By Jon Cogburn
Analytic philosophers easily divide into two camps, the majority of those who, with Thomas Ricketts,* find W.V.O. Quine "an enormous pleasure to read" and the minority of us who find such judgments to be an enormous embarrassment.
To the extent that a perhaps apocryphal, yet widespread, story is true, those of us in the latter camp can count among our allies such Quineans as Robert Brandom. According to the story, around fifteen years ago the nearly always amiable Brandom was heard several tables away at an Eastern APA smoker uncharacteristically bellowing, "It's not *&%$ing Shakespeare Robert! It's Quine." Brandom's interlocutor had breathily piled up just one too many quotes involving alliteration, e.g.: "To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it" and "A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news."
Quine's own (auto-)biography shows that self-taught-manhood can just as easily lead back to the more originary form of aliteracy. Quine really enjoyed his literature classes in high school and wanted to be a creative writer. This is self-taught man territory, desperately wanting to be cultured not having yet broken into the hermeneutic circle enough to actually enjoy or really understand the things one professes to value (cf. Mark Twain on Wagner, "it's better than it sounds"). Given his remarkable facility with languages, Quine probably had good prospects of making a go at it. But he didn't use the facility to study the literature of any of those languages. Somehow his study of philosophy killed this, and by some point after World War II he's only reading popular science magazines and philosophers writing about his own work. And so it goes. At the end of all of our exploring is to arrive where we started and not to know the place at all.
That is, if Al Gore was never a young person, but only an old person's idea of a young person, Quine was never a good writer, but only a self-taught man's idea of a good writer. The confession of having wanted to be a literary writer in highschool is his Rosebud. Every ex-high school nerd who harbored similar conceits once wrote with a nearly identical breezy affectation, and a nearly identical multiplication of literary tropes beyond necessity.
T.S. Eliot, never an old person's idea of a young person, was the anti-Quine in so many ways. Among others, you don't find barbarisms such as "fancifully fanciless" and "posit posit patronize" in his critical work. In his essay on Seneca's contribution to English play-writing he does mention overuse of alliteration though.
Here is a random bit of Studley:
O wanny jaws of Blacke Averne, eake Tartar dungeon grim,
O Lethes Lake of woful Soules the joy that therin swimme,
And eake ye glummy Gulphes destroy, destroy me wicked wight
And still in pit of pangues let me be plunged day and night.
Now, now, come up ye Goblins grim from water creekes alow . .The majority of the rhyme words are monosyllables. The most sonorous and canorous Latin names are truncated (it remained for Marlowe to discover, and Milton to perfect, the musical possiblities of classical names almost to the point of incantation). Alliteration, in as primitive a form as that of Piers Plowman, is constant. For instance, Heywood has
shal Sisyphus his stone
That slipper resltess rollying payse uppon my backe be borne,
Or shal my lymmes with swifter swinge of whilring whele be
torne?
Or shal my paynes be Tytius panges th' encreasing liver still,
Whose growing guttes the gnawing gripes and fylthy foules do
fyl?
There's not that much of a stretch between "fylthy foules to fyl" to "fancifully fancyless," though Eliot does have some nice things to say about Heywood.
Perhaps the most unintentionally ironic thing Quine ever wrote is the essay in Ways of Paradox berating Harvard for having dumbed down requirements for philosophy PhD students. He does not think that very many of the post 60s crop of students should be studying philosophy.**** Quine himself studied at Harvard in the late 1920s and early 30s. Eliot studied there from around 1906 through 1909, wrote his dissertation on Bradley, submitted it, but was never able to defend because he was stuck in England during World War I, and by the end of the war he had decided to give everything to poetry.
Part of what makes Robert Crawford's recent Young Eliot so interesting is that he shares a lot of research concerning Eliot's studies at Harvard. One of the strangest things from a contemporary perspective is that during his coursework Eliot actually learned Sanskrit and read an enormous amount of Indian philosophy. I think if Quine had done the same, he would not have written so badly, and perhaps those of us who stand on his shoulders would be able to tell the difference.*****
[*I only pick Ricketts because: (1) google loves the article to which I link above, (2) given his own accomplishment, there is no way picking him can be construed as kicking down.
**One of our philpercs authors was there, but I'll let her/him speak for her/himself should s/he choose to do so.
***At least I didn't write "desperately desirous of."
****In my first or second year of graduate school I was told over the phone by my then adviser to read this essay. I think about 1/3d of our entering class actually got PhDs, and that was a higher percentage than the classes surrounding me.
*****This is not a stab at analytic philosophy. I suspect that the same cultural stupor that produced a generation of analytic philosophers who don't read literature is responsible for once widespread continental embrace of: overuse of chiasmus, bad puns, Nietzschean "loftiness," that awful thing one does with parentheses, lazy metaphors, willful syntactic ambiguity, etc. etc. etc.******
******And this is the way a world ends. Not a bang, but a simper.]