Were you wondering what kind of essay I could have written that would arouse such furor at Cambridge?
I had no intention of withholding it indefinitely. I was just trying to create a bit of suspense.
Though I occasionally call myself a "writer," I'm not exactly, if you must be strictly technical about it, a published writer. But I'm working on the various tricks of the trade -- deferment, cliffhangers, surprise twists, jokes and puns, bathos -- because it seems you can make pretty big bucks at this sort of thing. Consider a news item that appeared just yesterday in the Times:
When Carol Boruk of La Marque, Tex., saw Kevin Trudeau selling his book on a late-night infomercial last November, she was mesmerized.
Mr. Trudeau was good-looking, energetic and articulate, and talked about nonpharmaceutical remedies that could eradicate virtually any disease - and that he said were being suppressed by the government and the drug industry.
Ms. Boruk, who suffered from allergies and recurring headaches, called the number on the screen and happily forked over $30 for a copy.
So have millions of others. In the last three weeks, the updated and expanded version of "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About," which Mr. Trudeau self-published, has been outsold only by "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," according to Nielsen Book-Scan.
The book has been on the New York Times list of best-selling how-to and advice books for eight weeks and is currently No. 1. Mr. Trudeau's publishing company says it has sold roughly three million copies since last August.
Mr. Trudeau has amassed millions from producing infomercials and from direct sales of products. Mr. Trudeau says he does not know how much money he has, but it is "probably a lot." He said he owns 10 cars and dozens of houses and condominiums around the world. Sam Catanese, president of Infomercial Monitoring Service, an infomercial research and tracking firm, said Mr. Trudeau, who is unmarried, was usually in the company of beautiful women.
[Edited excerpt from "After Jail and More, Salesman Scores Big With Cure-All Book," New York Times, August 28, 2005.]
So you'll understand if there was a brief delay before my unveiling ....
The Downside
Uriel Wittenberg
uw@urielw.com
August 7, 2005
I've generally enjoyed the Cambridge experience and the two subject courses I've been taking in the Literature program. The plenary lectures, however, have not been a thrill.
Several plenary lectures have featured LitCrit, a type of exercise which sometimes seizes on things that are thoroughly normal and treats them as remarkable. Bharat Tandon, in Monday's "Jane Austen and the Morality of conversation," urged his audience to note that although reading literature can be said to be a kind of conversation, there is a crucial distinction between, on the one hand, reading, and on the other, "live" conversation between people: In reading, unlike conversation, we cannot answer back, and we have the option at any time of shutting the book and returning to it later.
Fred Parker, in his "Negotiations with the dead" on Tuesday, dwelled on pitfalls of modernizing ancient texts that seemed apparent. For example, one might update a classic poem about a king by substituting a contemporary political figure. However, Dr. Parker pointed out, if the political figure is notoriously corrupt, that is likely to transform the poem's meaning.
This is true. But ... why on earth would one make such a substitution if one wanted to preserve the original meaning?
I am guessing the main point of the lecture was that it's impossible to reproduce, upon modern readers, the effect that classic texts had on readers at the time of their original creation. That is easy to believe. And one supposes an interesting talk could offer examples with illustrations, explaining the difficulty of reconciling the sociocultural assumptions of different eras.
But the king/corrupt politician substitution does not appear to be an example, because it does not seem to be a plausible effort to reproduce the text's original effect. If you want to re-tell an old story about a minstrel, and you truly wish to bring the same sense to your audience that the old story brought to its original audience, then don't replace the minstrel with Elvis Presley. That would just be silly. Unless the ancient minstrel shook his hips a lot and made girls scream.
Wednesday offered respite from LitCrit with Jill Paton-Walsh, who delivered "Facing the consequences: the novel as a mode of prophecy," a title she said she'd chosen in order to leave herself free to talk about anything. Indeed, her main subject had little to do with prophecy, but rather concerned the ways in which reading can yield moral guidance or insight.
Aristotle, she said, considered poetry superior to history in this respect, because history's wealth of specific detail made it inapplicable to different circumstances, whereas poetry could be universal and bring general insights that would apply for all time.
Ms. Paton-Walsh's take on the situation was different from Aristotle's. She agreed that poetry (or fiction), rather than factual recountings, was the place to go for moral guidance -- but this was because only fiction could produce the wealth of detail necessary to arrive at a moral conclusion. Factual recountings were always inadequate because they always represented a distortion of the truth.
One could question, in fact, whether truth is a meaningful concept for Ms. Paton-Walsh -- who is incidentally herself a writer of fiction. She offered her audience the striking assertion, for example, that all autobiography is "deceit." And she appeared to consider memory in general to be a dubious sensation. To support her general skepticism about memory, she described to the audience a particular memory she retained from her own childhood and stated that she could not be sure whether it was real or imagined.
Well. I have no trouble believing that Ms. Paton-Walsh's memory of an experience when she was 5 is hazy. But I don't believe that makes me incompetent to give an accurate and detailed account of something I experienced yesterday, or even 5 years ago.
But for Ms. Paton-Walsh, factual claims about the world are highly suspect -- with one important exception: those made by the OED. While Ms. Paton-Walsh attributes extreme frailty to men striving to remember their own lives, she attributes extreme potency to the OED's ability to cast back into human history and accurately discern the earliest occurrence of concepts. With the OED's help, Ms. Paton-Walsh has dated the concept of human individuality to sometime around 500 years ago. Ms. Paton-Walsh's technique is simple: she just looked up the word "personality." It was 500 years ago, the OED tells her, that the word first appeared.
Of course, it hardly seems deniable that people living 600 years ago might have had a different word to denote what we now refer to as "personality." But Ms. Paton-Walsh seems to find it much more plausible that people back in those days thought of other people as merely belonging to "types," rather than as individuals with distinct personalities.
Thursday marked a return to LitCrit with a vengeance, as Dr. Ato Quayson delivered his "Autism and dialogism." I greatly doubt that most people emerged knowing what "dialogism" means. I plucked out and recorded one revelation which Dr. Quayson seemed quite excited about, since he repeated it in emphatic tones more than once:
The implied interlocutor is always assimilated to different categories of silence.
Not only have I no idea what that means; I also have a positive wish to preserve my mind from the semantic muck that would have to be trudged through to understand it. The statement is LitCrit -- jargonism, contrived complexity, pointless uglification.
Academics endure LitCrit for the sake of qualifications and career progress. There is one indication, for us in the Cambridge summer program, that they too find it loathsome: The alacrity with which Dr. Parker vacates the premises immediately after introducing the day's plenary lecturer.
Although academics, unfortunately, have to pay for their credentials by subjecting themselves to LitCrit exercises, continuing education students are a different kettle of fish. This is generally supposed to be a non-credit program (although it turns out, nevertheless, that some students are in class for no other purpose than credentials). Most of us, presumably, have been drawn to Cambridge by the promise of literature, which gives pleasure. Does it make sense that LitCrit, which never gives pleasure, is being dispensed to us?
There is a more general objection to the plenary lectures: This is an English program -- and one of the most central purposes of English, just like other languages, is to communicate. Yet I would contend that remarkably little communication has been taking place in most of the plenaries. I have no doubt this could be objectively verified by asking audience members individually what points were conveyed in the lectures. Most would have trouble identifying any clearly made points; and I would expect little overlap among the responses audience members did manage to produce.
This would also apply to a lecture that appeared to be enjoyed by most people present, Stewart Eames's talk on stagecraft. Dr. Eames delivered the talk with panache and style. But what was the substance?
Dr. Eames told us how Shakespeare, in King Lear, creates the illusion in his audience of being at the height of a mighty mountain, looking down; then, immediately afterwards, the opposite illusion -- of being at the depths of the same mountain, looking up; then, Dr. Eames pointed out, Shakespeare has a character refer to "this great stage of fools."
This was a dramatic moment in the lecture. But would any two people agree about what point Dr. Eames was making? Was Shakespeare hinting that the audience's susceptibility to illusion meant they were fools?
Dr. Eames also asserted that the greater the imaginative leap demanded of the audience (by stage and set limitations), the greater the impact upon them would be.
This is a romantic, pleasing notion, like the idea that children from disadvantaged backgrounds who have to struggle are likelier to succeed than those with wealthy parents. But is there any reason to believe it's true?
Dr. Eames made the assertion. But, in a university, should such assertions not be supported by an argument of some kind?
Agree? disagree? I'd like to know what you think. Please tell me in person or email me at the address above.