Review Angela Saini Inferior

 

 

Angela Saini describes herself as a science journalist and this 2017 book is a fine piece of investigative journalism in which she goes out of her way to track down and interview academic researchers who over the past few decades have contributed significantly to the study of sex differences. They include experimental and developmental psychologists, evolutionary biologists, primate ethologists, anthropologists, and a few who might be characterised as cognitive scientists. She has read their books and research papers but it is the quotations harvested from skilful interviews which give this book much of its interest and accessibility.

I do have a general problem which I will make central to this review. Saini is interviewing researchers most of whom seek to model their work on an image of physical science in which painstaking laboratory or field work will yield decisive results. It ain’t gonna work. Decisive outcomes are the privilege of those who can control all the variables which might affect the results. Outside a few parts of physical or natural science it is, unfortunately, never possible to close the system; there will always be uncontrolled variables at work. Thus, for example, a much-cited study of newborns by Baron-Cohen and Connellan eventually comes to be criticised because the field researcher (Connellan) knew the sex of at least some of the babies she was interacting with in a situation where, ideally, she should have not known (page 88). It was a variable which had not been controlled for. Search hard enough and you will soon find others and you will find them in (almost?) every experiment.

Replication of someone else’s experiments is a gold standard test of reliability in the hard sciences. But in the fields with which Saini is concerned, replication is rarely possible simply because the human world will have moved on and that is also an omnipresent variable which cannot be controlled. You cannot replicate an experiment done on 1973 Harvard undergraduates on 2023 Harvard undergraduates because they are just going to be very different kinds of people and the cute experiment of 1973 may just seem weird in 2023. The same problem of replication confronts anthropological fieldwork among tribes comfortingly assumed to be remote and untouched by history when, just like everyone else, they are not. If they don’t have them this year, next year they will be carrying smartphones.

There are related problems and most significantly the fact that the very categories in which research is conducted and hypotheses formulated may be flawed by assumptions (stereotypes acting as uncontrolled variables) which anticipate the results even before the work has been done. Wilhelm Reich once nicely highlighted the problem when he said that the question is not why hungry people steal food but why they don’t. Scientists ask what they think are the right questions but what they think is right may be infused by unexamined prejudice, as Saini repeatedly demonstrates in the early chapters of her book. I mean, you can open almost any “scientific” work written in English in the reign of Queen Victoria and discover toe-curling prejudices which would make modern suburban table-talk seem subtle and sophisticated.

In archaeology and evolutionary biology Saini notes in a couple of paragraphs (pages 143 – 45) a really interesting oversight which is actually a fundamental flaw. Everyone knows that the archaeological record is very partial but we can only hypothesise how partial. It’s possible to dig up flint tools, for example, because they can go for millennia without degrading. But what about early baskets, baby slings and digging sticks? They leave no trace. And suppose it was women who invented and made those things and not the men who are always supposed to have made the flint tools and who squat there in all those cartoon-like drawings of prehistoric times? Without the baskets, the baby slings and the digging sticks you have only half the story of early cultural innovation.

There is one problem specific to work on child development. Though Saini indicates the limitations of the “blank slates” approach (page 66) it remains true that very little research tries to look at babies and young children as agents in their own right, with minds and wills of their own, making choices and decisions and agitating for their voice to be heard. In my own work (most recently Culture as Anarchy) I try to keep in mind the question, What is it like to be a baby? and am tempted to answer that it is rather like being a teenager. You will get my point if you consider the question, Why do babies hate vegetables?

Finally, and the elephant in the room, career researchers can and do falsify or big up results on a scale which is only now being acknowledged. In my youth, Hans Eysenck was reckoned a leading research psychologist, most famous for his Personality Inventory. Now his work is deemed “unsafe”. It’s a consequence of his personality flaws but also  of the scientific rat race and of publish or perish and more besides. And it’s happening now at scale.

What is to be done? There are very many millions of people who want to think about sex differences, talk about them, read about them, research and write about them. The chatter isn’t going to stop any time soon, at least not as long as I am alive. But to make any progress much more attention has to be focussed on the core problems of methodology. Routinised research papers which fit into a narrow, prescribed paradigm are to all intents and purposes rarely worth the paper they are printed on.

Review Anthony Trollope Barchester Towers - and the Victorian Novel

 

Go back fifty years and you will meet a young man who as a teenager had read a handful of Victorian novels and been devastated by one (The Mayor of Casterbridge) but who now had a complete understanding of what was wrong with the genre. These were novels in which an invisible but omniscient narrator created the trompe l’oeil illusion of a real world, tricking us into tears and laughter which diverted us from the temptation to engage in serious critical reflection on the moral and political values for which those novels provided a vehicle. But now grown up, I had learnt – and in three languages – what the alternative was. In Latin, larvatus prodeo [I wear a mask] anchored the idea that if you are wearing a mask then you should point to it as you advance on the stage, that you should make clear that what you are engaged in is the product of artifice and an artificer. In German, Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt [alienation effect] was the means by which playwright or author could avoid the crime of jerking (fake) tears and laughter from audience or reader by simply emphasising (frequently) that this is only pretend – a thought experiment, if you like - and you are meant to be thinking not wiping away the tears. In Russian, Shklovsky’s остранение [defamiliarization] labelled the ways in which a verbal artist could make the familiar strange and thereby prompt reflection rather than emotional self- indulgence.

Problem sorted. Farewell the Victorian novel.

Fifty years later and I am reading Anthony Trollope. I read The Warden and enjoyed it and now I’ve just finished Barchester Towers (1857) and enjoyed that too and no doubt in part because it provides so much grist for my anti-clericalism. But what sticks out a mile [larvatus prodeo] is an author who is all over the text, hopelessly intrusive, and very very funny. And if I had to identify the style I would call it High Camp (which may well pair with High Church which, if anything, is the religious value which the novel defends).  

Consider this passage (page 281 in my excellent Penguin edition) towards the end of a fraught, intense, seat-edge clinging exchange between Eleanor Bold [heroine] and a bungling but genuine suitor Mr Arabin [hero]:

As she spoke she with difficulty restrained tears; but she did restrain them. Had she given way and sobbed aloud, as in such cases a woman should do, he would have melted at once, implored her pardon, perhaps knelt at her feet and declared his love. Everything would have been explained, and Eleanor would have gone back to Barchester with a contented mind. How easily would she have forgiven and forgotten the archdeacon’s suspicions had she but heard the whole truth from Mr Arabin. But then where would have been my novel?

It's laugh out loud funny. And the tone of voice (which I can only render with both hands spread open) is self-parodying camp. The reader is still in volume two of what they know (according to the Victorian conventions) is to be a three volume, triple-decker novel and will immediately understand the author’s words. And when we do get to volume three we get (at page 415) this:

But we must go back a little and it shall be but a little, for a difficulty begins to make itself manifest in the necessity of disposing of all our friends in the small remainder of this volume. Oh, that Mr Longman [Trollope’s publisher] would allow me a fourth! It should transcend the other three as the seventh heaven transcends all the lower stages of celestial bliss.

And that’s high camp. I rest my case.

Bargains at Blackwells on Trevor Pateman's Books

I see that my preferred bookseller Blackwells has massively reduced the online prices on my books, most of which they have in stock. Hurry, hurry while stocks last ....

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/author/Trevor%20Pateman

Review: Sarah Ogilvie The Dictionary People

The Victorians were terrific collectors of both the animate and the inanimate, often indiscriminately and always excited by the rare and exotic. Each variety of collector had its name, usually confected out of school Latin or Greek: there were the butterfly collectors (lepidopterists), stamp collectors (philatelists), coin collectors (numismatists), inscription hunters (epigraphers), book fiends (bibliophiles), the magpie collectors of junk in general (antiquaries or antiquarians).  The leading figures in each field were often obsessives who neglected others and themselves – their personal hygiene could not be relied upon – and, as in the notorious case of the bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillips, they could rack up very large debts in pursuit of their hobbies.

As part of this cast of thousands there were also the word collectors - the logophiles, philologists, and lexicographers - who form the subject matter of Sarah Ogilvie’s wonderfully researched,  beautifully conceived and well-executed book in which she narrates the story of how the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was created in the period preceding the First World War when James Murray was its long-term editor.

I have my doubts about dictionaries and have never been a great user let alone reader. I possessed a Shorter OED as an undergraduate but don’t have one now.

The Victorian dictionary-makers claimed inspiration from the latest movements in German philology which to the Victorians was really one word, Germanphilology. Ogilvie alludes to Germanphilology but does not really tell us what its achievements were or why we should be concerned with them.

In dictionaries like the OED the living and the dead - words we might use and words we never will - are side by side, the living ones are supposedly illuminated by their history. Their ancestors are to be found in written texts - there was no sound recording of the past available to the Victorians - though the descendant language exists, of course, in both speech and writing. The heart of the lexicographer’s work is the tracking of the way words have been used through time, how their meanings have changed and expanded..

The OED was built very largely on the voluntary efforts of thousands of readers who read not for pleasure but to locate occurrences of words in print which could be dated from the publication in which they occurred and which fairly clearly indicated the sense in which they were being used. Just as stamp collectors hunt for the earliest date on which a Penny Black was used so the OEDs readers tried to push back in time the first occurrence in print of a word which – well, it may now be completely obsolete just like the Penny Black. There are some complications created by the fact that spellings change which are a small part of the problems around treating a word which was used then as the ancestor of a word which is used now.

In the case of what came to be called dialects it is almost exclusively in spoken form that they exist or existed (that’s what got them called dialects in the first place) and before the invention of sound recording they were hard to study unless some writer decided to try their hand at that excruciating genre known as the dialect novel. It was the institutionalised creation of “the English language” which created the dialects in the sense we now understand them.

But though a living language has the past in its DNA it has its meanings in the present, in the current inter-relations of its words as part of active and always mobile semantic fields many of them culturally reflected upon and policed to ensure that we get it right and, among other things, do not cause offence. It is a headache for the Office of Standards that nowadays so many Advanced Warnings are announced in bold letters and so many claims refuted daily in the newspapers

Ogilvie discusses the headaches which sexual words and swear words - she has nothing to say about blasphemous words - caused the Victorian makers of the OED. Alongside what it included there existed all that it excluded; despite the aspirations of its makers to achieve inclusivity. The OED belonged to the cancel culture of its time if only because Oxford University Press believed itself - as it still does - a guardian of morals. (Surprisingly, perhaps, Ogilvie’s book is not published by OUP but under the Chatto & Windus imprint of Penguin/Random House. But neither OUP or the University of Oxford come out of the story she tells in a particularly favourable light).

Propriety lasted well past the Victorian era: Lesbianism did not appear in the dictionary until 1976 before which time the entry for “Lesbian: of or pertaining to the island of Lesbos” was designed to enlighten no one (see Ogilvie page 226). The only concession to modernity was to provide an entry in English, not the Latin once used to keep knowledge of sexual matters away from the lower orders.

Of course, there might sometimes be a good reason for keeping a word out:

“Blandford wrote to him [James Murray] that aphrodisiomania, an abnormal enthusiasm for sexual pleasure, was a word coined by an Italian professor and ‘doubtful whether it can rank as English’. (Murray did not put it in the Dictionary).” (page 161). After all, since there was no abnormal enthusiasm for sexual pleasure anywhere in Victorian England, there was no need for a word anyway.

The OED fosters an illusion that there is such a thing as “the English language” which is more than a social construct or matter of belief and aspiration. In relation to vocabulary the longer you make the vocabulary list the more implausible it is to suppose that what you are cataloguing is “a language”. What you are really doing is attempting a cultural encyclopaedia from small fragments and with no clear boundaries. Ogilvie notes many cases where a word entered into the OED has just one known use (often in a novel or medical textbook) and seems to be unperturbed by that. But to admit words with one known use is really to admit that you are creating a bricabrac shop, a cabinet of curiosities mostly covered in dust.

If there was such a thing as “the English language” at the level of words it would be a fairly simple matter to decide if a word is in it or not. In printed text the presence of a word thought foreign is often indicated by use of italics. Would that it were that simple; loan words cause headaches for the typesetter: is “ennui” an English word and therefore not needing italic?  Does a person’s possession of a “je ne sais quoi” require italic? (See on this site my review of Richard Scholar’s Émigrés on 28 October 2020).

If that is not enough, consider the formation of words by analogy, a favourite of Germanphilologists and something which now excessively happens in the case of -philes and -phobes. I doubt that anyone would challenge the status of “Francophile” as a current English word nor give it italics. But if I am a lover of Australia can I call myself as Australophile ? Or just a lover of Australia? What gets a word into a (living) language is not that some obscure or awkward squad author invents it for a one-off occasion of use but that in some sense it catches on. Clearly, -phobes catch on more easily than   -philes –  that tells you a lot about our culture, I suspect. This morning, I read that Dmitry Peskov has been talking about Russophobia. Smart move; no one wants to be thought a  -phobe.

But because we understand the formation of words by analogy we don’t need a dictionary to know what someone means when they declare themselves an Australophile or Christophobe. It makes no sense to try to create a dictionary out of an indefinitely long list of personal idiosyncracies, including those favoured by the forgotten inventors of forgotten wheezes (see Ogilvie’s chapter on “Glossotypists”). This is the stuff of antiquarianism not of authoritative language guides.

I guess that out there are various answers to the question, How big a vocabulary do you need before you can be counted a fluent speaker or writer of language X? A few hundred? A couple of thousand? The contents of the Shorter version of the Longer dictionary? You can be perfectly fluent in English without knowing what’s in the OED though if you want to write like James Joyce or Vladimir Nabokov it will come in helpful when you want to bamboozle. Most often we identify non-native speakers not by their lack of vocabulary – which may be larger than our own – but by their accent which we can immediately and unreflectively identify as foreign without having any knowledge at all of phonetics, phonology or prosody. And in writing, it is small syntactic oddities not misuses of words which give the game away.

Whatever the English language might be (see footnote for my own answer), one might say that it is at least as much about phonetics, phonology, prosody and syntax as it is about words and their meanings.

Ogilvie records a regret which James Murray had towards the end of his life as the OEDs editor in chief: “If he had his time again, he said that he would have directed his Readers [ those who sought out quotations for the OED] differently, with the instructions, ‘Take out quotations for all words that do not strike you as rare, peculiar, or peculiarly used’”

But looking for the rare is exactly what all Victorian collectors/hobbyists did: they looked for rare butterflies (until they rendered them extinct), rare stamps, and exotic curios. They were uninterested in the ordinary, the everyday, things as common as ditchwater. They often went to great lengths to track down the rare and the exotic and that is what the makers of the OED did too. Like many or most collectors, they were attracted by escapes from everyday life..

 

Note

Trevor Pateman, “What is English if Not a Language?” in J. D. Johansen and H. Sonne, editors, Pragmatics and Linguistics. Festschrift for Jacob L Mey, Odense University Press 1986, pages 137-40.

Revised and republished in Trevor Pateman, Prose Improvements, degreezero 2017, pages 85-94.

Trevor Pateman Culture as Anarchy

 

My latest small book (64 pages) offers five inter-connected semi-academic/informal essays on the theme of cultural change. They develop ideas and arguments about Nature and Culture, Social Construction, Cultural Appropriation, and the inevitable failure of  social controls (cultural policing) to check cultural change. Most of the references are to popular cultures and minor cultural forms; included are discussions of creoles and tribal practices.

I don't  think many people now want to buy books when so much can be got for free on the internet so this limited edition (300 copies) book is being given away. Initial reception has been positive and I have received some nice emails about the style used to present my arguments.

To obtain a copy you just need to write to me with your name and full postal address But since our Royal Mail no longer aims to provide affordable postage, especially for overseas shipping, I ask that you show you are serious by sending  a letter or postcard to me rather than an email. 

My postal address is Trevor Pateman, Unit 10, 91 Western Road, Brighton BN1 2NW, United Kingdom.

Granta Issue 163 Best of Young British Novelists

 

Oh dear. Is this really the best?

The current issue of Granta (number 163) showcases in 270 pages the work of Young British Novelists who appear on its “once in a decade list of twenty of the most promising writers under forty living in the UK” (page 12). Each author has posed for a publicity photograph taken by Alice Zoo. More about that in a moment.

At some point in my life I began to encounter debut novels and debut novelists. In a British context that links semantically to the debutante, a well-endowed young woman of impeccable breeding who was presented to Queen Elizabeth the Second wearing virginal white dress before coming-out into a season of balls and parties where she would seek to attract the attentions of well-endowed young men looking for brood mares. The tradition had become sufficiently embarrassing for Elizabeth to abolish it in 1958. Of course, some of the debutantes went on to do non-debutantey type things, most notoriously Bridget Rose Dugdale who stole masterpiece paintings for the IRA and married an IRA gunman in her Irish prison. But most did their duty to reproduce the ancien regime.

For their coming-out photographs most of our debs of 2023 dress impeccably; they would not look out of place in Harvey Nichols or Debenham and Freebody (I borrow those two class indicators from Jean Rhys Good Morning, Midnight (1939)). Among those who don’t fit, K Patrick also contributes one of the better pieces - edgy and tightly constructed.

For the most part, the authors do not trouble us with obscenities, profanities or other breaches of etiquette. They have been schooled by their agents and publishers and before that their Creative Writing classes not to upset anyone. Lie back and think of the book clubs! Maybe for this decade’s crop of debs sensitivity nurses have combed through  the texts, squashing any lurking nits. It’s true, however, that Saba Sams’s prosaic low-life reportage has been allowed in, perhaps as a lesson to us all.

Eleanor Catton gets into this collection with a restrained piece which did not remind me at all of the confident, exuberant author of The Rehearsal, reviewed here on 6 January 2014 and reckoned “very,very good”.Of course, you are still allowed to howl but in that kind of restrained way which allows the Creative Writing seminar to co-exist on the same corridor as its neighbour, the Flower Arranging class. Yes, you can howl but of course not in the manner of that ugly face in Mr Munch’s nasty painting. 

The howling in these pieces is first-person in small family settings usually against the backdrop of natural scenery. In contrast, Isabel Hammad’s unusual piece is interesting because it directly connects to what one might call a bigger picture and Tom Crewe’s because it convincingly imagines how it feels to be one of the little people in someone else’s bigger picture.

But, overall, the picture is a modest watercolour or still life in oils. There is very little that jumps out of the page to demand attention or punches you in an unprepared gut or astonishes you with the virtuosity of its prose.

 

 

 

We Need to Talk about Diacritical Marks

 

At school in the early 1960s we had a History textbook which devoted a chapter to the Reign of Lewis XIV. My  teenage self was scornful: He’s called Louis XIV. Why are you removing useful information about how his name is actually spelt? I went on to find fault with other “translations”: Rome when it should be Roma, Joan of Arc when it should be Jeanne d’Arc and so on - but soon bumping up against the awkward squad of names which required diacritical marks. But I persisted and felt that such marks should be preserved too.

Now I’m having some doubts, partly occasioned by the fact that it’s a pain to type or typeset many or most letters which require diacritical marks, but partly for other reasons. Recently, I bought and read a new translation of Marguerite Duras’s 1944 novel La Vie Tranquille (translated with some acknowledged hesitation as The Easy Life (2022)). It’s very short and the publishers have typeset it rather elegantly with wide spacing. There are just a handful of named characters and places, all French and some requiring a diacritical mark (Clémence, Noël, Tiène, Ziès) and one which requires two: Jérôme. That name is actually the first word in the novel.

These accents are carried over faithfully from the French original which I have in front of me. The pages of that original are, of course, littered with diacritical marks of which French is very fond though that fondness is decreasing and some are being abandoned. But in the translation all of those are lost, except those attached to proper names. The opening three paragraphs of my French copy rack up a total of forty one diacritical marks; the English version has just eight, all generated by the repetition of the single word Jérôme. And on the page they simply look intrusive. Could the accents be left off so that we begin the novel reading about Jerome or would that just recreate the horrors of Lewis for Louis?

Interestingly, perhaps, I didn’t react adversely to Clémence or Noël and no doubt because acute accents and what I call umlauts are quite freely used in English to such an extent that, though I am typing in English, Microsoft automatically supplies the accent for café which is a thoroughly anglicised usage. So part of what is at issue is how the page looks as one reads and my experience when reading The Easy Life was that Jérôme is obtrusive though not more than that.

Now I turn to a novel I have just finished reading, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, The Serial Killer. It’s a very good novel and I recommend it. First published in Nigeria in 2017, it has become a best seller in its US and UK editions, both published in 2019 and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was written in English but contains a handful of short, untranslated, passages in which a character speaks in Yoruba. If you think written French is clotted with diacritical marks you’ve clearly never encountered written Yoruba. At page 113, for example, one and a half lines are occupied by nineteen or twenty words which rack up over twenty marks, one letter attracting two marks - a mark above the letter and a mark below.

Is Braithwaite a bi-lingual writer? No. In her Acknowledgments, she writes “Thank you to Ayobami Adebayo for taking the time to add the accents to my Yoruba” (page 226).   I google the name and up comes Wikipedia with Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, a Nigerian writer with seven accents around her Yoruba name (five above and two below the o's). But Braithwaite in her Acknowledgments gives up on the accents and substitutes an accentless, anglicised version. Should her friend be offended?  

The general justification for diacritical marks is that they provide a pronunciation guide though often enough we will know the pronunciation already: an English child knows how to pronounce café before starting to read about such places. In the past, such marks proliferated in the hands of (often colonial and missionary) linguists trying to index in writing how native words were pronounced in everyday speech without having the benefit of a tape recorder to illustrate them directly. 

I am going to guess that the Yoruba accents we see in Braithwaite's book are the legacy of a colonial past. [ See now the footnote]. I am also going to guess that they are sufficiently complicated to be usable only by quite highly educated people.  And I assert more confidently that they gave me absolutely no help in figuring out how to pronounce the Yoruba passages; I don’t possess even the minimal expertise which I possess for French and German marks. Ah! But should I try to acquire some minimal expertise in written Yoruba? If I’m right, maybe such minimal expertise is not possible - maybe I’m staring at a very complicated system when I look at the words on Braithwaite’s pages, a system which will defy the average person’s attempts to understand it and which did not derive from the work of people trying to make life easy for us.

So what are the marks doing on her pages but missing in her Acknowledgments?  The options are not reassuring. They could be virtue signalling - I care enough about my Nigerian heritage to get it right. Or they could be adding exoticism to the Yoruba - and nowadays we might well regard that as problematic. Yoruba is one language among thousands, but one which happens to be spoken by over fifty million people - so up there with, say, Italian. So why make it more distant from us by retaining the diacritical marks in a book aimed at English language readers very few of whom will understand the  marks as something other than marks of Otherness?

The question becomes this: What would have been lost (and to whom) if Braithwaite had offered us an accentless Yoruba? After all, when I read her Acknowledgments I reckon I have a rough idea how to pronounce the name of Ayobami Adebayo. And so I think do you. And then, to complete the questions, What would have been lost if  Jérôme had become Jerome in my English Duras?

Note

Here is where to start: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_language