The Art of Obscurity

 

It may not be up on a par with finding a solution to the problem of world peace, or even the catastrophe-in-waiting that is climate change, but if there’s one thing I could alter about the contemporary world, it’s the way that literary studies are perceived. For several decades now, literary criticism has been charged with obscurantism, elitism, and sheer pointlessness; schools don’t teach literature because children find it ‘boring’, university students accuse their English course of putting them off reading books for life, and governments have joyfully chopped budgets in departments of arts, because they are not seen to either generate income or provide tangible solutions to the current cultural crises. On the face of it, reading stories and discussing them can look like a self-indulgent pleasure (even if writing essays on them is seen as a futile, painful farce), and yet to approach this field of study from such an accountant’s perspective is to miss the point entirely. Language is the only means at our disposal for representing ourselves and the world we live in; we neglect the study of its possibilities and limitations at our own risk; politicians tell us stories, the media tells us stories, even science produces working hypotheses, which are fundamentally stories with good architecture. As individuals we don’t exist except through the changing landscape of our endlessly unfolding personal narrative. It’s imperative that we understand how stories work, or else we remain at their mercy, confusing or being confused by all the different forms of truth and falsehood we have to juggle every day, or bludgeoned into action by the brute power of statistics (which were ever at the mercy of interpretation but that’s a well-kept secret).

 

It’s not just the structure of stories that’s significant, either. Their content comes at the cost of taking a step backwards from the white waters of life, a moment’s pause and contemplation that can be ripe for transformation into a critical or insightful view into the way we live. Those who do not understand their history, either personal or collective, are condemned to repeat it. No other discipline provides the same opportunity for negotiating with this recalcitrant, remarkable business of existing. Neither science nor economics can help us in that way, for their perspectives are too narrow and too cold. Making a good life, battling with the overwhelming force of emotions, understanding ethical endeavour, confronting tragedy, disaster and despair; I cannot promise that the answers to these most human of conundrums will appear between the pages of a book, but a book has many and varied ways of at least posing the questions.

 

So, ever ready to understand the history of the decline in prestige of English studies, I was pleased to come across Literature: An Embattled Profession by Carl Woodring. In this book, Woodring analyses the role of literature from its earliest days as a form of study to its most recent unhappy manifestations in the form of poststructuralistm and postmodernism. The blurb assures me he will ‘offer critical insights into ways to rescue the profession literary study from insularity and dissension.’ Well, two chapters in and I can’t say that I’m terribly happy myself with the learned Professor Woodring. He’s been tracing the development of literary studies from their distant basis in Latin and Greek to their early twentieth century incarnation via philology, or the comparative and historical study of linguists (the business-end of language – how it makes meaning). But to do so, he has penned many a fine, scholarly passage like this (brace yourselves, for I’m being ironic):

 

‘As infrequently as the Victorian scientists called positivists (meaning slaves to Comte, or know-nothings) did the literary scholars of the thirties claim to be positive. Without grasping the implications of Jevon’s prediction that “the Reign of Law will prove to be an unverified hypothesis, the Uniformity of Nature an ambiguous expression, the certainty of our scientific inferences to a great extent a delusion,” T. H. Huxley came to realise that the reality studied by scientists was “a symbolical language, by the aid of which Nature can be interpreted in terms apprehensible to our intellects,” Most of the literary scholars had read Huxley and knew fiction to be the representation of representation. No deep chasm there. They knew that “facts” had to be filtered and interpreted. But awareness that what happened in the French Revolution would always be uncertain did not for them mean that War and Peace could be studied only as a language.’

 

After the first couple of times I’d read this paragraph, my considered, professional opinion could be summed up by a resounding: ‘Eh?’ I mean, it looked like English, and individual sentences contained the odd sub clause I could follow, but whatever was the man driving at? What was his point? Who on earth were these people he cited? I felt that, for a critic determined to chastise literary theory for its obscurity, and return literary studies to their rightful place of value in the educational hierarchy, he couldn’t really be making a worse job of it. Give me difficult theory any day, rather than a man who cannot resist feeling clever by talking in a series of allusive sphinx-like utterances. It’s the ultimate in sloppy, lazy thinking, as far as I can see, because people who write in this way never need to pause to consider with any clarity what they want to say, and what their audience needs to know in order to follow it. The whole discourse takes place at a level where only the most well-read literary scholar can go, and the rest of us are obliged to feel stupid. Only you may remember that I refuse to endorse such a charge; there are many, many complaints you could level at me, to which I would lower my head in acknowledgement, but I am not stupid. I’m also relatively well-read, so if I can’t follow this writing, the fault does not lie with me, but with its author. That it should be an author who is decrying the loss of ‘clarity, force and elegance’ in writing, and who sees the decline in literary studies occurring at the moment when good old-fashioned lessons in rhetoric are abandoned (provided I’ve actually understood his argument), is the ultimate in humourless ironies. What is poor old embattled literature to do with such scholars as its champions? Or to put it another way, with friends like this, who needs enemies?

 

As I un-hunch my shoulders and take a few deep, calming breaths to dispel the vexatious effects of Prof. Woodring’s prose, I’ll just take a moment to let you know that I’m away on holiday now for a few days in Bath, my most favourite city in the UK, to visit friends and the January sales. The doors of the reading room are not exactly closed, just pulled to, and they will in any case reopen on Sunday. Have a great few days, enjoy your reading, and beware of English scholars bearing cryptic quotations!