To Read and to Live (Part Deux)

Continued

Using the study of literature as a means for altering the political landscape involves no small amount of hubris. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., editor of the Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature and a leading critic of the traditional literary canon states the problem as well as any opponent might do:

"The recent turn towards politics and history in literary studies has turned the analysis of texts into a marionette theater of the political, to which we bring all the passions of our real-world commitments. And that’s why it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the distance from the classroom to the streets. Academic critics write essays, “readings” of literature, where the bad guys (you know, racism or patriarchy) lose, where the forces of oppression are subverted by the boundless powers of irony and allegory that no prison can contain, and we glow with hard-won triumph. We pay homage to the marginalized and the demonized, and it feels almost as if we’ve righted an actual injustice."

In other words, a Marxist or feminist “reading” of a literary work is still just a reading: it may be prompted by some political cause or some righteous doctrine, but in the end it tends to be only academic business as usual.

Nor is this state of affairs new. Most literary theories are proclaimed by their proponents to be--and at the same time are decried by their opponents for being--“revolutionary,” but the typical college classroom bears none of the battle scars conjured by the vocabulary of revolution. Case-in-point: see deconstruction, whose first appearance was either hailed or bewailed as a sign of the eschaton. But it didn’t work out that way.

Terry Eagleton, a British Marxist critic, skewered deconstruction’s radical pretensions by noting that “there is little admirable in an authority...which can savour the delights of textual agnosticism precisely because it is institutionally secure, and perhaps likely to reinforce that security the more flamboyantly it parades its blindness. Others may not know, but to know that nobody knows is the most privileged knowledge conceivable, well worth trading for a handful of critical certainties.”

Thus, Eagleton concludes, “Deconstruction is able to outflank every existing knowledge to absolutely no effect.... It cancels all the way through and leaves everything just as it was.” Now, the politically committed professor or student does everything he can to avoid this ethereal irrelevance--after all, as Marx said and as modern academics seem never to tire of repeating, the point is not to understand the world but to change it. But if Gates is right, then the work of the political ideologues misses that point in very much the same way as the deconstructionists do.

This is not only because a reading is just a reading, and a classroom just a classroom--as opposed to the “real world,” or as Gates would have it, “the streets.” Much political criticism, proclaiming itself to be the living repudiation of formal or structural analyses of texts, in fact mimics such formalism exactly. For despite its often formidable deployment of social and historical knowledge, political criticism tends to put that knowledge in the service of a dominant binary opposition, that between Oppressor and Oppressed, and then seeks to show what side a given text takes.

In this way it resembles both Russian formalism and French structuralism, which sought to identify the component parts of a text (usually seeking matching pairs: High/Low, Light/Dark, Helper/Opponent) and then analyze their relations--except that contemporary criticism is much more conscious of the hierarchical tendency that such pairs tend to have. So the same literary critics who proclaim themselves revolutionaries spend a good portion of their time arguing about whether Jane Austen’s fiction serves as an ideological prop for the repressive patriarchy of Regency England (in which case she stands condemned with the Oppressors) or slyly and surreptitiously subverts that tyrannical order (in which case she may properly speak for the Oppressed).

Of course, genuine oppression does go on in the world, and the road that leads you to subtle arguments about how, say, slaves in the American South in the 1830s were somehow complicit in their own oppression, while the slave-owners were in a way victims themselves, is a dangerous road indeed. But the opposition between Oppressor and Oppressed is not, as so many literary critics seem to think, a fulcrum upon which the whole world of discourse can be lifted.

A specific example may help clarify this point. The first novel of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958), is regularly cited as a great protest against colonialism and cultural imperialism. It is indeed that, and yet it is at the same time a profound critique of the features of Achebe’s own Ibo culture which made that culture both ripe for conquest and susceptible to the arguments of Christian missionaries.

Achebe says quite openly that one of the reasons Christianity succeeded among many of his people (including his own father) is that it called attention to the fundamental injustice of some Ibo traditions: for instance, excluding some people from the community as osu (ritually unclean outcastes), or leaving twins to die in the forest because they were thought to be evil. This kind of social criticism from within his culture is an important feature of Achebe’s novel, but it is almost always neglected by commentators because its complexity doesn’t fit their critical categories. Achebe’s book, while never relativistic or politically ambivalent, simply cannot be broken down into a neat, blunt opposition between the Oppressors and the Oppressed.

Nor is the problem with these categories merely that they are simplistic. What is far more damaging about most political criticism is the way it can conceive of human action only in socio-cultural terms--it cannot recognize personal moral agency. The Oppressor/Oppressed dichotomy will be appealing only to people who cannot conceive of human action except in the limited terminology of groups and classes. Such thinking constitutes politics without ethics, and politics without ethics can at best give a woefully incomplete account of the hows and whys of human action.

In other words, what chiefly afflicts current political criticism is a widespread and uncritical acceptance of social constructionism: the belief that human identity is solely the product of social, historical, and cultural forces and therefore the notion of the human “person” or “subject” must be abandoned or at least deconstructed. As Richard Rorty puts it, with his typical disarming clarity and directness, “Socialization goes all the way down.” (The same deconstruction of the person can of course be based on racial and sexual distinctions; and while arguments that depend on race and gender are not precisely identical to those of social constructionism, their logic is quite similar.) Thus many critics use a strictly political vocabulary because for them that has become the only vocabulary available; they have no ethical vocabulary, i.e., a vocabulary of moral agency, because they don’t believe in moral agents. Rorty himself has tried to articulate some kind of ethics for social constructionism, but with very poor, sometimes ludicrous, results; and even the effort is unusual.

Without going into a lengthy critique of social constructionism, we find two things worth noting. First, there is the question of cultural anthropology, from which much of the impetus for social constructionism derives. Maurice Bloch, himself a cultural anthropologist, has pointed out (in Ritual, History, and Power) that the members of his profession have a deep personal and professional investment in finding what makes cultures different, and no investment at all in finding what makes them alike. There is, then, a natural tendency for the anthropological literature--without being either dishonest or intentionally misleading--to suggest the fundamental diversity of cultures while at the same time obscuring their common beliefs, habits, and concerns. And academics are all too ready to welcome uncritically any research which generates distinctions that can be turned into books and essays. It is remarkable how few academics, when confronted with the sweeping assertions of a Foucault or a Lyotard, ask the simple question, “Why should I believe that?”

Second, the belief in a universal human nature has been a powerful force for good in the last two centuries. It is difficult to imagine that Frederick Douglass’ and Harriet Tubman’s arguments for the abolition of slavery and the equality of blacks under the law of the United States would ever have made much headway without their compelling appeals to a human nature shared by people regardless of skin color; and one could say the same about the thoroughly humanistic feminist arguments made by, say, Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller. Those who want to discard such convictions now, in the belief that they have lost their usefulness--and this group includes not just Rorty but also many feminists and "Afrocentrists"--should remember that for Douglass, Tubman, Wollstonecraft and Fuller “human nature” and “human dignity” were not mere concepts to be “used,” but rather foundational beliefs forged in the crucible of hard and painful experience.