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.

Read More – In praise of not being understood