I'm currently dipping into Will Self's Junk Mail (a collection of his early-ish journalism), and I've been struck by his use of arcane vocabulary.

Now, one man's arcane vocab is another man's pub--talk, and I definitely don't want to give the impression that I want my writers to communicate solely in monosyllables. One thing I loved about the writings of Simon Reynolds and our own Wingco in the late 80s Melody Maker was the way it made you stretch yourself: they were using words and concepts which were just out of reach, but in such a way that you made the effort to grasp them and familiaries yourself with them. (Indeed, I still find myself reaching for my dictionary during Hartley Sebag-Ffiennes' Arsenal match reports...) However, there seems to be a difference in intention with Will Self.

I've just read a piece he wrote for the Modern Review about The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy's album with William Burroughs, Spare-Ass Annie. In the space of one page, he's used the words 'pabulum', 'declivity' and 'moue', two of which I don't understand and the third a borrowed French word with whose English usage I'm unfamiliar. In the context of a piece which is just dripping with arch contempt for 'low' culture such as hip-hop, and to only a slightly lesser extent the Beat prose of Burroughs, the use of that kind of language seems to carry a meaning secondary to the literal definition of the words themselves: it's saying "I went to an Eton Group school and Oxford and you, my intellectual gerbil of a reader, did not."

Again, I don't want to give the impression that I am against a florid turn of phrase. In fact, it's the thing which attracted me to Self in the first place (and made me shell out for tickets to see him speak in Hove at the end of the month).

It's just that in this context it depressed me. Whether accidentally or intentionally, it reinforces the suspicion that while Self may like to present himself as a transgressive druggy bohemian, he actually shares exactly the same rigid mental hierarchy between High Culture and Low Culture as the establishment which raised him.

Or am I reading too much into it?