My Favorite Peer-Reviewed Journal Article

clown professor

Writing a peer-reviewed journal article is serious business for serious people. The research must be thorough; the footnotes must be perfect. The prose should strive for clarity even when it is dense and allusive; after several rounds of revision, it takes on a certain glossy, overdeveloped sheen. The whole process of writing a peer-reviewed journal article is about establishing one’s own claims to authority, correctness, prestige, expertise. It is, accordingly, hardly a genre within which one can dance, fool around, or goof generally. But peer-reviewed goofery is still possible, and when it happens, it is all the more wonderful for having happened in an inhospitable clime. This is why a rather obscure article published in 2000 in The Cambridge Quarterly, “Roland Barthes’s Resurrection of the Author and Redemption of Biography,” is my favorite peer-reviewed journal article ever.

Written by the mysterious French scholar J.C. Carlier (I choose to imagine horn-rimmed spectacles, a turtleneck, white hat-hair, and that distinct old man smell), the article proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Roland Barthes’ famous essay “The Death of the Author”¹ is a satire of the “New Critics.” The New Critics argued that we can never know what an author intended to mean, and therefore cannot try to understand what a work of literature means by referring to what the author “intended to mean.” By the time Barthes wrote his essay, Carlier reminds us, these ideas were already more or less orthodoxy among academic critics.

How do we know that Barthes is a satirist? Because Barthes “lets his narrator extend apparently plausible reasoning to the point of patent lunacy”—particularly in his denial of reason itself. He makes ludicrous, obviously false “poker-faced” assertions (like the idea that authorship as a concept emerged only after the Middle Ages), which are nonsensical if reflected upon for a moment. Barthes makes his narrator intentionally contradict himself to demonstrate the lunacy of the narrator’s argument. The most flagrant contradiction, for Carlier, is that Barthes’ narrator, “this declared enemy of reason…is obliged to use the procedures of reason to make his case comprehensible.” The essay is also signed by Barthes, a clear signal that it is satire: “If he really believed the views of his fictional narrator, he would not have dared to sign [the essay], for that action would have contradicted not only the claim that the traditional concept of authorship is nonsensical, but also the related claim that the producer of a work is not the author but the reader.”

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As I hope is clear to the reader by now, this essay is itself a work of satire—an intentional misreading of Barthes’ work that highlights its inconsistencies in a way that is irrefutable by those who agree with “The Death of the Author.” For if someone agrees with Barthes that meaning is made by the reader, not by the author, how can they contradict Carlier’s reading? They would have to say that Barthes, the author, did not intend for his essay to be a work of satire, an unsupportable protestation given their own theoretical assumptions. Carlier’s apparently generous mode of reading—interpreting any mistakes as intentional satirical provocations—is deliciously derisive.

“J.C. Carlier,” as it turns out, is a fiction—a satirical narrator created by Cedric Watts, primarily a scholar of Joseph Conrad, who, as his obituary puts it, “took a detached view of the passions which roared through the discipline during much of his career.” I wish there were more of this ironic, bemused detachment in serious, peer-reviewed journals. There is an elegance and force to Watts’ argument that is only possible through satire, and the joke—hidden under the mantle of dry, meticulously-footnoted academic prose—is funny and cutting. I won’t summarize the whole thing here—it would spoil the thing entirely—but you should read it, because Carlier’s satire gets sharper when he trains his sights on the general trends within academic literary criticism that have enabled readers to take Barthes seriously. Watts’ argument loses none of its depth or clarity by being advanced in a satirical form. It is a literary argument, prosecuted with literary techniques. Usually, when someone says that a theorist’s style is part of their argument, they really mean to say that the theorist is nearly unreadably opaque but that their opacity is a feature rather than a bug. Not so here.

It’s a wonderful break from the seriousness and earnestness of so much academic prose. I have no idea how Watts got this thing past peer review—perhaps he knew the editors well enough to place the article without sending it to readers; after all, he was two years away from retirement when he wrote the thing—and I doubt that many editors now would be willing to publish a work of unmarked satire. Academic humanities writing, it seems to me, operates within the bounds of a professionalism made necessary by the increasingly technocratic vibe of the university, where humanities writers, with their citation counts and their ORCIDs, seem rather desperate to establish a certain kind of epistemic legitimacy by being, in some cases, deeply conventional and frankly unfun. Hoaxing, deception, satire, fictionality—all are legitimate ways to argue, and all are august traditions. It’s a shame, in some ways, that they’ve been more or less exiled to places like Substack (where writers like Naomi Kanakia and Justin Smith-Ruiu are doing very interesting things). Here, anything goes, and so there there is less of a delicious shock when one realizes that one has been fooled or jibed. When one is silly on Substack, it’s not such a big deal. It’s much more fun to be silly in The Cambridge Review.

1. Barthes’ argument, in a nutshell: text don’t mean what their authors intend them to mean. Instead, the meaning of a text is created by the reader.