Rereading Hogarth and Pope: Authenticity and Academic Fictions of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

In Sophie Gee’s 2007 novel The Scandal of the Season a character complains about his profession’s insular publishing culture and its scant rewards. He does so in terms that might produce a jolt of recognition in a certain type of reader:

I might toil for years to produce an indifferent monograph […] It would be published obscurely — a run of fifty at best. But my colleagues […] would fall upon it like so many gourmands upon a Bologna sausage. For months to come, they’d gather in the evenings to divide a bottle of wine among eight of them, listen to one of their number perform upon the viol, and chew over my threadbare ruminations […] A year or so later, one of them would groan out a pamphlet in reply […] and the whole ridiculous performance begins again: the wine, the viol, the interminable talk.

(Gee 2007a, 55)

The speaker is Jonathan Swift, his subject theological debate among eighteenth-century clergymen. But his description has a clear presentist ring: minus the viol playing, the fictional Swift imparts a jaundiced but fairly accurate view of the cycles of writing, conference attendance, peer review and publication that make up the research culture of modern academia. Read in this context, the comparison of a monograph to a Bologna sausage — more often referred to these days as ‘baloney’ — becomes a loaded one.

Authentic modern works are criticisms of past ones.

Theodor Adorno