WHEN an article is commended for its clarity, its force, its supposed communicative success, the writer is left in a peculiar position: grateful, certainly, but also faintly exposed, as though a private joke had been taken for a public statement. The words have landed too cleanly, the text has yielded too readily – something has gone wrong.
For there exists, in some corners of writing, a contrary ambition – not to be understood too quickly, nor too completely, perhaps not even at all. This is not mere perversity, though it may appear so. It is a disposition, a manner of proceeding, which treats language less as a communication device than as a battlefield. There are writers whose objective is not to deliver meaning intact, but to complicate its arrival. ‘I write so as not to be understood’ could be the motto of such narrators.
The commonplace view of writing assumes a sender and a receiver, a message dispatched and decoded, as though the writer were a telegraph operator. Clarity, in this model, is a virtue; ambiguity, a defect. Yet this picture is suspiciously neat. It presumes that thought precedes language in a stable form, waiting only to be dressed in words and sent across the gap. But is thought not made of language? If that is so, language is not merely a vehicle but also a difficult material – unstable, unpredictable, resistant to being neatly arranged like books on a shelf.
Ambiguity, contradiction, confusion, dissonance, non sequiturs and even the brazen infringement of propositional logic are often treated as failures. They are, at best, tolerated as stylistic flourishes, permissible so long as they do not obstruct comprehension. Yet, these devices can be comprehended as an assault on the tyranny of the obvious. They slow the reader down, they unsettle expectation, they refuse the easy satisfaction of recognition. In doing so, they preserve something of the strangeness of thought before it is flattened into paraphrase.
A cliché is efficient because it requires so little from the reader. It offers recognition without effort and assent without examination. To write against it is to reintroduce friction into the act of reading. One must hesitate, reconsider, perhaps even abandon the hope of full comprehension. The reward, if there is one, lies in inhabiting a space where meaning is as unstable as dreams are. A true creator is not in the business of making things easy.
There is, admittedly, an element of defensiveness in this posture. To write obscurely is, among other things, to evade certain forms of scrutiny. What cannot be easily summarised cannot be easily attacked. The critic, faced with a blurred target, finds it difficult to fix upon a single point of entry. In this sense, opacity functions as a kind of armour – sufficiently elusive to discourage blunt force. It is also a way of preserving a certain silence around the text, against the noise of those who would speak before they have learned to read.
Yet to reduce the practice to mere evasion would be too simple. There is also an ironic dimension, a self-conscious play with the expectations of communication. The writer who cultivates opaqueness is often acutely aware of the accusation that may be levelled against him: that he is obscure for obscurity’s sake, that he mistakes difficulty for depth, or worse still, that he is an arrant pedant. Rather than refuting this charge directly, he may choose to inhabit it, to exaggerate it even, turning it into a kind of performance.
Beneath these manoeuvres lies a more unsettling possibility: that communication itself is irreparably compromised or even impossible. Words do not simply fail to capture thought; they transform it. What is said is never quite what was meant, and what is understood is never quite what was said. Between intention and interpretation there lies a gulf which no amount of precision can close. To write as though no chasm existed is to indulge in a convenient fiction. Nietzsche’s famous dictum casts some light – or obscurity, for that matter – on this delicate question: ‘Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.’
From this perspective, the refusal to be entirely grasped is an acknowledgement. It concedes that language cannot deliver certainty, and that any appearance of transparency is, at best, provisional. The text that resists immediate comprehension does not necessarily conceal a hidden clarity; it may simply refuse to pretend that transparency – an illusion wrapped up inside a convention – is achievable.
There is a tradition of writers who have flirted with opacity. Their motives have varied: some sought to capture the complexity of painful experience, others to disrupt habitual modes of thought, still others to withdraw from a public they found either indifferent or hostile or worse – incapable of reading properly but always eager to condemn what they do not apprehend. What unites them is not a shared doctrine but a suspicion: that the demand to be understood may itself be a constraint, an imposition upon the freedom of thought.
Stéphane Mallarmé allows meaning to hover rather than settle; Franz Kafka’s lucid sentences open on to situations and dead ends that resist a final interpretation. James Joyce was the architect of a prose that seems dreamt, dense with echoes and private signals. This taste for opacity extends beyond literature proper to figures far outside the mainstream such as Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), whose poetry treats language as a matter to be twisted, fractured and recombined. A notorious remark often attributed to Niccolò Machiavelli captures something of this resistance spirit: ‘For a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I ever believe what I say, and if indeed sometimes I do happen to tell the truth, I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find.’
Put more prosaically: who cares what the reader thinks, or whether they think at all?
To write for the proverbial ‘dear reader’ – indeed a blatant illusion – is a way to corral oneself into the realm of correction, good manners and elementary constructions. Writing for an imaginary reader is a subtle way of persuasion, a chore writers impose on themselves in order to feel they are treading on the right moral path. It often ends in condescension towards the unsophisticated and the banal. Perhaps the task is not to choose between being understood and not being understood, but to inhabit the tension between the two. To write in such a way that meaning is neither fully given nor completely withheld; that it flickers, appears, recedes.
The demand for straightforwardness is itself a form of exclusion, favouring those accustomed to its conventions and marginalising those who think otherwise. No mode of writing is neutral; each establishes its own conditions of access. Its refusal, on the other hand, carries an unmistakable – perhaps inevitable – hint of elitism. Creative writing is always a selective practice, an exercise in good taste, an individual choice free from the impositions of fashion, commerce and media. As Immanuel Kant declared, speaking of popular taste: ‘Taste that requires an added element of charm and emotion for its delight, not to speak of adopting this as the measure of its approval, has not yet emerged from barbarism.’
To write on the periphery of the mainstream is to accept a certain solitude. It is to relinquish the assurance that words will be received as intended, or received at all. The text goes out without guarantees, subject to misreading, neglect, or unexpected appropriation. It may be praised for qualities it does not possess, or criticised for intentions it never had.
And yet, this outcome could be savoured as a victory. Freed from the obligation to be ‘clear’, the writer may explore paths that would otherwise remain closed. Thought can take on more provisional forms: it can contradict itself, double back, search for balance among approximations and divergences, doubts and certainties, and at times dissolve into fragments. The result may be less immediately satisfying, but perhaps more faithful to the unsettled – and painful – nature of existence.
A good piece, whatever it may be, always starts after it ends.
