CYNTHIA OZICK
767
torian seriousness : conscience and work . Elevated literature was the
model for an educated tongue. Sentences, like conscience and work,
were demanding.
What did these demanding sentences do in and for society?
First, they demanded to be studied . Second, they demanded sharp–
ness and cadence in writing. They promoted, in short, literacy- and
not merely literacy, but a vigorous and manifold recognition of liter–
ature as a
force.
They promoted an educated class . Not a hereditarily
educated class, but one that had been introduced to the initiating
and shaping texts early in life , almost like the hereditarily educated
class itself.
All that, we know, is gone . Where once the
Odyssey
was read in
the schools, in a jeweled and mandarin translation, Holden Caul–
field takes his stand. He is winning and truthful, but he is not
demanding. His sentences reach no higher than his gaze. The idea
of belles-lettres, when we knock our unaccustomed knees against it,
looks archaic and bizarre: rusted away, like an old car chassis. The
content of belles-lettres is the property of a segregated caste or the
dissipated recollections of the very old.
Belles-lettres in the schools fashioned both speech and the art of
punctuation-the sound and the look of nuance . Who spoke well
pointed well; who pointed well spoke well. One was the skill of the
other. No one now punctuates for nuance- or, rather, whoever punc–
tuates for nuance is "corrected." Copy editors do not know the whole
stippled range of the colon or the semicolon, do not know that "0" is
not "oh," do not know that not all juxtaposed adjectives are coor–
dinate adjectives; and so forth. The degeneration of punctuation and
word-by-word literacy is pandemic among English speakers: this in–
cludes most poets and novelists . To glimpse a typical original manu–
script undoctored by a copy editor is to suffer a shock at the sight of
ignorant imprecision; and to examine a densely literate manuscript
after it has passed through the leveling hands of a copy editor is
again to suffer a shock at the sight of ignorant imprecision.
In
1930
none of this was so. The relentlessly gradual return of
aural culture, beginning with the telephone (a farewell to letter–
writing), the radio, the motion picture, and the phonograph, speeded
up by the television set, the tape-recorder, and lately the video–
recorder, has by now, after half a century's worth of technology, re–
stored us to the pre-literate status of face-to-face speech. And mass
literacy itself is the fixity of no more than a century, starting with the
advancing reforms following the industrial revolution- reforms in-
