Essays on topics which seem obscure today, it’s perfectly true, might someday prove important for reasons that we cannot anticipate. Perhaps future scholars will fit them into now unknown patterns. But we shouldn’t assume that all essays are important just because we can write them. At a minimum, we should say at the outset why non-specialist readers might be interested in the essay’s conclusions. How might the essay fit into a larger, better known pattern? If I wrote an essay about a play by Henry Glapthorne, for example, oughtn’t I to say why it might tell us something, if not about Shakespeare, at least about Middleton, Davenant, or 17th Century drama in general?
We sometimes hear in scholarly conferences that we “privilege” Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. That assertion perplexes me. Is it meant to suggest that we have elevated these authors to a status higher than they deserve? To me, such a suggestion can’t be sustained. Or is it meant to suggest that the study of English literature should be reduced to intellectual egalitarianism, and all literature be treated the same? To me, that is nonsense. All men may be created equal, but all literature they create is not. We shall never enroll English majors if we plan to have them study Glapthorne and Shakespeare in equal proportion.
Let’s think of our problem in terms of American football strategy. We need plays designed to gain three and four yards, to be sure. They mark off real, albeit incremental, progress. We can’t go long on every play, or we will get nowhere. But we do need to mix in some long plays. When successfully executed those are the plays that actually win games. For us, long plays will comprise major advances in our knowledge or understanding of literature that matters to everyone. They will convey the excitement of discovering something new and important. They will engage both curious undergraduates, including perhaps those seeking majors, and members of the educated general public.
The classic long play in English literature scholarship remains John Livingston Lowes’s Road to Xanadu, concerning the origins of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” Lowes’s scholarship vastly expanded our understanding of Coleridge’s mind and poetry. More than that, his book was sensationally popular with the educated public, and has remained popular since its publication in 1927. In my field of Elizabethan drama, I would also nominate the accumulated works of Walter W. Greg. He began around 1910 with a great chaos of materials, and by the time he finished 50 years later he had given us a reasonably clear picture of what transpired in the world of Elizabethan theater. He never gained Lowes’s popularity with the educated public (he didn’t need to; he was very rich), but even today his learning continues to shape the way both scholars and the public perceive this field.
Both Lowes and Greg, unsurprisingly, have supplied the materials for small industries of scholars who since have pointed out the deficiencies in their work. Greg, we can all agree, was overenthusiastic in his penchant for classification. So was Darwin. No one, probably, could synthesize so much disparate information without making some mistakes. We need to appreciate the long gains and not ululate over the mistakes, lest we discourage others from attempting their own long plays. We don’t want to behave like crabs in a barrel, each circling around in our own little way, pulling down any crab among us who manages to gain a spot near the top of the barrel.
Whether any particular essay or book represents a long or short gain, all literature scholarship should be well and persuasively written. A principal reason why undergraduates should major in languages and literature, as I mentioned above, is that those studies will enhance the students’ writing skills. That point should be illustrated in our own scholarly writing. All too often, however, it is not. Many of our essays, to be blunt, are not well written.
The PMLA makes particularly frustrating reading. Authors rarely begin their essays with proper exordia. We are forced to plow into each essay with little idea about what the subject is, what the author means to tell us, and what the author’s plan is for getting us there. Without such an exordium reading any essay is a cumbersome, inefficient process. If we plow ahead nevertheless we often encounter little effort to signal to the reader the essay’s organizational strategy and many sentences that are difficult to comprehend. Let me just pick a couple, more or less at random, from the current issue: “More often, scholars of literary phonography participate in a Derridean critique of phonocentrism, reading in the gramophone an extreme case of the voice’s detachability from the speaker, body, and presence.” “Each poem is an experiment—an attempt to establish a collective response to the fact-value dichotomy that avoids nihilism and what Wittgenstein calls the ‘supernatural.’”
How shall we persuade undergraduates to take our courses to enhance their writing skills when we ourselves write such things? And if our work should be read by curious undergraduates and the educated public shouldn’t we seek to reach them with arguments that they can follow and prose they can understand? A secondary benefit also attends clear writing, as any litigator will tell you. Obscurity in expression can conceal flawed reasoning. Clear writing requires the writer to lay his or her cards on the table. We do scholarship because our work matters. Our regard for that work should be reflected in what we write and how we write it.