By Ryan Hammill
Thursday, April 27, 2017
Anybody wondering how the study of the humanities arrived
at its current, depressing state need only read the words of its practitioners.
In a recent letter to The Wall Street
Journal, James Simpson, the chair of Harvard’s Department of English,
unveils the supreme and lamentable logic that now governs the field.
Simpson writes in response to a March 31 op-ed from
Heather Mac Donald, wherein Mac Donald discussed the new “marginalization
requirement” in Harvard’s English department. All English majors must now take
a course covering authors “marginalized for historical reasons.” Mac Donald
posed the question (the title of her piece), “Does Harvard consider Oscar Wilde
‘marginalized’?”
After all, she says, “‘Heteronormativity’ may have made
his [Wilde’s] final years miserable, but it had no effect on the boundless
success of his plays.” Mac Donald, God bless her, rehearses many of the
familiar arguments against classroom identity politics: it gives students yet
another excuse to ignore classics of which they are already ignorant; given
their historically disproportionate access to education, it’s only common sense
that “Dead, White Males” predominate; and race or sex of the author ought not
to count for or against a truly sublime piece of literature.
If You Really
Believe This, Act On It
These are good and familiar arguments, and they should
continue to be made. But Simpson’s letter in reply on April 8 makes the
exchange particularly edifying for readers concerned for the classics. Simpson
tries to play the middle-of-the-road civility card. He calls Mac Donald’s op-ed
“intelligent” but “mean-minded.” At first, he seems to concede: “Nothing could
be more depressing than to see a literature curriculum determined by identity
politics with dutiful representation from the required range of
underrepresented groups.”
While the thought displeases me, I could find a few more
depressing things. In fact, so can Simpson! “Nothing, that is, except a
literature curriculum that betrayed the fundamental function of literature and
other art forms, which is to hear the voices repressed by official forms of a
given culture.” I find this claim nearly as depressing as Simpson claims the
hypothetical literature curriculum depresses him.
With this sentence, Simpson supplies the asinine creed
for the modern study of the humanities. The purpose of art, he says, is to
“hear the voices repressed by official forms of a given culture.” That’s not a
side benefit. It’s not an occasional consequence of studying art. It’s the
whole point. One could wonder why Simpson is taking such half-measures at
Harvard. If hearing repressed voices is truly the central purpose of literature
and art, should not Simpson ensure that every Harvard class in the humanities
fulfills the “marginalization requirement”?
One might also chuckle to hear a representative of the
most renowned and powerful educational institution in human history, sitting
atop an untaxed endowment of $36 billion—far larger than the gross domestic
product of many, many nations—promoting Harvard as a champion of the
marginalized. Mandating a class about marginalized authors for each Harvard
literature undergrad doesn’t nullify Simpson’s immense privilege. I propose
something more concrete: Might Harvard be interested in a “marginalization tax”
to divert part of their endowment to historically black colleges and
universities or other marginalized educational institutions?
My Dear Sir, Have
You Studied Literature Much?
Mostly, however, I wonder what in the world Simpson means
with the phrase “repressed by official forms of a given culture.” Is he talking
about censorship? If so, that would leave Americans a paltry handful of our own
works to study as “art”: Allen Ginsberg was charged for obscenity for reciting
his poem “Howl,” so that’s in.
The rest of Ginsberg’s poems might follow on “Howl’s”
obscene coattails, but what about that other iconic work of the Beat
Generation, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”? Well, since Kerouac originally
self-censored sections of the book before publishing, perhaps we can let that
in because of the way the hegemonic American state colonized Kerouac’s mind. To
be safe, really only the censored sections should be studied.
That brings me to that Most American of Great American
Novels, “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck. Sure, the novel highlights the
plight of the poor and downtrodden, but Steinbeck’s voice was hardly “repressed
by official forms of a given culture.” In fact, the federal government funded
this cishet white man’s work through the Federal Writers’ Project.
In Steinbeck, we find a voice not repressed but trumpeted by official forms of culture
(if the federal government is not an “official form,” I don’t know what is).
What right does he have to appropriate the struggle of poor, rural Americans
for his own financial benefit and fame? This is cultural appropriation in its
most insidious form. Like Western Civ, Steinbeck has got to go.
Two Can Play This
Game of Nihilism
Steinbeck would not be the only one stricken, not just
from the Harvard curriculum, but also from the rolls of what qualifies as true
art. After all, according to Simpson, the “fundamental function” of art “is to
hear from the voices repressed by official forms of a given culture.” If a
piece does not fulfill this function, then it must not be art.
So, Greek tragedy must face the same fate, to be
downgraded to the status of mere propaganda. Indeed, tragedy was sponsored by
the Athenian city-state, that brutal empire of the antique Mediterranean world
(just ask the Melians—whoops, too late, they were massacred!). Gothic
cathedrals as well, though their stones bear the anonymous fingerprints of
countless European artisans and peasants, proto-proletarians if you will, must
now be seen not as architectural masterpieces, but as imperial-ecclesial projects
for ideological manipulation.
The Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris may look pretty, but
don’t be deceived—it’s the medieval equivalent of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
Classical music—Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn—produced under a patronage system for
nobles, kings, and emperors, can likewise be dismissed; what is it but the
vanguard of the Nazi Kampfbund für
deutsche Kultur?
Simpson’s pronouncement on art’s “fundamental function”
is a chainsaw. On the one hand, it can be used to totally decimate the vast and
variegated garden of art and literature. But of course, a chainsaw can also be
used to sculpt a tree into a totem. Rather than annihilate Western culture
wholesale, Simpson and likeminded scholars have selectively wielded their
theoretical chainsaws to disfigure art into hideous totems of ideology and
politics.
Some writers from the past are hacked down. Some are
carved into academic fetishes. Not only do we get ideologically driven
interpretations of Greek tragedy, e.g. the de
rigueur feminist readings of Sophocles’ “Antigone” or feminist defenses of
Mozart, but also such works as “Chaucer’s Queer Nation” and “Shakesqueer: A
Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare.”
These “Dead White Males”—Sophocles and Mozart, Chaucer
and Shakespeare—can continue to be appreciated only if they are studied ideologically. These artists are admirable
insofar as they challenge the patriarchy, or the imperial hegemon, or whatever.
They must be read as such, or completely debunked. Otherwise, scholars participate
in privileging already privileged voices. It is not so different from the
Soviets sculpting the reactionary Russian Orthodox Fyodor Dostoevsky into a
prophet of revolution—he may be kept, but not in his current form. Either
refashion him, or denounce him entirely.
Politics Is All
To switch metaphors, the modern approach pictures every
artistic or literary work as a face. To the untrained, naïve observer, all of
these books and cathedrals and operas seem wonderfully different and beautiful
(the word trembles on my lips: are they not diverse?).
But the true critic is proved by his ability to see that each book, each
cathedral, each opera, is wearing a mask. And underneath each mask is the
work’s true face—its ideology. In the end, politics is all we have.
“What virtue remains in the act of unmasking when we know
full well what lies beneath the mask?” Professor Rita Felski asks in “Uses of
Literature.” Indeed, what’s the point of diagnosing patriarchy in every single
author whom we read, when we’ve decided beforehand to diagnose them with
patriarchy? Continually unmasking art grows quite dull. But the act is also
dangerous. In “The Abolition of Man,” C.S. Lewis pointed this out:
You cannot go on ‘seeing through’
things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see
something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because
the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden
too? … If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a
wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is
the same as not to see.
We have nearly come to the point that Lewis foresaw—a
wholly transparent world, that is, an invisible world. A quick glance at modern
art is more than enough to convince me that many artists’ materials are indeed
quite transparent. Our critics and artists seem to be telling us that though
the world is in fact visible, it is not worth looking at. We might as well not
see it.
Art, criticism, and education in the humanities suffer
deeply for our wrong turn into the critique of pure ideology. Identity politics
is, however, only the latest stage, and not even the most nefarious. Even more
troubling has been our refusal to grant that beauty is real, that it exists
outside of our personal preferences.
In “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis makes the case that when
a man calls a waterfall “sublime,” he is not just commenting on how the
waterfall makes him feel. Lewis writes, “The man who called the cataract
sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was
also claiming that the object was one which merited
those emotions.”
To see that he is right, just imagine the man’s companion
disagreeing: “No, the waterfall is in fact quite shabby.” Whether an argument
would arise between them is hard to say, but I have no doubt that the original
speaker would persist in his belief that the waterfall is indeed sublime, and
attribute this not to his own unique preferences for overpowering vertical
flows of water, but to his friend being in the wrong—and possessed of poor
taste.
To Judge Without
Destruction
The humanities are in a bad way. Simpson’s letter reminds
us how far the study of the humanities has drifted from the contemplation of
the beauty, truth, and goodness that our artistic tradition embodies. A passing
comment from a layperson would not merit such a refutation, but a statement in
a leading newspaper from a leading literary scholar—one who speaks for the
discipline—requires it.
If we can learn anything from Simpson’s dubious statement
on the purpose of art, it is that the time has come to put down criticism’s
chainsaw. His outlook leads us into absurdities such that a “marginalization
requirement” is only a foretaste. The solution is not abandoning criticism
altogether in favor of sentimental appreciation, but taking up a criticism that
is faithful to its Greek root, krinein,
which means to separate or judge. This criticism must be done on the proper
basis.
The man who comes to art or literature looking only for
politics is like the man who attends the orchestra for a rousing rendition of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and walks away complaining that the first chair’s
outfit was slightly ill-fitting and a bit out-of-date. His is a case of
mistaken genre—he believes he attended a fashion debut when he has in fact
listened to a symphony. So with literature and art, we must grasp what it is so
we will be able to look at it properly.
We must learn to see the garden through the window,
without seeing through the garden. The critics with their chainsaws are wrong
to imagine the trees require our carving. Our task is to krinein, to separate the sublime from the shabby, the beautiful
from the hideous, the good from the bad, the true from the false. When we do
this, we can then make our way outside to taste that garden’s good fruits, and
delight in them. We might even discover a hitherto unknown waterfall along the
way.
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