The transparency of language

George Orwell suggested that prose/essay style should be transparent - the less we notice it the better. With poetry, the language is more like stained glass than a clear window. The stained glass can be more interesting than what's beyond.

Sometimes in Book Groups people get frustrated by the comments about language - they want to focus on the characters and their emotions, not syntax. It's a fair enough approach - though we can't know about the characters unless we read the words first, we might not miss much by "seeing through" the words in the first instance. That approach doesn't work well with novels like "Finnegans Wake". That's an extreme case, though even with more mainstream novels it may not be ideal - 'Grief is the thing with feathers' merits careful reading, and a review of an Alan Hollingsworth novel said that you could read it just for the language.

I was wondering about how other arts manage in this regard.

• If you watch Macbeth, you'd certainly comment on the acting. If you watch a new play, you're more likely to comment on the plot and characters
• Looking at a Van Gogh, you're likely to comment on the brushwork and how it contributes to the effect. A Vermeer doesn't provoke such comments.
• If you've been to film school, you might watch a film with more awareness of camera angles and background music than the general public does. One person might say "Didn't you notice how lonely Sue was?" and another reply "Didn't you notice how the Sue character was always framed alone, even in a crowd?"

In Poetic Opacity (How to Paint Things with Words - Jesse Prinz and Eric Mandelbaum, 2014) the authors take the painting/writing analogy further, listing some ways that a poem might be opaque - "flowery, obscure, metaphorical, rich with allusion, ambiguous in narrative voice, and constructed in metric schemes that depart away from ordinary linguistic usage". They point out how technical writing can have a different type of obscurity, and that "Aesthetic opacity stems from our conventions for individuating artworks. As Goodman (1968) observes, every form of art comes with implicit norms for tolerable variation."

I think I tolerate more opacity in prose than most readers do. That's partly because of the "Macbeth" point above - I've read so many books that not many are "new", so I'm interested in how the familiar theme is re-interpreted. I read more "Van Gogh" style novels than Vermeer ones. And I certainly have a "film student" approach to reading a book.