Literary journalists rely on tired tropes to hold together the points they make as the themes of essays about one or another of the subjects they decide to write about. They need to have points because their high school English teachers said so, even though newspaper type reports or encyclopedia entries or recipe books may not have them, nor do memoirs or diaries or clinical records. But literary journalists do make points and those therefore can be obligatory references to a theory or a touchstone that lets the reader know how the writer is placed among the ideologies and interests and pursuits that define the writer, or else just to provide some apparatus to help hold the thing together. I am reminded of this by my catching up with past issues of the New York review of Books and finding that so many of its ideas are unnecessary or simply canned. There is an article that reminds the author that she is a Feminist, or else that imperialism was a bad thing, or that an author was underrated when all that was meant in the claim was that an author was not properly rated rather than was upped higher on a ruler presumed previously ranked.
This is not to be writing badly or that journal having used up anything fresh it had to say. Rather, it was the nature of the activity, which is to write a literary essay as if it were free standing, to be supported on its on efforts and sufficient to make the arguments necessary to making it self-sufficient., as so has been the case with english essayists since the turn into the eighteenth Century, with DeFoe and Addison and Steele. The reader has to decide what writer is worth reading, all those each asking to display themselves for their charms, whether of wit and style, or logic, or range of reference, yelling out “buy my attention” out of the myriad of voices contending for attention. The freedom of the marketplace is the ultimate arbiter and so essay writing is a kind of fad in that there are many contenders and the consumer is king and there is no certainty in why fashions of ideas come and go, whether for another piece about Trump or climate change or the state of the novel.
Sometimes the anarchy or do what you will about writing can be turned into a mores stable system as happens when literary journalism becomes scholarly journalism, the writer trying to accumulate knowledge or understanding by integrating what has been written previously into the present work through the device of using footnotes, which means that previous work becomes incorporated or at least acknowledged for what is added, whether in agreement or disagreement, so that scholarship itself is an edifice independent of the independent literary entrepreneur, and so a kind of knowledge, alongside inspiration or speculation, as something worthy, something akin to Diderot’s encyclopedia, which would, by making a book, make collective knowledge possible and a building block for a further and even more edifying and complete statement of what is known, words and ideas replacing things through their architecture, however much the encyclopedia was devoted mostly to material knowledge of agriculture and machines. The genius of footnotes is that nothing has to be left over, everything inclusive, even though there was something retrograde about the entrance of literary criticism into the field of literary studies, which previously meant not opinion mongering but staying close to authenticating texts and historical references. Every critic became his own journalist, an opinion of the moment, squeezing out a fresh insight, as if cataloguing them mounted or exhausted old authors, unless like Shakespeare criticism, it could be refreshed when a new generation offered a new perspective. But I am not all that sure that the mother lode of Shakespeare has not been played out and so scholars can move on to new fields, new authors or new genres, so as to plow through, unclogging the new work so as to make it clear and then going on, separating chaff from seed. How many ways can you read “Ecclesiastes”?
There are self-limits to the enterprise of footnoting as a way to create collective or super-individual essays. Understanding footnotes as documentation means tracing down all the opinions or facts worth citing. Comprehensiveness is the goal, But the weakness of that method is the same one that the ancient skeptics mentioned. Comprehensiveness would mean reading every book because if you left one out or a new one appeared, then you wouldn’t know that that was the one to tell you the truth, every one of the footnotes an independent item to support its thesis. Better to think of footnotes as indicating strains of thought, making a reader aware that there are major different strands of what has been said rather than proving what has been said. But all that would require are some parenthetical references to the names of a few authors rather than documentation to make that case, and so footnoting is usually unnecessary.
When thinking about footnotes, I am thinking of Jacques Barzun’s magisterial two volume biography of Berlioz where Barzun covers not only literary comments and history and also the musicology of Berlioz’s work. Quite an accomplishment. Barzun also seems to footnote every single piece he could find about Berlioz including not only reviews created a the time a Berlioz piece was first presented but also with whatever was offered later on up until a month or two of when his own two volumes were printed in 1945. The question arises as to what happens next. Some scholars might say that anything not long afterwards has to be updated if it is to be considered definitive. In that case, scholarship has a very limited shelf life. Barzun is over once the Forties are past. But that is wrong because what he offered as an evaluation becomes part of a permanent corpus about Berlioz, just as any scholar worth reading becomes a way to understand its subject as a significant way of seeing the author. I can read Burkhardt to know about Constantine even if there are refinements about the age of Constantine since the Nineteenth Century. Burkhardt has become an author rather than a commentary. In that case, forget the footnotes as the basis for cumulativeness. And footnotes as credence is also questionable in that you would have to check out the footnotes to make sure that they got it right. Not a practical expedient. So we trust the footnotes because of the authority of the writer, as happens when we just trust that Peter Brown has got right the texts about which he comments. Every scholar is another literary journalist.
A scientist once claimed that there wasn’t much to becoming a literary scholar. Read all the books by a dozen or so major writers, learn the biographies and the criticism of the author and the history in which the author was placed, and then you have to be considered a literary scholar. Frank Kermode in answer to that thought that was pretty much right. Do that work and you were an expert. What Kermode left out and what the scientist had presumed was that what literary scholars left out was theory. They had no body of articulated concepts that allowed them to go back one time after another to use so as to explain their subject matter. Without a body of theory, there is only the accumulation of facts, which is tedious but not illuminating. Kermode, as a matter of fact, was not only one of those people who, as the expression went, read everything, but had along with empson and Frye, offered concepts that systemized literary production into being the subject of a science, though no one has been as comprehensive or inclusive as was Aristotle, and that contemporary literary journalists seem to me to be less interested in understanding the ways their artworks than it is to illustrate their extraliterary concerns with politics or ethnicity or global warming. So we can say that as a matter of genre, a scientist is engaged in freeing knowledge from the individual writer, each scientist regarded as having made a contribution to the edifice of those interlocking principles which make science rather than the subjects of science which are considered scientific because they can be reduced to mathematics, while literary studies have not.
An alternative, then, to the accumulstion of individual forays into thought compiled together into a collective and accumulative enterprise, as that is indicated by using the apparatus of footnotes, is to engage in scientific enterprise, which means constructing an edifice of interrelated propositions based new findings where the point is to disregard the originator or originators so much as the edifice itself, and that is the hallmark that distinguishes science and humanistic endeavor, even though it is usual to treat mathematical matters as scientific while humanists deal with just words. But we do not think of paleontologists as scientists even though they can use complicated chemical analysis to get at the strands of evolution. That is because humanists, including physical anthropologists, are always saying that findings are indicative rather than definite, as when a biblical scholar also says that likely as not, Jesus probably did exist as a real person because a messiah, by prediction, should not have died, and so recording him as having done so means that event probably took place.
Scientists, for their part, are definitive. Concepts mean what they say and only that. A term has exactness because it is part of the latticework of the theory. The best model for science remains Euclid, which engaged deduction from premises rather than calculation as its metier. I am still impressed with my college level of classical mechanics, which elaborated the concept of force as equal to mass times acceleration into more complicated and different things by adding new qualities and so work is force over displacement and power, a very different thing, measured in watts rather than joules, is work divided by time. That is science and the emulation of such a system remains its hallmark. Economists also present their insights as curves and formulas that are related to one another and so offer economics as a science though it is not very predictable in macroeconomic affairs and have much less consensus, despite their common body of formulas, than would earn it science on that account.
There are efforts to make social thought scientific. That certainly was the attempt by Spinoza, who embarked on the Euclidean model. But was more Marxist in his reduction of social life to the means of production and whose psychology was systematic but relied more on insight and an answer to Aristotle and Hobbes, and so part of the philosophical rather than the scientific tradition. Noone has managed to crack that nut. But Talcott Parsons did tried to do something a bit different and is worth admiring for its own sake as an attempt to find a format that did justice to the humanities but made claim to being scientific. Parsons and his confreres put out two volumes which were a compendium of snippets from each of the writers who are legitimately claimed as sociological. The idea in ”Theories of Society” was that the concepts briefly invoked made up the corpus of sociology and so were the collection of ideas that could be used again and again to explain other or new phenomena, the present wealth of sociology rich enough to be considered a science. But the book did not turn terms from one writer into the terms of another writer and so was therefore not strictly cumulative, even though Parsons, when developing or expanding upon one of his themes, claimed that he was making a discovery rather than another insight. He wanted to make science but it didn’t happen, nor did it for Robert Merton, who talked about continuities in social research but never gave a tome articulating all the aspects of role theory to one another. And today, the idea of a unified social science is well past, people in those fields engaged in advocacy, every one trotting out their pet ideas as humanists do, rather than become engulfed in the overall enterprise that stands on its own, independent of both its geniuses and its minor participants. Even a physicist can contribute something in a calculation, but most of what is in the humanities could perish to no one's great loss other than having had the reward of having savored again one more time about Shakespeare or a minor pet of fifty years ago. These are different ambitions, the scientist and the humanist, the one to give truth and the other to give opinion, both of them needed to try to manage the human desire for knowledge.