Last week I wrote about the sheer amount of bibliography we are using in academic work. I neglected, however, to mention that in textual analysis primary sources are occupying less and less space. In the presentation of my volume La verdad sin fin: Expediente X back in September, Iván Gómez praised me for having the ability to tease out of texts what they do contain rather than impose on them my own perspective. I panicked, realising that is possibly the reason why my peer reviewers don’t like my work. It is not fashionable to let the primary sources analysed take centre stage: one rather nasty reviewer even told me, about five years ago, that I was very far from mastering academic analysis. What is fashionable now in academic work is throwing upon the text analysed an immense barrage of secondary sources, presumably needed to sustain argumentation, and only comment the primary source in short bursts that hardly scratch the surface.
Like everyone else, I’m guilty of the same crime. Without masses of secondary sources, as I explained last week, there is no way an academic essay can be published. The problem is that I happen to enjoy very much textual analysis in its two main aspects: searching for clues in the text analysed (whether print or audiovisual) about how it works in form and content, and then bringing to my argumentation plenty of comment. This used to be called ‘illuminating a text’. In fact, I have never written any essay inspired by theory but the other way round: my interest in discussing a text has necessary led to a search for a theoretical framework, as a sort of alibi to be allowed to express what I find relevant in the text (Dickens, to give an example, always has for me preference over Derrida or Butler). If I don’t feel sufficiently inclined to work on this theoretical framework, I write about the text here, offering pure comment and opinion, and less argument.
There is something else at work. Searching for bibliography these days on the trilogy of novels on Takeshi Kovacs by Richard K. Morgan, I have found the following: a) an upsurge of interest in the Netflix adaptation (2018-2020), with very limited interest in the novels (2002-2005); b) an exaggerated attention paid to the first novel, Altered Carbon, to the detriment of the other two, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, even though Kovacs’s narrative arc cannot be understood without reading the three novels; c) a reluctance to write about the whole trilogy, with the honourable exception of Pawel Frelik, whose article “Woken Carbon: The Return of the Human in Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy” is simply excellent. This is not a matter specific to this trilogy: it’s a general pattern.
I am noticing a palpable scholarly laziness in relation particularly to the print primary sources. If audiovisual adaptations exist they soak up all the academic interest, regardless of the origin of the characters and plotlines analysed (routinely attributed to the film or the series, without bothering to check whether they come from the source text). In Morgan’s case, while there is a collective volume dedicated to the series—Sex, Death and Resurrection in Altered Carbon: Essays on the Netflix Series, edited by Aldona Kobus and Lukasz Muniowski, and published in 2020 coinciding with the second and so far final season—there is no equivalent volume about his novels. Frelik’s essay, as I have noted, is the only work analysing the trilogy. On the other hand, of course you may write about a novel which is part of a trilogy or series before the rest are published, but once all the volumes are available, all need to be taken into account. Yet, most scholarly analysis of trilogies refer only to the first volume, with the second and the third ones hardly leaving any trace, as, sorry, few scholars seem inclined to read that much (possibly the exception is Harry Potter, with the whole heptalogy often analysed in a single article).
If you follow my drift, the growing pressure to include many secondary sources to prop up a thick theoretical framework is possibly causing scholars to use less time for the analysis of the primary sources, particularly those in print. I wrote last week how I often find myself scanning academic articles for nuggets of original contributions by the authors, buried among so many quotations and comments from and on the secondary sources. Searching for original comment on the primary sources is even harder. Most academic analysis is extremely biased so that, for instance, I have come across articles comparing Andy Weir’s The Martian with Robinson Crusoe, while there is no comparison with Apollo XIII, which, according to Weir himself was his main inspiration. I’m citing this example because this inattention to the primary source is not only a matter of identity politics bending textual analysis towards ‘issues’. I am not defending formalism, either, but calling for more respect, if that is the word, for the primary sources and their authors.
When dealing with recent work by living authors, which is my main target of research, I tend to include in my bibliography at least one review and one interview. Reviews must offer opinion, which we no longer do in academic writing, and I need them to bring into my own essays straightforward statements about the texts I analyse. I rarely find in current academic work a clear opinion about the quality of the primary sources, though feminist criticism (like mine) tends to be vocal about what male authors get wrong (sorry guys!). Interviews are just wonderful tools, providing evidence of authorial decisions that the text alone cannot confirm. I found, for instance, a little golden nugget in an interview in which Colson Whitehead explains that his zombie novel Zone One expresses the idea that when a person is depressed it feels like the end of the world, so he decided to place his depressed protagonist in a literally apocalyptic narrative. I have not seen this essential declaration quoted in any of the many academic articles on Zone One, which mostly obsess about race (so, perhaps it is after all a question of the excessive weight of ‘issues’).
I’m thinking that in the end what we are missing is a space to publish quality textual analysis which is not subordinated to the argumentative essay. In a way this already exists in the different sites that offer study guides, which started on paper with the famous Cliff Notes and then moved onto the internet in the 1990s. Wikipedia informs that the company was founded by Clifton Hillegass in 1958, who actually bought the rights from Jack Cole, the co-owner of Toronto book business Coles, to the Coles Notes, first published in 1948. Study guides have a very low reputation as aids to help students skip reading the set books, but I find them myself extremely useful when preparing classes, and I have borrowed for my own use (not in class!) chapter summaries and characters lists. The series Modern Critical Interpretations and Bloom’s Classic Critical Views, published by Chelsea House under Prof. Harold Bloom’s editorship, is perhaps the closest which literary criticism has come to offering the kind of analysis I have in mind. Yet, if I’m not wrong they ceased publication after Prof. Bloom’s demise in 2019. And, no, we academics don’t write study guides, at least not openly so (but someone does write them…).
The work required to find relevant passages in secondary sources is vastly different from the task of dissecting how a text works (both fiction and non-fiction). I have for each book I analyse, at least 15 pages, if not 30, of quotations and notes, as it is extremely hard for me to select just three or four quotations and make no notes about the plot or content. Habitually, essays (whether articles or chapters) run from 4500 to 8000 words, rarely more than that, which means that there is actually very little room to explore in depth a text in them, particularly considering, as I’m explaining, the prominent position that secondary sources occupy. On the other hand, the notes we take end up in the trashcan, with lots of interesting passages never commented on for the benefit of other readers. I feel frustrated that so many hours of work end up represented by so little textual analysis, then, but I would not know what to do with a 25000 word-long text commentary, either. So what am I saying? I’m saying that current academic fashion pushes us to fill our essays with so much from the secondary sources and so little from the primary sources that the texts analysed are fragmented rather than illuminated. My impression is that most literary and cultural scholars hardly bother about how texts work, preferring instead to flaunt their reading of a myriad secondary sources. In the journal I co-edit, Hélice, we have made room for what we call miscellaneous essays, in which comment is given priority, and perhaps that’s the way to go: reinvent the academic essay and make the close reading of the text analysed the priority, with all the scholarly apparatus kept as a secondary element. Let’s give it a try, shall we?