Lest you be deceived, the title of the post is not a description of its author--as humble and retiring a figure as she is. Rather, it's a description of the project I'm currently working on.
And I suppose I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's a very old-fashioned kind of essay, one that points out an odd metaphor that seems to crop up in certain kinds of texts; traces it through those texts; and draws some conclusions about why it works the way it works. It's almost an assignment that I might give my students ("No, you cannot write about what a bitch Lady Macbeth is. But birds, now birds would make an awesome paper. There are totally a lot of birds in Macbeth").
On the one hand, it's nice to be working on something so focused and so self-contained. It's an interesting topic involving some unfamiliar texts, and since nothing has been written on the subject, I have a lot of freedom. On the other hand. . . is this actually an essay that anyone, anywhere, will ever care about?
It's at times like this that I recall a visiting researcher at the rare books library where I worked in college. He turned in dozens upon dozens of call slips, insisting that we wheel out cartloads of books to him at a time. Then he'd flip through them, taking only the barest of notes--and after 20 or 30 minutes return the entire cart and submit another batch of requests.
After a couple of days of silently watching this, one of the full-time employees looked up the guy's research application to see what he was doing with all those books. His project? An analysis of the use of the macron in Greek texts of a certain period.
Now, from my current vantage point, I recognize that this was probably only part of a larger project, and I can at least imagine some interesting and important questions that might have animated what at the time struck those of us behind the desk as hilariously pointless. For years, though, the dude studying the macron was my pet example of scholarship's willful obscurity; I'm pretty sure I trotted out that story more than once when explaining why I didn't think I should go to grad school.
So somewhere behind my mixed feelings about the narrow scope of this particular project is Macron Dude. But I suspect it's more than that. Maybe what it is, above all, is the worry that everything I work on would get me sniggered at by the folks behind the library desk. Yes, I've published things with bigger and often quite aggressive arguments. But maybe their aggression is really a compensation for--and semi-conscious recognition of--their irrelevance.
Which doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing any of it, of course. I'm not modest enough for that.
11 comments:
Amen to that!
Ooo, birds in Macbeth! I noticed there were totally a lot of them when I was a freshman. I still treasure the professor's comment on that part of my term paper: "I love the paragraph where you turn Macbeth into a Hitchcock flick."
... Uh, that had nothing to do with anything, I think.
Those lovely little bits are what keep me going. I found two when I was doing my diss research: a man who disappeared during a flight to Amsterdam (as in mid-flight) and a Russian princess who worked as a dancer in Paris (yeah, up there) and married a minor Serbian prince. His mom disapproved when he started dancing with her... on stage. Oops.
I've always wanted to go back and work on those.
It strikes me that this post is itself a modest little thing. Certainly compared to your last few: money, identity, truth. This one's more like: fluttering minutia.
I'd like to think the MLT aspect of what we do is also its potential. Great range, little censorship (comparatively anyway).
Well I only said I'd like to believe it.
Jack: So wait--I don't post in over a week, and now you're criticizing that post for not being weighty enough? Tough crowd.
Belle: those bits sound awesome. You should write on them.
And Fretful: heh.
If scholars worried that no one would ever read their work, then very few works would ever get published. Your job is to make it engaging and relevant. Sounds like you're doing that. So keep it up!
I think sometimes we try to hard to make everything we do earth-shattering, loading it with theoretical or conceptual baggage it can't hold. Sometimes a "small" piece leads somewhere once it's done. And I trust that you can make it seem interesting and relevant.
Ha. Not exactly how I meant it, but I see what you mean. Perhaps I actually have a thing for fluttering minutia (birds! bits!). Which leads me to believe that I am indeed in the right profession.
Ok, first: is it a problem that Macron Dude is my ideal image of an academic? And may be the very reason I did go to grad school? hmm...
Second, on the question of whether anyone will want to read your essay, I tend to think thusly: the number of people in the world is decidedly non-trivial. Sometime, somewhere, someday, someone will be extremely thankful that you wrote that essay. Perhaps only a single person, but there you go...
H: Actually, I kinda love Macron Dude now--and at most moments I also love the fact that our profession allows us (as Susan, Jack, and Anon are suggesting) to pursue our odd little interests as far as we want to without needing to subject them to someone else's idea of relevance or importance.
But at the same time--I'm not exactly writing Surprised By Sin over here, if you know what I'm saying. And at times I vaguely feel that I should be.
Flavia-Flav, you know that _Surprised by Sin_ got written, in part, because of lots of folks who'd done the modest little things before it. I'm pretty sure that you don't get to decide how important your work is going to be down the line, how it will trickle down into later stuff.
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