The Valve - A Literary Organ

<< On pens and ink and sealing wax | Front Page | Continuity >>

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Of Flapdoodle

Posted by John Holbo on 05/14/05 at 11:43 AM

Two passages.

The first from Frederick Crews, "The Grand Academy of Theory", in Theory's Empire. (Serious discussion when the event happens. Jokes now.) He's discussing C.P. Snow's 'two cultures' as background bogey to Quentin Skinner's The Return of Grand Theory.

In those days, we are reminded [by Skinner], the most prestigious general model of explanation was logical positivism, the view that the meaningfulness of a statement is vouchsafed by its testability. Judged by that criterion, much of what had long passed for important discourse had to be dismissed as vacuous. Consequently a generation of no-nonsense philosophers abandoned metaphysics for more modest pursuits, including, for example, clarification of the exact meaning of scientific terms. Social scientists, caught in the same wave, declared an "end of ideology" and steeled themselves to perceive only narrow empirical issues. And historians followed Sir Lewis Namier in rejecting all theoretical "flapdoodle," as he called it, and in fixing their attention on "the detailed manoevre of individual political actors at the centres of political power" (RGT, 3). Thus, while most academics may have been as scientifically illiterate as Snow alleged, their own work implicitly honored what they took to be the heart of science, namely, deference to the almighty fact.

The second passage from Stella Gibbons' foreword to Cold Comfort Farm:

And it is only because I have in mind all those thousands of persons, not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle, that I have adopted the method perfected by the late Herr Baedeker, and firmly marked what I consider the finer passages with one, two or three stars. In such a manner did the good man deal with cathedrals, hotels and paintings by men of genius. There seems no reason why it should not be applied to passages in novels.
It ought to help the reviewers, too.

Sir Namier sounds a veritable Flora Poste for cleaning up messes. Ms. Gibbons is groping - in her earnest way - for a literary counterpart to logical positivism's Protokollsätze. (The basic form: 'poetry-here-now', obviously. But the devil's in the details, I expect.) No reason I should have all the fun. You finish the post.

Comments

I don’t think “flapdoodle” really captures what Crews and Gibbons describe. In both cases, they’re trying to express the emptiness of claptrap these “intellectual” nitwits discuss. This calls not for “flapdoodle” but a good ol’ fashion diminishing reduplicative. Nothing captures the vacuousness of a statement quite like saying one word then repeating it with a slight variation of the initial vowel and/or consonant sound. These mish-mashed terms describe those hob-nobbing fuddy-duddies with their hoity-toity mumbo-jumbo far better than some wishy-washy insult like “flapdoodle.”

By A. Cephalous on 05/14/05 at 01:32 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Isn’t “wishy-washy” copyrighted by Charles Schultz?

By on 05/16/05 at 06:42 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Name:
Email:
Location:
URL:

Valve Links

Current Authors

Past Authors

Most recent articles

Most recent comments

Search:

Archives

Syndication

Validation

Credits

Blogroll

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Of Flapdoodle

Comments

Add a comment: