Hilary Mantel is
annoyed by those who ask silly questions at literary festivals – perhaps the
problem is simply that intelligent
question at a literary festival is an oxymoron – but, anyway, she is annoyed
enough by the inane question Do you write
every day? to want to snarl back, Of
course I write every day, what do you think I am, some kind of hobbyist? I
saw a chance when I read that in The
Guardian, 16th April 2016.
As academics got
themselves properly organised in the twentieth century they marked their
territory in two important ways. They invented ways of expressing themselves
which form what is now the superordinate genre of academic writing, its presence most obviously signalled by the
literature review and by footnotes and Harvard-system bibliographies and bad
writing. In doing this, they successfully marginalised the superordinate genre
of belles lettres which had hitherto allowed
anyone with the right social background and half an education to put pen to
paper and tell you what they thought about, well, anything really but most
obviously, the future of civilisation -
unarguably a topic about which we are all entitled to an opinion. T S
Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of
Culture (1948) can serve as a familiar-enough example of such belles lettrism though when you look
closely at it, it’s really rather clichéd and I have criticised it on this Blog [
12 November 2012] for that and other reasons.
But academics did a
second thing. Enabled by institutions which provided them secure livings with
salaries and pensions, they were able to see off not only the belles lettristes but also the hobbyists who had pursued knowledge as a
pastime which might or might not result in the occasional publication which
might, occasionally, be a very good publication. But for hobbyists, their
salaries and pensions were elsewhere and pursuit of those might occupy a good
deal of time, certainly enough to inhibit daily writing. For me, the stand-out
but already anachronistic hobbyist of the twentieth century is the Reverend W. Keble
Martin, author and illustrator of The
Concise British Flora in Colour. This is what Wikipedia says:
The Concise
British Flora was published
in May 1965 when the author was 88. The book was the result of 60 years'
meticulous fieldwork and exquisite painting skills, and became an immediate
best-seller. He completed over 1,400 paintings in colour and many
black-and-white drawings before the book was finally published.
Nowadays, for any academic who allowed themself to think that
they could be that late-flowering then
a Research Assessment Exercise would prove a grim reaper. Ah, yes, Reverend, still working on that Flora are we? Perhaps you
would be interested in our restructuring plan. Have you thought about early retirement?
You’d have more time and we’d be shot of you.
Academics, as they have invented themselves and been invented
by their hosts, are not only pushed into productivity but into gregariousness. They
are more or less obliged to put themselves about, though when I look at online
CVs I find it hard to believe that the obligations are quite so ferociously
extensive. Believe the CVs, and it seems that academics are pedalling furiously
simply to keep the aviation business airborne. As for all these editorial
boards or the journals which enable them, some must surely be no more than Potemkin
fronts designed to impress a passing benefactor; they surely can’t all be for
real.
More importantly, I suspect this kind of gregariousness, made possible by
the co-operation of others like you but combined into the competitive context
of academic research, also leads to the kind of group-think which makes some university departments fairly indistinguishable from theological seminaries and
political groupuscules, both completely
sectarian in their thinking. True, it was only in the twentieth century that
universities really sought to distinguish themselves from seminaries, hoisting
the flag for the pursuit of truth in a context of tolerance, but there are many
signs that they have become half-hearted about that pursuit and are now
reverting to an older type of institution, one which valued conformity and
distrusted difference and which doled out livings only to those who subscribed
to the right articles of religion.
Some hobbyists are gregarious, but not all. Some are recluses
and eccentrics and simply disappear from view into the bottomless pit of
research they have selected: Who was Jack
the Ripper? Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Who did Queen Victoria actually sleep with? But this is actually
one of the reasons why hobbyists can be important. They don’t have any economic
dependence which might push them towards conformity with any prevailing
orthodoxy, they can decide for themselves what is important, and they can find
their way into whatever research methodology they find comfortable.
Some journalists are able to free themselves up in the same
kind of way and, even inadvertently, produce original work which stands up very
well to academic scrutiny. So Svetlana Alexeivich who won the Nobel Prize for Literature
isn’t in any obvious sense a hobbyist, but she is a single-minded journalist
who has picked her own topics and invented her own methodology. She’s under no
group pressure to conform, though she has often been under direct political
pressure to mind what she does. A superficial assessment might conclude that
she is simply an oral historian and that, of course, oral history is accepted
and practised in the academic world. No need to make a fuss. But she isn’t just
another oral historian. It is not only that she has sought out those who have
hitherto had no voice – most obviously in The
Unwomanly Face of War, a best-seller
when originally published in a first, censored, version in 1985; the uncensored
version appeared in English in 2017 and I reviewed it here on 5 September 2017 .
It is also that she has a distinctive methodology, of her own invention. First,
she sits and waits and listens patiently, just as a psychoanalyst might.
Second, she won’t always take No for
an answer. She’s respectful but not deferential – she has a job to do. She’s not making polite tick-box enquiries. Third,
if they cry she often cries too. She can’t help it. It’s why she’s doing the
research in the first place. But it certainly helps along the research because
those she interviews feel they can trust her. She cries too.
You might argue that, well, she could have done all that as a
Professor at Minsk University. But that’s not true. She would not have had the
same ideas and, even if she had, she would not have been permitted to pursue them
in the conditions prevailing in the then USSR. The Unwomanly Face of War was completed in 1983, after years of
research. It was turned down flat for publication because it undermined official
narratives. Perestroika made it
briefly acceptable, with some of the sex and violence taken out, but with the
turning back of the clock in the former USSR, it is now once again not
acceptable. Yet, you might say, all it does is to interview at length Soviet
women (and girls – many falsified their ages to join up) who fought at the
front in the Second World War. The Soviet academics of the 1970s? They weren’t
interested. Alexeivich was an eccentric or a trouble-maker.
But she is morally serious, producing work which is
polyphonic and inter-textual with major
cultural and political issues, and that may be typical for a journalist but not
for a hobbyist. Hobbyists are often trying to get away from that kind of
seriousness, interesting themselves in things on which the fate of civilisation
most definitely does not hang – things which are exotic and obscure and, at
least apparently, pointless. In contrast, it might be argued, even when it
looks pointless, academic work at least tends to fit into some larger,
over-arching and morally serious project.
I am not sure this argument will stand up. It doesn’t take
long if you riffle through the Fellows of Oxbridge colleges or Fellows of the
British Academy to find those who are pursuing pleasant hobbyist research into
the pointless, but for the fact that they are salaried and the hobbies are
hallowed by long tradition. Yet there are only so many Fragments of the Ancient
World which can be regarded as significant, or so much seriousness of purpose
which you can strain from a study of Virginia Woolf’s breakfast.
Twenty years ago, I took early retirement from university
teaching and at the same time decided that I would supplement my income by
becoming a stamp dealer. Though I don’t present myself as a particularly
up-market one – I don’t have headed notepaper – I do now possess a fund of
exotic, obscure and pointless hobbyist knowledge. If, for example, you should want
to know whether an Armenian stamp from the period 1920 to 1923 is genuine, or
the overprint genuine, or the postmark genuine – well, then I am one of the
three or four go-to people in the world who will give you a reliable answer,
often with a narrative attached – the postmaster at Basargechar was an idle
fellow who never cleaned his canceller and so, yes, this dirty smudged postmark
you are showing me is most likely genuine because that is how they all look. In
contrast, if you had shown me a cancellation of Novo-Bayazet, I would expect it
to be crisp and clear – conscientious chap there.
But just as you could put Virginia Woolf’s breakfasts into a
wider context, so I could set my pointless knowledge into a wider context which
would, for example, point to the renewal of postal activity in 1922 – 23 as
evidence for some success on the part of the Bolsheviks in turning around the
country from the low point to which it had descended in the period 1918 – 21. I
could also point to the evidence of ideological change which meant that for
1922 – 23 you can no longer find stamps cancelled as a favour for collectors
and dealers, whereas in 1920, that is pretty much all you can find. The
Bolsheviks chased the speculators from the post offices, if they had not
already fled the country.
But a difference remains. You can get a Ph D for setting
Virginia Woolf’s breakfast into a larger context; it is not clear that you
could get one for expanding on the tale in the previous paragraph. The former
is High knowledge, the latter too Low. And if there is one thing which surely
separates academics from hobbyists, it is snobbery – snobbery of similar kind to
that which has Hilary Mantel dismissing the non-professional writer who doesn’t
write every day.
The modern forms of snobbery are quite varied and include the
self-righteousness of young academics who think they are radical or subversive
or cutting-edge and consequently will only to reply to emails from people whose
names and affiliations they recognise. They know who their Facebook Friends are
and that’s what really matters.
But I have my own snobberies. I can’t quite take seriously my
knowledge of Armenian postal history because much of it – not all of it - is
second-hand. I haven’t done the archival research, both collateral and
essential, for the obvious reason that I don’t read Armenian. I have to rely on
the work of the late Professor Christopher Zakiyan who was a Soviet-era
musicologist in his day job and a philatelist in his hobby-time. He researched
the Armenian archives in Yerevan – no mean feat – and found many documents
which cast a great deal of light on the work of the Armenian post office in the
years after World War One and he published his work in Russian and some of it
in English.
But the fact that I couldn’t make sense of the archives
consigns me to being a researcher of the second-rank, except in those areas
which do not require knowledge of the Armenian language. For example, I have
re-constructed the printing history of one series of Armenian stamps purely
forensically: you don’t need the archives to study the sheet formats, the
paper, the gum, and so on. You need the stamps in front of you.
But universities are also full of researchers of the
second-rank. A few years ago, I advertised to employ someone as an assistant on
editing some of my earlier academic work for re-publication. I did not hesitate
to interview someone who had completed a Ph D on a French post-structuralist
thinker, only to discover during the interview that they did not read French.
Well, I thought, surely that’s essential if you are writing about a living
thinker who writes in French, not least because without that ability you have
no access to the untranslated secondary literature in French. However good the
translations of your subject may be, you are still limited in what you can
achieve and in a Ph D there should be such a prior constraint on the limits of your
achievement.
That thought might get a Hear!
Hear! from academics who are adepts at working in the original languages.
But I am willing to qualify my snobbery. The original language matters less if
you are, for example, a philosopher trying to engage with an argument which can
be fairly well expressed in translation and which has already been fairly extensively
discussed in languages other than the original. So if someone wanted to write a
Ph D on Frege’s theory of Numbers in relation to his theory of language, I
would not absolutely insist that they learnt German first - though I would say
that they really had to look seriously into the nuances of meaning of Sinn and Bedeutung in German as well as in their English translations as Sense and Reference, and I would do that because I had somewhere read (in
English) that this was probably going to be relevant.
But in arguing along these lines, I do incidentally weaken
the snobbish belief that academics do it better. There will be hobbyists who
outsmart them for purely chance reasons: they grew up bi-lingual, for example,
or they travelled with a circus so have a head start in understanding circus
life.
Ah, but what about Methodology? Isn’t the real problem with
hobbyists that they are methodologically naïve? Well, I am sure many are – just
as are many academics, those for example who still conduct banal and pointless psychology
experiments. I’ll agree that many hobbyists are heavily into making lists,
accumulating facts, and not doing much more than assembling a cabinet of
curiosities even if they title a work A
History of Victorian Lamp Posts ( I hope there isn’t one; I don’t want to
upset anyone). But it’s not inevitable and it is not a distinguishing mark
which leaves all academics comfortably on the other side of the line. For some
academics, methodological sophistication does not rise above playing safe with
the routines of academic writing.
