Years ago, I met an old classmate. A poet, he had joined a graduate program on Critical Theory somewhere in the States and was back in Singapore for the holidays. He had workshops with Judith Butler! Gayatri Spivak! Scholars who have galvanized and conducted the orchestra of communal thought. Just embarking upon my own PhD journey, I met him, excited, enchanted with the ivory tower, eager to hear more.
But alas. “It’s become harder to hear myself,” he shared in his soft, careful voice. Haltingly, he described how the language of academia colonized his thinking, dampened his inner ear. I couldn’t understand his despondency, how he described theory stifling his unique poetic voice. It seemed implausible to me that one's voice could be forgotten, overwritten. His problem seemed an issue of poor management, easily remedied with more upright habits.
Seven years later, I understand now. It creeps up on you so slowly.
Just last year, absconded in a study carrel in a famous university, right before Covid-19 hit, I wrote in a proposal:
My work dislodges and supplements Mitchell and Snyder’s framework of narrative prosthesis. I am interested in the dynamic process of what I call narrative prosthesis in action, which I argue shows the dynamism and unpredictability not just of nonnormative disabled embodiment at the representational level, but also the extratextual, lived experience of the reader/viewer.
Writing that tries to be incontestable at the level of argument, but moves no one, not even myself. This proposal has thankfully been shelved, rendered obsolete by time and writerly senescence. But the language— painful to write, painful to read. It's trying so hard. To be... what, exactly?
What is your argument? What is your scholarly intervention? How many times have I searched for different ways to say the same thing? “I assert that... I posit that... I contend that... I advance that...” The language of academese is characterized by its unflappable performance of authority, its assertion that what it is saying, the suggestion it is making, is of discipline-changing import. The common result is language as dry as a bone, over-blanched or dehydrated, ultimately indigestible. Why is it that I, a 'literary scholar' devoted to close reading since age 17, only now, at 31, have finally cast these honed narrative competencies upon my own scholarly writing?
For English writer Geoff Dyer, the “hallmark of academic criticism” is that “it kills everything it touches.” He jeers, “Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable sense of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.” Humorous, but I felt the sharp stab of recognition. Because that's precisely what I did. Slowly, paper after proposal after prospectus, asphyxiating my love for the written word with the very language I use to write about it. And I’m not alone. So many of the works I read and cite are brilliant and timely analyses in the field I’m working in, flawless in their rigor, exciting in their impact. Their authors put in years of painstaking care researching and writing about their subjects. Tens of thousands of students and professors read them, are enriched by them.
And yet, and yet— there is a despairing sameness to the language, a starvation of pathos or enthusiasm. Recently, I read a book about the history of slapstick comedy in America, and it was as humorless as the atmosphere in a university’s Office for Dispute Resolution. Similarly, a thick monograph on magical realism was as antiseptic as a decontamination ward. The subjects so exultant, so mirthful, but their study so suffocating, so barren. The words somehow without musicality or sound, only a distracting physicality. The body of an armored vehicle in a museum, without the grace of motion.
Something about academia, despite its utopian ideals, produces language that is inanimate because there is a persistent and confounding myth that good scholarly writing has to be irreproachable, airtight. It is impenetrable— all shields, awaiting a battalion. The language produced presents itself as a parliament of cognition, logically and elegantly sound as algebra but substantively as empty. There is no adhesion; it does not stick, does not linger in the reader's mind. We are not enlivened, there is no resonance. Our cognition may be nudged, but our feelings unmoved.
British anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us that if writing is to speak, then reading is to listen. Depression took my ability to listen from me, the melody. It thieved away some sort of inner hearing— unable to produce rhythm, tempo, cadence, everything I wrote was stale, expired. Editing, I couldn’t inhabit my reader’s ear. That, coupled with the curious osmosis of academia to produce ironclad language, eventually generated the strained, stilted language in my work that seems parroted from the Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature Graduate Guidebook.
It really had seemed implausible that one's voice could be forgotten, overwritten. But the more I produced this arid writing, the more the zeal that used to spur me on faded, until one day I looked around the famed, historic university library and wondered where my joyful dreams and goals had gone, for I couldn’t find them anywhere, not in my head or heart, nor in the countless MS docs on my laptop. When had I stopped writing for pleasure? How was it that any writing outside of ‘work’ had became ‘frivolous’, ‘non-essential’?
Where had my love gone? Philosopher Alain de Botton observes that the practice of converting passion into facts has “an established pedigree, most noticeable in academia, where an art historian, on being stirred to tears by the tenderness and serenity he detects in a work by a fourteenth-century Florentine painter, may end up writing a monograph, as irreproachable as it is bloodless, on the history of paint manufacture in the age of Giotto.” He astutely remarks, “It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naïve question of how and why we have been moved.”
My desiccated language made me illegible to myself. I developed a stutter. Speaking became embarrassing. I stopped reaching out. It was far safer to be unheard. When I did write, I hoarded the words, refusing to let them see the light of day. Not to advisors, nor friends. Subconsciously, I was ashamed. My words reached no one.
Years passed.
Novelist David Means comments that “As a fiction writer, so much academic writing seems sealed up and hermetic and uninspired, shorn away from a love of subject.” So he advises, “Before you write an academic paper, go back to whatever you loved early on; go back to whatever gave you the impulse to delve into the depths of the subject in the first place… whatever it takes to re-establish the pure meaning of the subject in your mind as it once stood, at that edge of discovery, thrilling and meaningful in the deepest way to your own emotional life.”
Only now, far away from the university campus, back in my home country, freed from the obligation to perform what I self-consciously called my "fake American accent"— only now do I take Means’ advice, going back to the start, finding anew why I love what I do. I am reading not just for work, but for pleasure. I am writing, not just for the dissertation, but also for myself.
The answer has always been there: why does this move me? I want to know.
And I am finally bringing my ear to my own academic writing. Now, I look back on past work with sadness and compassion. My bold, ineffectual posturing tried to cover up poverty of thought by hiding behind jargon, hawking sense without sensibility. My language was so preoccupied with concealing its fears that there was no space for the rigor and expressive force that can come from sincerity and delight. In retrospect, my unconscious pursuit of unimpeachable writing betrays nothing except fear of incompetence, lost and lonely— Please listen to me. I am dedicating years of study to tell you this. Please don't invalidate my work, my life.
The essential Amitava Kumar asks, “Couldn’t our analyses become more exuberant, imaginative, and even playful?” In Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style, he quotes the existentialist Albert Camus, who said this gorgeous, unforgettable line— “the best way of talking about what you love is to speak of it lightly."
And before the reader has time to breathe, Kumar continues, “Which is to say that there is no contradiction between a piece of writing having a lightness and also, at the same time, a depth to it.”
What—
—what a fucking revelation.
The world of the blank page opened up, and the blinking cursor smiled.
Time, as it inexorably does, goes on.
One day, I was working on the dissertation, writing about a graphic novel I love, and trying to describe its art. I wrote:
Lush pencil renderings give the art a Gothic, sepulchral feel that is childlike in its uninked glory.
There’s nothing stylistically innovative or memorable about this sentence. It doesn’t vary syntax or depict movement of thought. Quite simply, it describes the art in a comic book. Yet something about this line moved me, made me float on air for a week, made me think, with burgeoning excitement, This. This is my voice. Some brief honesty resonated from it, some quiet ring of truth. “Childlike in its uninked glory”— my delight for this book is seeping through, my strange, lonely love is joyfully bleeding onto the scholarly venture. This book moved me, adjusted something ineffable but important within me, and I’d like it to move you too.
— in its uninked glory— My language is exactly as incontinent and leaky as it is supposed to be. The default style of academic writing is so embarrassed of this porousness of language that it stoppers any hint of warmth or coolness, erects dykes of authority to protect itself. As if desire or enthusiasm is shameful. As if the ‘I’ that is revealed is too much, too unprofessional. As if the love we have for our subject is too sticky, too messy, this love that led us to embark on the years of training it takes to become scholars. How much self-betrayal we commit, we solitary sages who hide our affections behind our decolored, armored language. As if the strength of an argument depends on how well we hide our enthusiasms and delights. As if the reader isn’t part of the labor of love that is writing.
It is slowly getting better. Writing about breast cancer and graphic novels, thinking about Mummy and Auntie X and Auntie M and Auntie G who have endured or are enduring this horrible disease; as well as J, as well as P, who have cancer, who went to school with me— I wrote:
The reader too, is presented with the coordinates of the onco-pathography plot, but is spared its fleshly truths—a breast was excised; later, the wrenching of skin expanding, reconstructing its shape. Instead, we view it all through the gloss of poetry, children's songs and nursery rhymes, safeguarded by comforting fictions, knowing these evasions are all utterly precious, and absolutely necessary.
My sentences now have breath in them. They are beginning to throb gently with sound, with movement. I’m not actively thinking about ‘style’, nor am I under the delusion that I am breaking genre boundaries or being experimental. I am, however, for the first time in years, focusing on having a voice that rings true. True to me, in that I’m drawing from that neglected well of feeling: this is what moved me; does my language reflect the emotion? I’m writing for a committee, and for a discipline, but also to whoever might want to read it. I am relying on my ear to a ridiculous extent. Making sure the syntax and cadence make space for air, the soft rise and fall.
Gray, sombre Annie Dillard confirms: "The line of words fingers your own heart."
How to explain how comforting it is, to write for the academy, but now, in my own voice? How to explain it is at once more difficult, yet so much easier? More difficult, because a part of me has to be receptive, open, at the time of writing, in order to receive the resonances of thought and emotion that flow through. How challenging it is to be vulnerable that way. Now, I overpunctuate— em-dashes and semicolons proliferate like weeds, and commas litter the page like wind-scattered seeds. Meanwhile, half-formed metaphors and analogies compete for light and space. How this demands a different kind of editing. Yet easier, because the reverb is honest— my language has decided to bare it all, my love for art and the written word. The desire to want my reader to love them too. That gentle, insistent pride.
I am actively consuming the language I admire, because I need reminders. Stylistically, these are the academic and non-fiction writers who turn me on. Vivian Sobchack. Susan Orlean. Maggie Nelson. Chris Kraus. David Abram. Olivia Laing. These are the essayists who send shivers up my spine. Annie Dillard. Joan Didion. Charles D’Ambrosio. Leslie Jamison. These are the poets whose words haunt my waking moments: Ilya Kaminsky. Anne Boyer. Forrest Gander. Ocean Vuong. They shall be my guides now.
Animating my language now is a precarious faith that the affection I have for the things I love will leak through. That this fondness will nourish the rigor of my thoughts. That it will show up, wobbly, bruised but blushing, gesturing—
I love this book. I love this writer. I love language and writing. Let me spend years telling you why.