understanding, insofar as any of us do) P's novels; but won't
make the effort to understand "signifiers sliding all over the place".

For the record, because I don't wish to be accused of evading the issue
... if a signifier is said to have a direct relationship to the
signified, then when that relationship is disturbed, or brought into
question, the signifier is destabilised.