"There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't"
About this Quote
Ford’s little feint begins with a courtesy bow to the cult of “clarity” and ends with a clean refusal to join it. The target is a certain technocratic fantasy: that prose can be a perfectly clear pane of glass, transmitting meaning without texture, bias, or residue. By calling that prose “absolutely transparent,” he’s not praising good craft so much as diagnosing an ideology of craft, one that treats language as plumbing rather than atmosphere.
The subtext is a writer’s defense of the medium itself. Transparency is never neutral; it’s a style with its own politics. The supposedly invisible sentence tends to smuggle in whatever assumptions the author (or the dominant culture) prefers unexamined, because readers are encouraged not to notice the scaffolding. Ford, a science fiction and fantasy writer with a poet’s ear, is insisting that attention matters: to rhythm, to ambiguity, to the way a sentence can carry doubles and shadows that “clear” prose would sand off.
Contextually, it’s also a jab at workshop dogma and the utilitarian strain of American letters that confuses accessibility with virtue. Ford isn’t arguing for obscurantism; he’s arguing against the pretense that language can stop being language. His “I don’t” lands as a quiet punchline, an understated assertion of authorial agency: the writer gets to choose friction. Sometimes the point of prose isn’t to disappear, but to leave fingerprints on the reader’s mind.
The subtext is a writer’s defense of the medium itself. Transparency is never neutral; it’s a style with its own politics. The supposedly invisible sentence tends to smuggle in whatever assumptions the author (or the dominant culture) prefers unexamined, because readers are encouraged not to notice the scaffolding. Ford, a science fiction and fantasy writer with a poet’s ear, is insisting that attention matters: to rhythm, to ambiguity, to the way a sentence can carry doubles and shadows that “clear” prose would sand off.
Contextually, it’s also a jab at workshop dogma and the utilitarian strain of American letters that confuses accessibility with virtue. Ford isn’t arguing for obscurantism; he’s arguing against the pretense that language can stop being language. His “I don’t” lands as a quiet punchline, an understated assertion of authorial agency: the writer gets to choose friction. Sometimes the point of prose isn’t to disappear, but to leave fingerprints on the reader’s mind.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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