When I, as a professor of English,
first became acquainted with postmodern ways of reading I immediately wanted to
find the right set of passages from the toughest epistemologists I knew so that
I could show, by impeccable step-by-step reasoning, that the theory of
knowledge supporting this new method was unsound. When Zoë Heller, as an English major, first
became acquainted with it she wanted to "lie down in a darkened room and
cry."
It's such a sad, sweet story the
novelist tells in last week's New York
Times Book Review (3-15-15) — coming out of high school and going through
her early college years believing that "authors were actual people"
who wrote works you tried to explain to a demanding teacher, then discovering
that she'd been laboring under a "bourgeois delusion." Reading was "not an act of exegesis
but a kind of creative, semi-erotic play." You certainly never read an author for his message.
That kind of reading gets its
come-uppance in her essay when she reports that the college essays she wrote
displaying her expertise at it turned out, on mature review, to be
"infinitely duller and cruder than any of my naive high school efforts to
figure out what authors actually meant." Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, she has moved back to her
prepoststructuralist position. "Whatever
embarrassment attached to re-embracing the old bourgeois delusions was far
outweighed by relief."
Heller tells us that her
disenchantment with reading as creative play is paralleled by that of Zadie Smith, whose "doubts about the
readerly freedoms bestowed by poststructuralist theory set in around the time
she became a novelist."
Statements about reading by
successful writers have a lot of force in English departments, and I was
delighted to see these writers employing it in support of the old way, my way,
of teaching. How hard it had been
to hold to that way through the years of poststructuralism's triumph. Now here was the old counterforce,
resurgent. Go Heller, go
Smith. Sock it to 'em.
But then, in mid-cheer, I had to
stop. The memory of somebody I had
taught in my old-fashioned way kicked in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Voice
of the independent American Scholar, promoter of Man Thinking, scourge of
obedient thinkers. They'd be
socking it to him!
There he was, right in the middle
of the canon, an author my students had
to read in the traditional way.
"Do you understand his message?" I had asked them. "Do you buy it? Are you willing to live by it?" And what was his message? Freedom! "Free should the scholar be, — free and
brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, 'without any hindrance that does
not arise out of his own constitution.'" The American Scholar took everything he read on his own
terms. "I had better never
see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and
made a satellite instead of a system."
Houston, we've got a problem. Our targets the poststructuralists were
working as hard as Emerson to keep people from becoming satellites. Look at what Heller disparages,
their belief that reading was "not an act of exegesis but a kind of
creative, semi-erotic play."
Take out the disparagement and what have you got? Man Thinking, the self-reliant American
Scholar. Nothing's going to keep him from playing with a text.
Where did Heller run into
poststructuralist reading, I mean really run into it, as opposed to hearing
about it? Same place she would
have run into Emerson's Man Thinking, Columbia University. She had come there after education at Haverstock
School and Oxford. From what I
know of Oxford education in the eighties nothing in it would have softened her
up for poststructuralism. I doubt
that Smith's education at Cambridge would have softened her either.
So welcome to America,
Britishers. Over
here there is "creative reading as well as creative writing." And to do it you have to trust
yourself, as Emerson exhorts Americans to do in "Self-Reliance." There are no holy texts. "Nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of your own mind."
Socrates will be proud of you.
This tells me that,
after I have given up on the impossible question ("How can I make sure my
students get Emerson's message of freedom without infringing on their
freedom?") I, side-by-side with my fellow-American though maybe over-eager
poststructuralists, have to let those free-readers into my class. They get in on Emerson's pass.
But that throws me into an
impossibility. I just can't teach my
lower-level courses at Ohio University with poststructuralists in the room. In
Freshman English I have to curb freedom every three minutes. You cannot play,
creatively, with the subject-verb-complement structure of the English
sentence. You cannot, if you are
to remain teachable, play with anything established by convention or
agreement. You cannot play with
the rules of logic. You are not
free to make any inferences you please. Tell me you are free, as some up-to-date students have
told me, and I will go into a dark room and weep.
Yet I want play. Especially in the interpretation-of-poetry course, where every new
imagination is encouraged to exercise itself.
What I need is a warning in the Course Catalogue that will give me only teachable students. A fatwa from the head of the English Department. "You cannot play with the walls
around your playground. In a work
of literature what's given you in declarative sentences — the physical set-up,
the time-frame, the evidence
given you for your own inference-making, the rules of inference-making — is
your reality, and it's as hard as concrete."
For my poststructuralist
colleagues a petition.
"Please don't write as if these walls did not exist." That's the way the founding poststructuralists,
the French, wrote, and the way American relativists following them wrote. Only a careful, statement-by-statement
display would make sure of it but I think that if you made a quick survey, or maybe just looked at Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Contingencies of Value, you would see what caused us the teachers, and them the literary theorists, so much trouble: they
did not make clear that the relativism they advocated was cultural and
esthetic, not epistemic. The first
two relativisms you can get away with; the last will bring a ton of bricks down
on top of you. Alan Sokal's load. (That's "get away with" in
front of scientists and analytic philosophers, not continental philosophers
who, in the eyes of the former, will let you get away with murder.)
It's those analytic philosophers
who give me now the most exhilarating and finally most depressing thoughts. First the exhilaration. Emerson, I realize, has nothing to fear from their
analysis! Emerson, the man people
quote when they deprecate logic ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds"). He separated the epistemic from the
cultural and the esthetic, and gave it its due. The teaching of "elements," the "indispensable
office" of colleges, was outside
of everything he gave freedom to, as were "history and exact
science," which the scholar "must learn by laborious
reading." The old walls. (His statement, "A foolish consistency is
the hobgoblin of little minds, was outside them too — for readers who paid close enough attention to see that the consistency he was referring to was temporal, not logical.)
That is exhilarating, isn't
it? The American ex-preacher doing
just the thing all these Europe-sucking intellectuals failed to do. Ask why they failed, though, and you're
on the road to depression. When
you give the obvious answer, inattention (they didn't notice science standing there, demanding its due), you can't stop with
the intellectuals, you have to go on to the teachers, who didn't notice that
they had nothing to worry about.
Why make a big fuss, a science war, a culture war, over
poststructuralist freedom? Just
notice the right passages in Emerson, read them to the intellectuals, and get
on with your business.
