Academics don't write that badly
| Randall Munroe, xkcd
("Impostor") |
A certain kind of person likes
complaining loudly about the prose of tenured professors, especially in the
humanities and social sciences. It's indigestible gobbledygook masking a latent
charlatanism! they cry. The 1986 Sokal hoax—in which physicist Alan Sokal
submitted a preposterously fake article to the journal
Social Text, which
was subsequently published—is a favorite "proof" of many things, but especially
the stereotype that academics and their disciples venerate whatever crap they
can't understand. Ross Douthat, currently a
New York Times columnist,
wrote
an
article for the Atlantic in
2005 about his time at Harvard, complaining that he was taught merely to excel
at sophistry, nothing more. A slew of novelists—Kingsley Amis, A.S. Byatt, Don
DeLillo, Zadie Smith, and Jeffrey Eugenides among them—have loved lampooning
academic shop talk in their books. Critics point to the
Postmodern Essay Generator, which
algorithmically generates nonsense that sounds a bit like lit-theory. (Never
mind that anyone with half a brain can call it out within two sentences.)
Denis Dutton's "Bad Writing
Contest" indicted Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha (favorite targets) for the
crime of high puffery when they were still relatively young.
And on and on in a widening gyre. Most recently, there was a
Prospect blog post called "
Why
academics can't write" that took up this strain. The post itself was a lot
more nuanced than the title. But the problem is that the title itself is a
surefire way to attract the attention of people who love griping about how the
academy protects and fosters fakery; how we should throw the entire enterprise
overboard; how professors should just write in a common-sense, unpretentious way
that anyone can understand. They equate wordiness with untruth.
But this
viewpoint is what's nonsense. Sure,
some academics are bad writers. But
some academics are also bad teachers, just as some football coaches are bad
linemen. Saying that most academics write nonsense based on a few egregiously
bad examples is not sufficient evidence to prove that the whole profession
writes that way. Anyone who claims that should be forced to take more statistics
classes.
I can think of just as many academics who are or were graceful,
elegant writers, and a few who may even be outright prose masters: Ernst Robert
Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper,
Bernard Williams, Helen Vendler, Colin Macleod, Marjorie Perloff, Philippa Foot,
E.P. Thompson, Quentin Skinner, Richard Hofstadter, Christine Korsgaard, Stephen
Jay Gould, Alan Ryan, Martha Nussbaum, Carl Schorske, Jonathan Rose, Louis
Menand, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Linda Colley, Andrew Delbanco, Jill Lepore,
Hermione Lee, Mary Beard, Steven Pinker, D.A. Miller, and Nicholas Dames—and
those are just the people I can think of off the top of my head. All professors,
and every single one of them is/was a good writer. Indeed, by this measure, some
of our
best writers are academics.
Someone will doubtlessly think
that these are the exceptions that prove the rule that universities are stuffed
with jargon-addled mediocrities. But this is hardly the case. Throughout my
entire college education, clarity and even elegance were held up as cardinal
virtues for prose writing. And I suspect that was also true for most of the
professors I just named. Even if obscurantism was
once encouraged, the
current trend in higher education pushes away from that. No one wants to land on
the latter-day equivalent of Dutton's list.
I think the modern stereotype
of the incomprehensible professor dates back mainly to the heyday of Marxist and
structuralist thought, whose stylistic excesses sometimes masked (or even
resulted in) self-contradiction. But even professors that might get tarred as
falling victim to this tendency could sometimes be elegant stylists. Marjorie
Garber and Rosalind Krauss are, each in their own ways, excellent writers when
at their best. (Skeptics should read Garber's fantastic essay on the NFL in
Symptoms of Culture and Krauss's beautiful article "Tracing
Nadar.") Roland Barthes, in his later years, wrote in a powerful and moving
way:
For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells,
clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were
related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras,
in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears
in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. (Camera
Lucida)
This is no more difficult to read than Proust or Mann or
Nabokov, and a good deal less so than Hawthorne or Faulkner. Cardinal literary
theorists could have their beautiful moments, too. The Russian formalist Mikhail
Bakhtin always comes to my mind:
"Laughter has the remarkable power of
making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where
one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer
at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center,
doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it
freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an
object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus
clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a
vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it
would be impossible to approach the world realistically."—"Epic and Novel" in
The Dialogic Imagination
And I think those who
mock the most jargon-laden English professors underestimate their control of the
language. The truly incompetent who have no choice but to speak in "-isms" are
few in number. Those who cite Homi Bhabha's most tangled sentences probably
don't realize that he's a serene, warm personal essayist. Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar move smoothly between "speaking theory" and not. When Gubar writes a
sentence like, "Aestheticism—far from being an elitist retreat—is an anodyne to
anaesthetization, a defibrillator to the comatose," it's far more beautiful,
even with the five- and six-syllable words floating around in there, than the
exceedingly simple but often baffling style of the philosopher Derek Parfit.
Anyone who has read Derrida and Wittgenstein side-by-side will be struck by how
multi-clause verbosity can land you in a place very similar to severe
asceticism.
Finally, a polysyllabic, technical style doesn't necessarily
make one a bad writer or thinker. Those who decry Gayatri Spivak, Jacques
Derrida, or Fredric Jameson for their verbal contortions would do well to
remember that complicatedness, even when unnecessary, does not
necessarily mask lies—nor is simplicity a guarantee of truth. Political
advertising consultants have to speak to the masses in monosyllables; so did the
totalitarian propagandists of the twentieth century—and they are/were no closer
to the truth for it. Sometimes the aesthetic imagination compels a writer to
harsh sentences; sometimes the truth demands a little awkwardness. Who are we to
say that truth always walks about well-dressed?
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