A brief note on literary criticism

Firstly, apologies for the lack of posts. Have been very busy recently and it seems I will be for a while here, but will post as soon as I can. In the meantime, keep reading 90ways.com and theouterloop.com for more pieces. This week: On the nature of cloned meat from animals (90ways) and on Jewish terrorists (theouterloop). Both are articles with which I wish I had more space, but other editors aren't as ready to indulge my narcissism, because they want people to "read" their sites and not get turned off by my long-windedness. The nerve.

Anyway, I was moved to write today because of something I read in the Tribune- a brief little article asking some college English professors (and a few other people) why it was that no one seemed to teach the late, great Saul Bellow anymore. A few interesting answers- Bellow is complex, perhaps too quirky, etc. But there was one, from Erin G. Carlston, English professor at University of North Carolina (which is already annoying for having beaten Illinois), which stood out for its sheer craven, knee-jerk idiotic response that goes a long way toward explaining why intelligent people like Robert Conquest are disgusted by the educational system. I am going to quote it in full, so you can appreciate the growing horror and anger I had while reading it.

"The truth is I dislike Bellow so don't teach him myself. I'd guess from informal conversations with friends that my dislike for Bellow is fairly widely shared among women scholars, at least. But it's also highly idiosyncratic and all about gender and ethnicity, for me. I’d say in a general way that most post-World War II literature by American white men strikes me as incredibly whiny. It's trivial and narrowly focused, and they go on and on about how it's the end of Western Civilization because they can't get women to pick up their socks anymore. Bellow, being Jewish, is less offensive to me on these grounds than [John] Updike and his ilk, for whom I have no patience at all -- I mean, American Jewish men have actual cause to be insecure . . . and their relationship to power is much more complicated than it is for WASPs. But he still fits, in my mind, with a kind of writing I think of as self-absorbed and trivial. There's no real tragedy, no joy, no relish in humanity. It's all kind of flat."

And this woman, if you read her CV, teaches on Ulysses and writes about Proust! If the above paragraph is any indication of her temperament or true sensitivity (as opposed to the New Age-y sensitivity she espouses) her students, when being taught about some of the finest novel and novelists in the post-Flaubert age, are being force-fed the most merciless pap and sub-academic trite the eastern seaboard has to offer. I for one despise when people like Tom DeLay or Bill O'Reilly denounce in off-handed manners the "liberal elite" and stand proudly as sneering bastions of "political incorrectness"- but it is people like Carlton that give them ammo for their ad hoc attacks.

For her whole analysis of Bellow is one long attack itself, and has little or nothing to do with his actual writing. Rather, she attacks him because he is a white male, and says his literature is worse for it. His "relationship to power" (admittedly tempered by his partially redeemable Jewishness) takes everything he writes and skewers it.

This reminds me of a story by (who else?) the great Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." The conceit of the story, if I may do it the injustice of summation, is that Menard, an author, wanted to write Don Quixote. But he wasn't just going to copy Cervantes' masterpiece, or even take the route of becoming Cervantes (learning Spanish, forgetting history, fighting the Moors) because it was too easy. Rather, he wanted to have the Quixote come to him as Pierre Menard. He only manages to "create" a couple of passages, which the author of the story (also a character, though I presume Carlton would assume it was Borges' own opinion) summarizes thusly.

"It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part 1, Chapter IX):

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

The catalog of attributes, writer in the seventeenth century, and written by the 'ingenious layman' Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

History, the mother of truth!- the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history as not delving into reality, but as the very fount of reality...the final phrases- exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor- are brazenly pragmatic. The contrast in styles is equally striking."

It goes on like this. Borges uses his narrator to brilliantly expose the worst kind of modernist tripe- that a work of literature has to be judged by who its author is, what they looked like and where they lived, if it was experimental, what the ultimate intention was, their politics and their contemporaries, rather than if it is, you know, any good.

This is exactly what Carlton does with Saul Bellow. I can't claim to be any real expert on Bellow. I've read, and greatly enjoyed, several of his novels and some short stories, but his canon has long been on the "to get to someday" list, lamentably. But I do know garbage when I see it, and having read only a little Bellow (admittedly his classics) is enough to classify her opinion as garbage.

What is Bellow's relation to power? Perhaps pretty high- he is, after all, a white male (as, one presumes, is Carlston's father- for shame!). Therefore, the lamenting of his characters, their personal sorrow and tragedy, their inner strife, from Augie March's journey to the giant, bellowing anger and sadness and titanic lust and fear of Henderson, is moot. Boring. Piffle, really. What does anyone who is white know about sadness?

This is absurd. Bellow's characters are not powerful men (not all whites, it must be noted in passing, have a silver spoon and hands firmly gripped on the wheels of power). The are frequently low and desperate, many terminally dull and violent. Bellow himself may have amassed some money and prestige- but should that take away meaning from his exquisitely drawn characters? Of course not.

Carlston's foolishness in this article has failed to meet a bound a decency or rationality that it didn't leap. One asks where she has read a writer lamenting having to pick up his own socks- a literary trope she seems to find pervasive without actually giving an example. But perhaps she has read it, perhaps often. Then one has to ask if it was a character lamenting his own relative decline in the power-structure of his own family, which may or may not reflect the author's own bias. There is also the chance that the author is- perhaps, and I know this defies common sense- creating a character.

But that is too easy. It has to be the author "whining" through their character, which really is just their avatar, even if there are many characters. This is awful garbage, and it shows an elementary mistake, and one that is being beaten into the heads of her students. I know it seems awfully much to pick on her, but she did decide to make these comments in a major newspaper and does in fact teach at a prestigious university. And this is not an attempt at a Daniel Pipes academic blacklist- she has every right to teach like an idiot, just as we have every right to call her out.

Her last section is the most infuriating (other than when she says she "has no time" for Updike and his cronies. I am not an Updike fan myself, but she dismisses them for being in the majority in every way, which is the height of bigoted wrong-headedness). Of Bellow (and his ilk): "There's no real tragedy, no joy, no relish in humanity. It's all kind of flat."

One might be generous enough to say that she is making these comments without actually having read Bellow, judging him on cover-jacket picture alone. That is the generous interpretation. But what seems is the case is that she read Bellow, and based on who Bellow was, judged him flat. This is impossible unless you start reading with an agenda, as did those who read "Menard's" Quixote. For someone who teaches literature, who makes her living off of it, Carlston seems to lack any real appreciation or insight. Literature has to be appreciated for what it is, not as a tool around which one twists their politics. Bad politics frequently makes for bad literature, though not always (as Orwell reminds us). There are exception, like with T.S. Eliot. If one like Ms. Carlston were to read Eliot, though, she would impugn him for his beliefs rather than celebrate his magnificent poetry. If she can say such a thing about Bellow she could make hash out of Eliot, reminding us that while dirty politics can still sometimes make bad literature, bad politics always makes dirty literary criticism.