What Is This All About? An Appreciative but Puzzled Response to Newman’s Publishing Wisdom

MANGO TREE: THE ARTISTRY AND ALCHEMY OF WRITING. By Carey C. Newman. Chester Heights, PA: Friendship Press, Inc., 2023. Pp. 124. Hardcover, US$ 29.00. First, let me say, with all the others contributing to this symposium, what an honor and pleasure it is to be responding to Carey Newman’s extraordinary little book, Mango Tree, his unique distillation of many years of accumulated wisdom about the art of writing and publishing. Anyone who has worked with Carey (whether in his role as publisher and editor, or simply as a friend and fellow scholar) will know his extraordinary skills in bringing books to birth: in encouraging, cajoling, and if necessary, bullying recalcitrant or undisciplined authors into becoming better authors than they themselves could have ever “desired or imagined!” Our whole discipline is deeply indebted to him for his skills and his support; and thus, I was greatly intrigued to hear of this new book project of his when it was published last year, and eager to engage with it personally. I should add at the outset here that I am also deeply indebted to Sonya Cronin for her assistance to me in negotiating this text and embracing its undeniably elusive meanings. It was she who showed me, for instance, that the main text must be read through the Notes, rather than vice versa. For this is indeed a difficult book, and above all a “semiotic” book: playful, obscure, teasing, provoking. Therein lies its attractiveness and its genius. I found, therefore, that when I first picked it up, I needed to first return to my copies of James Joyce, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva for inspiration and bon courage, before proceeding further! Then things got easier: I got into the mood. But this is also a deeply controversial book because it enshrines at its heart an agenda that might in some circles be called “Romantic,” or perhaps “Romantic/ post-modern.” To explain: the view presented is that a book (any book) has its own life and intentions, to which we must duly attend, as writers and editors; moreover, a book is also, Carey avers, fundamentally and necessarily semiotic, poetic, “apophatic,” or “mystical,” before it is clear, analytical (or what Carey calls “noetic”:); and yet texts, according to this view, also have their own distinctive “desires” to be “rightly read” (83). So, it seems that texts should not just court a free-for-all of chaotic license and quite optional arrays of response but aim at a certain “precision” (a favored word in this book) which nonetheless should never kill that (Browning-esque) “first fine careless rapture.” Now I should say immediately that I’m not certain I buy all this, or at least I don’t buy it immediately. That is, I’m not sure that any book I have written, at any rate, has had some sort of hypostasized identity and propulsion in advance of my own wrestling to write and complete it. And I’m also not sure that the “semiotic” or “poetic” mode necessarily laps primarily, and thus more fundamentally, behind and before all attempts at appropriate literary clarity: is not that a matter of context, substance, and aim? I’ll come back to this matter at the end of my comments, for it may be that I have misunderstood what Carey is up to and failed at the first hurdle of responding appropriately to his text. But here’s the rub, and it’s a true confession: I’m that most oxymoronic of phenomena, a feminist author—naturally thereby attuned to the “semiotic” mode (especially in my appeal in my theology to the force of the “contemplative”)—who is at the same time impenitently “noetic” in aiming for an intensive clarity of writing, and armed with an ambition for “accessibility,” both for the sake of the academy and the church. How does that place me in Carey’s hierarchy of authors and his given advice about their appropriate strategies for successful writing practices? Am I just an unfortunate hybrid? Or is that actually what Carey is after in the end, despite appearances? In what follows, I shall try to answer that question by concentrating my attention on the important sections in Mango Tree entitled “Genre,” “Voice,” and “Social Psychology.” I shall play the role of devil’s advocate in wondering aloud whether I do indeed concur with Carey about how books happen, especially in academia, and in particular, how books happen well with the aid of good editors and publishers such as Carey himself. For the sake of succinctness, I shall raise only three basic points for discussion in what follows. As we shall see, these points actually overlap and entangle with one another. So first, I want to gently contest what Carey has to say about genre (Chapter Three, one of the most important chapters, in my view). Here, Carey wants to divide all us writers into three types: noetic, transformative, and affective (or, academic, professional, and trade). And he warns against consciously trying to transgress or mix these types (in particular, as he puts it sharply, “the noetic fails by trying to be something it is not” (17)). But here I would like to complicate and query this three-fold typology contrapuntally by reflecting on the way in which an academic writer goes through different phases in her career, and what this might mean for the typology itself. I think it at least complexifies and skews it a bit. And this has rather important, knock-on implications for how theological scholars, in particular, aim to also connect with the church and its life. A lot hangs on this, then. Put it this way: In academia, we learn our writing craft via various stages of development in which our genre is profoundly affected by whom we are trying to please. First, we write essays for our professors in a bid to impress them sufficiently to get into graduate school. Next, we write our dissertation in order to satisfy our committee or examiners, in the first instance, but from there, we hope to bamboozle a publisher into launching our first book (this is rarely achieved, as we know, without intercession by a senior, supporting scholar). And I think we might all agree that writing one’s doctoral dissertation is unlike anything else that we later undertake, given the level of anxiety created by the need to justify every word we write as fully supported by our own critical scholarly work: it is like writing with a threatening little homunculus crouching on one’s neck and breathing fear and skepticism onto every attempt at originality. Next, if we are lucky enough to get a job, we proceed to the yet-more-fearful tenure project. Many fall at this final fence, as we know; and by now our explorations in the noetic genre of writing may be tending to crescendo to the level of neurosis. As Leonard Cassuto has put it recently, “Too many people in academia think it’s more important to show that you’re smart than it is to communicate with somebody” (Cassuto quoted in Samantha Laine Perfas, 2024). Carey persistently tells us not to focus on readership, note; and surely something is wildly awry if the only people we are trying to impress are our immediate colleagues and rivals—but this is a matter of academic Realpolitik. The self-absorbed noetic rot may by now be setting in—the need to employ obscure jargon, sharp polemics against other scholars, or inflated claims to originality. (As Henry Kissinger once put it, when returning to Harvard after being Secretary of State: “Why do academics hate each other so much? It’s because so little is at stake.”) The problem of noetic genre, then, is surely bigger merely than genre in general; for it fuses into issues of established institutional behaviors, competitive vainglory, and personal jostling for promotion, while distracting us from what might be called the necessary “asceticism” of noetic “precision” in its best sense. The matter of literary genre, then, is more than it seems. Not only is there not just one noetic style (compare the writing of analytic and continental philosophers, for a particularly stark contrast), but there is also an issue of genre’s social location and its accompanying practices and expectations. We all have to go through this stressful noetic academic formation, and I doubt if Carey’s insistence on the priority of the poetic can really shift its power. Yet so far, I think I shall not necessarily be displeasing Carey in complicating his typology of styles in this diachronic way. After all, one of the main messages of the book is to stop worrying about readership and allow the book to be itself (whatever that means, exactly). But here’s my main point in relation to this basic question of genre: once we are through the tenure barrier, we noetics do in principle have the opportunity to re-invent ourselves as writers, to free ourselves from the tyranny of self-regard, and to try and reach a broader readership, including that of the church. Indeed, many of Carey’s most celebrated authors are ones who do precisely this, in a generation when most academic theologians have tragically obfuscated themselves out of any possibility of wider cultural or ecclesial impact. Why is it then that Carey seems to imply that this is a mistake, so as to mix genres? As he puts it, “The public celebration of the noetic does not happen because the academic has changed its spots; it appears because the noetic kept its spot” (17). Please explain, Carey. Secondly, and probably connectedly, let me add a word about voice (Chapter Seven). Carey says here that “the academic vocational book tells a story [qua ‘voice’]”, but that, “Both academic authors and academic publishers mistakenly turn to voice in their respective pursuit of readers and buyers” (97). Yet he makes an exception for those whose first-person voice “responds to a purchase on justice” (100, my emphasis). I find myself suspicious of this division, however, one that is seemingly—yet also somewhat covertly—aligned with issues of race in this country. For all its good intentions, it seems to me that this approach may tokenize and implicitly trivialize autobiographical voice (so-called) as an outlet for a form of prophetic expression all too easily romanticized and adulated in liberal American culture, in one sense, and yet at the same time strangely de-potentiated in the process. Voice, in Carey’s sense, is good for those, he suggests, who need to protest. But where does it get them? As Carey himself writes in the Notes to this chapter, “Both academic authors and academic publishers mistakenly turn to voice in their respective pursuits of readers and buyers” (97). But, “the manipulation of voice does not earn the effect that adherence to genre does” (97, my emphases). This leads me then to enquire: what is the most effective literary locus of prophetic protest? If autobiographical ululation can—alas—merely re-establish an assumed social or racial hierarchy (while satisfying some shamed cultural need for a brief purgative interruption?), what does this mean for those writers, whether in the academic context or outside it, who authentically seek to redress injustice and write with real power against it? And here I include both “white” and “non-white” authors, against the assumed identification of “voice” only with the oppressed. Finally, and thirdly, I’d like to say something briefly about “social psychology” (Chapter Eleven). The brilliant chapter in the book of this name insightfully charts the snake-infested territory that younger and older academics pass through as they try to negotiate a reputational ascent; and it thus comes to address, rather late in the book, precisely the issues I’ve already raised here in relation to genre’s problems. At this point (in the Notes to Chapter Eleven) Carey acknowledges his dependence on the theory of “noetic” maturation outlined in Erik Erikson’s work on psychological maturation (see 113–115), and now concedes that, after the crucial tenure-transition in academia, the noetic author does have the opportunity to transition successfully into something like “vocational” or (so-called) “legacy” books. But what does this mean in terms of breaking Carey’s own rules, earlier adumbrated, against mixing genres in the academy? If an author finally moves in this direction of wider impact, will it ultimately undermine her noetic credibility, even while potentially earning her some nice royalties on the side? On the other hand, if an author climaxes too soon in terms of originality and semiotic poetics, does this potentially spell doom for later (“Big can come early, even first. But curse as much as blessing if it does,” 59)? My question, then, finally, is this: if everything we say about successful book publication in our field has to be complicated by social psychology, voice, and genre, how can our publishing editors—supremely Carey!—help us in making the right choices (not just for our careers, but for the pursuit of justice and truth), as we negotiate these dangerous shoals of stylistic decision? Let me end by coming back to what I said at the beginning. I remarked earlier that I was not certain that Carey’s romantic view of the book as intrinsically poetic, and as having its own inherent life and propulsion, fully convinced me. I think I stand by that critique still, although I am now clearer about what he is after by expressing this view. What he wishes for is that noetics, so-called, would become more poetic, rather than attempting, manipulatively, to cross actual genres and boundaries. And what he wants to unleash in his authors is a permission to say what they really want to say, however outré, as opposed to what their institutions will approve, or what they would like to hide behind in a mistaken attempt to be “important.” “Authenticity” ultimately thus becomes the hallmark of success in writing for Carey, but not in the concocted mode that the category of voice may mistakenly mislead us. But let us admit that different authors write in very different ways: some writing chaotically and semiotically in order to find out what it is that they want to say (I fear that Carey still assumes that this is the best model); but some read and muse and mull for many months and years before they know what it is that they want to say, and only then can finally express with precision what that is (alas, I fall into the latter category, and it is not a comfortable vocation). How does this divergence complicate Carey’s normative vision about writing well, I wonder? Mark Twain said various memorable things about writing. One with which I heartily align myself was that “to be a good writer is to acknowledge that writing is difficult.” But he also allegedly said, most paradoxically, that writing is “Easy: all you have to do is cross out the wrong words” (see https://marktwainstudies.com/the-apocryphal-twain/writing-is-easy-all-you-have-to-do-is-cross-out-the-wrong-words/, my emphasis). We are all indebted to the great editors who, like Carey Newman, kindly tell us what words to cross out. We need more publishers who do that with authority. Otherwise, we, as religionists and theologians, are rapidly going to be doing ourselves out of our own jobs

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