11/11 - Holmes vs. Steyn

Holmes and Steyn write in unsurprising ways for their subject matter. The tactics they use are obvious, and examination of these may show that their methods break down by political stance. But for the moment, that is out of the department.

Holmes is ostensibly writing a review of two nonfiction books. He begins the review by introducing one of the authors, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in detail. He uses her biography to highlight key moments in his article, giving her arguments emotional potency. Perhaps this is a reflection of the tactics Hirsi Ali uses in her book, but in either case, Holmes puts her, and to a lesser extent Ian Buruma, in the foreground.

He disappears almost entirely from the article. “Hirsi Ali argues...” “In Hirsi Ali’s view...” “Hirsi Ali urges...” “Buruma remarks...” “Buruma argues...” “Buruma describes...” These links are the ways that Holmes moves from one part of his examination of the issues to another. He mixes hypotaxis and parataxis. His sentences are long, as he usually needs one of the above framing clauses to begin an idea. Since very little of what he writes is framed as coming from him, he has to orient every statement from one of the two reviewees, to the reading public. He acts as conduit.

He hardly appears at all except for a few remarks at the end of the review, in a studied show of impartiality. “One comes away from these two remarkable books suspecting that neither compromise nor confrontation will do much to avert the coming train crash between a resentful minority of indigenous Europeans and a potentially violent minority of young men among the millions of Muslims now permanently residing in Europe.” And again, with, “One might even argue that, in today’s Europe, the Enlightenment ideal of universal citizenship is already dead.” That “One” can really only be one man in his review, since he quotes and names almost everyone else who has a voice in it. Holmes comes in at the very end to sum up, and insert a point of view that seems unforgivably wishy-washy, given the highly emotional problems the books he has been reviewing holds.

He does not “review” as much as sum up, quoting the authors and putting them in conversation with each other. He attempts neutrality, but it is clear from the amount of time he spends on Hirsi Ali’s biography that at least his emotional, if not political sensibility, is clearly in her corner.

Holmes poses questions central to the issues, and then uses quotes and the personified points of view of the authors to answer them, setting them up in conversation with eahc other. If it were not for the titles at the beginning of the review, it would be hard to tell that he was writing about two separate books.

Other writers get into the act, too. Oliver Roy, Fortuyn, and Baruch Spinoza all make appearances while Holmes is elucidating Buruma’s point of view. It may be that Buruma makes a point of mentioning/quoting those figures in his own book, but by using them in the review, Holmes subtly weakens Buruma’s stance. He does this by not mentioning other people in Hirsi Ali’s case, leaving her story to stand as the emotional signpost for her argument, and her anger.

The use of quotes and personal stories, emotion and political theory, is how Holmes “sells” his audience. His veneer of neutrality between the two authors has several cracks in it, but his attempt to be evenhanded does not quite fall flat.

Mark Steyn does not attempt to be evenhanded. He is also writing an article, not a review, so he has carte blanche to be as opinionated as he likes. And he is. While Holmes begins with the biography of a woman who, though important, may yet be unknown to the readers of his review, Steyn begins his article with, “Sept. 11, 2001, was not ‘the day everything changed,’ but the day that revealed how much had already changed,” a universal beginning to English-speaking readers, in the United States. Since the article is an excerpt from a longer piece of writing called, “America Alone,” it is not hard to see where he is coming from. From the first words of this excerpt, he is playing on fears that he knows are already present to help drive his point.

The opposing duality in the first sentence makes him sound lyrical. In that same first paragraph, he uses lists, perhaps to establish intellectual authority. He also uses some colloquial language, as well as bringing the reader in to the prose. “If you’d said that... most folks would have thought you were crazy.” “Most folks.” Really. Then he says, “Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.” A metaphor. How literary. But despite it being a very bad metaphor, it does imbue him with a certain amount of... well, I think what it imbues him with is a matter for debate. But it is there.*

He continues: “This is about the seven-eighths below the surface...” “This,” presumably refers to his article. Oh, and that ties in to his inane iceberg metaphor because seven-eighths of an iceberg is below the surface. I get it now. Great. Some substance, please?

And does substance ever arrive, beginning in the form of a math problem. “If your school has 200 guys and you’re playing a school with 2,000 pupils...” It rather illustrates his statistics nicely, but it also makes them hard to check because you are already invested in the imagery he has created. Or, at least, he wants you to be. He gives a statistic, and then tells “you” how “you” respond to knowing it. And the statistics come past and furious, usually accompanied by some kind of imagery attached.

When he says, “Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the most basic root of all,” he is subtly setting himself apart from the “experts,” while saying that he is going to the “basic” root. He even puts it in a mathematical formulation further down the page. He is saying that he is not an expert, while at the same time wielding population statistics in “friendly” language. He keeps coming back to “demography” as the defining signpost of his argument. His argument can basically be summed up as the pessimistic tagline, “How The West Was Screwed.”

His criticisms of the American government belong on the Glen Beck Show. He uses “you” continually, a method of personification very different from Holmes. In Steyn, “Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you’ll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on Sept. 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.” Leaving aside that “big time” is not hyphenated, let’s “we” examine that for a minute. It is symptomatic of much of Steyn’s writing, in that he makes a statement, and then expounds on it. Note “your vulnerability” and the suggestion that one’s government changes one’s ability to make decisions. Also note the absolute disrespect of calling what happened on Flight 93, “good news.” But he’s making a point. This one, thankfully, without icebergs.

He also defines the words he uses, acting as his own dictionary. This reminded me of the narration in Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” where the narrator uses a big word and then explains the word’s meaning in the context of that particular sentence, often partially obscuring the dictionary definition in the process, because it is such a specific definition. The analogy holds here. He specifies his multi-syllabic, sometimes vague word choices based on the context.

Holmes and Steyn write very, very differently. They are both writing for audiences they expect to more or less agree with them. But while Holmes is trying to consider, Steyn is trying to scare. He is more effective than Holmes is, because taking a stand is inherently more powerful than considering something, especially in text.

*Icebergs do not “bob up,” they break off glaciers. They do not topple things, they sink them. Furthermore, did we really need a Titanic reference in there?