Two weeks ago I discovered a fabulous new way to procrastinate: reading about the psychology of language. It counts as learning! It makes me a better writer!
My first find: Daniel Oppenheimer, a Princeton psychologist, won an Ig Nobel for his 2005 “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly” (free PDF), which should be required reading for anyone who uses the Microsoft Word thesaurus.
Key results: undergraduate readers correlate clear language with intelligence; long words have a disorienting effect similar to that caused by an illegible font.
Unless you’re right-clicking every third word you write, Adam L. Alter and Oppenheimer have an article perhaps more appropriate to lit crit: “Effects of Fluency on Psychological Distance and Mental Construal (Or Why New York is a Large City, but New York Is a Civilized Jungle).” Psychological Science 19.2 (Feb. 2008). [Behind the paywall: Blackwell Synergy; Academic Search Elite.]
Their argument begins
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play of 29,551 words about a fictitious Prince of Denmark. It is also a tragic tale of revenge and existential angst. Although both descriptions are accurate, they constitute fundamentally different representations of the play. Distinct cognitive and behavioral consequences might arise depending on whether a person construes the play in the concrete terms of the first description or the more abstract terms of the second description. (161.)
Those “cognitive and behavioral consequences”:
- The more difficulty a reader has understanding something, the more remote that something will seem
- When a concept is easy to understand, the reader expects concrete language; when the concept is obscure, the reader expects abstract language—as Alter & Oppenheimer put it, concretely: “as each individual tree begins to blur, the perceiver has no choice but to focus on the forest at large” (166)
This article is a call to arms for academic writing: we critics truck in abstraction, and our writing tends toward obscurity. This closes the circle—as A&O’s first rule suggests, obscure language makes its subject feel remote.
One of my first posts bemoaned the difficulty of arguing for the relevance of my dissertation, but perhaps this is because I lean on abstractions: Weltliteratur, intermediality, cosmopolitanism (which last word A&O use as an example).
I love love love examples in dissertations that come through the Writing Center, but I rarely see them in published lit crit. Are there examples of strong literary arguments written in concrete language? Since I’m writing about paintings, opportunities for concrete examples and metaphors abound.
“we critics truck in abstraction, and our writing tends toward obscurity”
I want to decouple these two phrases. While there’s plenty of criticism that needlessly obscures its point via over-abstraction, it’s possible to write abstractly yet clearly as well. In other words, there’s a difference between abstract language and the obscurity that results from using abstractions without really knowing what they mean. Take Charles Taylor’s book on Hegel, which very clearly outlines the work of one of the most abstract of philosophers while respecting philosophical rigor.
Sianne Ngai’s book Ugly Feelings also springs to mind as one example of a book about literature that combines concrete detail with abstract concepts in a very readable way.
Yeah, what Kermit says, or, I might point out the ways abstraction can get linked to simplicity and immediacy rather than obscurity. Ok I can’t go literary right now, but I’m thinking of the very abstract stylized brushstrokes of certain Japanese paintings, or Brancusi’s sculpture _Flight_, or, you know, lotsa poems. Ooh ooh, like “In a station of the Metro,” or pretty much any haiku.
I think I have finally decided I am not a theorist. But I love theory. _But_, what I love about it is taking something very difficult and abstract and teaching it to someone by using a very concrete and surprising metaphor. (Or analogy. Or whatever.) So I’m always moving back and forth in scale from abstract to concrete to abstract. (Which brings me back to Pound: No ideas but in things! Go in fear of abstractions! Or something like that.)
I do see good points in that quote about Hamlet — I just finished grading a bunch of finals that summarized a bunch of plots and told me that these plots were important because they were important. (Guess what tip I told them to help prep for the final?) But there is a _huge_ difference between the jump between literal plot-level stuff and the themes of Hamlet, and the next jump from the themes and structures of Hamlet to, I dunno, Hamlet through the eyes of Deluze and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus.
Sisyphus, It’s like you reached into my brain and picked out all the works I’m looking at—Pound, Brancusi, Japanese paintings. Your telepathic powers are a bit alarming, but I’m not entirely sure I follow all the connections you draw. Flight, for example, strikes me viscerally rather than conceptually; likewise “In a station.”
I’m no Pound scholar, but his Imagist works seem to me as though they are asking readers to bring their own abstractions with them to the text. His pseudo-translations of Chinese poems, which I think were roughly contemporary with “In a station,” have all these beautiful and detailed glosses. (One critic I’m reading—Daniel Albright—compares Pound’s reading of one short poem to Anna Karenina.) But I’m not sure that an ordinary reader could come at one of Pound’s poems and develop the abstractions of that gloss unaided.
Japanese paintings present an interesting problem, and I’d love to hear everything you have to say about them. I’m writing on conceptions of Japanese painting at the moment—An Artist of the Floating World, etc.—and I’ve noticed that some scholars associate Japanese painting with simplicity but not necessarily abstraction.
Here are a few lines from Gabriele Annan’s infamous NYRB review (1989) of Ishiguro’s first three novels:
“Ishiguro writes in English. His English is perfect, and not just in the obvious sense: it is accurate, unhurried, fastidious, and noiseless. A hush seems to lie over it, compounded of mystery and discretion. The elegant bareness inevitably reminds one of Japanese painting.”
At least three critics have picked up on Annan’s review as an example of a certain kind of cultural misreading. Rebecca Walkowitz—my wonderful advisor—argues that Annan’s recourse to Japanese painting as a descriptor for “elegant bareness” is culturally naive in a way similar to her apparent misreading of Ishiguro’s lingual background: we western critics have chosen to understand Japanese painting in a certain way, and as a consequence have a tendency to flatten or simplify what the painting is doing. (”Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds,” 1056-7.)
Sorry, this has become the Comment of Wordy Doom; it’s just that you hit on a topic that I am deeply interested in, and I was hoping to hear your thoughts on the subject.
Kermit, You’re right: I was a bit facile in my association of critical subjects and styles; I should have said that it is more or less accepted in our field that literary critics who write about abstractions can do so obscurely.
I’ll grab Taylor’s Hegel from the library this week: I’m dead curious to learn from him. If Taylor can write about Hegel concretely, then I have no excuse…
How can Brancusi’s thing be anything but abstract? It’s a bird it’s a feather it’s a plane it’s the trajectory of air in a wind tunnel —- everything’s been abstracted down off of it so that it could be almost anything.
If not him then, um, those dudes who draw the machinery? Hold on, let me search for stuff…ok, I can’t find the paintings of squares within squares within squares, but I know they exist, just not who did them…
what about this series? Or this guy’s thingies? (Actually I can’t find pics and description so go look at that header and then read the wikipedia page.)
Maybe I just don’t know what abstract means?
However, I am telepathic, evidently. Cool. If only I could use this power to rule the world instead of divine people’s dissertations!
Sisyphus! I adore the momentum of your prose. Is your diss writing as carefully paced as your comments? Are you writing to demonstrate how abstract claims can be argued with reference to the concrete?
I have been misusing abstraction, perhaps. OED: “considering a thing independently of its associations.” You have pointed to Futurist & Cubist objects that strip away the specificity of the subjects they echo; I have been writing more vaguely about literary concepts stripped of their experiential context, à la Alter/Oppenheimer: Hamlet as “tragic tale of revenge and existential angst.”
Finally, inevitably: over on The Valve, John Holbo writes much smarter things than I did about academic style and the ways we discuss it.
sorry, non-sequitur:
One thing that came out of both Holbo’s piece and a conversation I had with my adviser was that academic writing tends to be polite. Respectful. Sometimes circumlocution is a way of not directly engaging with/arguing with someone you disagree with or want to criticize.
Wrt Japanese painting, have you looked into art history related to Chinese and Japanese brush painting? As I recall from the art history class I took as an undergrad, the approach to landscape painting was not so much abstract as it was the attempt to depict an ideal. So, for example, none of the classical famous paintings are scenes of a particular place and time, but are instead the painter’s memories and idealizations formed together into a scene.
You might also be interested in the different styles of calligraphy, because the more “poetic” a writer was/is being, the less actually legible the writing becomes. (This is true even in modern Western calligraphic traditions, according to the instructors of the seminars my uncle attends.)
Then again, maybe you shouldn’t look into any of this, but should instead look for work on Western approaches to stereotypes of Eastern/Asian art. Orientalism certainly has a lot of theoretical language associated with it. It could add whole new depths to any amount of desired incomprehensibility!
Dana, I’m bouncing between these two approaches (actual Japanese art history vs. western simplifications of Japanese art)—it comes down to how much I want to argue that my author (Ishiguro) knows about the history of Japanese painting, and my opinion about that has shifted back and forth.
Mike, I’ve just looked at a bunch of interviews with your author and profiles of his life, and I wish you luck! Given his life essentially entirely in the West, I was initially inclined to go with the Western simplifications aspect, but then I read that his family kept all the kids well-educated with Japanese materials for many years because they thought they might be moving back to Japan at any time. So… short of actually talking to the author himself, sounds like you just get to guess!