What follows is an excerpt from my memoir, a document that will never find publication. The subject in this excerpt is writing, academic writing. The first paragraph makes reference to my editorship of The Children's Literature Association Quarterly.
Editing takes patience and close attention, two things I had in short supply. This explains my relatively brief tenure as editor of that journal. I have, however, edited or co-edited 11 books, and special numbers of two journals other than the Quarterly. I find this work frustrating, mostly because so much of what we, as editors, receive is poorly written. I guess you could chalk this up as yet another example of lost innocence. Having been nurtured on the prose of such scholars as Frye, Fiedler, Trilling, Bush, Bloom, Hartman, Fish and others, I looked for a critical prose that was not only clear and grammatically correct, but stylish in some way, even if this is the plain way. Simplicity is a virtue. And wit is welcome; I think of James Kincaid’s prose or Terry Eagleton’s. What I have seen, however, is a profession that does not place value in a graceful voice. I have mentioned along the way examples of writing that was faulty in some way; what I saw as an editor was writing that not only routinely accepted certain grammar errors, most notably the dangling modifier, but also failed miserably at idiomatic expression and accepted the academic cliché as gospel. Good news apparently comes gift-wrapped in a lingo that reeks of conformity. Prolixity too seems to have won the day.
The subject of academic writing is more complicated than I suggest. So far, I have implied quite simplistically that standards of prose have deteriorated over the years. And they have, for whatever reason. What comes to mind is Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell thought that writing in his day had become ugly and inaccurate; I wonder what he would say today. Whatever happened to a crisp and clear prose, a prose that Strunk and White could admire? Well, it went the way of all things – down the spout. I am speaking of academic prose. We still have writers whose prose aspires to the condition of poetry: Cormac McCarthy, Alan Garner, Toni Morrison, David Almond, Patrick deWitt, Paul Auster at his best, and so on. But academic writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences has suffered from the plague of self-importance. The usual culprit when this topic surfaces in academic circles is Judith Butler whose prose is famously tangled and circumlocutionary. And the usual argument for such difficult prose is that difficult ideas call for difficult expression. This may or may not be, but most of the submissions to your average journal in English studies do not contain deep philosophical arguments. The arguments are more often than not fairly mundane. And yes, we have a thicket of jargon words hurled together in an attempt to sound profound. I understand the desire and the need for the work academics do to be taken seriously, but really, does seriousness have to come wrapped in such drivel?
Recently, I read an article that takes an interesting tack in its reflection on what appears to be a lack of moral urgency and drive in academic writing. I refer to Lisa Ruddick’s “When Noting is Cool,” (2015) published in Point(http://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool#sthash.09OXsCT9.dpuf). Ruddick points out the postmodern notion of the empty self, the self constructed by various external forces. We used to call this behaviourism. Without an inner core, she suggests, the writer does not have the commitment to profess (she does not use this word). The writer is without agency, individuality, or even point of view beyond what is current. In short, academic writing emanates from the Borg we call the academy. Another way to put this is for me to call on Althusser’s Industrial State Apparatus and its power to interpellate. Insecurity and desire for acceptance can draw one into the institutional arms; these arms fold about the shuddering young acolytes knocking at the doors of academe.
Drawing on another writer, Ann Rippin, Ruddick writes: “Recruits to professional organizations . . . are trained in glossy but dehumanized ways of speaking and feeling. The work they learn to do ‘is silver service done at arm’s length, hygienically, through a polished, highly wrought intermediary instrument.’ In time, many of those so socialized ‘report feeling unable to bring their whole selves to work, [and] being obliged to dismember or disaggregate themselves, having to suspend feelings, ethics, values on occasion.’ I think our profession has its own version of silver-handedness, exacerbated by theoretical orthodoxies that suggest we never had a “whole self” to lose in the first place. Nothing inherently makes the theories that dismiss the idea of integrated selfhood better than the alternatives; they are just preferred by this academic community.” She goes on: “The poststructuralist critique of the self, though associated with progressive politics, has an unobserved, conservative effect on the lived world of the profession. It protects the institutional status quo by promoting the evacuation of selves into the group. In the story behind the story, the decentered subject is the practitioner who internalizes the distaste for the inner life and loses touch with the subjective reserves that could offset his or her merger with the profession. What is correspondingly strengthened is the cohesion of the collective. For our profession, alienated in various ways from the American mainstream, needs members who will band together. One way to get members to commit to the group and its ideology is to make them feel ashamed of the varied, private intuitions and desires that might diversify their interests.”
I find this analysis illuminating. In short, what Ruddick gives us is a way of understanding the blandness of much academic writing. Academics want to succeed and to succeed means to find acceptance by following the lead of others, not by forging new paths. I think back to that Ph.D. thesis from Australia I mentioned earlier, the one in which the constant use of the passive construction enervates the writing and removes the speaking voice of the subject. What I now think we see in such writing is the effacement of self, the embarrassment of standing alone. I also think of a successful colleague who, quite a few years ago, remarked to me in the interlude between rallies on the squash court, that he did not enjoy reading. He was quick to say that he enjoyed his work, but that reading was work and he would not go home of an evening and take a book to read in order to relax. You might recall what I said about work earlier in this meditation. There is no success like failure, especially when failure becomes the only success.
Sometimes a way of life can be rough.
By the end of the 1980s, I was well ensconced in academia. I was serving on the boards of ChLA and IRSCL, I had done administrative work at my university, and I was beginning to publish at a fairly regular rate. I had been in the job for some seventeen years. I do not remember exactly when I received promotion to Full Professor or even who my evaluators were, but somehow I got promoted. My academic contacts were mostly outside my own country, and I did not have strong friendships within my own Department. I kept busy playing squash with colleagues from Religious Studies, Classics, and even the upper administration. I sat on a few committees, and generally kept a low profile. Academia provided me with a comfortable life. And I was convinced that what the Humanities offered was an important life skill, the ability to reason, to assess, and to create a world out of words. The one thing I retained from my first acquaintance with Northrop Frye was the certainty that what passed for reality in the cold world, was but a façade, or if you prefer more fashionable terminology, a simulation, shadows on the wall of the cave. Reality was that which we imagined it to be and we could choose to imagine it to be where tolerance, justice, equality, fairness, and liberty were the order of the day. If we imagined this world and imagined it strongly enough, it would be just like Adam’s dream; we would wake to find it real! This is what literature and the arts meant and mean to me.
I might note here that during this time, the Humanities came under fire, or more specifically liberal humanism came under fire. As theory developed from structuralism through post-structuralism, we saw what Ruddick describes above, an assault on the notion of the centered self, the idea of identity. Just at the time when identity politics were becoming more important, theory was telling us that identity was nothing more than our socially constructed ways of behaving; the subject was de-centered and in actuality each person was not one identity but several depending on circumstances. Such a challenge to the notion of a core personality, a self that was stable, appeared to challenge the basis of liberal humanism and liberal humanism was the expression of that generation of critics that took their sense of value from Matthew Arnold and his notion of the best that was thought and said. Well hell, a liberal humanist such as Frye did trace his lineage back to Arnold and to the tradition that sees literature as the great civilizing force. Literature in this view forms the self, the stable and centered self. But Frye’s liberal humanism was sensible enough to know that the best that has been thought and said is not for the passing on by fiat; rather each of us comes to an understanding of the best that has been thought and said through immersion, as it were. The educated imagination is the imagination that has steeped itself in what the grand traditions of art have to offer, and then decided for itself what is best thought and best said. Despite the niceties of post-structuralist deconstruction of the self, the self survives. Deconstruction, after all, knows that the centre exists even if it is de-centered. The fun is in the exploration, the tracings of this self. Witness this document.
