Copyright 2003 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education

November 14, 2003, Friday

SECTION: THE CHRONICLE REVIEW; Pg. 10

LENGTH: 1584 words

HEADLINE:

Casaubon vs. Casaubon: Scholarship on Scholarship

BYLINE: JULIA M. KLEIN

BODY:
Two years ago, using a mix of Web research and economic jargon, Richard Posner bemoaned what he called the decline of the public intellectual. But his indictment, however flawed, may have been too narrow. The flood tide of adjunct professors, harried worker bees mostly too busy teaching to pursue research, has eroded the idea of the academic as scholar. Meanwhile, the push toward unionization of graduate students -- a natural reaction to deteriorating conditions -- has displaced some of the mystique of academic apprenticeship.

Now comes A.D. Nuttall, an English professor at the University of Oxford, to put it all in historical and literary perspective. Nuttall's subject is just how much the image of the scholar has deteriorated since its golden age in the Renaissance. His tract on the subject, Dead From the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and Popular Imagination (Yale University Press), demonstrates just how great the divide between the popular and the scholarly can be: The work is at once brilliantly erudite, frustratingly digressive, and replete with references so obscure that only the most devoted classicist will appreciate them.

If nothing else, though, Nuttall makes clear that the scholar's lot has not always been a happy one, whether in fact or in fiction. Take the unfortunate Edward Casaubon, the desiccated husband in George Eliot's 19th-century classic Middlemarch -- and a terrible role model for anyone trying to fashion a manageable dissertation topic.

Dorothea Brooke, his wife-to-be, is gripped by a seductive fantasy about the moral superiority of scholars. Under its spell, she imagines Mr. Casaubon as "a man who could understand the higher inward life" and "who could illuminate principle with the widest knowledge." In time, she learns otherwise. Mr. Casaubon's mind is a place where knowledge endures "lifeless embalmment," where ideas go to die. His work in progress, grandiloquently called the Key to All Mythologies, is as futile and interminable an undertaking as the infamous lawsuit in Dickens's Bleak House. And its pursuit has sapped whatever life force he ever possessed, making Mr. Casaubon a symbol of both claustrophobic Victorian marriages and scholarly dead ends.

In Dead From the Waist Down, Mr. Casaubon is also a representation of the crumbling image of the scholar. The book charts a decline from the idea of the scholar as a sort of secular magician, imbued with the power to discern truth, to a view of him as an irrelevant fool, lost in labyrinths of arcane trivia. It's a staggering drop, and one that Nuttall suggests took several centuries to occur. Though his examples are all British, it's easy enough to generalize his conclusions to the American academic landscape.

The subtext of Nuttall's work is the anxiety of influence, a theme that shapes the book's overall structure and its methodology. (It's no surprise to find the critic Harold Bloom praising the book on its dust jacket.) At the heart of Dead From the Waist Down is a complicated idea: a study of three interrelated men, one fictional and two real. The study moves backward through time, although within chapters, what Nuttall calls "the tyranny of the chronological sequence" is often overthrown by his masterfully (and sometimes irritatingly) circuitous style.

His first subject is Edward Casaubon -- a man distinguished, Nuttall tell us, by his "effortless sexlessness" as well as his intellectual sterility. Nuttall next dissects Mark Pattison (1813-84), rector of Oxford's Lincoln College and, some have argued, Eliot's model for Mr. Casaubon. One piece of evidence: Pattison's wife, Emilia Frances Strong, reportedly told a friend that she believed herself to be the model for Dorothea. Like Eliot's protagonist, she was nearly three decades younger than her husband, had mystical religious leanings, and found true love only after his death.

But the case for the link between Casaubon and Pattison is hardly straightforward, and Eliot's biographer, Gordon S. Haight, rebuts it by citing Pattison's athleticism and superior mind. Still, Nuttall won't let it go. He notes that Pattison had an important failure in common with Casaubon: He never completed his life's work, a history of scholarship built around the 16th-century classicist Joseph Scaliger. "Of the ambitions I had first conceived I have only executed fragments," Pattison wrote sadly.

There is yet another link, and it brings us to the third focus of Nuttall's inquiry, Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614). He was a Renaissance classical scholar of great intellectual heft -- and also, as it happens, the subject of a biography by Pattison. This Casaubon epitomizes, for Nuttall, the ideal of a scholar who is fulfilled in both life and work, and for whom the two are complementary rather than opposed. After being widowed young, he made a "profoundly happy" second marriage, fathered an astonishing 19 children (one wonders how happy that made his bride), became a counselor to kings, and pursued a "cumulative, complex simultaneous assault on a vast range" of now-obscure classical subjects. The nonspecialists among us may never have heard of him, but his contemporaries -- and later classicists such as Pattison -- revered him. Nuttall's chapter on Isaac Casaubon is tendentiously subtitled "The Real Thing," and Nuttall writes: "Casaubon's interior life was a vast, labyrinthine journey, through a world of books. ... But while Mr. Casaubon was lost and wretched in his labyrinth, Isaac Casaubon was happy in his."

Nuttall is clearly happy in his as well, even if the reader, like Theseus, might sometimes wish for a ball of thread. The author writes confidently, with an eye for subtlety and detail, about a vibrant web of relationships: between fiction and fact, a scholar's life and work, intellection and religious feeling, and more. He is especially concerned with the process of "reading into" -- which he both demonstrates and explains. Just as contemporaries sometimes "read" Mr. Casaubon as Mark Pattison, Pattison read his life into Isaac Casaubon's scholarly agon. Nuttall quotes approvingly the verdict of the Oxford Professor Emeritus Hugh Lloyd-Jones, who referred to Pattison's Isaac Casaubon as "a concealed autobiography." For Nuttall, too, the processes of identification and projection seem to be at work. Just as Pattison and Casaubon probed, prodded, and corrected corrupt classical texts, Nuttall seeks to disentangle strands of intellectual history and limn more-precise connections among the disparate figures he describes.

Laden with Greek and Latin verse and translations thereof, much of Nuttall's book is naturally heavy going, and his discursiveness doesn't help. Somewhat more accessible are his introduction, on Robert Browning's poem "A Grammarian's Funeral," and his conclusion, on Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, which help frame the argument. The Browning poem is central to Nuttall, who finds his title, "dead from the waist down," in a description of the grammarian. Despite that damning epithet, parts of Browning's poem seem triumphant, as though the poet is tempted to celebrate this man who "decided not to Live but Know." Nuttall's argument is that Browning is not purposefully ambiguous, but rather downright confused about the value of the grammarian's quest for (minute) knowledge, and the costs of that search.

In contrast, Nuttall is frankly admiring of Stoppard's play, with its "joyful persnicketiness about linguistic usage" and its adroit recourse to the classics. Pattison turns up as a minor character in the play, declaring, paradoxically, "Personally I am in favor of education, but a university is not the place for it." Nuttall identifies another intriguing paradox: For A.E. Housman, Invention's central figure, it is not his poetry -- with its repressed longings for the "comrades" and "lads" of an invented youth -- but his scholarship in which he is, arguably, most free, most nearly himself. Nuttall takes seriously the defense of classical exegesis, and, more broadly, of knowledge for its own sake, that is embedded in the play, a defense that tends to be overlooked when The Invention of Love is read simply as a tragic tale of a blighted and sublimated love.

Nuttall concludes his treatise with a meditation on the idea of scholarship in the contemporary world. He questions whether the term itself may have become outmoded, perhaps replaceable by words such as "intelligence" and "rightness." But he finishes, unsurprisingly and rather unfashionably, by defending what he calls "an altruistic reverence for truth, in all its possible minuteness and complexity." Yes, he admits quirkily, "money spent on university libraries would be better spent on relieving the third world." On the other hand, he says, "we might as well have some who are trained to ask critical questions, to weigh and to test."

That process matters very much to Nuttall, though, like all scholars, he certainly hopes that the road taken will lead to an intellectual pot of gold. "Casaubon struggled with what he read," he writes of the scholar he most admires, "but he struggled fruitfully." That's a consummation devoutly to be wished for Nuttall's own readers. How fruitful the struggle will be for those seeking to wed the traditional idealism of the scholar with the gritty practicalities of contemporary academic life, however, remains to be seen.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.

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