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Sunday, July 16, 2006
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Here's a Swatch of Prose... ...from a wonderful review by Stanley Fish in today's New York Times. It's a wonderful review because Fish takes down a book that makes what sounds like a rather silly, self-defeating argument. But Fish says something in the course of the review -- he makes a certain verbal gesture -- that's worth pausing at for a blogosecond. He refers to ...surely the most overrated essay in the modern canon, George Orwell's turgid, self-righteous and philosophically hopeless "Politics and the English Language." In principle, UD loves this sort of thing -- a full-throttle raspberry at an object of English professor piety. The problem with this particular raspberry, though, is that Orwell's essay is great. Fish is responding to a couple of things in dumping on it, I think. It has in fact been over-anthologized, over-revered, and over-alluded-to. So it can be annoying, over the course of a long career like his, to stumble over the thing again and again. Lots of people have said dumb things about it. But the key to Fish's comment appears when he calls the essay "philosophically hopeless." Of course Orwell wasn't a philosopher, and the essay isn't a philosophical essay, and one isn't supposed to judge it by Kantian standards. But Fish considers himself a philosopher -- a philosopher of language -- and he takes, I'm guessing, a somewhat competitive attitude toward the piece. Why should Orwell's underformulated propositions about speech command the world's attention, while an essay like "Is there a Text in the Class" (one of Fish's) moulders in obscurity? |