First published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.

Last Wednesday, my latest YA book came out in France :

It’s the culmination of 12 years of observing the British, and gradually sort-of-becoming one myself, a process of transformation not as painful as it sounds. It’s the very first time one of my French books is set in Britain, and, as its almost-500 pages testify, maybe it was long overdue.

Here’s my pitch, elevator-ready : in post-referendum Britain, a canny entrepreneur, 21-year-old Justine Dodgson, sets up a start-up – the eponymous Brexit Romance – to match young Europhilic Brits to generous-minded French people, for the purpose of entering into arranged marriages. Five years later, in theory, the former would gain the nationality of the latter, and thus get back their European citizenship. The only condition, however, is to Not Fall In Love. In practice, this is difficult.

Aside from Justine, the main characters include an innocent and romantic French girl, her grumpy Marxist-Leninist singing teacher, a young lord – and son of the leader of UKIP – and a beautiful British-American lawyer. As you may have guessed, it’s a rom-com of sorts, often verging on screwball comedy, and it’s also, as the title indicates, not too far from social and political satire. But it’s also, eminently, about cultural and linguistic tensions, often endearing, sometimes exasperating, between France and Britain, and French and English.

Form matching content, it’s written in a kind of Frenglish, or rather what I’d call ‘literary translationese’. ‘Translationese’ is generally used derogatorily, to refer to sentences that ‘feel translated’ – think, for instance, of Facebook translating your international friends’ statuses. But I mean it here positively, creatively: literary translationese, as I use it in Brexit Romance, is a way of writing in French that deliberately uses lexical calque and syntactic mimicry of English, as if to imitate the feel of a translation. It allows for a lot of fun things, from basic wordplay to painstaking rendering, in French, of the convoluted sentence structures of British politeness – je ne suppose pas que vous soyez libre dans trois semaines ?

Literary translationese occurs, famously, in Asterix in Britain, where all the ‘Bretons’ in the French version preface every sentence by ‘Je dis’, answer every statement with ‘Plutôt !’ and reinforce their assertions with an ungainly ‘n’est-il pas ?’, all of which baffled and delighted my 10-year-old self.

available in English translation by A. Bell and D. Hockridge

More recently, francophone Swiss writer Joël Dicker wrote The Truth in the Harry Quebert Affair, which reads, in French, ‘like a bad translation’ of an American crime novel – quite in keeping with the story, which is about an American writer writing about a crime involving another American writer (available in English translation by Sam Taylor). Another favourite of mine in the literary translationese category is Marie-Aude Murail’s sprawling teenage novel Miss Charity, a fictionalised biography of a Beatrix Potter figure, which audaciously espouses, in French, the phrases and lexicon of 19th-century British novels and of their classic translations into French.

Literary translationese pushes to its comical and beautiful extremes the daily involuntary instances of translationese that texts all around the world occasionally slip into. It aestheticises Globish, glorifies lazy Englishisms. Few people are more guillotine-worthy, in French, than those who use the verbs ‘réaliser’ or ‘supporter’ to mean ‘become aware of’ and ‘support’ (a team) – but use them in the right literary context, and suddenly the repulsive statement ‘Il supporte l’équipe de France’ can take on a new texture, turning football devotion into some kind of existential burden.

I particularly love literary translationese when it elevates to the rank of the finest surrealistic devices two things which we learn at school to be ultimate crimes against literature : the calque, and the cliché. He stormed out of the kitchen, says the English author who’s completely run out of energy to find non-banal ways of expressing the character’s anger. But nothing cliché in the outrageous French calque il s’oragea de la cuisine, halfway between orage (very much not a verb) and s’arracher (a familiar way of saying ‘to get out of here’). That sentence is intolerable in any literary context that doesn’t firmly invite a reader to delight in its being written in literary translationese. Once it’s there, though, it speaks its own quirky, playful language.

Learning other languages, one dreams sometimes of multilingual adventures in literary translationese ; women who would ‘give light’ to babies, as they do in Spanish, or bold experiments in the acrobatic word orders of declension languages, in languages that aren’t graced with the same toolbox of suffixes. The point of literary translationese, however, is not to turn readers into supersleuths, working out which expressions in which language have been borrowed and exploited. It’s to create a literature that joyfully, weirdly and, sometimes, nonsensically, celebrates the impossibility of maintaining watertight boundaries between literary languages in the first place.

In doing so, it also celebrates, indirectly, translation and its literary influence. The texture of translations has profound consequences on the literature of any country ; translations and their conventions condition our reading, and they also modify our writing.

We catch ourselves writing, in French, a million times per page, ‘Il haussa les épaules’, or ‘Elle cligna des yeux’, because English is a real spendthrift when it comes to telling us about people’s body language – even though French handles much more clumsily those innocuous He shrugged, she blinked. We are contaminated by the inbuilt English precision as to whether someone is currently standing or sitting, and we end up writing ‘elle était debout dans le couloir’, because we’ve read countless translated books where people are ‘debout dans le couloir’, instead of simply ‘dans le couloir’ – because in conventional French we can safely assume, unless otherwise stated, that a person in a corridor probably isn’t sitting, crouching or doing a headstand.

One interesting phenomenon of this ‘contamination’, as far as YA is concerned, has been the rise of the use in popular French YA of the term ‘marmoréen’ to refer to skin. ‘Marmoréen’ is an extremely literary, high-register way of saying ‘marble-like’ (‘marmoreal’ in English), and its incongruous use in contemporary popular YA otherwise written in low to mid register can probably be traced back to Luc Rigoureau’s French translation of Twilight, which used the word repeatedly to refer to Edward’s skin, translating Meyer’s more neutral ‘marble’. The word has become its own meme, and I can’t imagine, as a French YA author, ever using the term ‘marmoréen’ today in any way other than humorously. But with the right crowd – one attuned to precisely those connotations of ‘marmoréen’ in French YA today – that humorous use could be very powerful indeed.

From accidental translationese to literary translationese, the difference can be subtle – it’s about self-reflectiveness, artistic playfulness, and, to an extent, low-key political activism in literary form. It is indeed a political statement of sorts, especially when literary translationese is used with English as its point of reference, to calque English, and thus by definition make its influence visible, and thus makes its domination visible. It calls into question the ‘accidental translationese’ that happens all the time in countries where translations from English are ubiquitous (i.e., most countries), and suspends the transparency of that process for a moment.

I suspect it is exactly the same for other languages that might use literary translationese with French, or other locally hegemonic languages. It’s an act of linguistic love, but also of linguistic teasing, or even linguistic nagging.

Unfortunately, I can’t think of any novels in other languages than French that use literary translationese with English. For a good reason, doubtlessly : those novels don’t get translated into French, because literary translationese is horribly difficult to translate. It’s possible, of course – no such thing as untranslatability ! – but you can sort of understand why publishers are wary of it. And it’s also tricky because literary translationese is a linguistic love affair between two languages, so it would be quite difficult to get the gist of, say, a translation into French of a German novel that mimicks English turns of phrase. It’s the kind of in-joke that doesn’t travel very easily.

Long post, sorry. Let me know in the comments of your favourite instances of literary translationese in English or other languages…

This year, 3 departmental PhD studentships are being made available in my department, the Department of Education at the University of York. They will be extremely competitive, but of course not impossible, to get. If you have any interest at all in doing a PhD on the topic of translation and children’s literature in Britain today, please do take a look at my named proposal here, and apply!

There are many other proposals on offer, too.

See you there? the deadline for applying is March 1st.

Originally published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure

Recently I read, one after the other, the two debut novels on the Booker shortlist:

Again, this is not at all (of course!) a value judgment. What they might gain in perspectival ‘distance’, adult novels might lose in intensity, sincerity, or even beauty. There is a kind of rawness, of honesty, in a perfectly crafted YA voice – a seriousness, one could say – which is pretty much unrivalled in literature for adults. ‘Adult narrators’ , even when they are children, tend to be apologetic about their feelings or about the gravity of what they are experiencing. Irony opens spaces in-between, but any such ‘air bubble’ is always also a cushioning: it protects and insulates the reader. In that view, perhaps adult novels, paradoxically, are more protective of their readers; less skin-to-skin in their contact.

This is of course an ongoing discussion, with very many parameters. But reading and analysing books like Mozley’s or Fridlund’s is particularly useful for working out those little nuances in our readerly and writerly experiences. I really recommend both, if you haven’t tried them yet. And if you have, tell me what you think…

I’m delighted to be able to report that Mireille, Astrid and Hakima’s improbable cycle trip has seduced a number of people into nominating their adventure for two very brilliant awards indeed:

• The Books Are My Bag award – alongside an unbelievably high quality set of novels… Please do vote if you enjoyed Piglettes! it’s a reader’s voice awards, so get yours heard – with or without a comedy French accent.

• And the Carnegie Medal, for which it is on the nominations list, alongside many other books by Pushkin Press – congrats Pushkin! – and, I’m super pleased to see, five translations.

Bourg-en-Bresse power!!! Good luck to all the nominees and thanks so much to the readers who’ve already read the book, reviewed it, recommended it to friends, etc.

And those who thought it was a good idea for it to be on those lists: merci times a million.

Clem

As a note to self, and to other people affected by the same problem.

The Sociology corridor of the French ivory tower is under siege: a few weeks ago, two academics pulled a rather uncomfortable prank on the academic journal Sociétés, by managing to place in the prestigious publication a ‘fake’, or rather ‘hoax’, article.

The story is quite complex, but to sum it up: two sociologists, Manuel Quinon and Arnaud Saint-Martin, wrote an article on the Autolib’ cars, which are electric cars available to the general public for short-time rentals in Paris (think Boris bikes, but cars). They submitted the article, entitled ‘Postmodern automobilities: When Autolib’ makes sense in Paris’ under a pseudonym to Sociétés, where it was immediately accepted and published. So far, so good; except that, as Quinon and Saint-Martin explained in a long and fascinating article, their analysis is a hoax, a hollow and meaningless text, full of – they say – ‘inanities’, written by scrupulously following the methodological and epistemological line of Sociétés.

Autolib’s in their natural environment (c. Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz)

To give you an idea of what the ‘hoax’ is like, here’s a representative sample from the introduction, translated by me (I’ve done my best to convey the academic ‘wordplay’, sometimes changing the ‘meaning’, but, as you shall see, the ‘meaning’ is pretty obscure anyway):

Automotive(s)

It is hard for the man in the street not to notice them: in Paris, the “Autolib’s” have now settled in the urban ecosystem. They do not fail to interrogate our relation to the city and to driving – a driving of/in the city. In many ways, they foretell a new paradigm. In this double movement of an electrified urban mobility and of a sharing of common vehicles, we indeed find at play a (sub?)terranean postmodernity. Although communication campaigns, political marketing and economico-industrial aspects escort the deployment of those little grey Bluecars® conceived by the Bolloré group, we can nonetheless note that they mobilise us, as much as we mobilise them: in the contemporary city, the sovereign subject gives way to the nomad, to the puer aeternus.
Because the flux of urban Lebenswelt is woven into a series of perfectly connected socio-technical webs, it is now indispensable to work towards a comprehensive, or rather “formist” sociology of (de)ambulatory contemporary sociality. […] We will detect in Autolib’ the mark of a libido mobilis, a libidinal self-centred energy, a kind of “subterranean centrality” which is literally automobilistic. All this expresses, maybe, the impulsive need to reconnect with a “je-ne-sais-quoi” which is that of the matrix, of originary, vital energy […] The Autolib’ indeed participates of the contemporary imaginal; it reshapes not just forms of sociality, whose tribal future goes without saying, but also contributes to the creation of a new “semantic pool”, for which we need to elaborate a hermeneutic sociology.

Phew.

The point, of course, was to ridicule Sociétés and a certain school of French sociology; to show that there is nothing in such studies behind a façade of jargon, preconceived ideas about contemporary society, and smattering of Deleuze and Derrida. As such, the researchers followed in the footsteps of Alan Sokal, a physicist who published in 1996 a prank article in cultural studies journal Social Text in order to denounce what were, according to him, the pretences and unsoundness of much French-theory-inspired American cultural studies.

Importantly, the hoax was also an attack on a particular person. Sociétés is headed by, and federates the disciples of, a charismatic Sociology professor called Michel Maffesoli. The ‘Maffesolian’ school of sociology (I would personally call it ‘cultural sociology’ or ‘cultural studies’) has a particular appetite for French-theory-heavy descriptions of everyday objects, practices and behaviours, basing their analyses on a conception of the ‘postmodern individual’ – a fragmented, non-rational and nomadic subject.

According to the two authors of the prank (and here I can’t take sides, knowing very little about the politics of French academia) Maffesoli’s influence on French sociology and on the media is undeserved, toxic, almost guru-esque. Worshipped by his disciples, who write article after article according to the ‘Maffesolian’ formula, the professor, they say, failed to notice even in his own journal the grotesque exaggerations of his own theory and concepts. Indeed, the hoax article goes to great lengths to celebrate the works of Michel Maffesoli with energetically sycophantic sentences, using what the two authors identify as Maffesoli’s key contributions to sociology: the drama of postmodernity, the meaningfulness of the quotidian, the hedonistic subject, ‘presenteism’, etc.

To sum up, Quinon and Saint-Martin’s aims with this hoax were to bring into disrepute Sociétés, Michel Maffesoli himself, but also, through him, the kind of sociological study that he represents. That is, as far as I understand the issue:

• Studies which emphasise everyday practices and objects, finding meaning in apparently meaningless familiarity;
• A jargon-heavy, French-theory-heavy, pompous language, relying on ‘keywords’ (buzzwords) coined by French and German theorists and/or Maffesoli(ans);
• Predictable conclusions, ‘confirmation bias’ for the school of thought’s vision of postmodernity;
• A strictly non-empirical methodology. The two authors are very clear that this was, to them, a major issue. Maffesoli’s motto appears to be that ‘no fieldwork’ is needed in sociology – so, in this particular case, there is no data collected on users of Autolib’s, for instance. Instead, the ‘empirical’ part of the sociological study should lie in the researcher’s felt experience of the studied object. The hoax article conscientiously respects this dismissal of fieldwork, explaining instead that the author ‘experienced’ the Autolib’, exploring what it ‘feels like’ to the driver. Of course, neither researcher actually bothered getting into an Autolib’ car; their ‘phenomenological’ approach was entirely imaginary.
• A sloppy peer-review process, letting through slapdash and absurd articles; it was later revealed that one reviewer had rejected the manuscript, but that the editor had gone with the positive opinion of the second reviewer.

The revelation of the hoax caused a modest but palpable stir in French academia as well as in the media, with Le Monde in particular amply covering  the story (see also here and here). Michel Maffesoli, it was announced yesterday, has resigned from his Editor position at Sociétés, acknowledging that the article should never have been published, and that he had been careless not to have read it. But he refutes  the accusations of intellectual sloppiness and academic mystification, denouncing what he felt was the ‘jealousy’ of Quinon and Saint-Martin; for Maffesoli, in short, this hoax is a spiteful attack on an eminent figure of sociological research from two frustrated younger colleagues.

Where does this leave us? Beyond the fact that the story itself is quite revealing of the legendary cliqueyness and ruthlessness of French academia, it is difficult not to feel uncomfortable when reading the hoax article and the accusations levelled at the type of sociology it represents. While there is no doubt that the article was profoundly silly, it raises an important question: to function as a hoax, was the article principally relying on 1) meaninglessness, or 2) ridicule?

Meaninglessness is easy to pinpoint. When the article states: “in the contemporary city, the sovereign subject gives way to the nomad, to the puer aeternus”, the use of the Latin expression is simply meaningless; ‘puer aeternus’ means ‘eternal child’; it makes strictly no sense in the context there; it is pure mystification.
If the article was entirely meaningless, it would be, in some way, less problematic: its publication could be put down to a tired reviewer and editorial oversight.

But it isn’t entirely meaningless. Instead, most of the article instead works as a hoax because it sounds, in some way, ‘ridiculous’. For instance, here’s the description of the use of the Autolib’ as opposed to owning a car:

No contract; just nomadism. No property; just use and reliance. No petit-bourgeois trophy, pretentiously exhibited to neighbours, parked/ parking class, sex and age identities, but a grey, floating medium, open to alterity, to différance as well as to differing views, silently and ecologically passing from a “high place” of the city to another…

There is certainly meaning in this extract. In fact, it makes a relatively interesting point: the Autolib’ allows the contemporary petit-bourgeois individual to be liberated from the cumbersome and ‘blingy’ external sign of wealth that a car represents, offering himself, instead, the luxury of a flexible and eco-friendly vehicle.

So why can it be considered ‘ridiculous’? For three main reasons, which I think can be categorised as ‘language’, ‘interpretation’ and ‘subjectivity’.

• Firstly, language: it plays on many clichés of French theory language and rhetoric: bizarre declensions of words separated by slashes or brackets (‘parked/ parking’), conscious misspellings heavy of Derridean extraction (‘différance’), random italicising, poor wordplay (‘différance’/ ‘differing views’ (‘différends’ in the original text)) etc.
• Secondly, interpretation, or rather overinterpretation: if the passage sounds ridiculous, it is in part because we are made to feel that the authors are overinterpreting a banal everyday object – that they are spending too much time and intellectual effort trying to decode and decrypt an object that isn’t there for that purpose. This is what many people who want to dismiss academic research call intellectual masturbation.
• Thirdly, subjectivity: the researchers having not done asked ‘real people’ what they think, their claim that the Autolib’ users are rejecting conspicuous consumption appears spurious; there might be many other reasons for not owning a car in Paris, including cost and general needlessness in a well-connected city.

The fact that most of the hoax’s power comes not from its utter meaninglessness but from the feeling that the language is vacuous and the study (over)interpretative and unscientific asks really quite problematic questions for cultural studies or cultural sociology scholars.

Let’s take language first. I am no French theory fan at all, and I understand the frustration that comes from ploughing through lines of undecipherable words, random puns and sporadic brackets. Some writers, like Derrida, are particularly annoying, because they are both eminently incomprehensible and worshipped by all the cool kids. It’s difficult not to believe that they’re all just pretending to understand and actually part of a worldwide conspiracy, like those people who thought the dress was gold and white.
But let’s have a little faith here. There’s no reason why academic language should be directly accessible. I do use thinkers who have specific jargon and sound difficult: Bourdieu, for instance, is legendarily obscure… at first sight. Once you get into it, and understand what it’s about, and read it carefully with the help of secondary texts, it’s not obscure anymore. It makes sense. The jargon makes sense.

I’m always very wary of attacks on jargon, because jargon is only ‘difficult’ if you don’t know the field. Jargon sums up decades of research in one word or expression. Once you know and understand it, a word of ‘jargon’ becomes a neat little package for years of intellectual work. It’s actually quite a beautiful thing.

But then, of course, what Quinon and Saint-Martin denounced is the empty use of jargon – they accuse the Maffesolians of quoting the necessary keywords with no knowledge of the texts and intellectual history behind them. If it’s this easy to mystify everyone, and to use keywords to hide a lack of original thought, then yes, we do indeed have a problem with jargon.
It’s particularly tricky in cultural studies because the jargon is ‘applied’ to everyday objects – so jogging becomes a way of being-in-the-world, washing-machines are a sublime object of ideology and dog-walkers are a new type of rhizomatic subject. The suspicion is strong that the ‘big word’ becomes a way of concealing the pointlessness of the studied object, and that the researcher is solely engaging in intellectual play verging on surrealism – Quinon and Saint-Martin actually compared their own hoax article to an ‘Oulipian exercise’.

This leads us to the question of overinterpretation, which is particularly stingy for people who, like me, have studied children’s books, comics, ludicrous social phenomena like the Mozart Effect, and routinely use secondary sources from newspapers, pop culture, visual culture and educational documents. This kind of (now not so trendy, but still sexy) research is based on the notion that these different types of discourse are equally worthy of interest. But the Quinon and Saint-Martin academic hoax seems to ask: is it ridiculous to study such things?
Reading it, I was reminded of those Amazon reviews of Mr Men picturebooks by a (bored and highly entertaining) parent with more than a smattering of literary theory. These reviews are of course hilarious, but, from the perspective of a someone who has just published a book on existentialist approaches to children’s literature, they can be a little uncomfortable:

An infant’s primer in Existentialism, we find in this book a weighty treatise on the personal politics of agency and empowerment, taking ownership and authorship of one’s own life. (Mr Bounce)

And many a children’s literature article from a Marxist perspective concludes to the conservatism of much children’s literature in the very manner of the Amazon reviewer:

In a thinly-veiled reference to the oppression of the workers by the ruling class, we are told that Mr Uppity is rude to everyone, and the detail that he has no friends in Bigtown explicitly informs us that the masses are on the brink of revolution. Are we about to bear witness to class war, Hargreaves-style? To see Mr Uppity brought to account by the revolutionary power of the proletariat? Vanquished and overthrown by the party of the workers?

Not so. Mr Uppity is no Marxian analysis, no Leninist prescription for class action. As always, Hargreaves’ inherent and essential conservatism comes to bear. His critique of the bourgeoisie comes not from the proletariat but from the feudal aristocracy.

Well, to be honest… he’s right. If there was a systematic study of the Mr Men series, it would probably be along those lines. Would such a study be ridiculous?
I don’t think so. I bemoan the lack of studies of highly commercial, ‘trashy’ children’s books like the Mr Men series; given their huge success, there should be more effort to study them. But researchers in children’s literature are understandably wary of studying such texts – they (and I include myself here!) prefer to study ‘good’ picturebooks, so-called postmodern picturebooks, because they are understood to have artistic and literary content – while the Mr Men series are principally interesting as a cultural studies/ popular culture phenomenon.

So in children’s literature for instance, there is a striking lack of scholarship on humour, on seriality, on chapter books; and a huge amount on highly sophisticated texts, realistic YA, political fiction (guilty) – which are by no means the most popular nor the most influential. Even authors like Roald Dahl or Jacqueline Wilson have been shockingly underresearched (there are exceptions, of course: much has been written on Harry Potter, dystopian YA, etc).
But it’s hardly surprising, given the amount of suspicion we’re under – by ‘we’, I mean people like me who are perhaps more interested in the cultural sociology than in the literary/aesthetic aspects of popular culture – when we study ‘banal’ texts. In an already-marginalised subdiscipline, we often don’t want to further marginalise ourselves.
Yet such studies can be immensely interesting and revealing, and should absolutely be conducted, however ludicrous it might sound to do a Butlerian critique of Gossip Girl.
Hoaxes like the Quinon/Saint-Martin article are useful to denounce specific people, journals and schools of thought, but also problematic because they weaken the credibility of an array of subfields – popular culture studies, media studies, film studies, video games studies, etc – which they didn’t actually target, but which are already constantly under threat because they sound ridiculous – which shouldn’t mean they are.

I’ll end with what Quinon and Saint-Martin denounced as a ‘non-scientific’ type of sociology. According to them, sociology proper should include empirical research and be strictly field-based. Maffesoli, again, refuted these accusations, by saying that he never understood sociology to be a science. According to him, sociology is ‘a knowledge’, and sociological research can absolutely stem from the researcher’s particular sensitivity to the world and interpretation of it; it doesn’t need to be ‘objective’ nor quantitative, as it is, again, not a science.
Here we need to remember that Sociology is in France very much still considered a ‘soft’ subject – Bourdieu described sociology in the 70s as the discipline picked by lazy middle-class kids with a charismatic disposition. So it is unsurprising that some sociologists should strive to establish it as a ‘science’.

But, however little I want to side with Maffesoli [EDIT: I’ve just seen that someone has tweeted this post ‘quoting me’ as saying ‘I side with Maffesoli’, which is completely absurd: learn to read, espèce d’imbécile], I agree with him that it is pointless to argue that sociology is a ‘science’, or at the very least to base our defence of the field on that claim; and (of course I would say that, being a non-empirical researcher) I certainly reject the notion that fieldwork is the only type that should be ‘valid’ in the field. This notion relies on an extremely naïve view of what constitutes internal validity, ‘objectivity’, and ‘data’.
Sociology, since its inception, has striven to downplay the ‘scientific’ portrayal of individuals as rational decision-makers, to transcend the objective/ subjective dichotomy, and to highlight the biases of any observation – ‘scientific’ of not. Its ‘data’, from the start, has been gathered from a wide array of various sources, giving a voice to types of texts that were not considered useful before. Internal rigour has been ensured not just through testing of hypotheses and replication (though of course many sociological studies do do that), but also through academic debate, intense work on concepts, multiple methodologies, a breakdown of the quantitative/ qualitative divide, and, yes, a phenomenological or even poetic approach to the world.
A lot of the most interesting work conducted in sociology is not falsifiable, not replicable, not, in short, Popperian in the least. A lot of it, specifically in the cultural subfields of sociology, is not scientific. Nor should it be.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding around what cultural theorists do. It’s quite similar to what cultural historians do: they might study the cultural and social changes brought by the democratisation of cycling in the 19th century, and we might do an analysis of the cultural and social changes brought by the Boris bikes now. Cultural historians do not do ‘fieldwork’, and similarly cultural theorists do not have to. They could – you could tackle the topic by doing a case study of Boris bike users, but you could also not do that.
It’s also quite similar to what literary scholars do, except that what is considered ‘text’ is more elastic, encompassing objects, practices, behaviours, etc. You can ‘read’ such things much in the same way as you read literary texts, focusing on their metaphorical content, on their aesthetic aspects, on their embedded ideological assumptions, on their history, etc.
If you don’t do ‘fieldwork’, and if you do use jargon, and if you do focus on the banal and the ordinary, it doesn’t mean you’re basking in your own ability to spout out caustic Barthesian analyses of anything under the sun, and despising the man in the street.
However, it could mean that, in certain cases; and that’s why academic hoaxes such as the Sociétés one are sometimes much needed.

I have just spent the most wonderful week and a half of my life indexing my academic monograph. Few people, on their deathbeds, are reported as saying that they regret not spending enough time indexing their academic monographs; I feel there may be a reason for that.

The exact location of indexing as Dantesque punishment

Indexing, it turns out, is not only yawn-inducingly tedious; it is also much more difficult than I expected, and requires complete concentration. It is also one of these word-tasks which gradually empties all words of any meaning, to the extent that my book subtitle – Time and Power in Children’s Literature – now means stricly nothing to me, apart from the ‘and’ and ‘in’ that I didn’t have to index.

However, I must admit that indexing was also quite an interesting task in places, and taught me quite a few things about the way I write, the way I read, and the bizarre genre that academic monographs belong to. I thought I’d share a few insights about the painful process.

Firstly, just a few notes on the way it gets done (for me, at least):

• When I got my first proofs, I was asked to give two lists of entries (proper names, and nouns) to the publisher to constitute the index. My original list had roughly 300 noun entries. Because a software was going to be used to generate concordances, I had to submit several spellings for similar terms: not just ’empathy’ but also ’empathise’, ’empathetic’, etc. (so yes, ’empathy’ is now totally devoid of meaning too).
• Alongside the second proofs, the index came back with the page concordances. It looked a bit like this, everywhere:

désir et le temps 44, 49

desire 2–5, 7, 9–10, 19, 22, 27–28, 30–36, 39–41, 43–46, 49–51, 54–56, 58–59, 62, 69–71, 74, 77–79, 82–84, 86–95, 97–101, 104, 106, 127, 131–135, 139–140, 143, 153–154, 157, 165, 169, 172, 176, 178, 180, 186–193, 195–196, 199, 203–205, 207–209

didactic 2–4, 6–7, 9–10, 18–19, 36, 38–39, 41, 43, 46, 48–49, 53, 56–58, 63, 65, 69–75, 77–91, 93–94, 98–101, 106–109, 111, 117, 120, 122–123, 131–137, 140, 143, 147, 150, 152, 155–157, 161, 170, 176, 178, 184, 186, 188, 190–191, 194, 197–198, 203–204, 206–209

didactically 4, 156

Of course, the damn book being about children, children’s literature, and childhood, there were some particularly hellish lists of concordances for the terms in question:

childhood 5–11, 15–20, 22–25, 27, 34–35, 37, 40–41, 43, 46, 48–49, 51, 55–59, 71, 83, 85–89, 91–92, 96–97, 99, 104–109, 112, 114, 128, 130–131, 154, 166, 170, 176, 178, 180, 182, 186, 188, 192–195, 197–198, 205–206

child 2–11, 15–27, 34–36, 38–41, 43–44, 46–50, 52–65, 70–101, 103–110, 112–114, 117, 119–121, 123, 128, 130–131, 133–136, 143, 147, 150–152, 154–157, 160, 162–163, 166–188, 190–209

child reader 2–4, 7–8, 10, 40, 47–48, 58, 63, 71, 73–74, 78–82, 91–92, 94–100, 112–114, 117, 128, 130–131, 133, 135–136, 143, 147, 150–151, 154, 156–157, 160, 162, 167, 169–171, 174, 176, 179–180, 182–183, 198–203

children’s literature 2–9, 15–20, 22, 25–27, 33–34, 40–41, 43, 46–59, 62, 65, 70–72, 74–75, 77–81, 85–86, 89–91, 94–100, 105–106, 108–113, 118, 122–123, 131–135, 147–156, 161–163, 169–171, 174, 178–186, 192, 195–198, 202, 204–209

• I sat down with much tea, for days and days on end, and went through the proofs, and slowly cut down, merged, subdivided and split those ginormous lists of page numbers, using subentries. I Ctrl+F’ed by way through the electronic proof instead of printing out a paper proof, because 1) trees are dying and 2) it’s much easier.

So what did I learn, dear readers?

• Some concepts are just too damn large

I was primordially mystified about one thing: how do you index a term that is quite literally central to the whole book? In my case, it seemed difficult to index ‘time’, ‘power’ and ‘children’s literature’ in any other way than by saying ‘Read the whole damn book, you lazy sloth’.

I sought inspiration in academic monographs I happened to have lying around, such as Peter Stearns’ (excellent) Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing. How, I wondered, did Stearns index the term ‘anxiety’?

That’s right. Eight page numbers or ranges. I was pretty sure I’d seen the word ‘anxiety’ or ‘anxious’ something like a hundred times more throughout the book, but I was curious to see which occurrences Stearns had decided to index.

So I checked. And apart from an introductory bit (p.11) and a conclusion bit (215-216, 222) which were vaguely about definitions of anxiety, the other choices of pages were totally incomprehensible. Why pick those? I have no idea. If I had done Stearns’ index, I would have had subentries of the type: ‘health-related’, ‘about achievement’, ‘class-related’, ‘definitions of’, etc. An entry like this is of no use at all.

But at the same time, the truth is – as a reader, I didn’t care. I have a book in my hands called Anxious Parents. I read it from cover to cover, in part because it’s quite an entertaining book, and also because I needed the whole of it. I didn’t need to refer to the index to tell me where to find bits about anxiety. Still, it wasn’t a very satisfactory entry.

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble has a nice, very detailed entry for ‘gender’, but then random entried here and there: for instance, ‘reality of gender’, and ‘construction of gender’, which are not cross-referenced under ‘gender’. I don’t know why.

I then opened Stephen J. Ball’s Class Strategies and the Education Market, and looked for, well, ‘class’:

Quite a lot more detail here. This is a pretty good entry, I thought – clear, broad enough subentries, cross-referencing with middle and working class, which sounds very logical. However, having read the whole book, I can’t help but feel that frankly, Ball’s thoughts on class would be quite simplified and decontextualised if I were to simply pick my way through it thanks to the index.

But then again, it wouldn’t have occurred to me before to use an index to look for the central concept in a book. Who does that?? And suddenly a new diabolical thought came to my mind:

• Sometimes, you just don’t want to help the reader.

Seriously: do I want my readers to pick their way through the central concepts in my book?

Sure, I could put a subentry to ‘children’s literature’ saying, for instance, ‘definition of’. But that’s just asking the lazy reader to read just that definition and not take into account the pages and pages and pages of articulate and cogent reflection (sure) that have led to it.

By that time I was fuming, hungry, bored (and also getting dozens of hate emails per minute, but that’s another story) and ready to strike out at those virtual bad readers of the book I was imagining. I spent hours on those pages and pages of articulate and cogent reflection, you scroungers!

I suddenly felt like my index was exposing my poor little book to immoral cherry-pickers, ready to quote definitions entirely out of context. At the same time, I couldn’t quote a whole range of pages before the definition, or it would confuse the hell out of the immoral cherry-pickers and they’d close the book.

So I wanted to help some readers. Just not all readers.

Eventually, I decided to keep it broad and clear like in Ball’s book, but with subentries obscure enough that they couldn’t be relied on entirely out of context; ‘childhood’ became, for instance,

childhood temporal otherness of 6, 15-20, 22–25, 56-58, 71, 104-108, 150, 170, 194; symbolic 7-11, 40–41, 55-56, 71, 85, 88, 154, 170; as associated to hope 46-48; in the didactic discourse 85–89; and subjectivity 96–97; Beauvoirian approach to 104–108, 112, 192–195.

 

• You can really have fun with some entries

This is something I wouldn’t have believed in the first few hours of the terrible task, but I realised that some entries at least offered elegant narrative possibilities. Specifically, the not-huge-but-still-quite-important-concepts. I’ll give you my favourite one here:

disempowerment of the adult 3, 7, 57-58, 65, 113, 124-131, 205; of the child 17–18; of child and adult 176-178, 190 see also power

I’m proud of this one because it’s quite clever. You see, the whole book is about how children’s literature is not as disempowering for the child as much children’s literature theory seems to think it is (see previous article for more details). In fact, in my analysis, children’s literature, more often than not, betrays an adult lack of power.

So this little entry indicates quite neatly what happens in the book: ‘disempowerment of the adult’ has far more page entries than ‘disempowerment of the child’, and the last subentry (‘disempowerment of child and adult’) indicates that we’re talking here about a phenomenon that is also common to both.

I’ve managed entries like that here and there, but not as many as I’d like; they’re my favourite, and if they were little puppies I’d pat their heads and give them treats.

• Those horribly overlapping entries!

Inevitably, some entries are going to overlap. You can’t talk about ‘time’ without it overlapping with ‘futurity’, or ‘existence’ without it overlapping with ‘existentialism’. In a way, it could be worse: I actually discovered, doing the index, that I’m thankfully not too bad at using words rigorously enough that I don’t use different ones to mean the same thing (thank you, French education of torture and trauma).

But even so; the worst entries were ‘power’, ‘might’ and ‘authority’, because in my book’s theorisation, ‘power’ is split into two kinds : might and authority. So how do you index those and cross-reference them? And how do you make sure that people are actually going to look up ‘might’ and ‘authority’ instead of just ‘power’?

Well, I created a very inelegant subentry for ‘power’ which I called ‘dynamics of the adult-child relationship’ and which contains a lot of page numbers; and then I finished that subentry by saying ‘see also authority, might’; which I also did for ‘authority’ and ‘might’.

It feels redundant and awful; but it makes sure that a reader will look at authority and might. Since ‘power’ is a central concept in the book, I want to force the reader out of this entry through sheer boredom of all those numbers. The ‘authority’ and ‘might’ entries are much clearer and more reader-friendly, so the reader will jump on those instead.

That was, at least, my reasoning. Maybe I have a manipulative personality, or I’m good at mind games; you decide.

• How specific should the subentries be?

From Stearns’ completely nonspecific entries to a complete avalanche of subentries, my bookshelf was full of different approaches. If you want to get an index-inferiority-complex, Education and the middle class, by Sally Power et al, is your book:

Note the final ‘university entry, 95-6’ and ‘university studies, 95-6’. That, my dears, is commitment to indexing.

But seriously, it can get a bit surreal:

‘neglected in sociology of education’? Really? Do we need this entry? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good idea that it’s there, but the implications are shudder-inducing. Should I have a subentry saying ‘unnecessarily guilt-tripping the child into saving the environment’, under ‘ecological books’? There seems to be no limit to where this kind of subentry can lead you – you might as well rewrite the whole book in index form.

As you can see, this week and a half in the circles of hell has triggered some half-annoyed, half-intrigued reflection on the matter. Above all, it’s made me think that I can’t imagine giving the job to anyone else: at least for an academic monograph, you really need to know the whole damn book by heart, and only one person is sad enough for that: the author.

Of course, we’re all vultures of a kind, mostly feeding on previous bodies of work. But academics do have very varied diets. Which is yours? Take the test and discover what kind of scholarly gourmet you are.

1. Which thinker would you never have dinner with?

a. Judith Butler

b. Martin Heidegger

c. Harold Bloom

d. Friedrich Hegel

2. Which quotation gives you the most food for thought?

a. “The safest generalisation we can make about Western philosophy is that it is a series of footnotes to Plato.” (Alfred North Whitehead)

b. “If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.” (Peter Singer)

c. “Art is anything you can get away with.” (Marshall McLuhan)

d. “Declaration of principle, pious wish and historical violence of a speech dreaming its full self-presence, living itself as its own resumption; self-proclaimed language, auto-production of a speech declared alive, capable, Socrates said, of helping itself, a logos which believes itself to be its own father, being lifted thus above written discourse, infans (speechless) and infirm at not being able to respond when one questions it and which, since its “parent[’s help] is [always] needed” (ton patris aei deitai boithon—Phaedrus 275d) must therefore be born out of a primary gap and a primary expatriation, condemning it to wandering and blindness, to mourning.” (Jacques Derrida)

3. Which of these concepts or theoretical ingredients can you really not stomach?

a. Intersectionality

b. The animal-machine

c. The Great Conversation

d. Dialectic

4. Where do you find your favourite intellectual recipes?

a. Why, in books. Where else?

b. You listen to people that no one will listen to.

c. You have an app or two. And you follow a number of specialised blogs. You especially like those that explain things in comic form #yaybubbles

d. What recipes?

5. What are you currently cooking up?

a. A long monograph for a respectable academic press.

b. An impassioned TED Talk on how the implications of your work are both humbling and world-changing.

c. An article for an edgy online journal.

d. You’re not too sure. This morning you thought about how ‘hoovering’ could become a new concept. It would be interesting. You’re currently idly drawing a network of other concepts around it, on a napkin at a café.

Bonus question:

7. How do you like your eggs in the morning?

a. Raw.

b. Can I have tofu instead?

c. You don’t, unless they’re quails’ or ostriches’ eggs. Or Easter eggs. Anything else is b-oring.

d. Very, very scrambled.

Now count up your points! And prepare for revelations about your academic diet.

You got a majority of As.

You’re on an academic paleodiet. You’re the proud caveman of the Ivory Tower, buried under piles of yellowing paper, by the warmth of a good fire. None of those new low-fat methods, highly processed theories, interdisciplinary recipes and artificially-coloured concepts: you do things the old-fashioned way. Old recipe-book-writers knew what they were doing! And who cares if they were mostly white men. But times are changing, and for the worse: you keep grumbling that few people want to take a bite of your stuff when it contains your favourite mammoth concepts.

You got a majority of Bs

You’re an academic vegan. Endowed with supernaturally stretchable empathy, you’re always looking for the next free-range theory, the next concept not tested on animals, and you strive to create environmentally friendly versions of previous models. You’re highly suspicious of some traditional ingredients: reason, in particular, which, albeit a necessary base to your own theoretical cooking, has led astray many a philosophic chef. You mean to change the world, one homemade dish at a time. You believe in outreach, in nourishing the world: everyone should get a taste of your theories.

You got a majority of Cs

You’re an academic omnivore, with a clear preference for what others consider junk food. From media studies to children’s video games, from the science of Twitter to electro-pop-music theory, you just love that industrial flavour. Of course, you know all the cool kids (at least on Facebook), and you meet up for conferences which are so buzzwordy that they make it into the Featured page on Google news. The academic paleodieters hate you, though you sometimes pretend to them that you don’t actually have a taste for those things you study; you just find them worthy of attention, that’s all…

You got a majority of Ds

Is it molecular gastronomy? Is it Thermomix addiction? Is it simply that of someone who, erm, isn’t too sure how to cook? Difficult to say. Basic ingredients become quite unrecognisable – indeed even, some would say, unpalatable – when you’re in command. You keep inventing new implements, too. You are, however, a bit of a poet; you talk a lot about your ideas in a mouth-watering fashion before revealing them. Then you lift the cloche, and the deconstructed, disintegrated, dizzy concepts, not too sure whether they’re a wave or a particle, have a tendency to dissolve. It certainly looks, smells and tastes impressive, though.

Exceptionally this week, blog post on Monday rather than Wednesday. Because it’s the Rule.

Oh hurrah, a My Writing Process blog post! I have been tagged by the most ladylike Robin Stevens, whom by the way you should absolutely meet if you haven’t already, because 1) her upcoming novel is a detective-story-addict’s dream; 2) she has a lizard called Watson, and 3) she is Sesame Seade’s real-world counterpart. Also she is a lovely person and makes excellent cakes.

So the point of this My Writing Process blog tour is to answer three questions about One’s Writing Process, and then tag someone else. I don’t think there’s any curse if you break the chain (THIS DEAD CHILD SHALL VISIT YOU AT NIGHT) as everyone knows that you absolutely don’t need to scare authors into narcissistic self-reflectiveness; they will do it very willingly and respect whichever deadline you set them.

Here we go then:

1. What am I working on?

Not sure this question is inviting long explanations about my current research interests and/ or students’ essays I’m marking, so I’ll skip directly to fiction. I’m working on edits for a series with Bloomsbury, The Royal Babysitters and The Royal Wedding-Crashers, coming out October 2014 and April 2015. My other series, the Sesame Seade Mysteries, is finished – but I work a lot on promoting it by going to schools and meeting young readers.

I’m also working on my French books: a YA novel and a mid-grade adventure story, which no one cares about here you poor things, you are so missing out. But right now I’m pretty much done with everything I’ve been contracted to do. I’m therefore in the difficult situation of Looking For Another Contract.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

The Sesame Seade Mysteries are funny and mysterious detective stories, but I’m quite proud of the fact that they don’t kill off the parents or make them inexplicably uninterested in their daughter’s whereabouts. The language also makes the series quite different from other books of the same kind that I’ve read, I think. A lot of the humour depends on the language.

God, is there any way of answering this question without sounding hugely pretentious and/or making sound like your colleagues are writing utter rubbish?

The Royal Babysitters and The Royal Wedding-Crashers are, I think, wackier than your usual funny/ adventure story for early readers. They were written to sound like I was constantly high on some kind of magical herb, but I promise I wasn’t. I’m even down to one coffee a day.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Because I’ve found a more or less happy middle between what I want to write and what publishers are willing to publish. This happy middle in France is very different to what it is in Britain. I like many things when I write fiction: I like humour, I like language, I like sarcasm, I like adventure, I like a bit of cruelty, I like political commitment. The two countries allow me to express those different likings to different degrees.

4. What’s my writing process like?

Completely erratic. I make time for it; time is never already there. Writing fiction is not my full-time job, so it comes after doing research, writing papers, marking students’ essays, supervising students, etc. And part of fiction-writing-time must be devoted to promoting books that already exist, doing school visits, replying to emails, blogging, etc. I end up writing very little.

Fiction-writing time is clearly separated from Actual Work Time by my moving to the sofa with the laptop as opposed to sitting at my desk.

I’m a planner. I make relatively strict synopses to which I generally stick. I abandon many book projects after just a few pages or chapters. I start a lot of things.

I hate editing and revising; it’s a big problem, because I also hate it in my academic work. As a result, my first drafts are often quite polished, because Writing-Me does everything she can to diminish Editing-Me’s future wrath.

I write quite fast once I get going, and I don’t get hugely attached to characters and stories any more. I’m always thinking of the next project. I’m more anxious about writing than I used to be.

Somebody or other said that there are two types of writers: those who like writing, and those who like having written. Sadly, I think I am in the latter camp. It’s not that I don’t like writing, but there’s nothing like the joy of a finished manuscript.

Julian Sedgwick, it’s your turn!