Reconnecting with Literary Culture

Reconnecting with Literary CultureAuthor(s): Gerald GillespieSource: Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1995), pp. 123-129Published by: Penn State University Press on behalf of the Pacific Ancient and Modern LanguageAssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1316824 .

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Reconnecting with Literary Culture Gerald Gillespie Stanford University

In re-engaging the question posed in this forum, I am mindful of words I copied decades ago onto a 3-by-5 card from some now lost magazine:

Would that I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repeti- tion, not an utterance that has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.

As my frayed card still tells me, this oddly familiar thought is not a copycat insight by a Derrida disciple, but the lament of the Egyptian scribe Khakheperresenb writing around 2000 B.C. Meanwhile we have garnered innumerable examples of reciprocities between critical theories and literary texts; they are especially salient at major historical turnings. For instance, when Aristotle's Poetics was rediscovered in the Renaissance, Europe already had a flourishing high tradition of narrative. The finest writers soon found themselves caught between the elegant romance and newer imperatives supposedly based on the epic and much touted by theoreticians of the neoclassical persuasion. A sophisticated symposium on all the issues which had ripened by the late Renaissance occupies much of the end of Quixote, Part I. It reads virtually as if Cervantes wished to provide us with a clinical demon- stration of how bouts of theory always get built into literary discourses and practices. In the process, pains and dislocations are suffered, ben- efits are gleaned, and supersessions occur. Even Nietzsche's essay on The Advantage and Disadvantage of History is, in effect, now part of our literary history in the Western tradition.

Thus it is perfectly normal that, after having experienced so considerable a disconnection between theory and literary culture over the past twenty years, we are taking stock of this immediate past. There is a widespread feeling among cognoscenti in the land that such trends as postmodernism, poststructuralism, and other posts have peaked out, and that many of our students are now sifting through the debris of collapsed temples for souvenirs. If competent social scientists venture the needed studies of our particular fields as the century ends, they will find plenty of inside documentation in such recent collections as Build- ing a Profession, edited by Lionel Gossman and Mihai Spariosu.

123



124 Gerald Gillespie

As a card-carrying comparatist, I would like to focus on some symptomatic aspects of the widely perceived emergence of the imper- ious goddess Theory (spelled with a capital T) out of the jovial brain of Comparative Literature since the late 1960s. I take my stand as an international comparatist conscious that I am working inside compli- cated cultural flows and interchanges on the global plane. When I resituate things in this context, the highly tilted models and concepts of Theory promoted inside specific countries such as the United States take on quite a different complexion from that which their proponents often presume or assert. The very humbling lesson the international comparatist quickly learns is that most of his theorizing colleagues propound ideas quite deeply embedded in their native culture or traded principally with one or two close-cousin cultures, as if these ideas were universals-against the ample evidence to the contrary advanced by literary historians such as Earl Miner in his book Compar- ative Poetics.

Even if we limit our view to the shifting cultural streams within the North American sub-system, we detect the penchant of many in the host of Theory to restrict their and everybody's mode of universalizing. Closer inspection reveals how culture-bound, narrow, and highly spe- cialized their discourse so often is. For one thing-with some happier exceptions (e.g., certain New Historians)-too many theoreticians ex- hibit the urge to block out huge areas of specific, relevant knowledge about the constant interaction in their home world or chosen world among the discourses of philosophy, science, religion, politics, psychol- ogy, the fine arts, literature-my list is by no means exhaustive. Many construct their theory program on nothing more than exaggerated truisms which, in a vacuum, they elevate to the glamorous status of ruling principles. Illustrative is the existence of whole critical schools which swear by one dimension of a textual system: critics who beat the drum for the author, for the text, for the reader as determinant, or for writing in its own right, or for a principle such as narrativity, and so forth. While we do indeed gain many stimulating readings out of these distortions, the intelligent public's cumulative, commonsensical grasp of the bigger system and its functioning parts is today a surer guide. I believe this rift or discrepancy has helped bring about a discrediting of our kind of capital-T Theory in the academy at large. In the rawest pragmatic terms, this period of hypertrophy, for all its undeniable interest, has meant concomitantly the exclusion of considerable numbers of cultural interpreters who otherwise might have practiced the craft of criticism and cultivated a stronger linkage between the academy and the reading public.



Reconnecting with Literary Culture 125

What sense then does it make when Theory, that is, rebaptized literary theory, branches off to constitute itself as an independent enterprise at our universities in the 1990s, or what does the statement mean that a particular act of critical appreciation is "undertheorized," if the theories in question are not worthy of the noble appellation "theory" in the first place? I have taken note of the increase in disdainful remarks by colleagues in the social sciences into whose domains we comparatists have been expanding, sometimes with finesse, but more often clumsily. It has been a great romp, and some good has accrued to us because of it. But by now our confreres in the social sciences have thoroughly digested the arguments made by quite a few of my fellows who belong in the wing of critical nihilism or who are convinced literature no longer constitutes the core of our discipline. They read or hear of such statements as the new Bernheimer Report which, although it is not an official position adopted by American comparatists, appears to indicate that a whole professional group like the members of ACLA have abandoned literature as their central object of study. And our confreres begin to pay us the unwanted compliment of taking us at our supposed word and of suggesting to our university administrators that, (a) if Comparative Literature no longer pursues literature as its primary object of investigation and (b) if Comparative Literature is actually doing social science, universities can abolish it and turn its tasks over to other standing departments.

I am not avoiding the well-known fact that certain patterns appear in literary theory as a consequence of the reciprocal movement in fields or that reciprocal fructifying cooptations occur. Nor am I ignoring the role felicitous misunderstandings can play in generating new energies in literary criticism. These events eventually appear as self-exculpatory unfoldings of the cultural system in some future pages of its ever being revised literary history. A generous view of the imperialist impulses in many current theory clusters at American universities could be that the programmatic will to disrupt other scholars' enterprises reflects not simply group or generational aggrandisement. Rather, as so many self-labelled advocates of the generous view hold, their activity might indeed express an epochal rupture in the culture, the main outline of which will gradually come to be recognized. An analogue would be the well-known occurrences of epochal breaks in the generic and commu- nication media of a culture, modifying or inflecting the ways that something persistent in the human core, such as our need for stories, finds its outlet.

To avoid invidious comparisons, I shall not name specific groups but I am speaking of the extent to which, at the expense of high-level work,




certain theory clusters at American universities (a) either seriously lack, or cut themselves off from, discursive and critical capacity, and (b) promote too many activities legitimately suspect as not being serious theorizing. Under discursive and critical capacity in Comparative Lit- erature, I understand the mobilization of the apposite knowledge and tools in order to cope with the following four major tasks and to interrelate these tasks so that the pursuit of one enhances the pursuit of the others. One task is to read intelligently the texts in a main language of the culture, and in several if the culture has more than one main language, and to recognize the presence of subtexts. A second task is to examine how literary life interacts with that of the other arts. A third is to read intelligently the assimilated texts which have been introduced over time from related or remoter cultures and occupy variant positions of authority and centrality in the host literature. A fourth is to identify and read key texts which, because of our cultural background, we experience (or at an earlier moment our more immediate antecedents experienced) as foreign and/or remote. To the degree possible, we should approach these in the original language of expression, but aspects of their movement over various boundaries may make attention to translated versions especially pertinent. The recognition of characteristics of language, cultural framing, discursive systems, inter- ferences, and so forth will build our capacity as comparatists. It is the combination of all these tasks that gradually alters the conceptual framework of Comparative Literature.

To suggest that theory buffs in North America avoid what sound distressingly like hard work would be cavalier. Rather, it was the breakdown of training several decades ago that pushed many into needing Theory as a substitute for actual cultural knowledge. The desire for capacity has long been on the scene and is a natural response to the evolution of cultural systems in our modem communications revolution. Henry Remak's thumbnail definition of my field's cross- cultural and interdisciplinary dimensions, first given some thirty years ago, specified the requirement of the kinds of knowledge sketched above, and so it is worthwhile repeating his words here:

Comparative Literature is the study of literature beyond the con- fines of one particular country, and the study of the relationships between literature on the one hand and other areas of knowledge and belief, such as the arts (e.g., painting, sculpture, architecture, music), philosophy, history, the social sciences (e.g., politics, eco- nomics, sociology), the sciences, religion, etc., on the other. In brief, it is the comparison of one literature with another or others, and the comparison with other spheres of human expression. (Remak, 1971)




What has gone so wrong then after this virtual invitation to develop a theory wing for the field so as to coordinate all the phenomena we might potentially consider when dealing with texts? Before I name some spurious claims to theorizing, I want to say up front that, by discipline, "pure" theorizing pertains to philosophy. In Language, Thought, and Logic, John Ellis has shown how grievously flawed the main line of critical theory of the sixties, seventies, and eighties are with respect to any sound philosophic norms; so that I can point you to his exposition. I turn now to my highly abbreviated illustration of the "impure" theorizing with which our ivy halls resound and for reasons of space confine myself to three general types: a) tortured truisms, b) sectarian propagandas, and c) performative rituals.

I have already alluded to the self-evidence of truisms--such bro- mides as that misprisions become part of the cultural story, that audi- ences, authors, and works are factors in the life of literature, that assiduous critics can mine various codings and semantic nuggets from texts, and that interpretation doubles and redoubles upon itself in growth rings. We can move on to sectarian propagandas, which often come on stage draped in the respectable garb of that most elevated abstraction, a world view. The Marxian world view is so desirous of maintaining its place of honor in the American academy that it has been willing to borrow others' stylish attributes--its underdrawers from somatic criticism, its knitted vest from Freudianism, its powdered wig from deconstruction, and so forth. The insatiable American academy nowadays choses cafeteria-style from a plethora of sociolects redubbed as theory, and many of these groupie trends behave just as eclectically as more sweeping world views on their march through many decades or centuries. For instance, feminist theory nowadays latches onto al- most anything that passes in the cultural stream. Thereby "it" has become a plurality of arguments, and we now witness sectarian divi- sions within "it" not so unlike theological disputes of the past. This kind of energetic bricolage, however, may evidence a drive as powerful as the Marxian persuasion to push out a supposed ruling super-discourse and to substitute something in place of every one of its supposed constituent elements. Thus non-feminist critics are well-advised to track the latest trends. They will garner valuable lessons from substan- tial feminist discourse, from the work of meticulous literary analysts like Bonnie K. Scott delving into Joyce or of insightful social philoso- phers like Elizabeth Fox-Genovese interrogating the heritage of Euro- pean and Euroamerican "individualism." They can also benefit by learning from intellectual historians about earlier roots of critical ideas that pose as new but have reverend ancestry--e.g., somatic theories in




Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic medicine and anthropol- ogy.

My third category, performative rituals, cannot be neatly disentan- gled from the foregoing. We are all familiar with journal pieces that say to us very little about works, authors, or their times, although the titles may lead us to consult them for such insights. Instead these pieces mainly want to tell us news such as I summarize illustratively in the following cameos: "Wee, look at me; I'm doing a Foulcauldian analysis of the motif of blood revenge in the American western"; or, "How thrilling, gang, I'm doing a neo-Marxian variation on a Derridean deconstruction of Proust's narrative voice in the famous overture pas- sages"; or, "My pot-pourri tirade as an authentic tribesman from the Isle of Mull expresses my people's anger at the American System's complicity in British occupation since the unification of Scotland and England predating the American Revolution"; and so forth. Not a few observors of the Theory universe have noted that the general deconstructivist habits are now being vigorously recycled into social protest channels under the guise of "culture studies." This mysterious principle of academic conservation of energy operates so as to justify bringing on board not mainly creative intellectuals who construe, test, and "apply" theories, but performers who act out supposed "represen- tation" of a myriad of population groups (according to variegated criteria such as ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, etc.). Admin- istrators on the make at every level have cottoned onto this situation because it has allowed them to convert the humanities into a kind of political redistribution scheme and to gain manoeuvre room for their own career-enhancing social manipulation of institutions; by comparison, the natural sciences are frustratingly unfruitful for such games. In California, this fact has been reflected in a steady stream of legislation that "exempts" the hard fields from various redistributive quotas which are imposed on the soft fields in the state university system. There is nothing irrational in fear that, if Comparative Literature groups hire too many performer representatives, the field--any distinct identity for it--will disappear into the foggy lower tier of American Studies pro- grams. Neither subservience to local cultural passions nor charisma can ever replace informed command of the variety of specific cultural knowledge on which in days of old Comparative Literature depended.

Of course, chroniclers of critical theory catch on to the tricks of the trade, and soon the tables are turned, Willy-nilly a formidable battery of deconstructors of the deconstructors has trained its learning onto the weak target which just yesterday seemed the invincible Maginot line of the antinomian empire. In Against Deconstruction, John Ellis has dis-




mantled the claims associated with this august complex. In Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress, Lobomr Doleel has reminded us that there are powerful, alternate critical traditions in Europe and the West- ern Hemisphere more than worthy to rival the recycled extreme idealist thinking which has resurfaced in the second half of the twentieth century. Itamar Even-Zohar has outlined the possibility of a systemic empirical analysis that acknowledges the relative position of the ob- servers who observe and who in some degree also affect the dynamics of actual literary cultures, cultures which from time to time affect one another. Unhappy with pronouncements by the Bernheimer commit- tee, large numbers of respected scholars and critics in ACLA have declared their firm intention, as informed participants, to devote themselves to studies which concentrate on the literariness of texts. There is an uneasy dialogue within the ranks of American comparatists today.

Works Cited

Bernheimer, Charles et al. "A Report to the ACLA: Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century." ACLA BULLETIN 25:1 (Fall-Winter 1994): 14-22.

Dolezel, Lubomr. Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Ellis, John M. Against Deconstruction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Language, Thought, and Logic. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993.

Even-Zohar, Itamar. Polysystem Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. (=Poetics Today 11: 1 [1990].)

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Gossman, Lionel and Spariosu, Mihai. Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the Beginnings of Comparative Literature in the United States. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Remak, Henry. "Comparative Literature: Its Definition and Function." In Com- parative Literature: Method and Perspective, ed. Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1961; 1971. 1-57.

Scott, Bonnie K. Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.



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Reconnecting with Literary Culture