Professor Shami Ghosh’s recent screed has dashed my long-cherished hope of passing through life without ever responding to a review. The author reveals traits and deploys tactics that deserve no traction in scholarship. Some of them call for correction, while others cry out for reflection. The recipients of The Medieval Review must thrash out for themselves whether such practices merit being emulated or eschewed. As a courtesy to readers, I will limit my list for criticism and commentary to four features that give pause.
First, sloppiness and incoherence. Ghosh avers “philologists should be careful about the words they use.” Heartily agreed. But what care does he put on show? A simple rule of thumb would hold that a review, no matter how extended, should contain fewer typos than the book reviewed. That is not the case here, even if we set aside the picayune “rarified atmosphere of Harvard” (the variant i can be dredged up in a big dictionary) or the revelation that Jerome and Jesus Christ were “Middle Easteners.”
Using a spellchecker always helps, but doing so cannot fix everything. Reviews invariably begin with a bibliographic citation. The notice given here gets the full title of my book wrong. You cannot get more basic than that in the nuts and bolts of our craft. Pace Ghosh, the final word is Walthare and not Waldhare. Nor is this blooper isolated. To move forward from this entitlement issue, the initial and concluding sentences in any piece of expository writing carry special weight. His two read:
1) “The subtitle of the work under review might suggest that it is a study of the poem known to no one by that subtitle, which is not, as Professor Ziolkowski well knows but pretends not to.”
Huh?
2) “So let him have the eloquent last word (with elisions, I must confess, that his words more neutral than they appear to me), voicing noble sentiments with which I have even more reason to agree as I write this review than he might have had to express when he wrote them.”
Come again?
Can anyone out there parse the opening and closing sentences of Ghosh’s own prose? Did a single person, either author or editor, peruse them even hastily before hitting the Urbi et Orbi button, to ensure that they were intelligible? It is embarrassing for a broadside bracketed in gibberish to be distributed worldwide, as if the norm in medieval studies.
Despite being unable to construe fully the first three dozen words of the review, I detect two gripes. For starters, that more of the book is not about the topic listed in the subtitle. That objection overlooks the distinction between titles and subtitles. I never imagined having to explain it in a journal, but here goes. A subtitle, as the prefix signals, is a subordinate title that provides additional information about content. In my subtitle, I draw attention to thePoem of Walthare. Since that mini-epic is indeed subordinate and supplementary to the topic spelled out in the actual title, it gives me no pause whatsoever to have devoted to the Medieval Latin only a tad more than a third of my short book.
Next, we have the title for the poem. My choice may not be the usual one, but Walthare is the German form of the protagonist’s name that the poet himself employs pointedly at line 1434. It would shock me to meet someone conversant with the original who could not make immediate sense of this English, even without the explanation that precedes the term on p. 6 of my book. In 1989, the Germanist Brian Murdoch published for the first time his English of the poem under the similar title Walthari: A Verse Translation of the Medieval Latin Waltharius.
To proceed down my checklist, a second practice is out-and-out misrepresentation. Thus, the review includes these two sentences: “Perhaps Professor Ziolkowski’s dismissive attitude to how important the term ‘patriarchy’ has become for many people considerably younger than himself says more than he intends, or even knows. Perhaps the patriarchal (to be euphemistic about it) reputation of certain eminences at both Cambridges in his formative years does not bother him enough.” What I keyboarded in my book--omitting not a jot or tittle--was that patriarchy “has become a shorthand for a society in which men wield disproportionate power, especially economic and political.” That statement, for all its straightforwardness, is somehow warped to become a springboard for characterizing me as “dismissive,” for making a quick transition into implicit ageism against me, and for indulging in dark insinuation about my unconcern relating to those unidentified “eminences.” The overall misreading, culminating in the last kind of innuendo, should find no home in any periodical. Would-be reviewers who prefer not to stick to the truth and perhaps not to talk about books should pursue such options as blogging or posting.
A third ploy that surfaces in the review is often styled mindreading. Ghosh (whom for the record I do not recollect having ever even met) presumes over and over to have extraordinary, near-telepathic insight into what I feel. Ponder these examples in which he uses the verb explicitly: “Professor Ziolkowski clearly feels he has no need to display his erudition here”; “that’s what Professor Ziolkowski does, apparently just because he feels like it”; “the two pages he devotes to this almost make one feel that this effacement is standing in for the feelings he has regarding the effacing of Latin from its centrality in higher education”; and “he seems to feel a greater affinity for things Germanic than any other Medieval Latinist I can think of.”
The fourth and final category, akin to the foregoing, comprises ad hominem attacks and insinuations. To be old-fashioned and obvious, the book review (nomen omen) exists for reviewing books. The genre was not created for engaging in superficial and sometimes ill-informed assertion and speculation about the family background, education, institutional affiliation, and job title of the book writers. Ghosh draws inferences about mine that might be deemed garden-variety prejudice, with a bucket-sized splash of personal resentment to water it. In addition, he volunteers autobiographical minutiae galore about his own circumstances of being brown, having Indian origins, being Hindu but “visibly Muslim,” suffering (intense) professional disappointments, and liking dogs. He tells of his concern that he might be (honestly? in Canada?!) “branded a Nazi of Aryan origin.”
If a person decides to delve into personal details pertaining to an author (in bygone days avoided as the biographical fallacy, a corollary to the intentional fallacy in New Criticism), at least get them right. A case in point: the reviewer refers to me as “Ziolkowski jun.” The abbreviation serves the same function in German as Jr does in English: it differentiates two individuals, typically father and son, with identical first names and surnames. The problem is that my first name is Jan, while my parent’s was Theodore. Does Ghosh not grasp the usage of jun.? Does he not realize that my late father and I have distinct given names? Or could it be that when the surname is Polish, and when the person typing wants a witticism, any restraints about bad taste or impropriety are thrown out the window? No one should have to wonder, because the crack should not have been made.
But look: when research and writing have devolved into alternately venting wild generalizations about another and wallowing in “it’s all about me,” no oxygen remains for accuracy or fairness about either the living or the dead, let alone for books. And so we arrive at today’s bizarre twist on a “yo mama” joke. We forget that what counts is not “Who’s your daddy?” and other Aristotelian accidents. It is what you know, what you perceive, and what pains you take in expressing your interpretation.
Toward the end, Ghosh claims to have composed “a strange, and, to the author, doubtless also irritating review.” Alas, there is no strangeness. Writing and perspectives of these sorts are all too familiar, cliché enough to verge on being algorithmically generatable. And no, Professor Ghosh, your doubtlessness is unfounded: the review has not irritated me. The operative participles to describe my state would be saddened and energized. (Visualize me however you want on one of those t-shirts that pictures faces representing various emotional states.)
My greatest passion is to learn. In the process, I like to glimpse the most interesting and beautiful in human beings. Politically, I grieve to witness posturing inside universities that on occasion renders their denizens barely distinguishable from the thugs outside beleaguering them. Economically, it torments me to consider that academic administrators and board members with fingers itching to slash budgets may be justified: if this is the pass we have reached in the world of alleged learning, students might soon receive superior instruction in reading, thinking, and writing from AI than from degree-holders with professorial appointments. Should homo sapiens subsp. PhD-icus slip into anti-intellectualism or at a minimum non-intellectualism, the data centers will take over.
How do we resist? Book reviews should not replicate the bilious online comments that fanatics spew forth in reaction to op-eds or in reviews of consumer products. Knowledge, facts, and language matter. So too does civility. Prejudice is ugly, however firmly the prejudger is convinced of possessing absolute moral rectitude. Give me the humanities any day over identity politics and the ad hominem.
The rudeness has to stop. Can we please, please, please transcend crude assumptions and cranky binaries...and maybe tack back once in a while to the literature and history of the Middle Ages? If we medievalists don’t attend to them, who else will do so in our stead? These wars have dragged on way too long, to no one’s benefit, least of all to culture and the humanities. Can we read, think, interpret, and write, if possible, with charity and grace? As for my slim volume, judge for yourselves.