What, really, IS the difference between art and scholarship?

This blog arises out of an as-yet-unspoken protest, the pained cry of battered but determined idealism in partnership with a gentle but unrelenting faculty that presents itself as 'realism.' "If you want to change the conversation that goes on around the table," a co-director of my master's program advised me, "you have to get a seat at the table." In other, grander words, she was reminding me that idealism's potential to beget positive change is contingent upon a secure sense of reality. I seem to have imbibed an attitude in which "art" correlates with "idealism" and "scholarship" with "realism"--and from this attitude the protest that has formed in my mind is that art and scholarship should meld better than they do, in all our social institutions. These thoughts occurred to me in the context of clarifying for myself my purposes for this blog and re-reading Beauvoir's The Second Sex, whose "Introduction to the Vintage Edition" by Deirdre Bair quotes an early reviewer as lauding the work thus:

...more than a work of scholarship; it is a work of art, with the salt of
recklessness that makes art sting.[1]

Presumably the reader, along with Bair and the author of this observation, grasps the observation’s inherent meaning. I, for one, was immediately reminded of the assessment in A Room of One’s Own by Woolf’s narrator of Charles Lamb’s essays:

For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their
perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of
genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred
with poetry.[2]

These observations conjoin in my mind because they evoke a similar idea: of something almost mystical, of a logic so robust, probing and thorough that it breaks its own constraints, becoming, more than an argument, a site of possibility, a narratological Babel in which multiple implications converge and clash, converge and clash. Certainly these observations are quite provocative, like the sumptuous prose of some food critics that achieves on the intellect with words the same titillation the critics claim the repast in question achieves on gustation. They make me ‘hungry’ for Beauvoir and Lamb—meaning, I desire passionately to read them, as well as intellectually. But what does this mean? Look at the assumptions regarding “scholarship” and “art” implicit in these observations: scholarship is more polished, complete in itself, than art, yet art—“reckless” and “flawed and imperfect” though it is—is “more than” a work of scholarship. Each possesses desirable qualities that the other lacks. You’d think, then, that a partnership between the two would yield the most interesting and far-reaching thought. But the tendency is for scholars and artists to belittle one another: Spivak, for example, opined that to discuss fiction on its own terms is nothing more than “gossip about imaginary people”; one academic blogger mobilizes a common denigration of academics in her blog title, Another Boring Academic has a Blog? Artists are 'undisciplined and irrelevant'; academics are 'boring and irrelevant.' This mutual denigration, in turn, cleaves scholarship and art apart, when in fact they really might not be so different--or, if different, then at least not as seemingly hostile towards one another.

You may have noticed that on my profile I blend the words “scholar” and “artist” into “scholartist,” pronounced “SCHOL` artist” or “scholAR`tist” depending upon which emphasis best describes the work of the person to whom the name is applied. I thought, briefly, that I had coined this word, but upon looking it up on Google, I discovered that others, too, feel that “scholartist” might best describe the intellectual orientation and practice of some people. Yet it’s not enough to just stick a new name to an interdisciplinary practice; there has to be a theory of how scholarship and art have been and ought to be combined, as well as an effort to demonstrate what such a combination would ‘look like,’ i.e., what kind of experience it would invoke and what new kinds of conversations it would enable. Thanks to the assessment of The Second Sex quoted above, I realized that this is what I have been aiming to achieve in, or by means of, this blog. I went back to my first posting and revised part of it to reflect this newfound piece of clarity. The following is what it now says:

…literature is an outlet to me not only for rigorous analytical exercise, but also (and not separately) for every inarticulate yearning, sorrow, joy, and passion I have ever felt and will feel. I feel like I can thunder like a giant around books, be a bull and make impossible demands (love them to decrepitude like so many velveteen rabbits, elicit life in them, vivify my life), and the books are meant to, and must, withstand everything. And all that intensity elicited by and brought to books…I do not know how best to articulate it. I do not know how best to share it with others, and engage them in conversation about it. It often seems to me that the richest, most interesting way to discuss literature is through formal and rigorous study of it in an academic setting. But in that setting, literary discourse too easily becomes brittle and impotent, bold words full of promise that is never realized; it all degenerates into hubris the way a drowned body bloats like a hungry sponge but is dead. I am not someone who feels hostility towards theory; theory excites me as an aggregate of sophisticated discourses serving as 'lenses' that enhance the naked eye of shared human experience. But without an acknowledgement of and conscious working within an experience of sensual reading, theory, along with its subject, crumbles into meaninglessness. I do not think the sensual reading experience—what elsewhere in this blog I call “passionate reading,” among other things—receives its due in the academic discourse surrounding literature. Disdain curls the lips of colleagues into scorpions’ tails if anyone dares ask, “But what does this passage in the text make you feel?” I dream of a literary discourse that holds “intellect” to be an exquisite marriage between analytical rigor and emotional receptivity, linear reasoning and intuitive logic, and thoughtful and scrupulous discipline and lightning-flash imagination. Such a discourse would never conceive of dispensing with close reading; reading would be elevated to an Art, an act of creation, not a laying of train tracks for the latest theoretical trend. Such a discourse would be its own institution, aptly named the Academy of Readers--as opposed to being dubbed the "English Department" or "Department of Comparative Literature." So I dream it, and this blog aims to initiate the invention of this discursive institution, one word at a time.

No doubt I will return to this post and revise it, as well. It has not answered the question posed in its title, not that that was my goal for it. But even this post cannot comfortably stand as it is because its definitions of "art" and "scholarship" are unclear. Funny, how the differences between art and scholarship seem so obvious, and yet...

[1] Brendan Gill, “No More Eve,” The New Yorker 29, 2 (February 28, 1953): 97-99.
[2] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1989), p. 7.