Impostors : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Conspiracy theories will prosper in any field. A tasty one that has
recently sprouted in mine is that modernist literature may have been
composed as military code. Wouldn't that to some extent explain
its inexplicability? We might forgive Wallace Stevens his sludgy verse
if it turns out that An Ordinary Evening in New Haven was
devised to convey troop movements or that James Joyce was really
working in Zurich to transmit information to the Allies under cover of
Finnegans Wake. Had the literary canon proven as crucial behind
the lines as cannons at the front—imagine Eliot ensuring through
matchless assonance as many victories as superior artillery did, or
Faulkner, via The Sound and the Fury, laying successful siege
to the Siegfried Line—then it would all make sense. So to speak.
As it happens, I have discovered no foundation for these suspicions,
so there must be another reason behind the pleonasms and opacities
perpetrated by the most elevated members of my syllabus. Nor are they
the worst culprits. For truly repellant specimens of style, browbeaten
readers would have us look to recent critical theory.
"Poststructuralism" is the brush we typically use to tar such
untouchable prose. Writing smothered in austerity, writing stripped
clean of felicity--it would be painful to rehearse the symptoms
further. "Language most shews a man; Speak, that I may see thee,"
wrote Ben Jonson. Centuries ago, he never dreamed we would one day
have to look through lead.
How dismaying or gratifying—depending on one's
mood—to learn about the Sokal Hoax. In that infamous coup of
1994, a theoretical physicist from New York University, Alan Sokal,
submitted to Social Text a Trojan Horse of an article, a work
so sublimely impenetrable that infiltration of that journal was
assured. He had milked and mingled the vaguest vocabularies, combined
"hermeneutics" and "hegemonies" like a tenure-driven witch out of
Macbeth, and the plausible, intimidating haze that rose from that
vile broth sufficiently impressed the noses of the editorial board
that they published it.
The surprise is not that impostors pass through customs but that we
have grown so accustomed to it. We are pretty much convinced that
barbarians bar the gates that were established to keep the barbarians
out. Pundits and apologists are still stumbling over the rubble left
after the academic tempest Alan Sokal caused. Incidentally, this
parodic impulse continues to thrive on a website called Postmodern
Generator, whose randomizer program enables anyone to construct
instantly his own estimable gibberish. He may then set loose his
subaltern, neo-narrativized, postcritical, nickel-and-paradigmed
Frankenstein monster of jargon upon submissions editors and seminar
leaders, as his conscience dictates.
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