Esoteric Runes
My personal favourite is the contest held every year by a bunch of benign Americans who invite authors to come up with a truly horrific, mind-numbing opening sentence for a work of fiction. But the ones that target the genuine stuff have an appeal comparable to the raspberries that parody the Oscars, or those worst bosses in the world lists, especially when the top three nominees turn out to be professors of English.
Rob Wilson of the University of Hawaii, who came in second, and Fred Botting of Lancaster University, who came in third, are nowhere near as well known as Frederic Jameson, a professor of comparative literature at Duke University. His book, Signatures of the Visible, for which he won the wooden spoon, is also a prescribed text for some film and literature courses at several American universities. News reports say that he was not available for comment.
Once commentators quit rubbing their hands together in glee at catching three bona fide professors with their literary pants at half mast, perhaps they should turn their attention to a slightly larger problem. English literature used to be seen as lacking in a certain depth of scientific analysis. There were schools and movements, but they were not seen as comparable to schools of thought as studied in Psychology, say, or movements as in historical ones. But then came Derrida, post-structuralism, gender studies and Gayatri Spivak. Suddenly, English literature turned respectable, even cutting edge. And to prove it, it acquired a whole new vocabulary of chiefly incomprehensible technical terms.
Out of the three, Jamesons opening sentence is the most jargon-free. It compensates for this by using over seven subsidiary clau-ses, and even manages to squeeze an entirely separate sentence into a bracket at the end. (Among the more comprehensible phrases, Jameson includes this one: ...the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess.)
But then, Jameson has been a professor for long. He no longer needs to couch his language in jargon or technicalities in order to be a successful teacher he merely needs to be completely incomprehensible. Wilson and Botting are much lower on the academic totem pole, and therefore need to establish their credentials up front.
Wilson begins with a clash of symbolic trumpets: If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-fordist subject... He also pulls off the impossible, managing to work masochistic, deindustrialising and ecstatic agent into the same sentence. Botting flees into the arms of poetry: The lure of imaginary totality is momentarily frozen before the dialectic of desire hastens on with his symbolic chains. What do they teach them in these universities?
The real question is not whether these three academics, in particular, are horrendous writers: its whether a clean, logical writer would find a place in todays English literature departments. The following proverb, culled from a competition held some time back for the most meaningless invented adage, should sum it up. Passing itself off as Siberian, it said simply: The tallest trees are those that are closest to the sky.