Desecrating literature: reading the PMLA.

For reasons too complicated to go into here, I recently found myself subscribed--for the first time since 1964, my first year as a graduate student at Yale--to PMLA. That's Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, and in my racket it's the boss journal. You get a piece in there, and your career isn't exactly made, but it's well on its way: like being a first-draft choice for the Celtics. The magazine has this cachet because the Modern Language Association, its parent group, is the only and I mean only organization of literature professors in the U.S., and has a stranglehold on the hiring process. Every year, just after Christmas, MLA holds its annual convention in some big city. And thousands of professors, and more importantly, grad-student/professor wannabees, flock there ostensibly to give and hear papers on literary topics. Right.

The fact is--I've been to one MLA convention in thirty years, and one was enough-it's about as dignified as any convention, and maybe less so. (At least the Shriners in Indianapolis admit they come there to party, something entirely beneath the self-image of your average MLA weenie, thank you very much. Everybody gets drunk, nobody goes to the papers, and the grad students all try as hard as they can to ingratiate themselves to the various departments of English, Romance languages, etc., in their job interviews because this is the one chance you're going to get to be hired for next September, and start to pay off that gigantic loan you floated to write your Ph.D.

However, the convention is not my main point: it's not MLA I want to talk about, but PMLA, the journal, and how the journal is necessary and sufficient cause for the elimination of Departments of English altogether.

Nor am I kidding. I've spent my life teaching literature--or trying to--and I got into it because I thought it would be a fine and shining thing to spend a life loving, and sharing the love of, the dance of language and feeling that is the literature we have made, and that continues to make us: a vocation, if you will, and not a shabby one. Now I, like a lot of my colleagues, wonder what the hell ever happened to the mission we chose so gaily, and who these people are who now call themselves professors of literature. (Not to mention--we'll get to this--what damage they're doing to their students.

I told Harold Bloom, over the phone, "It's just not the life I trained myself for." And he said--first time ever he'd really replied to me--"Yes. We lost."

Indeed we did. And the students did. And the university did, and most important, you did, if you have a kid in college or if you believe in the idea of college, or if you do something even as inoffensive as pay your taxes, which of course pays part of the salary of the strange folks who are now, in most of America's major universities, teaching something they call literature.

Okay. There have been a number of recent arguments that trends like "deconstruction," "multiculturalism," and new historicism" in English studies are in fact silly, self-serving, anti-educational cults of specialists. Most of them, though, have come from nonacademics, journalists. And academics, than whom no one is more snobbish, easily sniff at attacks from that quarter: just another sign, the weenies think (and say) that the great unwashed can't hope to understand the complexity and importance of what they are doing. And when Harold Bloom, surely our most eminent and humane critic, said the same thing in his wonderful book, The Western Canon (Harcourt Press, 1994), the stuck-pig squeals of outrage from the tenured out-decibelled your average heavy metal concert.

I'm neither a journalist nor an eminence, neither a war correspondent nor a general. Essentially, I'm a grunt, and I'm here to tell you from the front lines that the situation is hopeless, and quite serious. We've produced a generation of teachers who cannot read, can barely write, and do not teach. We have turned the Department of Literature into, effectively, an asylum run by the inmates.

Here's one example, from the May 1995 PMLA. Donald Morton is professor of English at Syracuse University and the author of the essay, "Birth of the "queer." (You have to know that queer theory' is the current flash word for studies of gay writers and the gay experience.) Here's the first sentence of his abstract--and please read it all:

While the return of queer is usually

explained locally as an oppressed 

minority's positive

reunderstanding of a negative

word, as the adoption of an umbrella

to cover diverse marginal

subjectivities or as a sign of generational

difference, the term's

reappearance must instead be historicized--systematically

and

globally--as one of the theoretical,

cultural, and social changes that

result from the uncritical acceptance

(for class reasons) of the

premises of ludic (post)modern

theory in the dominant academy

and the culture industry'

Now I've read and reread Morton's essay, and he actually has some fine and smart points to make. But that's not the point. The point is that he's a professor of English and can't write his native language; at least not when he's being a "professor" of it. Here's my rewrite of his sentence:

When gay critics use the term,

"queer," they often think they're

taking a defiant stand against the

mainstream; but in fact, they're

only making themselves and their

orientation sound trivial and marginal-which

is just what the

mainstream wants them to do.

They're being had.

And it's not that I have a prejudice against gay studies: I was committee chair of the first-ever Ph.D. dissertation on gay American fiction at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This isn't a matter of life style, but of prose style, which is just as serious--wouldn't you rather meet Oscar Wilde in heaven than, say' Theodore Dreiser?--and Donald Morton has not a chemical trace of prose style. Language like this would make even a senior prom in Babylon sound like a painful duty.

But I'm being unfair to Morton, too. I chose his essay because it was awful (one has read assembly manuals from Taiwan with more verbal energy and punch), but not egregiously so. "Egreegious"--ex gregis--means standing out from the herd." But how, in a flock of bleating sheep like the contributors to PMLA, like the current downs of the academic circus, do you single out one?

The answer is, you can't.

Here, from the March 1995 issue of Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, is a guy named Mark Jeffreys on lyric poetry: "I argue that the act of identifying lyric as either an oppositional genre or a reactionary one encourages oversimplification of the term's history and criticism and desensitizes readers to the ideological diversity of texts identified as lyrical."

Does anybody know what that sentence is trying, poor wounded thing, to say? I do, but only because I read it as a version of Orwellian "Newspeak," the official language of 1984, a language whose purpose is not to convey, but to obscure information. In newspeak translation, jeffreys is perfectly clear: I don't know how to talk about lyric poetry. (But, God help me, I still like it).

One's heart goes out to Jeffreys as to the other victims of the present virus; but one cannot ignore that they are also infecting others--namely, the students they teach and the other folks who read sentences like the one I have quoted and assume that that's the way humans are supposed to talk. It isn't, you know.

One more bleat from the academic sheepfold. PMLA January 1995. Here's Gwen Bergner, a graduate student at Princeton, concluding her essay titled "Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks." Okay, the title alone is off-putting enough, especially if you've read Fanon's book, and know that he really doesn't care about "gender--the term hadn't gotten hot by then-but was a serious, maybe great man writing about racism and colonialism. That doesn't stop Bergner from rereading him as a proto--but, natch, failed--feminist, only awaiting her interpretation of his work to liberate him, with the truly dopey sentence, "The most important effect of conjoining postcolonial psychoanalysis and feminist psychoanalysis may well be to dear a space for black women as subjects in both discourses."

Basta! Gay identity, colonialism, post-colonialism, racism, multiculturalism, and for that matter rap music and the alarming rise of glue-sniffing-all these things are within the borders of what I regard as literary and cultural studies. But so are Chaucer, Shakespeare, Henry James, Faulkner, and Shelley and G.M. Hopkins. And most especially is the ability to write a sentence that says what it means, says no more than what it means, and, with passion, means what it means. "Let there be light." "I will not serve." "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." God at the creation, Satan at the mutiny, and W.C. Fields on his deathbed--these are all models of what language ought to be, and of what language is for.

And in the current academy, they might as well be the lost poets of Atlantis.

Quis custodiat ipsos custodes? asked Juvenal: "Who watches the watchmen?" And several centuries later, Milton wrote about selfish and self-serving pastors, "The sheep look up/and are not fed."

Whoever is a real teacher takes everything, including himself, seriously only in relation to his students. That's a paraphrase from Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, and for once Nietzsche was right.

How this situation came about I'm not sure--nobody is--although I think it may have been simply that the "profession of English" just got to be too lucrative and secure a gig for people who, in painful truth, had no other special ambitions or talents: it became a psychic resort colony for imagination failures. And being failures, of course, they had to find reasons to deny or deface the very idea of success. What ensued was virtually an all-out war against literature itself, carried on by professors of literature.

I won't bore you with the details of the warfare, but I will discuss the casualties, and the signal casualty is of course the idea of civilized literary discourse altogether. This is deadly serious, and this is an issue of trahison des clercs, essentially the trivializing of the tradition by the guardians of the tradition.

A graduate student of mine, a wonderfully nice and smart person, recently told her class--she was a teaching assistant for somebody else's course, thank God--that they shouldn't read The Great Gatsby because it was antifeminist, capitalist, and homophobic.

Well, sure: you can read Gatsby that way if you wish; and you can read King Lear as a howl of male dominance, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson as a whimper of female inadequacy. And all you miss in those readings is only the reasons for reading them in the first place. All you miss is the glamour of language, the impossible but true chance--and isn't this something like the grace of God?--that our words can lead us to better places than we now inhabit. All that is lost is poetry.

There are universities that still value the impossible task of teaching literature, of showing kids how to gasp--but gasp articulately--at the caught ball, the complete couplet, the perfect diminished fifth, and the well-turned tale. But they are few, and their number shrinks, and their troops dwindle.

The simple fact is that the serious reading of literature can probably not much longer survive the university: The technophiles and trenderasts of PMLA have, by and large, taken over.

So what's left? A dream, maybe: the dream that we could all read this great stuff--homer to William S. Burroughs--and agree that it was great stuff, and talk to one another about why it was great' stuff, and how we could use it to make our own lives just a little more human. A dream of the civilized tradition (which includes all the darkness you can imagine). A dream that language, rightly used, could make us right.

The enterprise continues, of course: in the journals, in the newspapers, in the absurd, glorious act of writing itself. But not, or not much longer, I think, in our universities. Those places have been given over to the barbarians, and my guess is that they're here to stay for some time.