The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age.

ACCORDING TO Robert Alter, who is a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, "litcrature, even as it fosters innovation, is an essentially conservative institution. In contrast to the evolution of technology, in which each subsequent stage makes previous stages obsolete . . . each stage of literature incorporates the previous stages, the impulse of literary creation being constantly self-recapitulative." What is more: "Literary fashion, generic constraints, cultural assumptions, manifestly change ftom era to era, but literary tradition constitutes itself as a transhistorical human community." No wonder, then, that literature is under attack-and has been for twenty years-by an assortment of "critical" schools whose primary interest is to demonstrate that the

resumed object of their attentions doesn't exist at all, and never has, To the serious writer of the present day, it must seem more and more as if the world is divided into two broad classes: those who can't read, and those who can but don't wish to. Although the situation calls into question the identity of the audience to which Alter's book is addressed, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (Simon & Schuster, $18.95) is probably more than a pleasurable exercise in futility. If it is true that, as has been recently suggested, the best writers have historically been political conservatives, perhaps to that extent they have been, and remain, historical pessimists as well.

A salient characteristic of the Left is its impatience with and, at times, its denial of the givens of human existence as they are expressed in politics-and in art. Thus it is scarcely surprising that, as Alter remarks, "The very notion that literature is severed ftom reality because it is composed of conventions, both linguistic and literary, is an unexamined dogma of both Structuralist and post-Structuralist. thought." Literature, in this view, is a bourgeois artifact created out of a bourgeois idea of reality and at a double remove from the world as it is actually constituted. It is also, by extension, a form of bourgeois propaganda, indistinguishable finally ftom a newspaper editorial or a speech by Richard Nixon; and therefore it can-and should -be read as one reads the daily newspaper, including the advertising copy inside it. For the ideological mind, this has become so fixed and pervasive a feature of modern intellectual life that what Alter calls "the high fun of literary reading which does not allow us to settle on stable ground that offers a single unambiguous perspective, like the political slant of newspaper headlines," is unappreciated; in fact, it is totally alien. As nature abhors a vacuum, so ideology abhors the aradox and ambiguity, the combination of the centripetal and the centrifugal, that creates "the lovely tension between structure and openness [that] is one of the distinctive, abiding pleasures of the experience of reading imaginative literature." The ideologue, in other words, abhors a poet. Only a man like Daniel Ortega could have written a line like, "The victory belongs to love."

Quite sensibly, then, the ideologue does not read poets-among whom I include Austen, Tolstoy, Ford Madox Ford, and Faulkner as surely as I do Dante, Keats, Eliot, and Frost. Less sensibly, he continues to read-and, worse, to write-about them. Worse still, the academic ideologue-and most literary critics today belong to this class, which H. L. Mencken in the 1920s dismissed with the observation that a pedagogue must have his theories as a dog has his fleas-insists upon infecting his students with his own .anti-literary prejudices. "I strongly suspect," Mr. Alter writes, "that many young people now earning undergraduate degrees in English or French at our most prestigious institutions have read two or three pages of Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva for every page of George Eliot or Stcndbal." No one with even an offhand acquaintance with what transpires in departments of English, here and abroad, these days has much reason to doubt the general accuracy of that statement, or of the added remark that "literature faculties may be increasingly populated with scholars who don't particularly like literature."

Unfortunately, it is not only ideologues who lack the patience and understanding for poetry as it is embodied in imaginative prose literature, let alone verse (let alone particularly modern verse). "The language of literature," Alter explains, abundantfy draws on ordinary language and achieves its coherences through operations that are sometimes instructively analogous to those of ordinary language, but it carries them to a higher exponential power, transmits through them messages of a different order. To read this language adequately requires a prehensile activity of the mind on the details of the text as it unfolds, a willingness to entertain multiple and unresolved meanings, an openness to the pleasures in the sound and look and combination of the words. All three of these capacities are bound to grow the more one reads, and that is probably why at the moment they are in a general state of decay. . . . And precisely because so many of our reading habits these days are acquired through exposure to thinner, more univocal, less complexly pleasurable uses of language, we need to understand more clearly the inflections and the underlying patterns of thc special language of literature. The final sentence, written in the era of Alice Walker and Bobbie Ann Mason, Spy magazine and the poetry of Mrs. Daniel Ortega, is a gem of understatement that the wit of Calvin Coolidge would have had to struggle to transcend.

The Pleasures of Reading could with nearly equal plausibility have been entitled How to Think about Writing Imaginative Literature. Alter's book can be turned inside out, like one of those handsome reversible jackets Abercrombie & Fitch used to make. At times the novelist, reading it, is likely to discover himself in a position analagous to that of M. Jourdain, impressed to discover that what he has been writing all these years really are novels. But reany, The Pleasures of Reading seems to me to have been written for the small, almost undiscoverable remnant: those people who -congenital misfits in the age of video TV and the Sony Walkman-hunger after the printed word as for the bread of life, realizing perhaps that, after all, the two amount to somewhat of the same thing.