On Stylish Academic Writing

With an apt nod to Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," Bradley Winterton took on Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing in the Taipei Times yesterday. Though I haven't read Sword's book, I wanted to respond to a couple points in the review.

In general I agree with Winterton that much academic writing suffers from a serious addiction to theoretical discourse. Like many heavy addictions, this one often proves fatal. Every passing month sees dozens of academic journals reach libraries dead on arrival.

But the excesses of what is often an addiction only make for part of the story. The theoretical terminology used in the humanities, especially in literature departments, can't be explained in any one way; it can't always be labelled "jargon" or "obscurantism" and that is the end of it. Rather, each instance--each academic paper, say--must be characterized on its merits.

I find most academic writing falls into one of the following three types. Of course they sometimes overlap. And of course I'm sometimes at a loss to be quite sure what type of paper I'm reading:

1) Very often what looks like needless jargon and obfuscation really isn't. Rather it is a matter of a serious scholar using language, the language of his or her specialty, as precisely as possible. And there's nothing wrong with scholars advancing a discourse in some area of study: scholars developing difficult arguments for other scholars to assess. Philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis--each has given us important new ways of understanding literature or other cultural practices, and each has its necessary terminology, which will always sound like "jargon" to people who don't study it. That these terminologies are difficult to master doesn't mean that they are simply nonsense. Like literature profs, electrical engineers discussing problems in their field will not be understood by outsiders. Nonetheless the engineers are rarely accused of spewing jargon. This is because most people believe in electrical engineering in a way they don't believe in literary study.

2) Very often what looks like needless jargon is just that: it really is a scholar using theoretical terms to window dress the writing so as to make it more suitable for academic publication. Sad, but true.

3) Very often what looks like needless jargon is terminology being employed as a kind of safe in-language. It counts as jargon because it's being used in the way Winterton stresses in his review: as a shibboleth. Such usage is legible to those in the know, thus establishing who's "in,"' while it keeps out the prying eyes of others. Yes, it seems academics often avoid saying too bluntly what they and their peers have agreed to already. Namely, that what is wanted is a radical reworking of society--heads will roll--one which, however, they personally aren't quite brave enough to fight for in their present circumstances. As a student in Comparative Literature in the 1980s, I was often impressed by how very radical the discourses were and how very conformist the professors were.

So in cases 2 and 3, yes, I think we should talk of jargon and obfuscation. But I believe many academics are writing work that should be seen as category 1.

I was having coffee the other day with an English Dept. professor here, at Taiwan Normal University, and she lamented how grad students always feel they "have to insert theory into their work one way or another." The problem is right there, in the verb. "Inserting theory" is something these students are doing almost after the fact of reading. If they were really engaged in the theoretical approach in question, their very approach would determine the content of the essay: the theory in terms of which they work would unveil things about the text, and these discoveries would be the basis of their paper. Instead, many grad students are reading literature much like other people read, they're coming up with normal readerly insights about the text, then having to window dress these insights with terminology that such insights don't really need. This is where a lot of the problem with "jargon" in the humanities comes up. Because some of these grad students (the lucky ones?) will become academics and continue to work in much the same way.

Wouldn't it be better if academic literature departments could support the existence of both very learned literary people, in the traditional sense, and more theoretically inclined scholars--all under the same roof? I mean, on the one hand, the department would have people who could read difficult works of literature and recognize from the get-go nearly all the allusions--this precisely because they've done almost nothing but read literature for decades--and, on the other hand, people who could adeptly write worthwhile work on what Lacan can teach us about Keats. Instead, what we get, because of the need (which Winterton points out) to ape the sciences, is literature departments that ONLY accept work done under the directives of theory. The former ability, that basic ability to read and present texts at a high level of cultural literacy, is downplayed. Which is doubtless part of the reason we are seeing our societies in general ever more skeptical of the value of literary study.

And while some people say we are entering a new period--"after theory"--I feel sadly that we might be entering a different kind of new period: after literature departments.

J.S. Porter and Jewishness

A new book by J.S. Porter is always something to celebrate. His Lightness and Soul, just out this month, does not disappoint. Full of surprises and keen insights, Porter's book takes on a difficult and long-debated subject: the literary character of Jewishness over the recent seventy-odd years. Subtitled Musings on Eight Jewish Writers, the book doesn't shy away from throwing very different figures into the ring: some of the chosen writers are avowedly Jewish, others deny their Jewishness, and one, as I will indicate below, can only be called Jewish in an oblique or ironic way.

If like me you've long cherished Jewish literature, this is a book you should read--for the sheer joy of it. Porter is one of our great expositors of the pleasures of reading. Like Alberto Manguel, considered in one chapter here, Porter teases out and explicates the multiple physical joys of book reading: the tactile attractions of the printed word; the magnetic draw that shelves of books or stacked volumes on a windowsill have for zealous readers. As in his Spirit Book Word (2001), he recounts his personal relationship with the books in question; this proves a particularly effective starting point for getting at what is singular in each writer he chooses. What we get as a result is eight in-depth readerly appreciations, eight critical portraits that give us what we, as readers, are really after: new insights into writers we already know; reasons to take up new writers we might not be familiar with.

For myself, Porter's chapters on Leonard Cohen and Harold Bloom were especially enjoyable. I found echoes of my own readings as well as new assessments I hadn't considered (both Porter's own assessments and those of the many people he quotes: this writer is a great collector of critical remarks). Probably most worthwhile for me, however, was the chapter where Porter, strategically, put John Berger in conversation with Simone Weil. Berger, the ever down-to-earth British art critic, and Weil, the doggedly idealistic left-wing Neoplatonist (I'm aware how odd my characterization is) illuminate each other as they illuminate what a commitment to the underdog can mean in terms of life and literary practice. What was especially useful for me here was the new introduction to Berger, a writer I haven't read since university and one I will now spend some time getting to know.

The problematics of what is Jewish make for only part of the intellectual interest of this book. Given that Porter's concerns are mostly readerly, the question of how and why these writers are Jewish, though repeatedly addressed, must finally be answered by the reader--and answered on what are perhaps mainly literary or textual grounds. That there are no easy answers should be no surprise: What, after all, do figures like Harold Bloom and Simone Weil have in common beyond a certain amount of DNA going back to the ancient Near East? Weil probably would have found Bloom a bombastic aesthete. As for Bloom's assessment of Weil, I don't know what it is, but I'm sure it's pretty grim.

Does the Jewishness of these writers reside in a certain spiritual register, a certain half-tangible something inherited even against the grain of what may have been the writer's very secular family history? Or does it reside rather in a particular deep-seated respect for texts and debate--a tendency to take the written register as something nearly as important as the real world? As George Steiner wrote in My Unwritten Books (and as quoted by Porter in his first chapter):

The tablet, the scroll, the manuscript and the printed page become the homeland, the moveable feast of Judaism. Driven out of its native ground of orality, out of the sanctuary of direct address, the Jew has made of the written word his passport across centuries of displacement and exile.

Whatever the Jewishness at issue here, it probably can't reside in a religious identification. Of the eight writers considered, only Leonard Cohen claimed to be a practicing Jew, and even he was occasionally called upon to defend his Judaism against other Jews who didn't appreciate his Zen practice or the often Catholic symbolic register of his work. His words to these doubters, which Porter quotes, are magisterial:

Anyone who says
I'm not a Jew
is not a Jew
I'm very sorry
but this decision
is final

I use the word magisterial to characterize these lines. And it is apt. Who if not Leonard Cohen possessed majesty in his artistic struggle--in its brutal honesty, its questing up and down the scale of high and low, in its utterly authentic spiritual need?

Much of Porter's chapter on Cohen is dedicated to the novel Beautiful Losers. Porter brings out the scattered brilliance of this work: its annoying side and its undeniable genius; he quotes critics who were maddened by the book even as they sought to put a finger on its power. Here, one feels, is perhaps the closest Porter's book gets to defining Jewishness. Jewishness as a kind of openness that nonetheless answers back; a willing spiritual wrestling with the many perverse angels of the day-to-day. Clearly discernible in Cohen's work, is this not also the Jewishness that, in part, made for the greatness of the first books of the Bible? Is it not this willingness to admit in writing to what is unassimilable? To always portray the here and now along with the painful elements that don't fit? This, I believe, is a large part of what is "Jewish" in significant Jewish writing.

In considering John Berger's essay on Simone Weil, titled "A Girl Like Antigone," Porter gets at what may be an important element of Berger's style, and again approaches what I sense as the Jewishness that really underlies Porter's book. I will quote at length:

Near the close of [Berger's] meditation on Weil's short life of thirty-four years, he returns to her . . . apartment on Rue Auguste Comte where, when writing, she could see the rooftops of Paris. In a single sentence, he captures the unity of her conflicting tensions with the insertion of a conjunction: "She loved the view from the window, and she was deeply suspicious of its privilege." The word and holds the tension and reintegrates the splitting of love and shame. They belong together

On a previous occasion Berger made similar use of the and. I'm quoting from memory. He said once about a farmer in his French village that the man loved his pig and ate his pig. And joins, it honors; it doesn't resolve or excuse. You can love a pig and eat it. You can love a window and feel ashamed for having a privilege that many are denied. But is a different kind of conjunction. It qualifies, prioritizes. Berger prefers and; he prefers it stylistically and morally. (67-8)

In the blank space after these sentences, as I sat reading Porter's book on the Taipei subway on my way to work, I scribbled the words that came immediately to mind: "As does the Old Testament." Berger prefers the and; he prefers it stylistically and morally--as did the J writer and, to a degree, as did the redactors who wove the J text into Genesis, Exodus and so on. The and is one of the great stylistic supports of ancient Hebrew prose (and poetry).

Above I indicate that Porter's book treats of eight Jewish writers, but this isn't quite true. Included as well, as somehow "Jewish," is Edward Said, the great Palestinian activist and intellectual. Said himself, toward the end of his life, joked that he was perhaps the "last Jewish intellectual." The ways in which this may be apt underline the degree to which Jewishness, as viewed in a literary-intellectual light, may indeed be a particular comportment toward difference, an openness to debate: again, Jewishness as a stance similar to something I believe Leonard Cohen has in spades--the willingness to wrestle, and to do so in words, regardless of whose hip may get dislocated.

Check out J.S. Porter's Lightness and Soul at Amazon.com

Go to J.S. Porter's blog

Clay: Appendix 4: A Letter to H.

[In August of 1996, I moved from Madison to Taipei. During my first year in Taiwan, I corresponded mainly with H., a friend of mine from graduate school.]

6/1/97,
Taipei

Dear H.:

All that simply means that something is there, something which Barnabas has the chance of using, something or other at the very least; and that it is Barnabas' own fault if he can't get any farther than doubt and anxiety and despair. --Kafka's The Castle, K. to Olga

Our ways of thinking are fundamentally different. In this letter, in a summary fashion, I will take this up. You must know these differences yourself. I think it's curious we haven't fallen out by now, that we've managed to continue communicating. Of course I will take up only my side of the bargain, because your side I can only get at secondhand.

* * *
For one thing, I am a Christian. This is something you must have already recognized, though at what level you recognized it I'm not sure. But in fact I've been a Christian since before we met.

I ought to make clear at least something about how I believe, since the fact of this belief is something you--I know this much--find hard to accept.

First of all, you should know that I am not a Christian merely out of some kind of "conservative" cultural solidarity. These kind of non-believing Christians exist by the churchful, but I'm not one of them. They have been taken in by the Enlightenment; I have not. I actually do believe in God and the soul and revelation.

I'm not of the fundamentalist mindset either. My understanding of things is quite different from the fundamentalists. The revelation, as given in Scripture and elsewhere, is not a kind of literal transcription of the truths of the divine, but is rather oblique: it points to an Otherness that can't be represented in language in any case. This is not to say, however, that I think there is nothing true about the specificity of the Scriptures. The opposite is the case. I am not a believer in cultural relativism when it comes to such things. Rather, there is a specificity in revelation. The texts of Buddhism, for example, are not part of it, or are only so in a very weak manner. The poems of the Mayans, whatever they may have been, were not part of it, or only in some weak and tentative manner. The revelation given in the Bible is not that of a particular culture, but is rather the revelation as given to man as such. This is to say it concerns the destiny of man as such, the meaning of man as such.

These few remarks begin to define what I believe, what I mean by saying I am a Christian.

* * *
You and I know each other because of our mutual concern with literature. But of course here again our thinking is fundamentally different. I have some idea of your thinking of literature from being in classes with you and from reading your dissertation proposal. My own understanding of literature has little in common with yours. I may get at my understanding of literature by beginning with what I could call the literary absolute.

For me, the texts of the Bible are literature's highest meaning. Literature's ultimate meaning is to be the textual medium of revelation. It is a matter of text, and revelation. Literature is that which results from the meeting of these two. Even the manner in which many of the most important Biblical texts came to be written--as a choosing, an editing, a kind of layering one could indicate by the metaphor of a heavily beleaguered palimpsest--even this for me makes the texts of revelation more compelling as the examples of literature. They define from then on what the word literature is to mean.

Literature for me is a question of canons even more than it is a question of rhetorical tropes. The Biblical texts are the Primary Canon and the great texts of Western literature are what I would call the Secondary Canon. They are a secondary canon because they are written after the fact of and under the dispensation of revelation. Following this understanding, the literature of classical antiquity must then constitute a Third Canon, being neither the Primary Canon nor the literature of the culture of the revelation, but being important to the formation (mainly the generic formation) of that latter literature. These remarks indicate how literature is arranged according to my understanding. If I continue reading and studying literature, it is partly in the hopes of an ever-greater understanding of the relationships holding between the major canons. This isn't to say, however, that literature is a scholar's game. If I read Villon or Dostoyevsky with particular delight, it's because these canonical writers articulate parts of a world whose general structure and meaning is founded in the revelation given in the Bible. And this is to say, for one who believes, that they articulate parts of the world as such. Thus it is that those who are not interested in the real world are not much interested in literature.

This is not an apology for the West. Of course I'm writing of the world as such in a manner that would make cultural anthropologists and the politically correct cringe. That doesn't concern me. There is in fact much offered by the West (such as the cultural anthropologists themselves) that doesn't concern the world as such. I mention current academic intellectual culture, but could choose the West's "literary" culture as well. I could take up the American Thomas Pynchon as an example.

As for the world represented in a Western writer like Pynchon, it is amusing, to be sure. It is full of interesting gags and twists, colorful and subtly modulated; the reader enjoys moving about in this world as one enjoys being taken into a film. I've once or twice suggested you read Pynchon because there's something unique in his work, something entrancing. He is, or at least for a time was, a major American writer. Ultimately, however, I don't find Pynchon's writing to be serious literature. It is not Literature. His is a flimsy world that does not recognize the bases of its being. It is one that is becoming quickly a world of mere surfaces, a dumb show of empirical data--nothingness. This is why many who seriously take up Pynchon as a subject of study will read his books five or six times, read much of the criticism, then suddenly feel a total lack of interest fall upon them. Diversion is not the stuff of life: it is rather something to keep one from taking up the stuff of life. The need for reality eventually makes one tire of such writing. But the readers around us, what do they do when they tire of a writer like Pynchon? Since so many of them are only willing to read contemporary writers, they put down Pynchon only to pick up another contemporary with similar strengths. Such writing as Pynchon's--and the West offers much of it now--shows a soul impoverished, a soul that has been seduced into believing that the dumb shows of science and technology are all there is. Intuition shut down, the soul's hearing shut down, language's revelatory power curtailed, the data of the senses organized by a logical machinery much smaller than language itself. Of course the literature arising from this general situation is comic. It is merely comic. This is to say that it is not even humorous in the stronger manner in which much of the great European literature is humorous. Don Quixote, the story of Jacob and Laban, Prince Myshkin. This latter strong humor, the possibility of this humor in man, is one of the mainstays of my understanding of man's place in the world. The critics that most interest me have all understood this humor to some degree: Bakhtin, for instance, or Benjamin.

* * *
I am a Catholic in most things, but am not certain if I am a Catholic, or rather if I can be accepted as a Catholic. At least many Catholics would probably not recognize me as such. There are things about which I believe the Catholic Church is wrong.

The Catholic Church is most crucially right in its understanding of the Mass. The Mass is the ritual that defines the destiny of man: it is the central sacrament. The Mass is the gathering around which men might eventually gather. Perhaps they will eventually gather around it. This is something the Catholic Church knows better than the other branches of the Church.

* * *
I know you must disagree with these things, and of course I can live with such disagreement.

* * *
We are both concerned with the question of how language reveals presence, but the register of the presence that language most essentially reveals--that is one basis of our difference.

* * *
That you are a secularized Jew makes you even further from me than if you were a believer in Judaism. For regardless of the gripes Jews may have with Christians, I don't have as much gripe with Jews as I do with the secular. The fact that you are a secularized Jew means to me that I have no reason to consider you other than, say, the secularized Christians all over America. This is to say, in part, that I don't know in what you consider your Jewishness resides. I know this is an infinitely discussed question, one that receives much of its immediate importance from the nightmares of the twentieth century.

The Jews as a religion are very close to the truth I follow, and their understanding of the truth of revelation is of great concern to me, much more, say, than the Zen Buddhist understanding of truth. I would never step on a Menorah, though I would certainly step on Diderot's Encyclopedia, or even Voltaire's hand. So you should know where I stand.

* * *
That you and I have managed to communicate. Perhaps it will continue. It is like Origen maintaining a correspondence with Lucretius.

* * *
ON THE EPIGRAPH--

I had read most of Kafka before, but it was only recently that I read The Castle.

Some readers find in Kafka an apparent restatement of the universe projected by the Kabbalists. Benjamin is the great exponent of this reading. Benjamin's Kafka wrote allegories of a kind of Kabbalist faith or hope. Other critics disagree by leaning on the fact that Kafka was not a "religious writer," that he was an atheist, that he was not a scholar of Kabbalism, etc. I am one of those who think that Kafka needn't have been a "religious writer" or a Kabbalist to write the kind of allegories he wrote. These allegories are Kabbalist allegories, if you will. Kafka was a Prague Jew, after all.

The dichotomy set up between a "religious writer" and a "secular writer": what does it amount to unless we are considering precisely weak writers or journalists or, again, cultural anthropologists?

The Castle seems to me, after this first reading, a kind of allegorical romance. K.'s quest is nearly fruitless--that is apparently the case--and yet K.'s life in the shadow of the Castle seems more a life than that, say, of Kafka's father in the shadow of a cash register.

Kafka's K. shows a certain daring in his quest. He is not struck with the same kind of unreasonable awe that strikes the people of the village. Threatening or not, he would be there where the Castle's power is manifested. He would know its workings and sees such knowledge as the only thing worth struggling for. Any other activity--cobbling, tanning, running an inn--is a species of biding time that concerns him not.

Does Kafka, despite his atheism, make it into what I have called the Secondary Canon? Evidently so.

Was Chretien de Troyes a "religious writer"?

E.

Clay: Appendix 8: The Sacramentality of Writing

God formed man of the clay of the ground and then breathed into him the breath of life. The clay of the ground as material and the breathing in of the breath of life: these have been the focus of most concern in our literature and speculation. And the question of what the breath of life may be has been recurrent. But the question of the forming, the verb forming, hasn't raised our attention in the right way. And yet everyone knows--the Sumerians and Babylonians knew--that the pressing of marks into the clay was the crucial part of this forming. It was the pressing of marks, the right marks, that gave the clay the dignity needed for its reception of the breath of life.

The clay as result of this writing is clay that may receive the breath of life if only this breath be given it.

It is in this sense originally that writing is a sacrament.

Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos

Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos is one of the most perfectly pitched pieces of modernist writing I know. Probably modern literature’s subtlest depiction of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the novel presents a darkly comic narration of the tempests that begin crashing in teacups in minds doomed to notice too much--or rather doomed to ascribe significance to everything noticed.

I admit that while reading Gombrowicz’s first chapters I kept telling myself the tale’s brilliantly idiotic tension had to break sooner or later; the writer couldn’t keep up such a pitch of fevered nonsense over the whole course of the book’s few hundred pages. And in fact he couldn’t. About a third into the novel the tension slacks ever so slightly: the fall comes, in my judgment, just after the comic duo of renters, Fuchs and Witold (the writer simply gives the narrator his own name), finish searching the servant Aglaia’s room. But this drop in tension--which probably results from the transpiring of just a bit too much actual action--doesn't change the fact that the opening chapters are nothing short of dazzling. Never has utter banality been pumped to such a beautiful pitch of aimless menace.

For readers of Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Max Jacob--this novel should not be missed. Gombrowicz is a master in the same company.

Check Gombrowicz's Cosmos at Amazon.com