“Broken-Backed” Texts: Meritocracy and Misogyny in Ben Jonson's The Forrest

Summary

Mediocribus esse poetis

Non homines, non Dii, non concessere columnae.

—Horace, Ars Poetica, H & S, VIII, 330, lines 389–90

But neither, Men, nor Gods, nor Pillars meant, Poets should ever be indifferent.

—Ben Jonson, trans., Horace, of the Art of Poetry, 1640, H & S, VIII, 331, lines 555–56

IN my early years of graduate study, I was told by a professor who liked my work that a paper I had written was interesting, even original, but that it was a “broken-backed essay.” Puzzled by the phrase I asked him to explain, and he informed me that I had really attempted to compose two essays and the result was a “broken” piece of literary criticism, something going simultaneously in two directions. Moreover, he pointed out that at times one of these directions seemed to oppose the vector of the other. That made for contradiction, confusion, difficulty in reading. Ultimately, he seemed to say, “what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate!”—it is perhaps no coincidence that this encounter occurred around the same time as the release of Stuart Rosenberg's film, Cool Hand Luke! (1967). But the professor hastened to encourage me because of my “potential” to think and write more coherently and even with some originality. That paper was on Hamlet, and it later became a centerpiece of an MA thesis I wrote on the topic “Self-Consciousness in Shakespearean Drama.” I doubt that the later version had overcome the disability of the earlier one; probably because by then I had begun to suspect that the professional diagnosis that someone has a writing “problem,” because they have difficulty accepting accepted rhetorical protocols, was itself the problem. But when I was told of my “problem” in my first year of graduate school, I probably did work to remedy it with the effect that my writing no doubt became more clear and distinct, but also more cramped and conventional, qualities that then required learning to unlearn, “Broken-backed” is a phrase that has stayed with me my entire academic and professional life, and I think I’ve only recently begun to effectively grasp the significance of a metaphor that conventionally signifies a communication “problem” or even “failure,” for what I consider to be a needed shift in our thinking about thinking, and in our thinking about writing.