In praise of affectation

Aversion to pretentiousness was probably an English trait before Dr Johnson famously refuted Bishop Berkeley’s arguments for the immateriality of the world by booting a stone. There are plausible historical reasons for this. Suspicious of the Catholicism of neighbouring Ireland and France (where words were thought to contain spiritual power even if they were not understood), the English easily adapted the Reformation’s injunction to simplify scripture into a more general doctrine of ‘say what you mean’.

This attitude is exemplified most famously in George Orwell’s essay of 1946, ‘Politics and the English Language’, in which long and Latinate words are anathematised. It ought to be read as a work of its time, prescribing a lexicon suited to the austerity of postwar Britain and expressing Orwell’s peculiar political gyrations. It’s still too often taken as a style guide of near-universal applicability — as though aspiring to an ‘air of culture and elegance’ were something diabolical.

Dan Fox would like us to reconsider pretentiousness. The common etymology with the word ‘pretend’ leads him to argue that pretentiousness suffers from the same suspicion that acting does: it sits uneasily in the large parts of our culture that prize sincerity and authenticity.

But Fox believes that pretentiousness is a vital element of self-discovery. Acting out a role — however limited our grasp of it — helps us escape the limitations of our background and traverse class divides. It provokes us to grow intellectually, and enables us to become the kind of people we would like to be. Pretentiousness is so widespread among the young because the pose of self-assurance provides cover for inner struggles over sexuality, politics or vocation. No undergraduate ever smoked Gauloises because they wanted to: like a shamanic intoxicant, their purpose is to deliver philosophical revelation (and sprinkle a pinch of Sartre’s inexplicable sexual allure).