Incomprehensible
Speak for yourself
December 20, 2008 29 comments
The Times Literary Supplement, a massively august organ to which I have occasionally contributed myself, is the most consistently stimulating periodical I know (of whatever periodicity). Its diarist, however, does have a rather tedious bee in his bonnet, or flea in his sock, about things like “political correctness” and strains of academic writing that can more or less plausibly be labelled “postmodern”. And so here is “J.C.” in the issue of December 12, casually impugning the intellects of TLS readers themselves:
Annals of incomprehensibility, an occasional series. Academics in English departments who used to write in private code are being gradually introduced to an important fact about language: that a written English sentence exists in order to be understood by other English speakers. Once the habit of writing comprehensible English has been unlearned, however, it can be difficult to reacquire the knack. Here is an example of a sentence which purports to be written in English, but which, we propose, is incomprehensible to all but a few. It is taken from Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting time and space in narrative fiction by Hilary P. Dannenberg:
Historical counterfactuals in narrative fiction frequently take an ontologically different form in which the counterfactual premise engenders a whole narrative world instead of being limited to hypothetical inserts embedded in the main actual world of the narrative text.
Is that really incomprehensible? You might not find it interesting, or you might want to see more of the context to find out exactly how much work “ontologically” is really doing there. But I suppose it’s fairly obvious what it’s saying, and that what it’s saying is indeed true. (One thinks of novels such as The Man in the High Castle.)
“J.C.” climaxes triumphantly:
Just think: someone read the book and endorsed its publication, someone edited it, someone else set it in type, designed a cover, compiled an index, read the proofs — yet hardly anyone can understand what’s in it.
Thus do defenders of plain speaking often insult the intelligence of the people for whom they are purportedly fighting.
Do you find that passage “incomprehensible”, readers?
No, I don’t think so, although it’s definitely in an academic register. The thing is, if you rephrase it in the register popular among the people who usually deal with the topic it becomes, I’d suggest, less clear. If you’re writing an alternate history (AH, in Speculative Fiction, or Spcfic, argot) book then it’s tempting to have your entire AH world be determined by your branch point: some combination of popular ideas about butterfly effects and the traditional preoccupation in AH writing with paradox and observer effects practically makes it a fanservice requirement. Moreover, the author’s reason for writing the AH in the first place is probably that they want to explore possible ramifications of the branch point chosen: keeping almost everything the same would show restraint but probably would not serve the point of the story.
Stephen Fry’s Making History plays with this very tendency, producing a counterfactual world with a very different political orientation which is nonetheless based on the premise that single branches don’t make brave new worlds. Playing the core trope of the AH genre, he says that you can’t eliminate Nazism by killing Hitler.
It’s not remotely incomprehensible although it might not be how I’d personally choose to express the same claim.
‘Ontologically’ is a perfectly good word although, like you, I’m not sure what work it’s doing there.
Utterly incomprehensible. I have no idea from that passage what book the writer is talking about. Though I have my suspicions that this is because it has been lifted out of context.
Funny how these ranters about “postmodernism” never turn their venom to other subjects, and complain how mere mortals can never understand fancy words like “abiogenesis”.
“Just think: someone read the book and endorsed its publication, someone edited it, someone else set it in type, designed a cover, compiled an index, read the proofs — yet hardly anyone can understand what’s in it.”
That’s certainly true of almost any monograph in a specialist area of mathematics or mathematical physics, but does not mean it is ‘incomprehensible’.
Any publication whose title adheres to the structure “[a] and [b]: [c]ing [d] in [e]” (there are many) is bound to be specialist in nature, and somewhat academic in tone. I’m struggling to think of an author thoroughly populist enough to contain no potentially “incomprehensible” passages. Even Tom Clancy gets a bit techno-fetishist specific there sometimes.
when i rolled in drunk last night i was definitely able to comprehend the offending paragraph, and i was literally too drunk at the time to type a comprehensible response. If this guy doesn’t like Dannenberg then he should really dip his toe into Badiou. It’s like Dannenberg filtered through the royal ‘we’ and a tendency to refer to one’s self in the third person- like the Rock does.
I was refraining from making comments about other authors I have trouble with, because that could go on for a long time. I deplore a great deal of “postmodern” writing: there are passages of Derrida and Bhabha which slip so readily off my brain that I can’t even bring myself to deal with them on a grammatical level, to point out that some of their sentences simply don’t make sense. I was in the audience when Gayatri Spivak fielded a question from a student who found her writing incomprehensible with “don’t fetishize clarity.” I think we’ve all felt, at some time, about some piece of writing, that we were being conned by meaningless verbiage, or asked to do more work as readers than was fair, by a writer who couldn’t be bothered to express themselves clearly. I bet we’ve all felt the effects of the peculiar network of social power and capital that exists in academic and critical circles, and suspected that some work gets promoted or denigrated regardless of the qualities we find in it.
So I’m confused: plenty of truly egregious writing must cross J.C’s desk: this was the best he could do to support what might be a legitimate line of argument?
OK, since I am emphatically not a literary scholar, here goes.
Shorter paragraph in question:
Sometimes people write what-if stories.
Longer shorter paragraph:
Things that are historically false may show up in fiction as incidentals, but often the point of the whole story is the different world that would have resulted from a difference in history.
If these are wrong, then the passage is indeed incomprehensible to me. If they’re right, then one might inquire what purpose was served by the less transparent statement.
There may be such a purpose. The plain-language bozos (none of present company, so far as I can see) who think that every thesis and every law should be written in ninth-grade prose (sorry — Second Form?) give one as much of the pip as the obfuscators whose “ontological” is pure name-dropping.
It occurs to me that this survey might be unfair to “J.C.”, in that the average intelligence of unspeak.net readers is very possibly even higher than that of TLS readers.
Richard —
That’s a good point. If he cries wolf with something so unobjectionable, who will believe him next time?
If I’d come across that paragraph I would have skipped it as being hard work, or chucked the book or article aside. The “ontologically” here is like the “existential” that crops up all over the place, that is, like the appendix is to the human body, something that has no function, and can cause pain and discomfort.
I take it what the paragraph means is that there is alternative history fiction e.g. The Alteration, where the action takes place in imaginary historical times, which in the case of The Alteration is that the Reformation has not happened and Europe remains a Catholic theocracy. You also have historical novels like the Flashman series where the scene of the novel is true to history e.g. the events occur in the Crimean War but the character of Flashman is imaginary.
Or does it mean something entirely different?
It occurs to me that this survey might be unfair to “J.C.”, in that the average intelligence of unspeak.net readers is very possibly even higher than that of TLS readers.
I was going to go along with that until I remembered Oliver Kamm was a reader.
Touché!
No. “Ontologically” here distinguishes counterfactuals as mere novelistic detail from counterfactuals as sole generators of a world enormously divergent from our own. The former might be removed (as in editing) and leave the novel pretty much the same. The latter absolutely may not be; either the counterfactual remains implicit (“where did Hitler go? guess he’s dead or something”) or the entire narrative unravels. And such contrasting of incidental against essential features is exactly the subject of ontology.
A handy mnemonic to help one remember the distinction between metaphysics and ontology is that metaphysics is the study of what there is, while ontology deals with what there really is.
The rest of the sentence is already devoted to making that distinction, so that’s not a very good argument for the necessity of the term “ontologically” in it.
But you are talking about the ontology of novels (ie, are their counterfactuals incidental or essential features?); while plainly Dannenberg himself is talking about the ontology of the counterfactuals.
Perhaps the second part of the sentence (after “form”) is just a gloss of the first. But I remain unconvinced, without sight of more context, as to what work “ontologically” is really doing in it.
A sort of help is at hand — from this page, you can download an excerpt of the “incomprehensible” book in question. Here, he appears mainly to use “ontologically” in the context of a reality-hierarchy of “possible worlds”.
Porlock Junior at comment 8 beat me to the punch.
Yes, people love to ridicule bad academic prose. Although there are copious examples to choose from, the impulse is typically anti-intellectual.
Even so, let’s grant the point and think about why many academics are bad writers. Then again, it might make more sense to ask why we would expect academics to be good writers. Are good writers in plentiful supply in other professions? I don’t think so.
Having finished my own Ph.D. in English this year, I can tell you that there was never a course or a seminar on writing well in all of my studies. In my first year of coursework, one professor identified all that I was doing wrong as a writer. I asked that professor to be my dissertation advisor. But that is not a typical experience. The critiques that we are given have to do with methodology, sources, interpretation, ideas, and so on. No one ever says, ‘Your writing sucks and here’s why.’ They probably should.
Steve, your timestamp is still on daylight time.
Not any more!
Jeff Strabone – people may expect academics whose field is English to be good writers in that they have presumably read a lot of good writing as part of their studies, and should at least know what good writing sounds like. The bad prose ridiculed is often from exhibition catalogues or bureaucracies as well as from academia.
Also, I don’t think the impulse to ridicule bad prose is anti-intellectual. No-one who was not a physicist would expect to understand a paper on physics on first sight. However, a literate person expects they should be able to understand a piece of prose about historical novels. I would have thought it was pro-intellectual, that is, showing a desire that ideas should be comprehensible.
Ridiculing bad prose is not anti-intellectual. Ridiculing humanities scholars as effete because their writing is difficult and defies so-called ‘common sense’ is.
Utterly incomprehensible as written. This does not mean that it is not trying to say something interesting. But, there is no reason why it can’t be said in a comprehensible way, except for the need of some to sound more officious than others. This is not anti-intellectual, but anti-pomposity, and pro-clarity.
The real crime is that instead of focusing on the ideas, the reader must stop and think about grammar.
I think it means something like this: “Narrative fiction frequently creates an entirely new world by inserting details which are different from historical fact. These counterfactual details become the premise for the new, fictional world, (encouraging the reader to compare it to the real one).”
But how can you tell, if it’s utterly incomprehensible?
In the crepuscular hours of my annual feriation, having read this post and the comments, I have come to the awful realisation of my parviscience.
On first reading the passage I wondered, first, what it meant and then, why an intelligent and literate author would go to such lengths to make it more difficult than necessary to understand what he meant. Yes you can understand it and of course hoi polloi would, for the most part, find the passage adiaphanous but anyone would argue that we ought not all and always bend and fashion our communications to the limited capacities of the least linguistically advantaged among us.
In literature and other communication are there are rival schools of thought that you could call the holophrastic, “less is more”, and the locupletative, “more is more”. But we love them both, don’t we, when they work. We love the baroque when the complexity itself is a necessary part of the communication. We do not love it when it is pretentious. So in this case is more really more? If we were to remove some of the words in the passage, how much meaning would really be lost?
But oh dear to say such a thing, to suggest the removal of “counterfactual” and “ontological” and “embedded” and even “narrative” is to unleash the tarassis occasioned by a perception of supposed anti-intellectualism when what it really is is anti-lexiphanicism.
After all, the language and style are periphrastic to the point of obnubilation. You would think that plain language was a terriculament for the author.
Alternatively, the intent is pleinotic which explains the lexiphanicism.
For my own taste, and despite what he says in this post, I very much prefer the arudshield of Steven’s prose style.
Isn’t there an issue though that academics decide what ‘good style’ is and then often write very badly themselves? What proportion of great novels have been written by English professors? I was going to study English at university but then I read the introduction to a collection of Borges stories, which cited a paper called ‘The fecal Dialectic’. Apparently this was the definitive study of the sublime poetry and fascinating ‘thought experiments’ of the Argentinian, so I thought literary studies were not for me (so apologies for my appalling spelling and grammar).
To be honest I was already shrinking from the idea of studying literature when I read a collection of Gogol stories, which rather than focusing on Gogol’s interesting style (as Nabokov did in his best book) sifted through his works for evidence that he may have been a subconscious homosexual (why not a gerontophile? Or would that be breaking the acceptable barriers of literary criticism).
So I don’t see anything wrong especially with criticizing academics for not using clear English, because they are probably equally culpable of criticizing others unfairly or of deterring others from reading great works.
As for the passage cited it is comprehensible but pompous because it contains such an obvious message. Why alter history if it is not going to change the weave of the book? No one is going to write a novel set in the modern world where everything is normal and recognisable and then briefly say, e.g. ‘Are you going to the Pink Floyd concert at Hastings where William the Conqueror was cut to pieces’? ‘No, I’m flying off to watch Status Quo at Milvian Bridge, you know where Constantine I was defeated’?
I presume this is what they mean by:
‘being limited to hypothetical inserts embedded in the main actual world of the narrative text’?
Roger — chapeau!
Gregor, if you seek an example of a literature professor who is also a brilliant writer, try Eric Griffiths (eg, or).
Thanks for the links Steven. I just wrote a long message, but it seems to have vanished; my computer automatically disabled javascript. Urgh.
Oh, drat. I do recommend cultivating the habit of
ctrl-a ctrl-c(orcmd-aetc) before pressing any comment-submit button on the internets btw.If he cries wolf with something so unobjectionable, who will believe him next time?
I must not be in the high-intellect group here, because I can’t figure out if you’re taking the piss. I’m guessing you probably are.
I was agreeing with you!