The Zone of Irritation

I'm annoyed.  I'm editing, re-editing and re-re-editing this week, so I have every reason to be.  How else should I feel when facing:

• The awkward phrasing of the words intended to bring to the reader  greater clarity through painful specificity.
• The lapses in register, from arid pedantry to way too fucking casual, often in a single sentence.
• The vocabular nonsense—the nouned verbs, the verbed nouns, the inexplicable revival of the Latin gerundive—any sufficiently detailed technical description requires.
• The vocabularian nonsense any insufficiently secure writer configurates to impress the easily impressed.

And those only speaks to the prose.  There is still the argument, burdened by:

• The claims so laughably overbroad only an idiot would believe them.
• The claims so laughably overboard only an idiot would believe them.
• Those passages only the writer can understand.
• Those passages not even the writer can understand.
• An unseemly penchant for parallel structures which, when coupled with the aforementioned vocabular and vocabularian nonsense, encourages the creation of inscrutable hypocorisms like "Pally."

As I said, I have every reason to be annoyed with myself.  (After those bullets, you do too.)  But that's not why I'm annoyed right now.  No, right now I'm annoyed by the way in which my annoyance radiates, how it establishes a Zone of Irritation from which nothing can escape.  Beards, they can not escape it.  Lettuce, it wilts.  Other people's work?  You must be kidding me.  Take this claim, from an otherwise impressive book:

Many domestic novels open at physical thresholds—such as windows or doorways—to problematize the the relation between interiors and exteriors. (43)

How many?  The author discusses three, but looking through my shelf of roughly contemporary novels, I can find no others.  Not a one.  The nature of the claim-structure is backwards here: I believe X, and "many" cherry-picked novels begin by thematizing it.  This is the academic variation of the classic Sportscenter statistic: "On the second and third Wednesdays in March, Bobby Knight-coached teams have only lost to unranked opponents twice in the five years he's coached at Texas Tech."  Only it's worse.  The Sportscenter infographic remains faithful to its  obscenely specific raison d'être, whereas the academic cousin hides its Wednesdays-in-Marchness behind a facade of general truth. 

The "many" employed in this passage obscures the fact that many, many more domestic novels don't open at physical thresholds.  It also conceals the reason why many domestic novels would do so: they're domestic.  We should expect thresholds and windows to appear frequently for the same reason we expect spaceships to make regular appearances in space operas.  Why even make the claim?  Why not focus on how often tables or children appear instead?

Notice, too, the implication that the physical location where a novel begins is significant.  Should the critic not establish that where a novel opens is more important than, say, where it closes?  How could anyone even write this sentence?  Isn't the dishonesty of the claim evident to anyone involved in any stage of the writing process?  What about all those people thanked on the acknowledgments page, did not a single one of them notice these grievous overstatements?  Why not?  I want to know.  I need to know.

This is what life is like inside the Zone of Irritation.  Everything is judged by the same unforgiving standards we apply to ourselves, and no one looks—or feels, for that matter—the better for it. 

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

How Scott Should Write His Dissertation

1. Write a chapter as if it's one big blog post. If psychologically necessary, write within the same software used for blogging. If a chapter is too long to hold the mental state of blog-writing, write each piece of the chapter as a blog post.

2. Put pieces of the chapter together into Word, and imagine that an inexperienced student has turned this in as an academic paper. Red-pen/edit the thing into academese.

In this way, it should be able to be done within writing styles with proven productivity already, rather than the new and uncertain dissertation one. After one or two chapters done this way, you should be able to merge everything into a new style and skip the intervening steps.

If you do try this, the next chapter is the obvious candidate, since you're probably nearly done with this one and want no excuse to re-write the whole thing. If you actually try this and it doesn't work, setting you back horribly, well, you should have known better to take advice from some guy on the Internet.

[Vance Maverick]

I've been reading the chapter with pleasure. "Irritation" is the mot juste for these reactions you're having -- an overreaction to a stimulus that, while real, is minor, and above all, amenable to relief. If the swelling doesn't go down soon, you probably should turn to another chapter for a while.

[Luther Blissett]

I hate to say it, but worrying about style in a dissertation seems like wasted effort. On the job market, you'll need one, at most two, 20-page writing samples, and it's probably best if one of those is a self-contained, article version of a diss chapter (or run-off of a published article). Other than that, almost no one will ever read your dissertation.

I received two different, but equally useful, pieces of advice about writing my diss:

1) write three long chapters and don't worry about anything -- just get it done, get the argument out there, and worry about style and form in the book manuscript and articles (if you decide to pursue that professional route)

2) write seven 25-page chapters in article form so that you can immediately send them off to journals and have writing samples at hand

The second is good advice, but it basically means writing a book manuscipt, not a dissertation. Book manuscripts take most scholars eight to ten years to write. Dissertations cannot take that long. They are disposable forms. You write one dissertation in a lifetime; you'll never work in this form again. There's not much point perfecting the form. Of course, you want to impress your dissertation committee, and you want to feel good about yourself. Still, I'd say, treat the diss more as a means to an end and less as an end in itself.

(Just don't follow the Walter Benjamin route and write something declared "unreadable" by your committee.)

[Adam Roberts]

Too, too and MUCH TOO hard on yourself.

[The Constructivist]

The point of the dissertation is to finish it. Plow ahead until the snowplow gets stuck, dig it out, and keep going until you've finished the route. If you have time, replow the parts that got snowed in since you last plowed them. Save soul-searching revision agonizing for the time when you turn chapters into into articles and the diss into a book.

Sounds to me like it's time to put this chapter's revision aside (at the close of this weekend, if you must keep going a little while longer) and come back to it when you've got the rest of the diss done.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I would love to, but unfortunately, I'm supposed to produce an introduction and three chapters, each of which needs to be publishable and, ideally, published. (Which means I'm on Luther's 2nd track, oddly enough, a longer one, since as you all know, I'm very good at producing tremendous quantities of prose in short periods of time.)

[The Constructivist]

Ah, but publishable when? After the diss is done--which makes sense, given how fucking hard it is to publish when you're new on the job, especially if you don't have much experience teaching a full load with service responsibilities.... Or before?

[bill benzon]

I realize this post is more methodological than substantive, but if you want to see a really creepy and excellent animation about domesticity that does start at a threshold -- the gateway to the front yard -- check out Winsor McCay's 1921 "The Pet," which runs for about 11 minutes. The whole thing is framed as a dream. We see a couple in bed at the beginning, talking about dreams, and we return to them at the very end. But the bulk of the film is the dream itself, the husband's dream about his wife and her pet. The wife picks up a dog-like pet just after it has walked through the front gate. She brings it into the house, feeds it, and it just grows and grows and grows until, at the end, it’s walking through the city, towering over buildings, eating smaller ones at a single gulp, and so forth, until it is finally destroyed by bombs. That ends the dream; we then get a few closing seconds with the couple in bed and that’s it. There's a scene in the middle that's as creepy as anything I've seen in movies and the whole thing is very well drawn and animated.

[ben wolfson]

It occurred to me that the bit you excerpt about domestic novels n'at is basically a higher-class version of the paper introduction that goes "For many millennia, man has tried to create ways to measure time" (or whatever); a transparently uninteresting attempt to motivate what everyone will recognize as the actual interesting part of the text, put there for fear of simply diving right in.