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Saturday, January 31, 2004
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THE SILENCES
“Under the set-aside scheme, farmers are paid for not growing crops. Why not pay academics for not writing articles? The state is already buying up the products at subvention prices and putting huge quantities of them into cold storage: it funds the university libraries, which buy the journals and stack them away unread. It is time for the academic system to mimic the agricultural one even more closely. Dons should be paid a bonus for every year in which they do not publish an article. Conversely, a rising scale of financial penalties should attach to every article or book that they produce. Pseudonym detection squads would sniff out fraudsters, like the satellites which monitor Sicilian olive groves. This approach, combined with the ‘three best publications per decade’ rule, would ensure that rational academics would spend less time writing and more time thinking.” Noel Malcolm, Prospect online August 1996. “As for faculty rank, my friend and fellow teacher, David Daube... has the best idea: everyone [should be] appointed to fullest professorships, and then, for each article, book, review or monograph published, demotion, with proportional reduction in salary as well as rank. Try to imagine the blessings - the silences, the stopped presses.” Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1972. Twenty years after Rieff wrote about it in America, Malcolm comes up with the same idea in England - a system of powerful incentives and penalties designed to get university professors to shut up. Although the two schemes differ in some ways, both propose to invert the established publications-based promotional paradigm in the U.S. and abroad, so that now the more you publish, the less rank and salary you earn. To be sure, Malcolm’s is the more serious proposal, since it allows three first-rate publications per decade, while Daube’s takes a hardline approach and punishes every peep. But you get the idea. Nobody’s really kidding here. I don’t know about England, but in the States nothing succeeds like excess. It’s as impossible to imagine English professors slowing the relentless expansion of their twenty-page syllabae omniae and curricula vitae as it is to imagine someone who drives a Cadilliac Escalade not somewhere along the line buying a Hummer. We didn’t get big and rich by curbing our appetites, and the U.S. News and World Report school rankings don’t reward restraint. So if, as it seems, our literature departments are being seriously overcome by fumes from foucault factories and factory outlets, what are they to do? I have only the most modest of suggestions, and that involves thinking a bit about the values of relative silence -- the advantages, as I’ve suggested in an earlier post, of replacing the huckster model of academic life with a more monastic one. Let us, before we get to writing with restraint, consider the idea of speaking with restraint. J.M. Coetzee, the most recent recipient of the literature Nobel Prize, belongs, as David Sexton writes in This is London, “to that small band of heroic writers who - without being as reclusive as Pynchon or Salinger - have declined to make themselves available for publicity purposes.” Coetzee himself puts it this way: “To me, truth is related to silence, to reflection, to the practice of writing. Speech is not a fount of truth but a pale and provisional version of writing.” When another Nobelist, Samuel Beckett, told his wife he’d won the award, her response was “Quelle catastrophe.” Yet Beckett was able to retain his privacy and his integrity: “Not once was his face seen on the front cover of a glossy magazine,” writes John Fletcher in About Beckett, “below a banner headline announcing: ‘The publicity-shy dramatist talks to us exclusively about the starstudded production of X, opening this week at the Y Theatre on Z Avenue...’” There is something here having to do with the protection of one’s individuality, one’s private being as it assimilates and expresses the world unadulterated and undistracted by the distortions and superficialities of public life. The reclusive writer Bill Gray, in Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II, begs to be left alone by a world of journalists because “I have my own cosmology of pain.” (Note that it is seduction not just by publicity but also by the comforts of America, comforts I’ve talked about a bit on this blog already, that Gray seems to fear.) As for writing, keep in mind that writers like Beckett, Coetzee, and Bellow (another Nobel recipient) are often criticized - in our public world of excess - for not writing enough. “When’s his next book coming out? Why hasn’t he sold film rights to the last one?” These are the questions of interest to our world, and all writers feel the ego and money pressure of them to some extent. It is a measure of their integrity, and likewise the integrity of the academic writer, to resist them. |