Amateur Barbarians

Robert Cohen, Amateur Barbarians (New York: Scribner, 2009). 401 pp. $27.00.

Sentence by sentence, Robert Cohen is perhaps the best prose stylist of any American novelist now writing. This award was previously bestowed upon Michael Chabon by John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, although he nearly revoked it seven years later. In my opinion, Chabon did not deserve it in the first place, not only because his thought disappears into the ooze of his sentences, but because Cohen has written the better prose—sharper, more nimble, faster-paced—all along. Where Cohen suffers by comparison, where Chabon deserves his loyal following, is in sheer inventiveness. Cohen is never quite sure what to organize his sentences around. In his anxiety, he sticks close to familiar subjects and depends upon his powers of social observation to see him through. This leads to the common mistake of describing Cohen as a satirist. But that mistake can be corrected. The bigger problem, which he himself as yet to solve, is that Cohen is confined to a particular and narrow stratum of society.

All of the characters in Amateur Barbarians sound like literary intellectuals. Even though Teddy Hastings, the protagonist, is a middle-school principal who was a math major in college (“usually holed up in the library, or washing dishes in the dining hall, or peer tutoring in the Math Center”), he is full of the insights that only a writer would come to:

• “[M]aybe that was the point of living rooms, he thought: to remind you to live.”

• “[B]ooks and marriages were well suited to each other, Teddy thought. Both were middle-class adventures: they conspired to keep you at home, sitting still, being good.”

• “Out on the streets, the postman and cable guys and housepainters and lawn-maintenance people and the other day workers made their noisy, oblivious rounds. What a waste, Teddy thought. All that effort just to travel in circles.”

• “Every man who embraces a woman becomes Adam, trembling with gratitude that he’s no longer alone. That was how Teddy felt now.”

Four decades ago Philip Roth faced the same problem. How was he to make use of a writer’s unique observations while keeping his sights on a social reality that increasingly outran his gifts of invention? After a series of disastrous semi-fantasies—Our Gang, The Breast, The Great American Novel—he hit upon a solution. A two-part solution, to be exact. He invented Nathan Zuckerman to serve as other men’s majordomo, supplying them with a voice in which literary opinions would no longer be inappropriate. And he researched their work, learning in full and fascinating detail the ways in which other men passed their days and supported their families.

Cohen sees the advantage of shifting attention from the writer’s isolated and sometimes claustrophobic life to other men’s work. After a scare with rectal cancer, a near breakdown, and a night in jail, Teddy Hastings finds himself “sick of the personal. Sick from the personal. He longed to get beyond the self, beyond all selves”—and so he heads off to Africa, retracing the steps that Wilfred Thesiger recorded in Danakil Diary, which he had been reading in the comfort of his big American house. In Harar, he watches a butcher in a blue-green skullcap hacking away at a camel with a medieval-looking scimitar:

In truth he liked nothing better than watching men at their work. The butcher’s acuity and grace, his no-nonsense authority as he set about flaying the carcass, peeling flabby flesh from blameless bone . . . all this entranced him. Teddy stood there reverent. It was as though some timeless ritual of sanctification were being enacted for his benefit. [ellipses in original]Compare this to Roth’s description of kosher butchering in last year’s Indignation:First a chain is wrapped around the rear leg—they trap it that way. But that chain is also a hoist, and quickly they hoist it up, and it hangs from its heel so that all the blood will run down to the head and the upper body. Then they’re ready to kill it. Enter shochet in skullcap. Sits in a little sort of alcove, at least at the Astor Street slaughterhouse he did, takes the head of the animal, says a bracha—a blessing—and he cuts the neck. If he does it in one slice, severs the trachea, the esophagus, and the carotids, and doesn’t touch the backbone, the animal dies instantly and is kosher; if it takes two slices or the animal is sick or disabled or the knife isn’t perfectly sharp or the backbone is merely nicked, the animal is not kosher. The shochet slits the throat from ear to ear and then lets the animal hang there until all the blood flows out. It’s as if he took a bucket of blood, as if he took several buckets, and poured them out all at once, because that’s how fast blood gushes from the arteries onto the floor, a concrete floor with a drain in it. He stands there in boots, in blood up to his ankles despite the drain—and I saw all this when I was a boy. I witnessed it many times.His father thinks it is important for Marcus Messner to witness the kosher butchering of an animal so that he might learn the first lesson of a man’s life: “that you do what you have to do.”

This is the first lesson the characters of Amateur Barbarians have forgotten. They have no work that another man could watch. In alternating chapters—the fixed form of the contemporary novel, apparently—Cohen tells the story of Teddy and his one-year replacement while he is on leave at half pay. Oren Pierce is a self-acknowledged luftmentsh (he has a limited Jewish vocabulary because he studied for a year at a Reform Jewish seminary before drifting into another field of part-time study). As he says to Teddy’s wife when offering help after her cousin suffers a stroke, “I do have some training, you know. I’ve got pretty close to a master’s in counseling.” He has pretty close to a master’s in several subjects, but has been able to complete none of them. He explains that he likes studying the stuff, hanging out in the library, arguing over the nuances of specialized texts. But actually doing the work? “No thanks,” he says. Teddy’s wife shakes her head. “I don’t see the point of all that study if it’s not for something,” she says.

As professor of English and American literatures at Middlebury College, Cohen is well-acquainted with the type. And he does a good job of capturing him in a typical pose. Indeed, the novel’s second chapter, “The Very Exquisite Melancholy of Acting Vice Principal Pierce,” is as good as the best Renaissance character essays. The trouble is that, once the character study is complete, there is little else about Oren Pierce to hold a reader’s interest. His life philosophy is a promising subject. If nothing is settled, he tells himself, “then everything was still in the air, still possible, within reach.” What happens to such a man when he is reduced to necessity?

Cohen is aware that it could happen. Teddy’s brother Philip has died of malignant melanoma the year before the events of the novel, and in his final weeks he discovers the “clarity of an absolute state, where everything has been taken from you.” But the curtailment of fictional possibility by physical necessity is Francine Prose’s subject, not Cohen’s. Cohen’s people are driven by compulsions, not the clarity of absolute states. “How complicated and strange, all these forces that guided or bypassed or thwarted a man’s will,” Oren marvels.

He drifts into an affair with Teddy’s wife, while Teddy himself, whose marriage, he knows perfectly well, is “the triumph of his life,” drifts against his will into child pornography. Given the assignment in an evening photography class to “get to know the camera” by carrying it around and “just take pictures,” he snaps his sixteen-year-old daughter sleeping in the nude. Cohen’s attempt to make the event seem unwilled is as unconvincing as Hurstwood’s theft of ten thousand dollars from Hannah and Hogg’s in Sister Carrie, and serves to underscore much the same theme. “Men are still led by instincts before they are regulated by knowledge,” Dreiser comments, and Cohen nods.

And so the characters are blown hither and yon, like waifs amid forces. Teddy is sent briefly to jail, but how does he get out? What becomes of the charge against him? Cohen neglects to say. As their affair approaches a crossroads, Teddy’s wife confesses she loves him and buys Oren a gift, asking him to open it later. What is it? We never find out. What happens to the affair in the sequel? We never learn that either. The novel dawdles to an unsatisfying close, as if Cohen ran out of energy or insight. The wit and keenness of his observations are enough to get you deeply into Amateur Barbarians before you realize that neither you nor Robert Cohen have the least idea how to find your way back out.

“Un-American”

Quickly, while packing.

In my review of Zoë Heller’s sensational novel The Believers, I observed in passing that un-American is a “term used exclusively on the Left to pound away at the Right for imaginary sins.” (See footnote 2.)

In a coauthored editorial in USA Today this morning, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and minority leader Steny Hoyer (D–Md.) object to the “ugly campaign” of opposing President Obama’s proposed health call reform by misrepresenting it. The campaign, they say, includes the tactic of disrupting public meetings. Then they write: “These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views—but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American.”

Only the Left accuses its opponents of un-American activities.

Thus my small contribution to a history of contemporary political discourse in the United States.

The desire machines

Alex Jurek lays into the conclusion of my essay yesterday on Gerald Graff’s Literature Against Itself. [Update: For some reason Jurek has deleted both his original counterpost and the reply to my refutation here.] An apologist for realism, Graff holds that reality presents man with certain “unrefusable facts,” which (in a phrase borrowed from Henry James) he “cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another.” But Jurek denies all this, arguing that “There are no facts outside of an interpretative scheme.”

Now, Graff himself easily dispatched this objection earlier in the same book: “That we cannot conceive of a fact without some interpretive paradigm does not mean that this fact can have no independent status outside the particular paradigm we happen to be testing at the moment.” (The emphasis is his. Oddly enough, I turned this passage back on Graff himself fifteen years ago in questioning his call to teach the conflicts.)

But this is not the most interesting part of his attack. “If anything is irrefutably real,” Jurek asserts, “it is that our existence as conscious beings is defined by our desires as well as our aversions. Humans are desire machines: All that most people think and do is defined by their cravings and aversions rather than true choice.”

Thus Jurek announces himself as a determinist. And thus it is not merely Graff’s “unrefusable facts” that he denies; he also denies the several defenses of freedom that I have mounted, such as here and here and here and here.

I have two questions for Jurek (or any other sociobiologist or Freudian or Marxist within earshot). If humans are desire machines (or evolutionarily adaptive machines or repression and sublimation machines or economic-class machines or what have you) is that a statement of the truth about the human condition or merely another expression of the machine’s desire (or adaptive behavior or sublimation or class)? If the latter, why should I credit it? Why should I think that it is true? If you genuinely were a machine, as Hilary Putnam points out, you would have no way to know it. Nevertheless, if your claim to be a desire machine is a statement of truth rather than an expression of desire there is then at least one human action outside the machine’s scope (namely, the machine’s unmachine-like assertion that it is a machine). And if there is one, how can you be sure there aren’t more?

More significantly, why is determinism appealing? What is it about the thought of being a desire machine that makes you want to reduce yourself to one?

The harsh style

For this Commonplace Blog’s precedent-setting two hundred and fiftieth post, I want to say a few words in defense of the harsh style.

It is the style most commonly associated with the philosopher and premier New York intellectual Sidney Hook, who has been described as a “take-no-prisoners debater whose style was deliberately confrontational“ and “deliberately provocative,” and whose “insistence that every battle be fought and every wrong righted made him a fighter.”[1] Because of this “engagé style,” Hook was “always willing to reenter the fray, to revive debates with countless political foes, and to have the final word.”[2] Although not as graceful as Orwell’s, his prose style was similar, exhibiting a “refusal to obscure his position with sodden words, turbid syntax, coy simulation of balance, or self-protective ambiguity.” His motto could have been “Have logic, will argue.”[3]

As the invocation of Orwell should suggest, the harsh style is first cousin to the plain style. They share a genetic predisposition, inherited from their ancestors the anti-Ciceronians and anti-Petrarchans, for clarity and exact statement (which are, of course, the same thing). The harsh style demands clarification, and knows there is a critical difference between clearing the air and freshening it. Where the plain stylist is content to speak definitively and to the point, the harsh stylist goes further, excoriating amiable blandness and sumptuous qualification. He is the sworn enemy of anything that menaces clarity and exact statement, whether it be accredited confusion, folk mythology, self-satisfied blunder, or political ideology.

Some other harsh stylists include:

• C. S. Lewis, who realized that polemicizing on behalf of Christianity would require that language step down from the pulpit and get into the streets.

• Gilbert Ryle, who did not merely attack philosophical error, but—to use his own word—abused it.

• Stanley Fish, whose entire career has been devoted to redefining literary criticism as a mode of argument rather than deferential appreciation or the rehearsal of pass-along certainties.

• Anyone who ever wrote for the old Partisan Review or Commentary, including—to speak only of previous generations—Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, William Barrett, Diana Trilling, Harold Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Robert Warshow, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Midge Decter, and Norman Podhoretz.

It is no accident that so many harsh stylists are Jews. Judaism is a religion without catechism or dogma, and as a consequence, the Jewish tradition places great value upon loud-voiced and teeth-baring debate—as long as it is a makhlokhet leshem shamayim (“a dispute for the sake of heaven”). As long as a dispute is for the sake of heaven, there are no restrictions on “tone,” no code of manners, because how is it possible to be too aggressive and discourteous for the sake of heaven?

What, though, according to the rabbis, is an example of a dispute for the sake of heaven? “The debates of Hillel and Shammai” (Avot 5.17). In the Talmud, Hillel and Shammai are bywords for lifelong, bitter antagonists. The law nearly always follows Hillel, but the views of Shammai are fully aired. For though the law may be indispensable, without any provision for dissent it is intolerable.

Many readers find the harsh style intolerable. It seems cruel and heartless to them, or rude and uncivil, and there is no question that a style which aims at rigor and austerity, which grants no sufferance to fools, can stray into abrasiveness and truculence.

The thin line can be firmly drawn by another excursion into religious vocabulary. Orthodox Jews who are uncompromising in their observance of Jewish law are sometimes described as mahmir (“strict, stringent”), an epithet that derives from the Talmudic principle that every debate entails a mahmir and a meykel, a strict and a lenient position. Now, among Muslims the equivalent to mahmir is hamas, but in Hebrew hamas means “lawlessness.” The line that divides conscientiousness from terrorism is clear. The harsh stylist knows where it lies and takes infinite pains not to cross it, even though his critics, out of ignorance, blur the distinction.

Nevertheless, the first question to be asked of any style, as J. V. Cunningham says, is what is its vice? How does it go bad? And here the critics of the harsh style are of small assistance. Cunningham, however, who could himself adopt a harsh, combative style, is suggestive:

Hang up your weaponed wit
Who were destroyed by it.
If silence fails, then grace
Your speech with commonplace,
And studiously amaze
Your audience with his phrase.
He will commend your wit
When you abandon it.

The vice of the harsh style is not that it will lead straight to its abandonment, but rather that its very harshness will prevent it from being recognized for what it is—its weaponry will distract from its wit—and so it will not be answered in kind. It will provoke a merely social reaction, expecting clichés and mutually agreed upon empty phrases in the place of battle for the sake of what matters.
____________________

[1] Judy Katulas, Review of Young Sidney Hook by Christopher Phelps, Journal of American History 85 (1999): 1623–24.

[2] Alexander Bloom, Review of Out of Step by Sidney Hook, Journal of American History 75 (1988): 276–77.

[3] D. B. Jones, Review of Convictions by Sidney Hook, Modern Language Studies 21 (1991): 116–19.

Literature Against Itself

As English professors all over the country head back to their classrooms in a few weeks to encourage another young cohort of students to “experience” literary texts in light of the most recent progressive thought, it might be well to recall Literature Against Itself, Gerald Graff’s pioneering attack on literary theory, which was published by the University of Chicago Press exactly thirty years ago. The book was particularly “meaningful” to me. Five years after its appearance, I enrolled at Northwestern University for the single-minded purpose of studying under Graff. (By then he was working on the book that became Professing Literature. He directed my dissertation, revised and issued as The Elephants Teach, which both of us considered an extension of his work on the history of academic literary study.) Graff was forty-two when he saw Literature Against Itself into print, and though he later become known for other things—especially the entreaty to teach the conflicts—his career was defined by his early effort to spell out a coherent theoretical position for resistance to the vanguard party in literary thinking.

All of those phrases are his. Although he took pains to detach himself from conservatives who merely beat the vanguard with club-like slogans, Graff quickly found himself identified as a conservative—along with such other first-rank critics as Wayne Booth and E. D. Hirsch Jr., who had “challenged prevailing vanguard dogmas” and so might “lend authority to a constructive resistance movement.” But Booth and Hirsch were also soon dismissed as conservatives. The association galled Graff, who was a self-styled man of the Left. (Indeed, my own political conservatism made for uneasy relations between Graff and me, although he has never been anything but supportive of my academic career.) The problem was that Graff held literary thinking to be “inseparable from social and moral thinking,” but the academic Left heatedly denies that literature has any connection with morality (while the Right is not always good at remembering its connection with society). Politically, Graff belonged on the Left, while his radicalism made him unwilling to join in common cause with the Right—as a young assistant professor at Northwestern he had been a leader of the antiwar protests on campus—and so he was left without academic allies.

That quality of independent-mindedness, whatever it cost Graff personally, is what distinguished Literature Against Itself upon publication and what keeps it fresh thirty years later.

The critical landscape had altered unrecognizably since 1970, when his first book came out. Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma had originally been drafted in 1963 as a PhD thesis under Yvor Winters, the prickly and controversial champion of moral evaluation in criticism. Graff’s entire generation of literary scholars appeared with a series of ’prentice works that gave no hint of what was to come. Edward Said, his contemporary, published a study of Conrad’s autobiographical fiction in 1966. Stanley Fish, one year younger, published Surprised by Sin, a study of Milton, in 1967. Frank Lentricchia, three years younger, published The Gaiety of Language, on Yeats and Stevens, in 1968. That same year Barbara Herrnstein Smith, five years older than Graff, published Poetic Closure, a study written under J. V. Cunningham of how poems end.

By the start of the next decade, every one of them, except for Graff, had changed course. Simply to name the titles is to suggest as much: Said’s Orientalism (1978), Smith’s On the Margins of Discourse (1978), a plea for the indeterminacy of literary utterance, Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism (1980). What happened?

French structuralism emigrated to the United States: that’s what happened. In 1966, the year that is described as structuralism’s annum mirabile in France, when new books by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan made a splash in the their native waters, the Johns Hopkins University hosted an international conference devoted to “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” Barthes, Lacan, Jacques Derrida, René Girard, and a host of other illustrious guests from the continent made their first public appearances in America. Paul de Man came down from Cornell to share his reflections.

Within a few years, the symposiasts’ books were on the shelves of nearly every university bookstore in the country. Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero appeared in 1968. De Man’s Blindness and Insight, cited by Mark Bauerlein recently as the first example of criticism-as-performance in America, appeared in 1971—the same year as Foucault’s Order of Things. Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena, a translation of his second book, appeared in 1973. A selection of Lacan’s Ecrits finally appeared in 1977.

These were the critics, those were the works, that constituted the vanguard in literary thinking by the late ’seventies. The biggest problem, to Graff’s mind, was that French structuralism had “come to be widely taken as a kind of ultimate refutation of philosophical and literary realism.” At least that is how the American critics who had fallen under its had taken it. And this had given rise to a moralistic streak among the vanguard. Thus they said that realism had been “discredited.” They associated it with everything that was bad and out of date: representation, the text as a determinate object, boundaries and constraints, docility, habit, truth as either correspondence or coherence, meaning as a product. On their “rhetorical scorecard,” Graff scoffs, the vanguard praised an entirely new set of goods: creation, the text as an open and indeterminate invitation, voyages into the unforeseen, risk, truth as fiction, meaning as a process.

The New Sensibility, as Graff calls it, displayed an “ambivalence toward reason.” Its repudiation of the human capacity to comprehend reality, along with a denial of the propositional nature of literature, had combined to provoke a crisis, not only in literature and literary criticism, but education and politics as well. As a man of the Left, Graff was deeply worried about its growing sway. “In exposing objective reason as a mere ideology,” he warns, “cultural radicalism leaves itself no means of legitimizing its own critique of exploitation and injustice.” The danger, in short, was not that the vanguard was Leftist, but that it was taking over and disabling the Left. “[T]he project of political demystification is to free terms from misuse by attaching them to appropriate referents,” Graff writes, “not to dissolve the very notion that language can have referents.” But the politics of anti-realism leads to resignation and something very like “the popular cynicism that regards all judgments as ‘matters of opinion’ and asks—without staying for an answer—‘who is to say’ what is real and what is not.”

The threat to reason was broader than the universe of literature, then, but the threat to literature was real enough:

That readers misinterpret literature has probably been recognized as long as literature has existed. But only recently has this human deficiency been turned into a law. And from a law it has become a recommendation—and a means of liberating oneself from humanistic bad conscience.What was a recommendation in 1979 has become routine thirty years later. Indeed, anyone who would insist that literature be interpreted faithfully is the one who would be accused of having a bad conscience today. How did we reach this pass?

According to Graff, by demoting all literature to the status of fiction. But the term fiction no longer referred merely to the action or plot of made-up narratives; it had been expanded to include “the ideas, themes, and beliefs that are embodied in the action or plot.” (The self-contradiction involved in denying the referentiality of language and then using a word to refer to more than it did previously was overlooked or ignored—not by Graff, but by the advanced thinkers under his microscope.) The consequence, as he points out, is that life and reality themselves came to be treated as fictions.

But there are certain “unrefusable facts” about life, which cannot be demoted to the status of fictions without terrible costs:The reality of the physical world, the inevitability of death, the social nature of man, the irrevocability of historical events and changes—these are facts that we cannot possibly not know, though we can argue infinitely about their significance and how we ought to understand them.On a propositional theory, literature is the argument. The new theory, though, “pretends that no such unrefusable facts exist.” The new theory would reduce all human utterance, and not just literature, to “an unaccountability that would be terrifying if its implications were taken seriously.” Luckily, after reading Literature Against Itself it is impossible to take the new theory seriously.

The Hack

Wilfrid Sheed’s second novel follows the career of Bert Flax, a self-described “spiritual hack” who supports a fruitful and multiplying family (wife, five kids) on inspirational stories and uplifting poems for the Tiny Messenger and Catholic Women, from the first stirrings of religious doubt to either a spiritual breakthrough or a nervous breakdown. Better known as a leading book critic of his day—he published collections of his reviews in 1971 and 1978—Sheed wrote better novels, including perhaps the best novel ever written about a critic. Max Jamison (1970) is about a Broadway theater critic who no longer believes in what he does for a living.

But The Hack (1963) introduces the theme of doubt, leading to despair and exhaustion, to which Sheed would return again and again in his own literary career. It was, perhaps, the story of his life; and not only his. Son of the independent Catholic publishers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward—Sheed & Ward was founded in 1926 and acquired by Rowman & Littlefield seven years ago—Wilfrid Sheed was born in London in 1930 and came to America upon the outbreak of the Second World War, when his parents emigrated from England. “The sheer differentness of America imbued everything,” he wrote in a 1985 memoir of his parents: “the swollen frames and tires of the bicycles, the station wagons with kids hanging from the sides, the kids themselves gangly or strangely fat, slopping around in striped T-shirts and knickers, alien from head to toe. . . .” Sheed carefully cultivated his sense of differentness. Although he never repatriated himself to England, becoming a huge baseball fan as an expression of his deepest feeling for America, he consistently adopted the attitude of an Englishman, an outsider, alien from head to toe. The attitude perfectly reflected his own incapacity for believing wholeheartedly in anything except baseball and books.

The crisis of belief in The Hack commences when Bert finds himself despairing at the thought of composing his annual Christmas poem. Being asked about it “was like having a tray of ice emptied into your socks. The coldness came up from there, then the desolation and finally the slow melting squish.”

Modeled upon Sheed’s father, whose main source of income was the lecture platform (“Americans might not like to read but they certainly liked to listen,” Sheed comments drolly), Bert roves from parish to parish in suburban New Jersey, delivering lectures on “the Catholic literary revival, the Catholic intellectual revival, Catholics and TV, Catholics and decent literature, Catholics and better communications,” even the Communist-dominated media and its hostility to good Catholics. Feeling like a “complete fraud,” Bert “can’t seem to get the Christmas spirit.” His wife sympathizes: “Even inspiration becomes a grind,” she says.

Looking for something to shake him out of his increasing squishiness, Bert tries to sleep late one Sunday and skip mass. He can’t bring himself to, but afterwards he hops a bus to Manhattan to look up old friends from Bishop Mahoney High School. He tries to provoke a fight, taunting one friend who no longer attends mass regularly for his cowardly refusal to become “an honest-to-God atheist.” He taunts a mass-attending friend with criticisms of the Church: “It’s a cruel joke,” he complains, “they keep you a child until it’s too late.”

They’ve got these rules against becoming a man, you see? You mustn’t develop independent judgment, because that’s pride. You mustn’t be honest, because that doesn’t square with the old prudentia. And you mustn’t have any kind of experience, because experience is an occasion of sin.When he demands to know whether he is right, his mass-attending friend concedes that “It sometimes seems like that.” “Won’t anybody fight about this?” Bert wails. “Won’t somebody, for godsake, argue?” No one, it appears, is prepared to take religion seriously.

What Bert keeps being told instead is that he has been working too hard and does not look very well. Behind his back they whisper, “Have you read his things? They’re lovely, aren’t they?” Even his Playboy-reading friend, too sophisticated a Manhattanite to be a practicing Catholic but too lukewarm to become an atheist, agrees that he is “a very fine writer.” The compliments send him over the edge. He denies that he is the writer of the “religious stuff” they are praising. “I am not Bert Flax, I am not Bert Flax, I am not Bert Flax, I am not Bert Flax,” he repeats until he passes out and wakes in a hospital.

The attention shifts to his non-Catholic wife Betty, who keeps the household running while Bert recovers. The Hack then becomes an exception to the rule that English-language writing is largely a literature without children. Sheed’s portrait of a suburban wife and mother, with life moiling and churning at knee level (in his phrase), is precise and loving, despite the satirical edge. Betty is keenly aware of the minginess of her lower middle-class surroundings. Like Bert, she has her doubts: “There were no big scenes, no climaxes, only people being patient with each other and practical with each other—so bored they didn’t know they were bored anymore.” But unlike him she takes solace and delight in ordinary successes like a dinner well-prepared, Christmas drawing near, a black mood rolling away, and a husband getting back to work.

Except that Bert’s return to work is not a return “to Bert’s high standards”—or so says the Catholic Passenger, rejecting his Christmas poem. Bert announces to Betty that he has just about had it. He blames the Church for his years of “peddling crap” and becoming a “dedicated hack.” He collapses in tears. And so a relapse.

Betty blames the Catholic magazines, which depend upon “false sentiment” and pursue the goal of “keeping the uneducated uneducated.” Father Chubb, editor of the Catholic Passenger, tries to explain: “The Church in America is changing . . . er . . . on the campuses and so forth. All this gush he writes is out of place in the 1960’s.” The Catholic journals are changing. And then, Bert never “had the faintest idea what the Church was really about.” The subjects that got him worked up, Father Chubb says,were pretty trivial for a grown man. Seat money and dirty movies, you say, and where angels go in the winter, such childish concerns—he seems to have had no sense of the sacramental, of sacred places and things, of liturgy and initiation into mystery.Maybe so, but no one else wrote about those things for the Catholic Passenger either, Betty points out. For that matter, she cannot recall Father Chubb’s ever talking of such things before. If he really believed that Bert knew nothing about “the real Church,” he might have brought it up some years ago.

The Church arrested his spiritual and literary development by employing him in the pseudo-religious office of inspirational writing. As Betty explains, Bert “wanted to reexamine the whole thing”—the truth about a life of faith—“but he couldn’t afford to because his livelihood depended on his maintaining a certain point of view.” To acquire a sense of the sacramental or to be initiated into mystery, you cannot be a hack, who is dedicated to the concerns of mere functionaries:He wasn’t like a priest, with a real role to play and somebody looking after him. If a priest ever got into that kind of hole, his bishop would say, “That’s enough, my boy, take a rest for a while, take a small parish. Don’t worry, we’ll look after you.” But Bert was just a self-employed child-raising religion-man, and he got struck with it.Religion is serious or it is nothing, the novel concludes. And Bert, suddenly obsessed with integrity and evil, sitting motionless in a mental hospital, has either broken through the mere profession of Catholicism into the seriousness of religion, or he has suffered a breakdown, psychologically blocked from taking religion seriously by a world that prefers employment to vocation. Sheed is careful not to say.

Very queer, indeed

The post below, in a dark green sans-serif typeface, written in the spirit of mockery, may have been a mistake. I have decided not delete it, however, but to let it stand as literary evidence.

I originally wrote it because the arguments that Andrew Seal attributes to me in his latest post on Death Comes for the Archbishop are so illogical and extreme as to be beneath refutation. As a friend put it to me, something in the mode of “Swiftian satire” seemed the more appropriate response. Since some readers have objected, though, I have included both—a logical refutation and the original satire.

The logical first. Seal grants my assertion that the doctrine of celibacy is crucial to the novel, but then he goes on to put an argument into my mouth: “Myers doesn’t just insist that this sympathy with celibacy is crucial; he argues that it excludes the possibility that these two male characters were in love.”

This is a falsehood, of course. Nowhere have I said any such thing. What I would argue is that a Catholic priest’s vow of celibacy, especially on the part of a nineteenth-century priest like Latour, who was “[e]mpowered by long training” to blot himself out of his own consciousness and meditate “upon the anguish of his Lord,” excludes the possibility of same-sex attraction. I would add that love between two men does not necessary imply same-sex attraction. The connection must be argued for, and not merely—on the basis of current opinion—assumed.

Seal, however, assumes that friendship between two men and same-sex attraction are one and the same thing. If Latour and Vaillant had something more than “the camaraderie of co-workers,” they must have shared a “very queer love story.” He believes that he is being logical and intellectually scrupulous when he goes on to say that such a “love relationship” between them does not, however, necessitate “the presumption that it is sexually active or even physically expressed.” Yet somehow the relationship still deserves the epithet queer.

Now, I do not believe that all love relationships necessitate the presumption of sexual consummation either. I love my children, but I am not sexually active with them.

Somehow, though, the onus falls upon me. For me, “adding a love story is literally sacrilegious,” Seal says; “assuming that the two priests have stronger feelings than camaraderie means assuming they’re having sex, that they’re breaking their vows of celibacy.” Seal argues that the friendship between Latour and Vaillant is a same-sex attraction, but I am the one who holds that, if there is love between them, it must be sexual. Is there any basis for such an assumption?

Well, yes. And here is where it gets tricky. Bear with me: “Since Myers is very upfront about his conservative credentials, I don’t think it’s out of bounds to draw a connection between common conservative views on the ‘inherent’ promiscuity of homosexuality and Myers’s interpretation of the novel.” If that connection is not out of bounds, there are no bounds. Notice that Seal does not even bother to corroborate his claim that “the ‘inherent’ promiscuity of homosexuality” is a “common conservative view.” Even if it were, however—and even if Seal accepted the responsibility of providing evidence that it were—that I hold the view, simply because I hold “conservative credentials,” is valid only under the logic of McCarthyism.

Seal’s effort to connect me to “common conservative views on the ‘inherent’ promiscuity of homosexuality” is a classic attempt to assign guilt by association. Thus he thinks that, for me, a queering of the relationship between Latour and Vaillant would entail a reinterpretation of the entire novel, “because these men are now completely different characters from their normal heterosexual interpretations.” But Seal understands priestly celibacy about as well as he understands male friendship and conservative thinking—that is, not at all. The celibate priest is neither heterosexual nor homosexual; he stands outside the sexual order altogether. The possibility of sexual attraction, to whatever sex, never arises, because he has decided not to respond to other human beings in that way.

My objection to a queer reading of Death Comes for the Archbishop is not that it is “literally sacrilegious,” but that it is an ignoratio elenchi. It is beside the question. It shoots eight or nine yards left of the mark.

On one point, though, Seal is correct. I cannot bear to see Cather’s novel, or any other novel for that matter, misinterpreted. I cannot bear to see error paraded as the truth.

And now the satire as originally written. I reproduce it verbatim.

Abandoning any defense of “experiencing” Death Comes for the Archbishop as a “very queer love story,” Andrew Seal goes on offense. My interpretation of the novel is the objectionable one.

His logic goes something like this:

Love between men is good. It is queer. The men are not gay, but they love each other. So their love is queer. Two men don’t have to go bed to have a very queer love story, even if they are not gay. But Myers is a conservative. Conservatives do not like gays. What do you mean, he favors gay marriage? He is a conservative and all conservatives hate gays. They think all gays are promiscuous. No, no: the men are not gay; I just said so. Don’t interrupt me again. For a conservative like Myers, two men in love cannot stay in love unless they go to bed. But queer love can still be queer love even if the men do not go to bed, although they are not gay and though conservatives think all gays are promiscuous, which is beside the question in their case since they are not gay. (Am I making sense?) Hey, look at their pictures. Myers thinks they cannot be in love because they are ugly. What? You are more immediately struck by their ecclesiastical garb? You think I am only revealing something about myself by calling them ugly? WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP INTERRUPTING ME! Myers thinks that ugly men cannot be attracted to each other, even though they are not gay. Myers is a conservative. He would call their love story a very queer love story, which says a lot about him when you think about it. Even though the phrase is mine.

For the record, I do think that Death Comes for the Archbishop is a terrific story of a friendship. I believe that’s what non-sexual love between two men is called.

Whether true or not

In a comment to his original post, Andrew Seal declines to defend his “very queer” reading of Death Comes for the Archbishop. The blame, he says, is not his. “I’m done arguing with you for entertainment’s sake,” he says. “If I thought you ever might countenance a view that you haven’t already accepted, I’d make an effort.”

This is not a particularly novel approach to refutation. It spices up the huffiness of “I won’t dignify that with a reply” by adding a pinch of argumentum ad hominem. But what happens if I stipulate that Seal is correct about me as a person? Despite evidence to the contrary, I refuse not merely to consider but even to countenance—to put up with—a view that I have not accepted prior to hearing it explained. Okay, this doesn’t make any sense to me either. How can you swallow an opinion before you fully grasp it? Let that pass. What Seal is trying to say is that I am close-minded, inflexible, mulish. I just will not agree to cultural marxism, no matter how many times I hear it explained to me. Fine. I stipulate this is true about me too. My mind is made up. Ain’t nothing you—or, at least, Seal—can do to change it.

My question is this. Do any of these malignancies and personality defects on my side absolve someone who has advanced a view from defending it against criticism?

I am assuming, from his comment, that Seal believes it is rationally inadequate to disagree with criticism in advance of reading it. The principle of non-contradiction would seem to suggest, accordingly, that either the critic who offers a “very queer” reading and then confirms it as “significantly more meaningful,” or the critic who denies the reading, is mistaken. Is either critic excused from the intellectual responsibility of correcting error by the miscreancy of the other?

If I am serious about my views, I must defend them against all comers. To complain about how criticism is hurled at me, whether it is rude or aggressive, is to protect my personal dignity, not the validity of my thought. To remark upon the place or rank of my critic (“I will not lower myself to answer a mere undergraduate”) is anxiously to guard my status, which implies that my ideas are advanced, not in pursuit of truth, but to bolster my reputation. And to sneer at the person of my critic is to preserve my identity, because my views contribute to my sense of self, whether they are true or not.

Aesthetic offenses

Nearly everybody understands a legal offense (breaking a law) or a moral wrong (irresponsibility toward another), but what is an aesthetic offense, a crime against art?

Daniel Green is pretty sure it is not the same thing as a moral wrong. Recoiling from the conservatism of Roger Scruton’s essay “Beauty and Desecration” in the spring issue of the City Journal, Green tries to distinguish between moral objections on one hand to slicing off a prostitute’s nipples and presenting them to the lead soprano in Mozart’s light-hearted opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail, or littering the stage with rutting couples, including urination as foreplay and forced oral sex, and on the other hand a careful account of an operatic production’s “aesthetic flaws”:

I am quite willing to believe that those responsible for it thought it a clever idea to “set the opera in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes,” but ultimately this is just an aesthetically vacuous attempt to “update” Mozart, to run roughshod over Mozart’s original vision of his opera and establish their own overwhelmingly lame one in its place. It is a practice to be found not only in opera but in theater in general, whereby directors and producers with the aesthetic sensibilities of lizards attempt to keep the great works “relevant.” One could, I suppose, call this artistic cluelessness a “moral” problem, but most of what Scruton sees as the unleashing of “moral chaos” is finally just the consequence of the aesthetic incompetence of some those entrused with the job of re-presenting the theatrical art of the past.Green uses the words aesthetic or artistic four times in this passage, but I am no closer to understanding what he means by them.

Scruton is much clearer. Art is the discovery and representation of beauty, and beauty is the affirmation and truth to life. On Scruton’s showing, director Calixto Bieito’s production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2004 was an artistic failure, because it was ugly and false to life.

Green uses the concept of the aesthetic in so many different ways he only ends up confusing the issue. Thus Bieito’s production was “aesthetically vacuous.” (Proposition 1: Art must have a meaning or purpose.) Bieito resembles other champions of Regietheater (German for “director’s theater”): all of them have “the aesthetic sensibilities of lizards.” (Proposition 2: Art requires a warm-blooded—presumably, a human—capacity for perception and feeling.) They exhibit “artistic cluelessness.” (Proposition 3: Art is a knowledge.) Their efforts are examples of “aesthetic incompetence.” (Proposition 4: Art is an ability.)

Set aside his obvious misreading of Scruton. I still don’t see how this is an improvement, how it eliminates the virus of morality to produce a healthy conception of art. Indeed, Green’s principal objection is that Bieito is irresponsible to “Mozart’s original vision,” and this, as I argued yesterday, is a moral failing. Upon closer examination, Green’s understanding of aesthetics turns out to be deeply conventional, and thoroughly confused.

A ramshackle dwelling, with materials borrowed from classical antiquity (art is an ability), the Renaissance (art is a knowledge), the Romantics (art requires a capacity for perception and feeling), and the Victorians (art must have a purpose), it does not provide the secure blockhouse for artistic autonomy that Green hopes it will. All it succeeds in doing is to recapitulate the history of aesthetics without reconciling the various doctrines that have been advanced at various times for various reasons.

More to the point, it leaves the question of aesthetic offense entirely up in the air. Is it an aesthetic affront to violate just one of Green’s implicit propositions, or is it necessary to infringe all four? Ronald Firbank’s fiction is nonsense, but it displays a genius for prose and literary form. And to read it is to acquire a workable knowledge of how fiction goes about achieving its effects. Aesthetic offense, then, or not? Or take the fiction of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. It has a clear purpose (among other things, to call into question the reality of love and to spread hatred of the Jews); it is competently made; its knowledge of a world without love and the fine details of antisemitism is unshakable. But Céline has the aesthetic sensibility of a lizard. Aesthetic offense or not?

I don’t particularly like Scruton’s conception of art either, but the trouble with it is the same as the trouble with Green’s. It conceives art as a category of value, and serves then as a scepter for knighting some works for their great value in order to distinguish them from other works of lesser value or none. But to call something art is to say nothing unless it is immediately clear what standards of artistic acceptibility are being invoked. “Beauty” will not do, because it begs the question. Green’s four-part answer simply multiples the confusion.

The whole conception of art is of limited utility in the study of literature, but in as far as a conception is demanded, what needs to happen is a shift from conceiving art as works of value to thinking of it as a specific kind of mental activity, or what Oakeshott calls a mode of experience. Art is what invites contemplation, whether it is the Rothko Chapel here in Houston or a 1961 Jaguar E Type, and an offense against art is to do something other than contemplate it. If I use the Rothko Chapel to host my son’s bar mitsvah, I am treating it other than aesthetically, and if I drive a Jaguar to class in College Station, I may be using it for the purpose for which it was intended, but I am hardly driving a work of art.

Solipsism in interpretation

There is an even greater danger than intellectual error in reading literary texts in the comforting favorable light of current theory. The danger is that the text will be treated, not as belonging to someone else, but as mine. It will be read as confirming my own intellectual persuasions and loyalties of feeling. Any differences will be elided or smoothed over. The text will become the next room of my own moral development; it will be arranged on my shelves alongside the other secondary sources that illuminate and augment the primary source of my mind. Its value will reside in its significance to me, not its meaning in itself. The text will be safely solipsized.

An especially comical version of this habit popped up on the literary blogscape the other day when Andrew Seal read Death Comes for the Archbishop,Willa Cather’s historical novel about Jean Baptiste Lamy of Santa Fe (left) and his vicar Joseph Machebeuf (right), as an “achingly beautiful love story about two men.” (I append the photos of the two men to indicate the prima facie unlikelihood of any such interpretation. You gonna believe Seal, or your lying eyes?) After admitting that the interpretation is achingly common (“I know that Cather is often assumed to have been queer herself”), Seal introduces the distinction that really grabs his attention:

I think it’s completely, 100% intellectually valid to read the novel as a very queer love story. But I also know that the novel doesn’t make this reading necessary, and that arguing someone into a queer reading might be a self-defeating proposition: you haven’t given them the experience of reading the novel this way, just the idea that it can be read this way. And I think being able to share the experience of reading a novel is sometimes much more important than being able to convince someone that your idea of a novel is possible or valid.By this means Seal seems to believe that he has insulated himself from the refutation that Cather’s homosexuality (and thus a “very queer” reading of the novel) logically cannot be “assumed” if another explanation of the facts is equally plausible. He shrugs that his “revisionary reading” is not supported by the text “very well,” but he prefers it to “a ‘straight’ reading” (ha ha ha), because it draws him “deeper into the book” and renders it “significantly more meaningful.”

He means “significantly more significant.” Meaning is stable; it is assigned forever when an author chooses a distinct and finite set of signs to represent it. Change the signs and the meaning is changed; otherwise it is changeless. Significance, as E. D. Hirsch Jr. says, “names a relationship” between a text and its author, readers, historical era, body of opinion, criteria of value, “or indeed anything imaginable.”[1] Significance varies from reader to reader, era to era. Indeed, there is no gainsaying significance, because there is no probative mechanism for challenging a text’s special relationship to you. All you must do is testify to it.

And that’s how Seal wants his “reading experience” received—as testimony, not as an empirical hypothesis that can be tested and thus falsified. In the terminology of Levinas, he wants his account of her novel to be heard, not as speech for-the-other—not as a statement on Cather’s behalf—but as speech by-the-other, which gives me the responsibility of attending to it as I would to a cry from someone in pain. “It is only in this way,” Levinas says, “that the for-the-other, the passivity more passive still than any passivity, the emphasis of sense, is kept from being for-oneself.”[2]

What Seal fails to notice is that he expects from his own readers what he is unwilling to grant Cather—the charity of respecting his intended meaning. He worries about the “communicative value” of what he is doing to Death Comes for the Archbishop. He is anxious lest sharing his experience of the novel come across as “shallow.” These are the stirrings of conscience.

“Am I,” Seal asks plaintively, “talking to you about the texts, or about myself?” The latter, sir. Rather than seeking evidence that confirms the solipsism of your interpretation you might rummage about for the impervious facts that falsify it. That Cather clearly sympathizes with Bishop Latour’s celibacy over Padre Martínez’s debauchery—that the doctrine of celibacy is crucial to the novel—might give you pause, for example. And in this way you might return from the roadside weeds of autobiography to the garden of knowledge.
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[1] E. D. Hirsch Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 8.

[2] Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974), trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981), p. 50.

A writer’s desk

The work week has ended, and the Sabbath queen is on her way. Maybe tomorrow I will clear away some of the clutter. Not now, though; not now.

The question in criticism

Everyone seems to like what I have asserted about literary criticism, at least “on a high level,” as Jake Seliger puts it, but no one really agrees with me.

Litlove, for example, accepts my credo that literary criticism must contribute to the store of human understanding, but then she adds that such contributions emerge “gradually, organically, from the process of continual, profound discussion in which teachers and students explore every angle and aspect of a text and enlighten each other.” What she endorses, in other words, is Mark Bauerlein’s call for fewer scholarly publications and more teaching.

I don’t know what it means, though, to say that new contributions to knowledge grow organically out of discussions between students and teachers. Such discussions may provoke curiosity, but when the research bears fruit, it is because someone has excused herself to go off and inquire into a question. Human knowledge is expanded by inquiry into something that is not yet known and understood. If and only if class discussion is organized upon the model of inquiry will it yield organic produce.

And that is the key. The institutional reforms proposed by Bauerlein and Seliger (limit promotion materials to one hundred pages, change peer-reviewed publication into a link to a paper on the author’s website) are sharp-eyed and promising—I hope they will be instituted—and are entirely beside the question.

Nor is the question, as Seliger would have it, “the difficulty of deciding what is good criticism.” Such a question can never be decided before the fact, and even when you have finally hit upon a practitioner of good criticism, the question has still not been decided:

Some writers tell us that this or that historian really did solve the problem, he wrote history as it should be written and all we have to do, if we wish to be good historians, is to copy him. But don’t you believe it. Nobody has solved the problem of how history should be written, and for the same reason that nobody has solved the problem of how poetry should be written, or how chess should be played or how houses should be built—because there is no such problem. We have been told, so often as to be nearly persuaded, that history must be scientific, or it must be imaginative, or it must be impartial, or it must be impersonal. But why all this “must”? Why should there be only one kind of history? And we are particularly puzzled because, as far as we know, there are a great many different kinds of history, and we find it very difficult to say one kind is really so much better than any other that it is the only kind we can allow the name to.[1]There are good critics who practice moral criticism (Yvor Winters), good critics who practice formalist criticism (Robert Penn Warren), good critics who practice the criticism of political ideas (Irving Howe), good critics who practice biographical criticism (Cynthia Ozick), good critics who practice philological criticism (J. V. Cunningham), good critics who practice the criticism of criticism (Frederick Crews), good critics who exercise criticism in the construction of literary tradition (Ruth R. Wisse), and perhaps even good critics who “do” theory (if I could only think of some. Or even one). What is good criticism can never be decided, because it is not a real question.

The only question is how to enlarge human understanding—how, that is, to return from the lure of career advancement, which encourages the critic to write something that is merely new and different, regardless of its validity, to the professional responsibility of adding to the store of human knowledge. “[M]ost people who are writing just to ‘write something new and different’ would argue they are adding to the store of human knowledge,” Seliger observes. He is right. Who am I to assert otherwise?

The careerist is motivated by “getting on,” while the professional is motivated by a sense of responsibility to the profession. And in the critic’s case, that means responsibility to the growth of literary knowledge. What follows from this, however, is that no one knows but me whether I am a careerist, because no one but me has access to my motivations. But what is more, the shift from careerism to professionalism—from commitment to career to commitment to knowledge—is entirely a matter of motivation, and entirely within my control.

The shift will never occur, though, unless the ideal of contributing to knowledge is clearly and repeatedly enunciated, and if it is not lost in the swarm of institutional proposals for merely scaling back the demands of a career.
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[1] Michael Oakeshott, “What Do We Look for in an Historian?” (1928), in What Is History? and Other Essays, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Charlottesville, Va.: Imprint Academic, 2004), p. 135.

Careers in criticism

The reason so much literary criticism is “crap”—his word, not mine—is careerism, Elberry says. He shares an anecdote:

I was talking to a young, ambitious, power-suited female academic in 2001, who as much as admitted that she didn’t study the literature that interested her, but rather the things she could easily write about, so she could publish, and so get on. She even said something like “you’ve got to play the game.”But if this is, as he says, the deep problem in criticism (“people like this exist and thrive in academia, like maggots in a carcass,” Elberry adds, and “will never write anything worth reading”), what is the solution? Like Mark Edmundson, whose proposal I dissected earlier, he suggests a “moratorium on academic publications.” But this won’t rid the world of crappy criticism. It will merely delay its reemergence.

What then is to be done? I have an idea or two.

Let me start by focusing for a moment on Elberry’s diagnosis of the problem. He is absolutely right that far too many academics are motivated by career rather than, as I put it the day before yesterday, the ambition to contribute to knowledge.

Career was originally a French word that entered the language in the sixteenth century for a horse-racing track. Within a century, the word came to be applied to what the horses were doing on the track—galloping at top speed. “To pass a career is but to run with strength and courage such a course as is [fit] for [a horse’s] ability,” wrote the poet Gervase Markham in 1671.

Another century, and the word had come to refer to a rapid and continuous course of action; an uninterrupted progress. In 1722, the philosopher William Wollaston warned his readers “not to permit the reins to our passions, or give them their full career.” Two hundred years into the word’s career, and the smell of horses was still upon it.

Not until a hundred and fifty years later was the word career first used in its current sense of a “course of professional employment, which affords the opportunity for advancement in the world” (OED). In this sense the word was first used in Felix Holt, the 1868 novel by George Eliot. The novel opens when Harold Transome, the second-born son of landed gentry, returns to England from the colonies with a self-made fortune. Under these conditions, at that time, Harold would have been expected to settle down to a life of country leisure. He has decided to do otherwise—to run for Parliament, as a radical. He could have had a comfortable life, his mother reflects bitterly. But no: “Harold must go and make a career for himself.”

The distinctly modern notion of a career upsets the apple cart of ancient expectations. In the Laws, Plato explicitly raises the question of what life should be like for “men whose necessities have been moderately provided for.” There is a “double, or more than double, glut of occupation” in such a life, he concludes, because it is “concerned with the practice of every virtue of body and mind” (7.806d–807d). When Abraham is confronted by God at the age of ninety-nine, he is told: Walk in my ways, and be complete [tamid]. God doesn’t say: Go and make a career for yourself.

Not until modernity, in short, was career understood to be separate from and perhaps at odds with life. All career advice is founded upon the assumption that such a separation exists. The current commonplace, for example, advises that you need to balance career and life. You can’t help suspecting that by balancing career and life, most people mean juggling them.

Here, for example, is some advice on how to balance your life and career:The flight attendant, giving preflight instructions, reminds individuals to first place on the oxygen mask on themselves before attempting to assist others. When you are busy bustling through life, how often do you take time to take care of you, first? You owe it to yourself! If you do not take care of you, you will not be around to take care of those who need you the most.This advice comes from the Institute of Family and Work, but you’d never know it. For it expresses the attitude which is most inimical to family: I have to take care of me first. I owe it to myself!

What is more, this attitude is already the driving force in many careers. I don’t know about you, but I already work with a whole lot of people who don’t need to be reminded to put themselves first. In fact, the habit of putting oneself first is what produces the careerist. Careerism is the self-serving, promotion-oriented behavior that seeks career advancement above all else.

Think of what we say to each other when we meet a new person. “What do you do?” she asks. “I’m a professor [or a doctor or lawyer or candlestick maker],” he answers. She asks what we do, but we reply with our sense of what we are—perhaps because we cannot bear to admit, even to ourselves, what we really do all day long. We’d be bored or appalled. And perhaps we can’t acknowledge that much of what we do is an angling for promotion. To the degree that we want to be rather than do we are all careerists.

Thus the ambitious, power-suited academic in Elberry’s anecdote wants to be published. What she does is to “get on.” At a cocktail party she would have to answer, if she were honest, “I write tedious, niggling papers for scholarly journals that nobody reads, because all I really want to do is advance to the top of my profession. I have no idea what I’ll do once I get there. Check back with me in about ten years—if I’m still talking to you. You may be beneath me by then.”

The careerist avoids risk for fear that a mistake or failure might tarnish his image and put promotion and career progress in jeopardy. You can easily imagine the effect that this risk avoidance, this reluctance to stand for principle, has upon a profession or institution.

In literary scholarship, the effect is pretty obvious. Because promotion is based upon the quantity of the work that is produced, not on its quality, scholars take shortcuts to publication. Hence the enduring popularity of the “application” model. Select a currently dominant figure of thought from column A and a canonical (that is, frequently discussed) text from column B. Now reinterpret text B by rewording it in the vocabulary of theorist A, et voilà! A new publication! Small wonder that so many literary scholars rush into print with work that is shoddy, half-baked, and sometimes even full of untruths. Probative inquiry consists almost entirely of combing through the names in column A. The conclusions yielded by “applying” their concepts and categories to the texts in column B are never examined. They are taken on faith.

It is a maxim with me that ethics place a person at a competitive disadvantage. If your scruples prevent you from doing what is no problem for a careerist then you face an obstacle he does not. There is another way of looking at it, however. If you have a competitive advantage over someone, it may be owing to your lack of scruples.

Careerism, then, does not merely damage professions and institutions. It damages the person. And, indeed, that is a better definition of careerism. It is the practice of advancing a career at the expense of a person’s integrity.

If careerism is the problem in the writing of literary scholarship and criticism the solution is the reinstatement of integrity, but there is of course no professional nor institutional mechanism for doing so. It would require the reintegration of life and career. It would require foregoing the lure of personal advancement in favor of responsibility to—to what?

The ancients would not have hestitated to reply. For the Greeks, virtue; for the Jews and Christians, God. The modern, though, believes in work (“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness,” Freud says); and for the modern, then, the question becomes this. What is he reponsible to on the job? Not in the sense of whom he must answer to, but rather what is he responsive to?

Elberry mistakes my answer to this question where literary critics are concerned. He thinks that I am suggesting that “critics should write about less well-known books,” but I suggest this only as a method, a practical expedient, for undertaking their real responsibility: namely, to contribute to literary knowledge. The demand upon critics (in the university and out) must be, not to “write something new and different,” but to add something new and different to the store of human understanding. If they accepted this as their professional responsibility, who knows? Their careers might even advance.

Criticism’s returns

In an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein concludes that literary scholarship has reached the point of “diminishing returns,” and a “redistribution” of efforts is in order, “particularly toward teaching” (h/t: Nigel Beale).

The problem, according to Bauerlein, is that an upsurge in scholarly “productivity”—fueled by universities’ policy of rewarding nothing else—obliged young scholars to look everywhere for an angle, a new and untried “approach” (in the English department’s jargon) to old and sorely tried literary texts, in order to satisfy the traditional scholarly requirement of making an original contribution. Over the past five decades, Bauerlein reports elsewhere, scholarly publications in language and literature have increased fivefold from thirteen thousand to seventy-two thousand a year. At same time, the audience for literary scholarship has shrunk to the vanishing point. Sales of academic books average about three hundred copies per title. What happened? “The audience got bored,” Bauerlein says. But what bored them? Here Bauerlein is somewhat less persuasive.

Some time in the late ’seventies, the conception of criticism as the explication of a difficult text was replaced by the self-inflating notion of criticism as performance. “The old model of the critic as secondary, derivative, even parasitical gave way to the critic as creative and adventuresome,” Bauerlein says. And certainly there is much truth to the complaint that the rise of literary theory led directly to a decline in the quality of literary criticism. Even by the time my own essay on the subject was reprinted in Theory’s Empire in 2004, critics were yawning that the arraignment of literary theorists on the charge of bad writing was fit to drop. Bauerlein himself said the same year that “Outside the tiny group of academic theorists, the question is closed.” Under the influence of theory, literary scholars now write badly, and there’s an end on ’t.

Yet Bauerlein’s history is confused. The real shift that steered criticism away from generally well-educated readers interested in literature but not professionally consumed by it occurred earlier. In fact, the shift can be summed up in Bauerlein’s own phrase: criticism-as-explication. The Anglo-American new criticism, celebrated by John Crowe Ransom as “a kind of literary criticism more intensive than a language has ever known,” spelled the doom of the “life-and-works” essay that was once a staple of general-interest magazines. Historical background and biographical information came to be held as irrelevant to literary criticism, because any claim for their relevance was theoretically incoherent. Prior to a close reading of a text no knowledge of what is necessary for understanding it is even possible, and consequently, the text is the whole context of understanding.

Although the literary theorists who emerged in the late ’seventies declared their independence from the doctrine of “close reading,” and though the next wave of theorists triumphantly announced the arrival of a new historicism in literary criticism, they cleaved as tightly to the close details of a literary text as their predecessors.

It is instructive, for example, to compare the “approaches” of the earliest and most recent full-length critical essays on the same author. In 1923, the University of Chicago professor Percy H. Boynton published a 3,000-word introduction to Edith Wharton in the English Journal. He begins by locating her in the American tradition, relating her to this country’s widening “expression of national self-consciousness”; then he discusses her upbringing, education, travels, and social class and ideals, mentioning four of her first eight books in passing; he devotes about a paragraph apiece in the next section of his essay to The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth, connecting the books to Wharton’s overarching social themes; and in the last section he delivers a verdict on her “work as a whole,” based primarily on Wharton’s prose style, dialogue, and characterization.

By contrast, last month Nick Bromell published an 8,000-word essay in American Literature comparing Wharton’s House of Mirth to Nella Larsen’s much slighter 1929 novel Passing,

not because they are representative of a historical moment or because they constitute an instructive genealogy, but because they have a striking power to engage readers in a perplexing problem of democracy. That is, they not only depict the “practices of listening” undertaken by their characters, but they also require such practices of their readers, schooling us to perform better than the characters by understanding what they do not: that knowing others means knowing them through—and not just despite or in terms of—their differences. Indeed, it is in the felt experience of their readers that these novels most fully activate their democratic pedagogy.This propositio is delivered only after Bromell has completed a careful two-page warmup, which establishes his theoretical stance and loyalties. When he finally gets around to it, his section on The House of Mirth is a third again as long as Boynton’s entire essay, and glances at none of Wharton’s other books. (He quotes her handbook on The Writing of Fiction once.)

Both critics attend to the social theme. But where Boynton speaks of Wharton’s uninterest in “social institutions of any kind,” “the social game of hide-and-go-seek as it is played in respectable society,” Undine Spragg’s “meteoric ascent in the social world,” and the novelist’s reluctance to venture “outside the social pale” except to invoke “forces of fate,” Bromell introduces his central term in this way:Cognizant of the need to understand more richly what it means to know an Other, political theorists are starting to produce phenomenological accounts of intersubjective communication or what I will call “social knowing.”A footnote directs the reader, if there is any, to a further elaboration of the term. Bromell uses it twelve times in the section on The House of Mirth alone: “The erotics of conjectural social knowing,” “successful social knowing,” “constitutive of social knowing,” “[George Herbert] Mead’s and [Donald] Davidson’s sunny conceptions of the self and social knowing,” “difference as an immutable obstacle to social knowing,” et cetera.

The source of literary criticism’s “diminishing returns,” in short, is not merely an upsurge in “productivity” nor a shift to criticism-as-performance. The problem is with a kind of literary criticism more intensive than a language has ever known, a kind of criticism that has only grown more intensive since Ransom’s day. Its microscopic focus, the stretching of its subject to excessive lengths, its fervid humorlessness, its exclusive concern with a text’s inner tensions to the utter neglect of literature’s extensions—the references and even the applications to a world outside the text—have narrowed the appeal of literary criticism and quite naturally cost it readers.

The solution, as I have suggested before now, is to return from interpretation (which includes both criticism-as-explication and criticism-as-performance) to a more traditional scholarly conception of literary study. Scholars do not seek merely, in Bauerlein’s phrase, “to write something new and different”; they seek to contribute something new and different to knowledge. They are not satisfied with new “approaches.” They demand new facts, new sources, new intelligence.

Literary criticism has been narrowed, not merely in its “approach,” but in its subject matter. When I took up the question of Richard Russo’s Catholicism in Empire Falls yesterday, I consulted the MLA Bibliography to find the previous criticism on the novel. Eight years after its publication, only three articles on it have been published—and one of those, by Joseph Epstein in Commentary, was a review-essay on it and Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections. In the same period of time, sixty-four publications have appeared just on The Sound and the Fury.

I have come to believe that what literary scholars abuse as the canon—the “established canon,” the “fixed, restrictive canon”—is an image in the mirror. It exists only in the scholars’ own decisions of what to study, teach, and write about. Few literary critics display the scholarly instincts of Miriam Burstein, whom I recommend to all young graduate students as a model of the scholarly life:DAD THE EMERITUS HISTORIAN OF GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT: Is that a good book?
ME: No.
DAD: So . . . you’re going to write about it.The motto of her blog The Little Professor, Burstein quips, is: “I Read These Things So You Don't Have To.” Why should that not be the ambition of literary scholarship in an age of diminished returns? Rather than another intensive examination of The Sound and the Fury, perhaps some news about Faulkner’s contemporaries and the novels they published the same year—Edmund Wilson’s I Thought of Daisy, Cornell Woolrich’s Times Square, Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs, Wallace Thurman’s Blacker the Berry, Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy, Joseph Hergesheimer’s Swords and Roses, Robert Nathan’s There Is Another Heaven, Elizabeth Moorhead’s Clouded Hills, DuBose Heyward’s Mamba’s Daughters, O. E. Rolvaag’s Peder Victorious, Myron Brinig’s Singermann—might increase criticism’s returns.

America’s leading Catholic novelist

Calling it “one of the finest novels of recent years,” Ted Gioia nominates Richard Russo’s novel Empire Falls for the new canon. I agree, and would go one step further. Russo’s 2001 chronicle of a small town in Maine is easily one of the five best American novels from the Twenty Oughts. (What is this decade’s handle?)

Since Gioia summarizes the plot, I am thankfully relieved of that duty. Instead, I’d like to glance at an aspect of the novel that Gioia neglects—its Catholicism. Although I have no rights in the matter, being neither Catholic nor close to one, I have long believed that Russo is—after the deaths of Walker Percy in 1990 and Paul Horgan in 1995—perhaps the leading Catholic novelist in America today. Although his fiction is realistic, Russo is not merely a literary realist, a fifth-generation descendant of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. Like theirs, his realism grows out of an innermost familiarity with small towns, but unlike theirs it takes flight, not upon a wind of revolt, but from acceptance of the lives he finds there. Russo’s fiction is grounded upon the deeply Catholic conviction that the world as it really is—the heavens and earth created by God—deserve the novelist’s deepest respect and closest attention. He is not interested in creating an alternative reality, because he is not interested in exhibiting his creative powers and thus confining himself to them. His sensibility, in George Weigel’s phrase, is “an unmistakably Catholic sensibility: a sacramental sensibility convinced that the ordinary things of this world are the vehicles of grace and the materials of a divinely scripted drama.”

What makes this assertion all the more arresting is that Russo is pretty clearly a lapsed Catholic—a “cradle Catholic,” but no longer practicing. Yet the Catholic theme of Empire Falls is made explicit early on. In the few hours that he can spare from the Empire Grill and his daughter Tick, Miles Roby paints St. Catherine’s Church (“St. Cat’s,” as he calls it fondly). While he still attends Mass there with regularity, he is no longer a militant believer. He prefers “the notion of an all-loving God to that of an all-knowing one.” As they contemplate the church steeple that Miles is about to paint, Father Mark remarks that he “used to think God actually lived up there.” “I was just thinking how far away it is,” Miles replies. He is comforted by the idea of God’s solicitous remoteness:

It pleased him to imagine God as someone like his mother, someone beleaguered by too many responsibilities, too dog-tired to monitor an energetic boy every minute of the day, but who, out of love and fear for his safety, checked in on him whenever she could. Was this so crazy? Surely God must have other projects besides Man, just as parents had responsibilities other than raising their children?Miles does not waste much time on theology, however. With God far away, he transfers his attachment to his parish church. The rectory is one of his favorite places, and Father Mark is one of his favorite persons. He had considered taking Holy Orders until well into high school, and the “romance of the profession” stayed with him for much longer.

As his daughter points out, everyone in Empire Falls has a secret except for Miles. He is something like the town’s confessor. Where Henry James would have put the “centre of consciousness,” Russo has installed a figure of great stillness and release from striving, who is peacefully at home in the decaying paper-mill town by the polluted Knox River. Charlene, the Grill’s buxom “full service waitress” whom he desires (without taking any steps to fulfill his desire), calls him “a good man, straight and true”; his ex-wife Janine calls him an “enabler.” The truth is that he displays what Sally Fitzgerald, meditating upon a passage by Jacques Maritain, called Flannery O’Connor’s “habit of being.” Despite his failures—he dropped out of college to return home and manage a diner that he does not even own, his wife has left him for a middle-aged fitness guru—Miles has raised the level of his moral existence through the sustained and practically unseen exercise of a quiet will. He is a good man, not because he checks himself constantly against a moral code, but because he has thoroughly internalized his virtue. He doesn’t even think about it, although everyone else in town is fully aware of it.

Empire Falls is not about Miles, though. He is merely the “enabler” of the novel’s action, which occurs because his presence testifies to the reality of grace. One day, for example, he decides to scrape the old paint off the south face of St. Cat’s, even though he has only about an hour’s worth of painting left on the west face. It is, he decides, “more satisfying to be peeling something away, creating ugliness before restoring beauty.” (That’s also the history of the town in a phrase, come to think of it.) After scraping the entire wall, Miles climbs the ladder to the steeple as darkness falls:He’d felt strangely serene on the ladder, reaching farther and farther out to where the paint had bubbled and cracked. Even as he moved up and out, he felt the opposite sensation, as if he progressing down and in, through the protective paint and into the soft wood. A powerful and dangerous illusion, he knew, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that if for some reason he were to step off the ladder, he wouldn’t tumble to the ground but step onto the side of the church, as if its pull had supplanted gravity.The illusion is powerful and dangerous only because Miles does not inhabit a supernatural matrix. The real world, though, contains the certainty of grace, a feeling stronger than gravity. Its operations lead Miles down and in, scraping away lies and misperceptions to get to the truth. He scrapes away, convinced that the world, stripped bare of its cracks and bubbles, will be restored to its original beauty.

Few other American writers, living or dead, have believed as strongly as Richard Russo that the ordinary things of this world, perceived in their ordinariness, are worthy of close attention and perhaps are even redemptive.

Five Books of immigrants

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Matthew Kaminski selected the five best novels about immigrants to America—three of the five published within the last decade. Pnin, his first choice, is not a novel about an immigrant at all. Timofey Pnin is an émigré—a very different thing. The immigrant comes to America in search of a better life; the émigré comes to escape a far worse one. A more representative novel about Russian immigrants to the U.S. is Gary Shteyngart’s frantic and hilarious Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002).

Only one novel on Kaminski’s list belongs there, in my opinion. That is Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. Here are some other titles that scour the immigrant experience in unpredictable terms.

(1.) Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete (1939). A proletarian novel in origin and not merely in subject matter—the author was a bricklayer—Christ in Concrete was the first American novel to explore the lives of Italian immigrants. It is episodic rather than traditionally plotted and carelessly written in places, but these qualities only add to its foreignness—as does its portrait of working-class Catholicism, which is mixed heavily with sensuality and paganism. These are not Mario Puzo’s Italians.

(2.) John Okada, No-No Boy (1957). About a young man, the son of immigrants from Japan, who is drafted for the U.S. Army while his family is in a detention camp. He refuses induction, but he also declines to express any loyalty for the Emperor. Hence the title. The novel begins as he returns to Seattle after his imprisonment, finding himself in a unique situation that nevertheless captures something at the heart of the immigrant experience, especially for the second generation: “[I]t is not enough to be American only in the eyes of the law and it is not enough to be only half an American and know that it is an empty half. . . . I am not Japanese and I am not American.”

(3.) Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). Selina Boyce is the daughter of immigrants from Barbados living in Brooklyn. To come of age, to come into her own, she must distance herself from her family’s “Bajan” ways. Marshall’s novel complicates the simplistic notions of race and African-American identity now current, for the Caribbean blacks in the novel have little in common with the Brooklyn blacks whose families had been in this country for more than a century. The terminology of race—“Negro,” “black,” “African-American”—conceals those differences. Marshall exposes them to the light.

(4.) Lore Segal, Her First American (1985). Ilka Weissnix, a young Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, plunges into an affair with an angry middle-aged black intellectual. She is unsure whether Alabama is a Southern state, and is unable to distinguish a Negro from a Chinese. Her lover introduces her to America. You can imagine the racial taboos and linguistic barriers that must be negotiated, but as he says, there is nothing about this country that race and sex will not bring out. The author of the autobiographical Holocaust novel Other People’s Houses (1964), Segal herself emigrated to this country in 1951.

(5.) Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (1995). Born in Seoul and brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was three, Lee published this first novel at the age of thirty. It is an astonishingly accomplished and complex work. Based on the boycott of Korean produce stores by black activists in 1990, the novel is a summa of all the themes enunciated by the first four books on this list: the subordination of the first-generation immigrant to his job, the divided loyalties, the sense of belonging to neither nation, the tragic conflict between American blacks and later immigrants. Written in the voice of a man who is unsparingly honest about himself, whose intelligence is the archive of his family’s ambitions, and who insists upon the truth. Compared by reviewers to Ellison’s Invisible Man, it is more realistic and less political. Yet the comparison is not a scandal.