"Who Cares?"

Is academic self-justification to blame for the state of academic prose?

I'm reading a dissertation written in 1941 called “Balzac in the United States During the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Franco-American Cultural Relations” by Ruben Cohen. It is precisely what its title indicates—nothing more and nothing less. And it has given me the most fun and pleasure out of any nonfiction title I’ve read in the past two or three months.

Written in accessible and often sprightly prose, the dissertation is divided neatly into four sections: 1835-1850, 1850-1865,1865-1885, 1885-1900. Each section provides a brief bit of historical context followed by a summary of criticism, translations, and sales of Balzac's work. We see Balzac emerge in 1830s America as a scandalous, “trashy” author writing steamy adultery novels of ill repute. Beyond a few exceptionally liberal-minded readers, Balzac is seen as incorrigibly French, which is to say, lecherous and dangerously Catholic. As a writer, Cohen generally gets out of the way, offering evenhanded summaries of review essays in a generally chronological manner.

It isn't until the generation of literary artists we now call the American literary realists—especially Henry James—that Balzac begins to really be taken seriously by American critics despite his novels’ lack of didactic and moral purpose. After ten or fifteen years of critical praise, and the advent of Émile Zola—who was so immoral and French that he made even Balzac seem straight-laced—the author of the Comédie humaine finally got his kudos in the US. By 1900, he was regularly compared to Shakespeare, and his massive literary project was finally considered a masterpiece by the uptight WASPs who still largely dominated American “high culture.” Through his reception history, we glimpse the changing taste of a nation, changing attitudes toward the French, and the advent of new theories of fiction and literary value. If in the 1830s a “moral” novel needed to inculcate a didactic lesson, by 1900 a novel could be considered morally improving if it simply told the truth—a major shift.

Maybe this is all terrifically boring to most people, and perhaps my enjoyment of this dissertation is nothing more than a charming (I hope) quirk. But I don’t think so. To me, as a reader, if the cultural historian stands aside and more or less lets the past speak for itself, the interest will emerge, for the past and the people who populate it are colorful and fascinating. But Cohen's dissertation would today be vulnerable to charges of “antiquarianism”—the simple relation of fact after fact without a larger sense of why those facts are relevant or important to the reader.

I once got a reader’s report on a journal article that accused me of the same crime. My reviewer said something to the effect of, “You just sort of gather all of your evidence and present it to the reader.” To which I answered, well, yeah!¹ The problem my reviewer found was that I was not yet “telling a story,” not yet clearly “making an intervention in the scholarship,” failing to answer, in so many words, the question, “Who cares?”Academic humanities writers worry, rather a lot, about whether they can answer this question. The idea is that any piece of scholarship must have some clear pay-off outside itself. You can't simply discover something new and explain it to your reader clearly—you must make the case for why your discovery matters.

This makes sense, in its way. We live in a world that has infinite facts in it. Academics, the logic goes, should not be in the business of generating useless factoids. We should only bother to do research if that research moves the sum of human knowledge forward in some way that matters, that helps us achieve some goal.

But, like any sensible standard, this one can backfire. Because how can you make any knowledge about Balzac seem necessary? Unless someone is already interested in Balzac, they will quite rightly consider Balzac-related research beneath their notice. So the contemporary Balzac scholar must find a way to make their work seem relevant to those who are not already interested in it, even if it is not. There are two primary ways this is done: first, by suggesting that the scholarship “transforms” our knowledge of some larger field, or by arguing that it contributes, obliquely or directly, to a struggle for social justice. Inflated claims to theoretical profundity or inflated claims to social “impact.” Scholarship made “relevant” by affixing it either to a massive theoretical apparatus or to a movement for social change.

Answers to the “Who Cares?” question are often made in a kind of defensive crouch, because they are an admission that the research being done has no intrinsic value or interest. They concede the point that knowledge about, say, Balzac's reception history can only be seen as valuable if it does something “real” and “useful”—that is to say, it is only legitimate if it simultaneously tells us about something other than Balzac’s reception history. Instead of catering to an audience that already cares about and values the history of literature, for example, they cater to an audience of people who are skeptical of the worthiness of the research. They, sometimes, protest too much. It would be one thing if literary scholars’ answers to the “who cares?” questions were taken seriously, and our insistence that our scholarship improves the world resulted in that opinion becoming widespread. But it seems pretty clear to me that that is not happening. In the meantime, the scholarly writing becomes more tortuous and inflated than it really needs to be.

One reason why Cohen’s old dissertation, from way back in 1941, seems so fresh and interesting is precisely because it seems unburdened by such demands for relevancy. (And, in any case, if Cohen had spent lots of time explaining how his work transformed the discipline of cultural history, all of that would be irrelevant to me now, since the discipline has moved on considerably; the facts and excerpts that Cohen presents are still relevant to me today, even if his “contributions” are not.) Cohen doesn't dwell on why his research is important. He just sort of presents his evidence, in as clear and lucid a package as he can. He doesn't spend half of his time being a salesman for his own work. He lets the work speak for itself and stand on its own. And I think that's why his work is so fun for me to read: it just gives me the goods, and lets me decide for myself whether I care.

1. This is not true. This is what I thought at first. I actually answered “OK, thank you very much for the feedback,” then spent a few months making the article “tell a story” and “make an intervention.” I’m probably too close to the article to know whether it was improved by this particular suggestion—although many of the other suggestions made by the reviewers vastly improved the article. But I’ve always thought: if antiquarianism isn’t allowed in academic journals, where is it allowed? Are we simply to scrub the Earth of antiquarianism?