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Scholarly Publishing in the Age
of Oprah
William C. Dowling
1. Barbie's Queer Accessories
Until one day last February, I thought
I had a pretty good understanding of what is now generally called
the crisis of the monograph -- that is, the drying up of resources
for "intensive studies of small but worthwhile subjects"
(Auguste Fruge's phrase) in favor of trend-driven publishing,
today even by some leading university presses, on subjects formerly
associated with punk rock lyrics or supermarket tabloids or the
Oprah Winfrey show. For as an eighteenth-century scholar I had
myself published several specialized literary studies, and as
co-owner of Winthrop Press, a small part-time publishing operation
based in Princeton, New Jersey, I had learned a good bit about
the economics of short-run book production. The one thing I hadn't
done, as it happened, was actually lay eyes on any example of
the new trend-based scholarship.
Nor did I have any intention of doing so
on that day in February. I had gone up to Micawber Books, our
most dependable local purveyor of "serious" titles,
in search of Aulus Gellius, a new study of the Noctes
Atticae by the British classicist Leofranc Holford-Strevens.
I knew it was a long shot. The book is published by the University
of North Carolina Press, and I had seen other UNC titles on
their shelves, but even Micawber seldom carries anything as specialized
as studies of minor second-century Latin authors. It wasn't there.
I special-ordered the book and, the weather being chilly and
the afternoon gray, fell to browsing in Micawber's recently-expanded
section on Gender and Cultural Studies.
This was my awakening. I stood there reading
for an hour, by which time I saw that I would never understand
the crisis in scholarly publishing until I had at least attempted
to understand how this section of the bookstore had come into
existence. The book I took home from the cultural studies section
that day was Barbie's Queer Accessories, written by Erica
Rand,  a "dyke activist" --
the phrase comes from the back cover -- who teaches art history
at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. It was published by Duke
University Press. In the months since, I have read a great number
of works in gender and cultural studies, but that first encounter,
happening almost by chance, seems to me now to have been entirely
serendipitous. Nothing I have read since does a better job of
exemplifying the new trend-driven scholarly publishing than Barbie's
Queer Accessories. To read it through is to see why, for
better or for worse, the traditional scholarly monograph is on
its way to extinction.
To begin with, Barbie's Queer Accessories
is written in the quasi-autobiographical mode that has become
the trademark of so much writing in cultural studies. It is difficult
to resist its note of personal engagement. Rand begins with the
story of how her interest in Barbie dolls arose, almost by accident,
from an otherwise wholly routine incident. A friend had sent
her the latest copy of their favorite lesbian sex magazine, and
while leafing through its pages Rand came across an photograph
of a woman inserting a Barbie doll -- "feet first"
-- into her vagina. Here, Rand saw instantly, was something more
significant than a mere bit of lesbian pornography. She loved
the photograph, and she immediately wanted to teach it to her
students in art history and women's studies.
Yet there was a danger. In a world still
powerfully swayed by homophobic attitudes, a Barbie-in-the-vagina
photo might be taken as an immature or sophomoric gesture of
"transgression" rather than an occasion of serious
intellectual analysis. "I worried," as she puts it,
"about inserting a Barbie dildo into the heterosexist context
of the university classroom." In this moment of pedagogical
perplexity lie the origins of Barbie's Queer Accessories as
a work of scholarship. For as Rand consults colleagues and friends
about the problem, the question of the Barbie dildo drops into
the background -- she does eventually introduce the photo into
classroom discussion, and nothing much happens -- while Rand
herself begins to get widely known as someone with an interest
in Barbie dolls.
The ostensible subject of Barbie's Queer
Accessories is what in cultural studies is called counterhegemonic
discourse -- "the Barbie features that," as Rand puts
it early on, "make her seem to resist the free play of accessorizing
signifiers" -- but a reader soon understands that Rand's
heart isn't in the talk about counterhegemony and accessorizing
signifiers. The real subject is the book itself: how it came
to be written, what Rand went through in writing it. Thus, for
instance, Rand's account of how her early research as a Barbie
scholar took the form, very often, of simply gathering anecdotes:
"My friends told me about how they had loved or hated Barbie
and about what they had done with and to her -- how they had
turned her punk, set her on fire, made her fuck Midge or Ken
or G.I. Joe [other dolls sold by Mattel, Barbie's manufacturer],
or, on occasion, gotten the much advertised 'hours of fun' by
following Mattel's directions. People I hardly knew who heard
of my interest were anxious to tell me their Barbie tales."
The serious intellectual substance of Barbie's
Queer Accessories always has to do with personal experience.
Rand does undertake a dutiful review of Mattel's own "official"
history of Barbie, but this is quite unabashedly journalistic
filler, the sort of thing one might find in a magazine article
about the toy industry. The moments at which the writing comes
alive -- the reason, one sees, that the editorial board at Duke
must have been drawn to it in the first place -- are those in
which Rand talks about her own personal involvement with Barbie
dolls. Thus, for instance, her extended account of an doll-house-like
"environment," Barbie's Dream Loft, originally created
for Rand by an artist friend. As restaged by Rand herself, the
scene features two dolls, a blonde Barbie and a Chicana Barbie,
in a " top/bottom dyke sex scene" in which the latter
plays the dominant role: "she stands bent over blond Barbie
with a hand on blond Barbie's butt, a hand moved now and then
to suggest alternately spanking, anal penetration, and the more
run-of-the-mill hand-to-vagina activity generically known as
finger-fucking." The intellectual substance of the Dream
Loft section lies in the way Rand is able to turn her own sense
of inner conflict to the purposes of serious cultural analysis:
Among other problems, I struggled with
how to assign roles to my two Barbies. Putting Chicana Barbie
on top reinforces racial stereotypes of the dark brute overpowering
the less animalistic white girl; the hair contrast alone places
my Dream Loft firmly within the hetero-generated tradition of
lesbian representation, which often features an aggressive, dark-haired
vixen seducing a blond innocent. Putting blond Barbie on top
would have subverted these stereotypes but performed white supremacy.
In terms of race there was no way out of the dominant discourse.
This is a standard sort of analysis in
cultural studies. Allowing for some adjustment among "theoretical"
registers, most of the books in the section in which I originally
came across Barbie's Queer Accessories were written in
this mode. Its significance lies, I think, no matter how one
may happen to feel personally about Barbie studies or the paradoxes
of lesbian representation, in the way it is today driving out
of existence a more "traditional" sort of scholarly
publication. For it is not simply that demand for specialized
studies like Aulus Gellius, the volume I had come to buy,
has all but disappeared -- as I shall show, current statistics
suggest that such studies will in a very short time cease to
be published at all if present trends continue -- nor that the
demand for books like Barbie's Queer Accessories has,
at least over the short term, mushroomed. It is that a hidden
play of institutional and economic forces has conspired to put
them in direct competition.
An essential point here -- what I mean
by talking about "hidden" forces -- is that a decline
in demand for books in the Aulus Gellius category and
rise in demand for Barbie's Queer Accessories need not
be related. It is true that one has an intuitive sense that the
two must be connected. Chevrolet sales go down and Toyota sales
go up: isn't this likely to be related to the zero-sum nature
of competition in the automobile industry? But the problem is
that books, unlike automobiles, need not exist in precisely this
zero-sum relation to one another. We could easily enough imagine,
for instance, a situation in which sales of books on Tai Kwon
Do or astrology rose spectacularly and books like, say, Rawls's
Theory of Justice or Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment
stopped selling altogether, and yet the two occurrences were
wholly unrelated. By the same token, we could very easily imagine
a situation in which demand for both Tai Kwon Do books and The
Machiavellian Moment rose dramatically simply because, for
whatever reason, people had begun to read more.
This is a point that seldom comes up in
recent writing about the "crisis of the monograph,"
where, beyond occasional grumbling that only titles about gender
or identity politics seem to sell these days, most of the talk
has been about production costs, library budgets, warehouse storage
rates, and the like. So it is that we get the essential clue
to the zero-sum relation between Aulus Gellius and Barbie's
Queer Accessories in quite a different quarter: the journalistic
celebration of Cultural Studies that has tended to pursue the
story on the level of names and personalities -- a long Lingua
Franca article on editor William Germano and the triumph
of what its critics have called "tabloid scholarship"
at Routledge, for instance, or a piece in The Chronicle of
Higher Education on Nicholas Pfund of NYU Press, or, on a
weekly basis, items in the Chronicle's own recently-instituted
"Hot Type" department, devoted to the new and the topical
in university publishing.
The reason that this journalism strikes
me as crucial is that it has emanated from the same space --
located, as one might say, somewhere between People magazine
and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology -- occupied
by Cultural Studies itself, such that one is constantly aware
of tremors of an assumed "transgressiveness" just beneath
the surface. For otherwise, on the face of it, these would simply
be marketing stories, as readily told about General Motors as
Routledge or NYU Press. Thus, for instance, we hear in Lingua
Franca that Routledge once favored sober, academic-type covers
for its books. No more: "The cover of Spectacular Bodies,
a study of gender and race in action movies, is typical of Routledge's
hunky, puff-'n'-pant aesthetic. It features a muscle-bound and
tattooed Jean-Claude Van Damme. Arresting Images, a collection
on art and censorship, juxtaposes an image of the artist Leon
Golub dressed as a cardinal with a bound torture victim, her
nude chest dripping with blood." Or, from the Routledge
in-house organ The Cultural Studies Times, a list of the
"top-ten reasons why you need a cultural studies section
in your bookstore" ("#6--To create a hip pick-up scene,"
"#8--Where else would you find Barbie, Disney, and Madonna
next to one another?").
The tendency in these stories is to focus
on two elements, the personality of the protagonist -- portrayed
as a brash young ex-academic or would-be academic who has dared
to overturn the stodgy orthodoxies of conventional scholarly
publishing --and the "sensationalistic" quality of
the titles they have dared to publish. Thus the picture of Germano,
the central figure in Lingua Franca's Routledge story,
moving through the corridors at the Modern Language Association:
"Germano's devotion to the culture of academic celebrity
remains strong. 'When I go to MLA,' he says, 'I don't go to hear
papers. I go to ask people whom I respect who's hot, what's going
on, what are you really excited about? That's much more important
than spending two hours listening to a lecture.' And, apparently,
what people are really excited about is Tonya Harding: Routledge's
most-hyped forthcoming title is Women on Ice: Feminist Responses
to the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan Spectacle."
The emphasis, in short, is on what is being
published and how it is being packaged: Tonya Harding, Jean-Claude
Van Damme, nude torture victims dripping with blood, Barbie as
dildo. The same note occurs in The Chronicle of Higher Education's
account of Nicholas Pfund, the new director of NYU Press. ("Fast-moving
and aggressive," reports The Chronicle somewhat breathlessly,
"Mr. Pfund may represent the future of scholarly editing.")
There is the usual story of a marketing miracle wrought by paying
attention to trends -- NYU, we learn, "has doubled sales
in the past four years, to more than $3.2 million annually. And
with Mr. Pfund at the helm, it has an all-important buzz going
for it" -- and then the list of titles that have brought
in the profits: "what do people want to read, according
to Mr. Pfund? Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the
Performing Arts, Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd, Lesbian
Erotics, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, and Heavenly
Sex, 'a lighthearted tour of sexuality in the Jewish tradition,'
by Ruth Westheimer (who is an adjunct faculty member at N.Y.U.)
and Jonathan Mark."
Yet it would be a serious mistake, I think,
to suppose that the subjects or topics or titles of these books
play anything but a minor role in such stories of marketing success.
For there is, first of all, the simple fact that the culture
on which they report is immensely more "sensationalistic"
than anything that could be found on the Cultural Studies bookshelves.
Tonya Harding and female impersonation are not, after all, news
to the millions who view TV "trash" talk shows, and
who, if they should happen to want more information, would be
far more likely to turn to People magazine or a supermarket
tabloid than a title published by Routledge or NYU or Duke University
Press.
Then there is the fact that large commercial
publishers, with far greater resources and even fewer misgivings
about being accused of intellectual prostitution, have taken
aim at the same market. It is a despairing sense that the very
notion of intellectual prostitution has ceased to have meaning
among American publishers, for instance, that drives The New
Republic to an almost desperate irony in reporting on a new
children's series to be put out by Random House:
Last week Maureen O'Brien of The New York Post reported that Random House
is planning a series of fast tabloid books about sensational
crimes . . . for children. A spokeswoman for the publishing house
told O'Brien that these books will be "exposs of the most
provocative, frightening, other worldly and until now 'adult'
current events." We're not sure what "other worldly"
means, but the meaning of "until now 'adult'" is perfectly
clear. Random House is preparing to pander to kids. The same
spokeswoman admitted that "if another Jeffrey Dahmer and
Amy Fisher were to come along and make the news, that's precisely
the type of crimes that we would want to cover in these books."
(See Amy fire. See Jeffrey chew.) . . . The first volume is called
Unabomber: Handled With Care. Another shrewd publicity
person at Random House did us the favor of sending along the
book's first three chapters. They are special. Chapter One tells
of a botched explosion on a Boeing 727 carrying seventy-two people:
. . ."The bomber went to a lot more trouble than he had
to. He could have bought a lot of the stuff at Radio Shack."
(Cool.) . . . And so on. We wish the publishers luck in hell.
Were they simply entries in the Jeffrey
Dahmer-Amy Fisher market, there is no reason to suppose that
books like Women on Ice and Barbie's Queer Accessories
would be selling any more copies than the average scholarly monograph.
There is simply too much competition, both in the media generally
and, within publishing, from commercial firms like Random House,
to explain their success as being due to an attentiveness to
market trends to which traditional scholarly publishers have
remained oblivious. This is what directs us, I take it, to look
for an explanation in a source of "transgression" having
very little to do with Barbie dildos or nude torture victims
and a great deal to do with a titillation presumed to arise from
seeing authors trained in serious scholarship -- an ancient tradition
of disinterested learning caught, so to speak, with its pants
down-- displaying an absorption in such topics.
To see the marketing success of publishers
like Routledge and NYU as a narrative or story, in other words,
is to see that its underlying plot has all along been a version
of Belle du Jour, Bunuel's film about an upper-class woman
who has a secret life working in a Parisian brothel. The thrill
lies not in the scenes that take place in the brothel-- one has
always known, after all, that houses of prostitution exist --
but in all the scenes that don't: the prim society lady at home
in her proper surroundings, the servants and the rich furnishings
and the ceremony of afternoon tea. It is this that gives meaning
to the rest: the lady waiting until her husband is gone for the
day, putting on dark glasses and a borrowed coat, parking her
automobile blocks away, making her furtive way to the inconspicuous
hallway where she rings the buzzer and gives her assumed name.
The hovering sense of a "violated" propriety is the
story, in a manner of speaking: take it away, and Belle du Jour
is simply about a prostitute going to work. The recent success
of various Cultural Studies titles seems to me explicable on
similar terms.
Yet there is a twist. The Belle du Jour
scenario would seem to make sense, on the face of it, only
if there were some market of general readers thrilled to discover
that university-trained scholars -- minds presumed to be at home
with Plato and Kant and Shakespeare, popularly supposed to be
the custodians of some "higher" learning -- have, once
one has penetrated the veil of intellectual hypocrisy, exactly
the same preoccupations as the average viewer of Rosanne or
Oprah Winfrey. The problem is, of course, that no such
market exists. For it is academics themselves, by and large,
who provide the market for these titles. No one who actually
buys Barbie's Queer Accessories is shocked by its "transgressive"
patter about finger-fucking, and no one who might be so shocked
buys books like Barbie's Queer Accessories.
The zero-sum relationship between books
like Barbie's Queer Accessories and books like Aulus
Gellius thus demands to be understood as, after all, something
entirely internal to academic publishing, involving a kind of
pantomime or shadow-show in which an specific academic audience
is encouraged to imagine, to its considerable delight, a ghostly
"establishment" driven to apoplexy by the very idea
of Barbie or Madonna studies. The shadow-show itself has largely
been, in the way of such entertainments, a fantasy or illusion,
but it has had real and important consequences. For most Cultural
Studies titles are something like those special-effects movies
in which a cartoon-character protagonist is introduced into a
actual setting: Barbie's Queer Accessories "transgresses"
only so long as its readers may imagine its being actually presented
as a credential for tenure or promotion at a real college or
university. For the same reason, it is important that the contributors
to Women on Ice be "feminists," which, translated,
may mean "academic feminists," which in turn means
university-trained scholars who may be presumed to be "transgressing"
in writing about "tabloid" subjects like Tonya Harding.
In the next section I want to look briefly
at the crisis in scholarly publishing, but I want then to return
to what might be called the Roger Rabbit aspect of the
Cultural Studies trend, which is the way the phenomenon of imaginary-transgression-in-a-real-setting
has demoralized scholarly publishers, seeming to put a power
of evaluation and oversight traditionally invested in the community
of scholars themselves into the hands of figures like Mr. Germano
and Mr. Pfund. For the real death-knell of the learned monograph
is not to be heard, it seems to me, in any dreary recitation
of declining sales figures and shrinking library budgets. It
is, rather, the sound of Mr. Pfund cheerily spelling out to a
reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Education his own
predilections in publishing: " I'm just not interested on
an intellectual level in figuring out how to publish tremendously
esoteric texts. What I want are books that people read, that
deal with subjects that are of interest to a range of people.
That entails a willingness occasionally to say it's not our responsibility
to publish a book, no matter how good, if it's going to lose
a lot of money."
2. The Gargoyle of Truth
No reader of Scholarly Publishing
needs to be briefed on "the crisis of the monograph,"
but I want nonetheless to cite a few sources and run through
a few figures to get a sense of how the crisis is being perceived
in circles outside academic or university publishing. Here, for
instance, is part of a letter from John G. Ryden, the director
of Yale University Press, to Hugh Kenner, who quotes it in a
recent Common Knowledge article on scholarly publishing:
" Yale and every other university press in America has seen
the sale of the scholarly monograph . . . decline by two-thirds.
Where we once expected to sell perhaps 2500, we now sell 800-900.
Over the years smaller print runs pushed up costs and therefore
prices in an ongoing spiral. Scholars virtually stopped buying
books. Library budgets declined in the 70s; in the 80s they dropped
again and serial purchases cut deeply into funds available to
buy books.'"
In the same vein is "The Endangered
Monograph," written as a recent "Director's Desk"
column in Perspectives, in which Sandria Freitag gloomily
summarizes the ways university presses have been trying to cope
with declining sales. "The first strategy is often to cut
print runs. Many presses have reduced their typical print runs
from 1,000 to 750. When titles sell only 350 to 450 copies in
the first three years, however -- and this is often the case
-- this strategy does not allow presses to recoup their production
or inventory costs." Freitag then briefly discusses "docutech,"
a system in which as few as 5 copies per run can be produced
by a single machine using laser imaging and xerography to go
straight from disk to bound book, but concludes that such technologies
still result "in discouragingly high per-unit costs. So
while a press may avoid inventory costs and the pall of hundreds
of unsold copies of a monograph, it has done so only by raising
the cost of a title so high that, generally, the market will
not bear it. The vicious spiral continues."
Or, finally, "The Crisis in Scholarly
Communication," written for The Chronicle of Higher Education
by Sanford G. Thatcher, director of Penn State Press. It is a
much a cri de coeur as a recital of statistics, though
in this case the statistics very nearly constitute a cri de coeur
in themselves. In the last ten years, Thatcher reports, Penn
State Press has published 150 titles in literary studies, putting
it among the leading scholarly publishers in that field. "We
cannot be sure exactly how many people have read these books,
but we do know how many have bought them. Of the 150 titles,
65 per cent have sold fewer than 500 copies and 91 per cent fewer
than 800. Only 3 per cent (generally those dealing with American
literature or gender issues) have sold more than 1,000 copies."
The result has been a draconian change in policy: "The market
for books of traditional literary criticism has now shrunk to
the point that it is no longer possible for a small, unendowed
press like Penn State's to continue publishing such works."
Thatcher's column in the Chronicle
seems to me noteworthy on several counts, one being that it does
a better job of conveying the current sense of demoralization
among traditional scholarly publishers than anything else I have
read, another that it is particularly clear on two points that
otherwise tend simply to lurk ominously in the background in
such discussions. The first is a purely technical point. "American
university presses might buy some time," says Thatcher,
"if they were willing to follow the example of European
publishers and raise book prices to cover the full cost of small
print runs -- to, say, $150 for a 250-page book with a print
run of 400 copies." But this is based on an assumption that
is, as we shall see, worth looking into in some detail: "Many
publishing costs--such as acquiring manuscripts and copy editing,
designing, typesetting, and marketing books--are fixed, in that
they don't vary with the size of the print run."
The second point usefully emphasized by
Thatcher -- it is the gloomy subtext of most of these discussions
-- concerns the close connection between scholarly publishing
and tenure and promotion in American colleges and universities.
Much of Thatcher's column is based on a survey taken by Penn
State Press among authors on its own list, and the results in
this department are especially dispiriting: "according to
the survey of our authors, the deciding factor when they do buy
a book is the reputation of the author.' This suggests that the
careers of younger scholars publishing their first books are
especially at risk. If faculty members are required to publish
books to gain tenure, how will they manage to do so if presses
can no longer afford to issue books by unknown authors that are
likely to sell only a few hundred copies?" When university
presses like his own have to simply cease publishing specialized
studies, says Thatcher elsewhere in the column, something is
badly amiss in the scholarly world, "which relies on such
publications to make the process of tenure and promotion work."
But what are those specialized studies
that Penn State Press is no longer able to publish? Thatcher's
mention of "gender issues" as one of the only two categories
in which Penn State titles have sold 1000 copies is enough to
let us guess that we are dealing here with the zero-sum relationship
discussed earlier. Most books that attain even this modest level
of marketing success will be those that, like Barbie's Queer
Accessories, manage to attract a somewhat wider audience
by promising to transgress the norms of conventional or traditional
scholarship. In the background, then, gathering dust on the shelves
of unsold volumes, will be all those books -- 97 per cent, in
the Penn State case --that, like Aulus Gellius, embody
precisely the "higher" learning whose very conventionality
gives the transgression its point: studies assuming a certain
background in ancient and modern history, philosophy, literature,
and languages, and very often presuming beyond that a genuine
interest in some writer or intellectual milieu that, from what
might be called the Barbie's Dream Loft perspective, must seem
hopelessly and hilariously obscure.
One could not look for a better example
than Aulus Gellius, the subject of Holford-Strevens's study.
For the author of the Noctes Atticae wrote long after
the great age of Livy and Horace and Virgil, and even among scholars
who take a serious interest in authors of the Antonine period
he is has not been seen as a commanding figure. The Noctes
Atticae is itself a collection of occasional pieces, composed,
as Gellius tells us, during the winter evenings when he was staying
in a villa with a friend outside Athens. The work consists of
anecdotes and chatty observations, remarks on books and Greek
and Latin grammar and curious points of natural history, little
glimpses into Graeco-Roman life as it settled gratefully into
a long calm after the terror and insanity of Caligula and Nero
and Domitian, the incest and murder and capricious tyranny of
the Julio-Claudian and Flavian years as one reads about them
in Tacitus or Suetonius.
To anyone drawn to the Noctes Atticae,
a great part of the attraction has always no doubt lain in the
way they permit a modern reader to bask, as Holford-Strevens
once says, in the afternoon sun of ancient culture, to dwell
with Aulus Gellius and his friends in a Roman intellectual milieu
that was beginning turn backwards to its own earliest roots and,
beyond that, to the enormous debt to Greek literature, philosophy,
and political theory on which so much of the Roman civic and
literary achievement was based. Modern scholarship has done a
great deal to recover the details that make this picture so compelling
-- the large-scale absorption of provincials into Roman administration,
so that the empire becomes gradually and peacefully a homogenous
entity, the completion and perfection of the road system that
allowed one to travel easily from one end to another of its vast
extent, the hundreds of cities of the empire that became "little
Romes," with their amphitheaters and their baths and libraries
-- but it is only in works like the Noctes Atticae that
we are permitted to hear the voices of the age.
Yet those voices are conversing in Latin
and Greek, which is no doubt why a book like Holford-Strevens's
Aulus Gellius, even given the great attractions of what
one scholar calls the Antonine golden age, could hardly be expected
to sell a thousand copies in the 1990s. For the Noctes Atticae
takes place during one of those cultural moments that Foucault
describes so compellingly in The Order of Things, in which
a language has begun to turn opaque -- gradually ceasing, as
Foucault says, "to be transparent to its representations,
because it is thickening and taking on a peculiar heaviness"
-- and so becomes an object of curiosity in its own right to
its educated speakers. Thus it is that much of the Noctes
Atticae is about matters that we would call philological
or grammatical, with Gellius and his friends endlessly absorbed
in the interplay of Greek and Latin meanings as these have created
the mental universe dwelt in by educated minds in the second
century.
In practical terms, this means that Holford-Strevens
must assume on the part of his readers at least enough Greek
and Latin to make sense of the world -- to a very large extent,
a world of books, of phrases echoing earlier poetry and drama
and philosophy -- that it is his business to recreate. So, for
instance, we have the scene in which Gellius, who has just made
the sea passage from Greece to Brundisium, comes ashore and takes
a stroll around the marketplace to regain his land-legs. He comes
across a bookstall in which a great number of old Greek books
are for sale. They are in battered condition, but they are cheap.
He buys the lot, and then spends the next two nights reading
them, copying into his commonplace book their tales about strange
people in faraway places, cannibals and one-eyed humans -- we
are in the immediate vicinity here of Othello's "Anthropophagai,
and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders" --
and tribes who are able to kill by uttering praise. Some of these
same stories, says Gellius, he later found in Pliny's Naturalis
Historia. The point made by Holford-Strevens will be precisely
that a great deal of this has demonstrably come directly from
Pliny, that the story of the sea voyage and the stroll around
the marketplace has been imported into this context to bestow
verisimilitude on a borrowed template onto which Gellius will
then overlay other curious bits of Greek anthropological learning.
The argument depends, inevitably, on a close analysis of the
language used by both Gellius and Pliny:
That the order is the same is an argument
for dependence, supported by linguistic similarities. At NH 7.16,
NA 9.4 7-8, and nowhere else till Symmachus, Ep.6.77, we find
the verb effascinare; Pliny
writes in eadem Africa familias uoce atque lingua effascinantium';
to Pliny's effascient interemantque' correspond in Gellius
exitialem fascinationem' and interimant.' . . .
Pliny is therefore a source, but not the only source: whereas
at 25 he states that the Astomi are clad in leaves, uestiri
frondium lanugine', Gellius (10) gives them feathers like
the birds', auium ritu plumantibus'. An original pterion
, it seems, has been diversely understood as fern' and little
feather'.
As a work of scholarship, Holford-Strevens's
Aulus Gellius is a superb exploration of this literary
and cultural moment. It is also, significantly enough for the
present discussion, a perfect example of the sort of work that
can no longer be published, or even considered for publication,
by Penn State Press under the policy reported by Sanford Thatcher.
Not that Thatcher pretends to be anything but seriously downcast
by the decision forced upon him. It is "a sad admission
for a publisher like me to make," he says, having brought
himself to announce that Penn State will no longer publish specialized
literary studies, "as I have always believed it to be the
primary mission of university presses to publish monographs."
But in the current climate, Aulus Gellius has become one of those
"tremendously esoteric texts" in which Nicholas Pfund
professes so complete a lack of interest in comparison to the
titles that do appeal to him and the readers sought by NYU Press:
Lesbian Erotics, Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd,
and Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing
Arts.
No one who has studied the present situation
can doubt that Penn State Press is, in its decision to give up
publishing studies like Aulus Gellius, simply a bit ahead
of the times. For the same bleak story is being played out at
every university press for which statistics are available, and
it cannot be long before Sanford Thatcher's announcement begins
to be repeated by directors of other presses. Yet there is a
problem here. Aulus Gellius, however small its present
readership, is a genuine contribution to knowledge. It will be
there on the shelves of a few great libraries a hundred years
from now, read and studied by scholars who retain a serious interest
in the culture of late antiquity, long after the last copy of
Barbie's Queer Accessories has been pulped and the names
of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan and Midge and Ken and G.I.
Joe have faded into oblivion. And in a situation in which works
like Aulus Gellius are no longer published, it seems to
me, we may with some justice cease to speak about a "crisis
of the monograph" and begin speaking of a crisis in the
sphere of human knowledge.
There is, perhaps, a way out of this dilemma.
It would consist of taking seriously a proposal made some years
ago by a friend of Hugh Kenner. "I have in front of me a
letter," writes Kenner in Common Knowledge, "that
urges an extreme proposition: Scholarly publishing must be isolated
even from the scholarly market.' So university presses should
be endowed, heavily subsidized, whatever, on the principle that
scholarship is a gargoyle meant for the eye of Heaven alone.
The point of academic publishing shouldn't be to sell copies,
but to place one copy each in the L. of C., the BL, and the Bodley."
Today, when a dwindling minority of scholars survives among hordes
of badly-educated PhDs trained in identity politics and Madonna
studies, the measure no longer seems so extreme. It should be
tried. But whether or not that happens, the comparison seems
to me inspired: genuine works of scholarship as being in some
essential way like those gargoyles intricately and lovingly carved
by medieval workmen because, though invisible to the onlookers
below, they would always be visible to God and the angels.
Reprinted with permission from
The Journal of Scholarly Publishing 28:3 (April 1997):
115-134.
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