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Guest Blog: Stepping out of Jargon

Published 8 months ago

Several years ago I attended a conference on Walt Whitman.  Like most such gatherings it was lively and entertaining, also like others I had attended or participated in this conference concluded in a bar for, ahem, ‘lunch.’

I found myself seated next to a friendly and very talkative young woman who had been awarded her PhD in English Literature just months earlier.  She had been critiquing the proceedings while at the same time identifying the visiting scholars and writers seated at the bar and close-by tables, remaining silent only long enough to pick up on some of the clever banter swirling round the tables and up and down the bar—the ‘one-up-man-ship’ not uncommon to gatherings of literary types. After a while she interrupted herself on both ends—commenting and listening—to undertake a frantic search of her backpack. Before finding what she was searching for (a travel pack of tissues) she had removed several paperback books and placed them in my lap: “Hold these for a minute,” she asked between sniffs. One of the books was the latest reprinting of John Fowles’ novel, The Magus.  After examining the new cover, I thumbed across the book once or twice, opening the novel wherever my thumb caught a page.

“Oh, do you know the book?” she asked.  “I’m teaching it this fall.”

I didn’t answer that my own thesis was on John Fowles. (Yes, a cad. I know. I know.)

I closed the book, added it to the several she had given me, and placed the pile in her lap.  “’The novel is dead,’” I answered.  Her face registered surprise, her back arched; she scrunched her tissue to the size of a ping-pong ball.  Before she could utter a word (she was as infected with the cleverness virus as the others at the bar), I continued:

“The novel is dead, as dead as alchemy.  I realized that one day before the war.  Do you know what I did?  I burnt every novel I possessed. Dickens.  Cervantes. Dostoievsky. Flaubert.  All the great and all the small.  I even burnt something I wrote myself when I was too young to know better.  I burnt them out there.  It took me all day.  The sky took their smoke, the earth their ashes.  It was a fumigation.  I have been happier and healthier ever since.’”

She stared at me for the longest moment before returning the books to her backpack.  Head down, she fingered her glass of Sauvignon Blanc, pulled a new tissue toward her nose, and then brushing her hair back from her forehead, looked at me and said: “Well, I don’t agree.  The novel is a rich, viable art-source. It’s as important to culture today as it’s always been. More so now than ever.  How could you believe that?”

When I felt assured that she was not putting me on—for she too could be clever at a moment's notice, I reminded myself—I reached beneath the table and into her bag.  I fished her backpack for her paperback copy of The Magus, and opened it to chapter fifteen, to the page that contained the paragraph I had recited to her, and put the book into her hands.  “There,” I said, “‘The novel is dead,’ you see, it says so right there.”

She read the paragraph that I had recited, and then laughed.  I smiled and waited for her response to my cleverness.  After what seemed like more time than necessary, she lifted her eyes from the text and said, “What do you think can be linked to the initiatory function, the symbolism he places within the allegorical, pseudo-divine, yet repressive forces at play, both inside and outside the masque?” (Yes, I have had nightmares over that..)

 Obviously, she was cleverer than I.  Also obvious to me at that moment was that she had been dead serious in posing her question in that foreign language. She spoke ‘Eng. Lit,’ and I no longer spoke that language. (As with any foreign language, the dictum, ‘use it, or lose it!’ applies here as well.) Fortunately, I was saved by another ‘native’ speaker at the bar, one who immediately proved himself superbly fluent in ‘Eng. Lit’-speak.

That night I recalled something that the critic George Steiner had written, one of the essays in his book, Language and Silence, in which he commented on what he felt to be a malaise in the study of English Literature.  “The entire notion of research, when applied to literature is problematic.  As there are fewer and fewer really significant texts to edit, and this is what doctoral research in literature originally meant, as the historical or technical problems to be cleared up grow less and less substantial, the whole thesis business grows more tenuous…. 

“The contrasting notion that a dissertation should be a piece of literary criticism, that a young man or woman in the very early twenties should have something fresh or profound or decisive to say…is equally perplexing.  Few people are ever able to say anything new about major literature, and the idea that one can do so when one is young is almost paradoxical.  Literature takes a great deal of living with and living by….The combing of increasingly barren ground for some tiny fragments, or the large, uneasy vagueness of premature generality or judgment…is either a genuine discipline…?”

I thought again of the young woman heady with her newly earned PhD.  How well did she know the novelist's ideas or the book she was about to teach? John Fowles, the internationally celebrated British author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and other novels, in numerous interviews, has repeated his need for an audience of ‘active readers,’ readers who, along with the author, will become  full participants in the creative experience that ultimately leads to something of a symbiotic relationship between writer and reader.  Was she, this jargon-loaded scholar-to-be, already lost to that army of academics that George Steiner had found to “deal with trivia or matters so restrictive” that one can barely take the atomized subject matter seriously?

Fowles himself has been particularly critical of academics in which  “the jargon the theory-holders evolve to express themselves becomes a kind of cancer, a mortality….What is it in theorists that makes them wrap themselves in a language that only their fellow-believers can understand…?”

Despite the overwhelming amount of scholarly attention devoted to his work, Fowles continued to “have strongly heretical views on the value of literary analysis for the ordinary reader….I believe they [his books] ought to mean what you, the ordinary reader, think they mean; not what some academic authority or professional dissector of texts tells you they mean.  I believe it is profoundly unimportant that you may ‘miss’ some of the subtleties, structures, cross-relationships, other literary influences…all that stuff.  A novel…is not a machine, a thing you don’t understand till you have taken it to bits.”

 In short, books, stories, or at least some of them, should be lived and felt; not placed and tagged.  I truly believe this, though there was a time when I was as guilty as the young academic I’ve made reference to in these remarks.  Jargon-loaded, theory-besotted, I sat with friends and colleagues in graduate-study seminars, and like high school biology students performing the ritual dissection of a frog, we used our ‘scalpels’ (read highlighters) to slice open and examine section after section of the greats and not so greats of English Literature.  In retrospect, not one of us had been able to offer “something fresh or profound or decisive to say,” to borrow Steiner’s observation, though we didn’t know this at the time.

But I did learn this about myself: it was time to walk out on the jargon.

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