Scholarly writing and emotional knowledge.

Publication: Papers on Language & Literature

Publication Date: 22-SEP-07

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All our writing is spun out of our guts, whatever kind of writer we are, but we arrange many codes of indirection to avoid letting our guts be seen in our academic articles and books. This makes those who write about imaginary persons become, themselves, fictions for the reader. In turn, the reader will resist this recognition mightily in order to maintain trust in the knowledge being produced. First guts, then trust, and only then guts in a finer tone--with only partial trust! Eventually, the professional reader of professional writers comes to understand: knowledge is what we're persuaded is the case in the world, and no scholar's entirely powerful or charming. That leaves openings for my disagreement with the scholar's claims and warrants and my show-me attitude toward the scholar's manner.

EMOTIONAL KNOWLEDGE IN A FIELD THAT WITHDRAWS FROM EMOTION

There is no way to prove Mikhail Ryklin's claim, in conversation, that every work of scholarship originates in a trauma that is pushed below the surface in the writing--but Ryklin himself has actually shown this in his essay "Bodies of Terror," where he reads M. M. Bakhtin's book on Rabelais as Bakhtin's disguised response to the Terror of the Russian 1930s. Writing as trauma is the wildest thesis, but trauma is more valuable than vague animus. It may not be trauma in the sense of physical/mental harm or family disruption; more likely here, it would be trauma as an intellectual assignment whose roots can be partly traced to personal experience, like the outsider/insider mind of a Camus or a Derrida raised in Algeria away from the metropole of Paris, or like the working class family life that gave D. H. Lawrence his anger and insight as well as his limitation. Exclusion and suppression prepare for overthrow. Trauma is attractive as a preliminary explanation, because the financial and career rewards for scholarly writing are not obviously equivalent to what gets paid out in dogged reading, carrying books out of libraries and back, outlining, drafting, putting family and life on hold for long stretches, taking corrective comments from friends and strangers, suffering rejection at publishers, making the index and choosing the cover, writing jacket copy, paying permission fees, correcting galleys, and paying for extra copies: there has to be an explanation beyond money for the lonely effort of spirit that drives the scholarly author to ransack libraries and burn up the years.

But the original trauma explanation is arbitrary, because it requires us to discern a change in the structure of the scholar-author's mind and character and then to find it in every new work. Let us more cautiously ask: how do scholarly articles and books deal with scenes of emotion, and how do they perform emotional knowledge, rousing floods of feeling through argument and evidence? Narrative is the answer most ready to hand: scholarly books also come from and appeal to the storytelling urge, and they are easier to write and read if we think of them as the unfolding of stories. What are the filters and baffles through which scholarly stories are told? In Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, the essential story of their literary criticism is Marx's stages of history, but energy in the one comes from dialectical reversals and surprise collisions of cultural levels, and in the other from the severe wit of a working-class outsider who speaks in the halls of privilege. In influential scholarship, often part of the story is the author's force of affect: M. M. Bakhtin's dialogic inclusiveness, W. K. Wimsatt's knotty style of compression with its patrician disdain, F. R. Leavis's lists of grievances against attackers and his repeated watchwords of emphatic assertion, Donald Davie's formal and theological rigor and his withdrawal from confessional candor, Harold Bloom's grumpy defense of Aesthetic and Canon against New Historicist critics whom he calls the School of Resentment, Stephen Greenblatt's personal turn in the statement that he wants to speak with the dead, Jonathan Culler's and Judith Butler's sober good sense in summarizing others' arguments, Elaine Scarry's decision to end Dreaming by the Book (1999) with pages describing mourning doves and cardinals in her garden. One comes to such summaries of emotional knowledge by remembering the effect of whole books.

In the last quarter-century there has been much serious consideration of the convertibility of scholarly and imaginative writing, to the advantage of the scholarly as imaginative. It is normal now to speak of books about books with the same attentiveness we'd give to novels, plays, or poems, and the fictive attributes of non-fictional prose are familiar to us due to the work of such rhetoricians as Hayden White. Impersonal, we've come to learn, is another word for personality that has been sent around a detour, and that just makes the neutral voice more intriguing as a guise--not something we can dispense with. Now that scholarly writing is no longer a synonym for impersonal, academic writing has often managed a more omnipresent I speaker and opened the pages to straight, even confessional, autobiography. I had to read to the last paragraph of one of my example-studies for this article, to find Richard Helgerson making exactly this point of mine, about several seventeenth-century authors, each of whose discourse of nationhood is also a discourse of self:

In representing England, these writers represent themselves. Their individual authority depends on the authority they attribute to the social and political entity of which they are part. Every man, says Hobbes, belongs in the body of Leviathan. But every man is also the author of Leviathan. All the apparent displacements of rule, all the apparent defenses of it, are so many forms of self-writing. The face that peers out from our various constructions of the nation is inevitably our own. For those who were prepared to recognize it--or rather to recognize him--Hobbes made this point in a particularly telling way. In giving up his right to govern himself, as he says we must all do when we author Leviathan, Hobbes gives up nothing at all. He is the sovereign for whom he apologizes; he, the apocalyptic other with whose ungodly body he merges. In Hobbes's writing of the nation, perhaps in all national self-writing, self-alienation and self-aggrandizement are one. (294)

This was a perfect circle if not a perfect confirmation, because it had me quoting what Helgerson says about Hobbes, who said it best and first.

Even this small example of a convergence of contemporaries entails a question, of what may be the rhetoric of scholarship in such an era as the present--the same question that Aristotle asked in his Rhetoric. Aristotle's answer is ours, too: we need to know everything we can about the emotions of an audience in order to evoke or suppress the audience's emotions when we speak.

In the late-50s moment of Robert Lowell's book Life Studies, Lowell defended the poet's freedom to invent details in family scenes in order to convey the meaning vividly. That makes perfect sense so long as the inventions are consonant with exactly reproduced details so the reader cannot, need not know the difference. There, ripeness of virtual emotion is all. In scholarship, we do not invent details, but we invent (or, often, borrow from others) their selection and omission, ordering, and the styles of their description. Here framing is all--and phrasing.

SEVEN EXAMPLES OF SCHOLARLY WRITING

Here are seven examples of recent and successful scholarly writing, from literary criticism and philosophy. (1) I'll treat them as an array, asking the same interpretive questions about all of them. How do these authors manifest their knowledge of human emotion overall, and in local detail? In representative passages that show what it is to encounter each writer, what are the methods that project a scholar as an imaginary person?

The point of the exercise is to show that some valuable scholarly writings may be conducive to more (Francis Barker) or less (Susan James) presentation of self than others, even within this narrow range; and that flaws in arguments probably coordinate with faulty rhetoric--but they don't have to, because Francis Barker's outrageous style may impede the reader but does not fatally harm the cogency of Barker's points.

The framing structures of the scholarly study, which enable argument to show affect, are: preface, epigraph, acknowledgements, part and chapter structures, summaries, statement of concepts, title as standing for the intent of the whole, constitutive metaphors, movement between claims and warrants for claims in the examples, movement between higher and lower levels of generality in the introduction and handling of examples, gestures of conclusion. The phrasing-level attributes of the scholarly study, which also enable affect in a more distributed and local way, are: proliferation of terms, perspicuousness of and devotion to examples, diagrams, admissions, ironies, humor, citations of affiliates and disaffiliates, quantity and type of footnotes,...

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