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The Mandarin Dialect: An Essay on Style in Contemporary Geographical Writing

1983; Wiley; Volume: 8; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/621959

1475-5661

Mark Billinge,

Philippine History and Culture

Human geography has witnessed the emergence in recent years of a particular style of writing. This style whilst claiming to capture with richness and subtlety the nature of the human subject and its mode of cognition, has in fact served different and more covert purposes: the perversion of meaning, the disguise of mediocrity of sentiment, the inflation of the authors' self-regard and the representation as profound of ideas which are in reality cliched or banal. This paper discusses the tradition from which such writings spring and advocates a return to a more 'normal' style of writing in the tradition of the best academic journalism: a style which performs its proper function-the transmission of information and interpretation-without unnecessary artifice. Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.' If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious even to yourself.2 The impulse to write an essay such as this may spring from many sources; not least from an irritation with what is currently vogue: with popular stylistic devices, contemporary 'literary' habits, modern conventions. It is in the nature of 'ways of writing' that fashions change and that each new readership re-assesses what is good and bad in the expression of its predecessors. When particular writing characteristics establish for themselves a place in the. literature of a subject, their innovators may establish too a powerful currency: a currency for which they may or may not be 'good'. But one thing is clear: nothing corrupts the geographical literature of our time more than fadishness, verbal trickery and the uncritical employment of unnecessary literary conceit, and in this sense, the impulse to write may stem equally from misgiving: from the need to exorcise from one's own style the rococo tendencies of much modernistic prose and to re-establish what may pass for a 'normal' unaffected manner of writing: a manner which says what it means---no more and no less. The balance between journalism (the conventional reporting style normally employed in academic writing) and creative writing (the literary styles more typical of novelists, poets and dramatists) is ripe for re-examination. Insidious habits are creeping into the writing of geography. Perhaps a reaction to the flat homogeneity of an earlier period, a new style has become acceptable, even mandatory, and the dapper amongst us are exhibiting it with relish. The sonorous phrase is in, clear expression is out. Ostentatious, nonsensical and artificial by turns, the new form is increasingly de rigeur. It has balance and 8lan, passion and commitment, it has imagery, metaphor, simile and hyperbole, flamboyance and energy--in fact everything save honesty of intention and meaning. Living Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. N.S. 8: 400-20 (1983) Printed in Great Britain This content downloaded from 207.46.13.172 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 06:24:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Mandarin dialect 401 for the well-turned phrase, the daring (and frequently irrelevant) flight of fancy and the elaborately-tooled purple passage, it lives for little else. The rest is padding and pretty poor at that. It does nobody and nothing-least of all the reputation of the discipline-any good, though its authors doubtless consider it 'stylish' and that is enough. It is ART and it proclaims itself thus. This piece is written with STYLE. Conversely, those who do not succumb to the delights of the new cult are seen as lacking in a fundamental way: in originality, virtuosity, seriousness, 'significance' and, by implication, depth of purpose. In short STYLE is all, and you have either got it or you haven't. Though the historiography of this particular stylistic position is of less than paramount concern here (it is considered briefly below), two observations are of contextual interest: first that, like many of the more general attitudes which it reflects, the pre-occupation with style harks back to the literature and philosophy of the inter-war years when many of the writers invoked by current geographical 'stylists'--Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, Eliot etc.--were at their most active, whilst more interestingly the contemporary of its development in geography and the flashy popularizer of the wider gospel implied, was none other than Marshall MacLuhan of 'the medium is the message' fame. Secondly and relatedly, it is worth noting that the opponents of this shallow stylistic doctrine--the proponents of clear language (Orwell, Connolly etc.) wrote after Joyce and his colleagues, and like their creative contempories reacted strongly against it. Hence: The poets of the New Signatures have swung back... to the Greek preference for information or statement. The first requirement is to have something to say, and after that you must say it as well as you can.3 The rationale behind the new style's success in geography--whether too many journals and too few authors, or too little talent and too many outlets, or too little thought and too many pressures-is not for discussion here. Readers may make of these what they will, though there is little doubt that the demands placed upon academics to write quickly and often, rather than well and only when they have something to communicate, encourage whatever trivializing tendencies exist, whilst the disinclination of reviewers to challenge the credentials of the new 'literati' make their continued posturings almost inevitable. Equally it is clear that some authors 'just write' because being 'professionals' in the subject they still need to profess it and accordingly publish what is patently not geography in geographical books and journals. If indeed they have nothing to contribute then an inflated style helps enormously. The corollary of this--that much of the best geography (in terms of both content and style) is being published by nongeographers through non-geographical outlets--is unquestionably true and is a lesson to all those who suggest that the subject itself no longer has anything worthwhile to say. Important issues are at stake, for style is no superficial matter as anyone involved in the transmission of ideas must be aware. Let us be clear at the outset, however, that this attempt to analyse and 'deflate' the paraphernalia of the new writings is not to argue for poverty of expression. Of course the manner in which things are said is important--as important as what is said (though no more so). Style, in the true sense of the word to which we shall come, matters; though the avoidance of inflation of style matters still more. As journalists of a sort, geographical writers must tread a careful course between two extremes: investing their work with the richness which characterizes thoughtful writing, whilst avoiding the subsumption of content to an arbitrary literary form. We are not Joyces or Eliots and should not be encouraged to think that we might be. We should not be aiming to be admired for our style in fifty years time, rather to be consulted for our This content downloaded from 207.46.13.172 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 06:24:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms