It’s beginning to feel a little like this
conversation is an elaborate ruse designed to induce me to spend whatever
meagre resources remain once my bookie’s had his share on esoteric volumes of
which I had hitherto been ignorant, and if I wasn’t already convinced of your
near-saintly moral decorousness, I would suggest you were in cahoots with the
online bookmongering behemoths, all in the name of making a quick buck in the
run up to Winterval. But that’s obviously gibberish (with a hard G, in
honour of Evelyn Waugh).
So: with regards academic writing style, I would
have to agree with you. Steven Pinker – he of the interesting theories of
mind and language, and the wild, Simon Rattlish shock of silvery hair – has
written extensively on this subject, and I would wager more eloquently and
learnedly than myself, so I will just alert you to an excellent article,
available as a pdf on his homepage, entitled ‘Why Academics Stink At Writing’
(which you can read here: http://stevenpinker.com/why-academics-stink-writing),* and leave the matter there. The
need on the part of literary criticism to follow a pseudo-scientific mode of
knowledge creation and dissemination – pseudo both in the sense of being
a pastiche of scientific methods and codes, and in the sense that it’s an
unnecessary, and ersatz import from a field that works in a very different way
to the humanities – is probably, at least in part, the product of a degree of
insecurity. (The concomitant rise in a socially responsive, explicitly
partisan mode of criticism is arguably symptomatic of this, too.) It’s
easy to point to the applications and impact of research in the sciences in a
concrete way that’s simply not possible to the same extent if we apply
comparable terms to the humanities, so different methods of gauging ‘impact’
and ‘importance’ need to be delineated. It’s rather a circular process,
isn’t it? Literary academics (or perhaps more correctly, examples of the
slightly over-egged, straw-stuffed stereotype we’ve managed to conjure up
between ourselves) feel the need to bolster the perceived seriousness of their
work with semi-comprehensible jargon, but in the process manage to radically
denude their potential audience, so the seriousness and import of their work –
whether real or cosmetic – becomes, if you will, academic. No-one will
ever know, except other researches in the same field writing more or less the
same thing about the same subjects for the same journals.
Puerile caricature of academia that may well be,
but the sentiment underpinning it – scepticism, if not outright hostility, to
the kind of dry-as-dust criticism that academia, more often than not, tends to
produce – is genuine. Moreover, given that this has gone hand in hand
with an increasing distaste, or boredom at any rate, for the mechanics of
outright fiction, my reading, almost by default, has swung towards the essay
and its cousins. I think I like the mess – the muddle, yes, that’s
absolutely right – and uncertainty that define these works (though I perhaps
wouldn’t go so far as to employ ‘brokenness’ as one of my favoured descriptors,
because so long as a mind can communicate, even if what’s being communicated
may seem confusing and chaotic at first, nothing’s really broken): mess and
uncertainty that seem, for the most part, to be ruthlessly excluded from the
boundaries of, on the one hand, the ‘rigorous’ academic monograph, and the
well-made novel on the other.
As to the matter of thought: yes, I entirely
agree that it’s too limited, too straight-jacketing a term to properly
encompass and communicate everything that I think I find in these
border-hugging books. There’s a quote from one of Elizabeth Bishop’s
letters, which I sort of carry around in my brain at all times as a point of
contact and inspiration (though it’s half remembered, and although I could
easily use the wonder of Wikipedia and clarify the line and provide a proper
citation, I’m choosing not to, partly out of laziness, partly out of
stubbornness, and partly out a misplaced desire to give some impression of what
I mean by a text that acknowledges its own ‘thinkiness’ in the process of its
making),** which, paraphrased, goes along the lines of: “I tend to favour works
which provide not the finish of a completed thought, but the ragged process by
which such a thought came about.” Of course, that’s probably completely
wrong – E-Bish is usually a lot more lucid than that, I’m sure of it – but the
sentiment’s a good one, and one with which I concur.
This all chimes in with an increasing sense I have
that the real work of literature tends to be happening in the sidelines.
By this I don’t mean to suggest some quasi-utopian fantasy, where every
bedroom’s hiding a starveling, scribbling Tolstoy-in-waiting (though that might
well be the case: who knows?), but rather that the real work by writers who are
already established, or who might become established in the future, resides in
the interstitial, the neglected, the seemingly-inconsequential. Thus:
Thoreau’s journals are more valuable than Walden; Virginia Woolf’s
diaries have a greater, or at least equal, claim on posterity than her novels;
in decades to come, people are going to remember Simon Gray and Alan Bennet at
exemplary diarists who wrote the occasional play (the last of these three
examples is arguably already true, which may or may not undermine my
argument). I’m saying this not to be controversial (well, maybe a
little): this is simply the direction my thoughts – coupled to my reading –
have been tending towards. I wouldn’t be so bold as to translate my own
idiosyncrasies as a reader into a manifesto,*** but it’s good way to get a
conversation going.
Yrs, as ever,
ST
*I think some of the ideas and critiques in this
article were later expanded into book-length form in The Sense of Style,
an excellent and lucidly written writing guide which J-Pillz may want to add to
his library of same.
**If not ‘thought’, then ‘self-consciousness’ or,
maybe, just good old fashioned ‘pretentiousness’ might well do in its
stead.
***Besides, that’s already been done.
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