LITTLE ROCK — There’s a new study of Sophocles out, which is the good news from a book review in the New Criterion, one of the last bastions of literate commentary among America’s little magazines. The bad news, according to the reviewer, is that the new book is largely unintelligible. That is, it’s written in the muddy style that has come to be known as deconstructionist literary criticism. The title of the review: “Sophocles, jargonized.”
This new, up-to-date version of Sophocles sounds awful, and its being up-to-date is just what’s wrong with it. For it is precisely the beauty of the classics that they are beyond being dated; they are meant for the ages.
Sophocles’ seven surviving plays (out of the estimated 120 he wrote) represent one of Western civilization’s great legacies—and great lessons about the hubris and fate of man. It’s time for a new generation to be introduced to this ever-relevant poet, tragedian and student of the human condition. But instead of a fitting introduction to this invaluable treasure, we get impenetrable academic prose like this:
“When suffering becomes so charged a term, there is inevitably a great deal at stake in how pain or misery is narrativized (and valued), and thus policing the tragic becomes in turn far more than a philological nicety—especially in the troubled interrelations between German Idealism and Christianity, which lead through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others to extended arguments about pessimism and promise.”
Huh? What has all that murk to do with the clarity and simplicity of Sophocles’ works? Beats me. It sounds like one more display of the gnostic vocabulary of current literary criticism, at least of the academic kind. Any resemblance such prose bears to cogent thought may be only coincidental. And rare.
In the introduction to his fine, simple, direct translation of the Oedipus plays, Paul Roche notes that “Sophocles shows us a character pursued to and pursuing its end amid the full illusion both of freedom and destiny and so to a gloriously headstrong doom.” And he adds: “The horror for us, as it was for the Greeks, is precisely to see that an Oedipus . . . can so easily be ourselves.”
Is there any hint of any of that simple wisdom in this latest piece of gobbledygook out of the academy? This pseudo-scholarly act may impress graduate students properly trained in the mysterious vocabulary of deconstructionist clichés, but no one else. All this post-mod gibberish constricts rather than liberates the mind, and here’s one more example of how low Higher Education has become.
Didn’t there used to be such a thing as intelligible scholarship, the kind any literate English speaker could recognize—and be enlightened by? And it was scarcely confined to graduate seminars. You could find it in the conversation of the cultivated, or even in a good English murder mystery. For example, in Sarah Cauldwell’s classic quartet of detective novels starring Hilary Tamar. The first one, Thus Was Adonis Murdered, begins with a few words about the sad fate of the scholar in the modern university, a subject Ms. Cauldwell knew something about, having done her undergraduate work in the classics at Aberdeen and read law at St. Anne’s College at Oxford.
The law, they say, narrows the mind by sharpening it. Counselor Caudwell seems to have been the exception to that rule, to judge by the opening lines of her book, which bespeak a broad education in the ways of academe:
“Scholarship asks, thank God, no recompense but Truth. It is not for the sake of material reward that she (Scholarship) pursues her (Truth) through the undergrowth of Ignorance, shining on Obscurity the bright torch of Reason and clearing aside the tangled thorns of Error with the keen secateurs of Intellect. Nor is it for the sake of public glory and the applause of the multitude: the scholar is indifferent to vulgar acclaim. Nor is it even in the hope that those few intimate friends who have observed at first hand the labor of the chase will mark with a word or two of discerning congratulation its eventual achievement. Which is very fortunate, because they don’t.”
These days the scholar gets even shorter shrift at prestigious universities across the country—as opposed to the academic climber who winds up either in administration or warming an endowed chair to no clear purpose. And mystifying any reader outside his parochial circle.
Wasn’t there a time when Sophocles was considered the inheritance of any educated person, not an arcane mystery reserved for a professoriate with its own secret lingo?
If anyone were to write a murder mystery about the strange process that has transformed the liberal arts into illiberal ones, turned universities into degree factories, and generally made academic prose an oxymoron, it might be titled: “Who killed scholarship?”
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial, Pages 16 on 11/28/2012