A.
“What is literature” yet once again?
The
“world of literature” sounds like an appealingly solid and resonant phrase
– this morning it returned exactly 101 million “hits” on the Internet --
primly suited to be a title for a thick anthology or an educational series on
public radio and television. But under close scrutiny, it readily turns
problematic, fractious, elusive, perhaps evanescent. Neither of the two terms it
links together will hold still firmly enough to anchor the other. To ask such
mundane questions as what and where this “world” might be, what happens in
it, how one gets there and who can (or cannot), is prone to feel petulant if not
petty. Yet failing or refusing to ask affords no satisfaction either, because
“literature” itself perennially challenges us to do so.
And
thus the hunt sporadically sallies forth after “a definition of literature”.
The direct question “what is literature?” returns at this moment 36,900 hits,
not just invocations of such luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre, René Wellek and
Austin Warren, Terry Eagleton, and Jonathan Culler, but perplexed or rueful
probes from seemingly ordinary respondents who deal with “literature” in
some practical or pragmatic way, mostly as teachers; and taken together, they
sound anything but reassuring, e.g.:
No
one has successfully defined literature in such a way that it accounts for the
complexities of language and the wide variety of written texts (Barry Laga)
Literature
is one of those things that cannot be easily defined, explained, or even
recognized. (Kelsey Brown)
When
you asked this question, panic ran through my mind. (Miriam
Schacht)
I
sure as hell don’t know (Angelfire)
A
great excuse to drink beer (Neal
Pollack)
If
there be a consensus among these voices, it should pronounce that no consensus
can be attained if our definition requires “literature” to be just one thing:
a province and provenance of culture, a social institution, a record of human
history, a set of valued texts, the products of acknowledged authors, an
academic field, an educational subject matter… All these cannot be so readily
steeple-chased into one converging corral, since what they have in common after
all is most essentially that they can apply
to “literature”, which returns the hunt to its starting gate.
Convoking
“literary criticism” to promulgate a definition, which might seem cogent
enough at first glance, may actually blur the perimeters of the hunt. All the
definitions I have just enumerated can be applied to that field of endeavour as
well; and in any event, much of it does not expressly address the question
“what is literature”. Instead, some work or author is routinely taken as an
already certified instance to pursue the agenda of describing its qualities, and
ultimately (at least) implying whether or not a heading or a reading is
worthwhile. These methods and aims foreseeably trigger dispersions into which
works the critic judges, say, “beautiful”, “refined”, sophisticated”,
“edifying”, “appealing”, “entertaining”, “delightful”….
Literary works that are incontrovertibly just the opposite can be glibly ignored
or excluded.
Not
being myself a “literature person” (a common if not mildly comical label in
academia) but a “text linguist” and a “discourse analyst” (alien labels
in much of academia until recently), my own point of departure has
matter-of-factly been begin a definition by accepting that “literature” is
discourse, and “literary criticism” is discourse about discourse (or
“meta-discourse” if you will). From there I have contended that “literature”
is controlled by a principle I elected to call alternativity:
literature is a mode of discourse authorised to conceive and represent
alternative worlds, including whatever is accepted by some society and culture
as the “real world”, provided it too is treated as one alternative among
others. “Literature” is therefore not just about “what is, full stop, but what could
be or what, if it is indeed, could be
otherwise. Literature complements whatever is taken by some society or group
as the “real world” through navigating, by virtue of its own freedoms,
within the unbounded spaces such a “reality” overlooks, marginalises,
conceals, denies…and thus offers to share or loan out some of its freedoms to
authors and audiences, without dictating or pre-empting the means or
consequences. Literary authors need not bow to commonplace obligations to
“tell the truth”, nor to social sanctions for not doing so, despite periodic
and wilful misunderstandings of this point. Rather, they strive to represent
something that is true of the human situation in some larger or deeper sense,
insofar as language can empower them.
“Poetry”
focuses the principle of alternativity upon language itself as a system of
resources, both for its own materials (say, combinations of sounds) and for its
significations (say, metaphors). This definition might help to elucidate why
poetry has been more consciously (or self- consciously) set apart from other
modes of discourse, whereas literature has genially shaded over into the
discourses of philosophy, history, folklore,
religion, and so on, where the distinctions are more in intent and effect
(e.g., to impose one sole or “true” alternative) than in language as such.
If applied circumspectly, the same definition might also indicate why poetry is
far more easily ranked into “great successes” versus “dismal failures”,
even when the evidence may consist of short texts. If we are to luxuriate in
Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley, it appears we must cringe at William
MacGonagal, Thomas Holley Chivers, and James
McIntyre.
Still,
the accumulation of literary and poetic works since antiquity suggests that
humans may regard expansive freedoms with a barely assuageable ambivalence.
Otherwise, we could be hart put to account for the beguiling but illusive
impulse of authors to imitate each other, and the concern in literary criticism
for delimiting “genres”, “styles”, “conventions”, or even “rules”.
To us today, attempts to legislate what literature and poetry must be, from the
top down, seem foredoomed to fall short of actual practice. Few, I suspect,
still draw their techniques from Aristotle’s Poetics, Horace’s Ars poetica (long
an alluring model), Sturluson’s Skáldskaparmál,
or
These
definitions I propose are not conceived to be evaluative, nor to sponsor the
gate-keeping (though window-shopping) balustrades between “good” versus
“bad” or “high” versus “low” literature, and their covey of kindred
polarities. They merely predict that some works of all these types are and have been with us all along; and that
audiences will naturally disagree when applying such labels. More dynamically,
they predict that the “genres” and “styles” of literature subsist in
evolution and transition; wherever, say, Romanticism yielded to Realism, both
could impinge upon perceptions and interpretations of “reality”.
B.
Alternative realities of the third kind
For
digging into such issues, the discourse analyst has access to a “third kind”
of realities, which are the discourses themselves – what was “really” said.
For our data base, we can choose between small samples from a large group, or
between large samples from a small group. Here I chose the latter, attentively
reading and analysing a spectrum of current works of established “literary
critics” in some depth with the goal of synthesizing a book-length report. In
this project I was fortunate to obtain a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation for 1984-85, and set about the labours that would eventually become a
book from a loyal and friendly publisher, simply named Critical
Discourse,1 perhaps a strangely unadorned title for addressing a
field emblazoned with more bathetic titles like Criticism
in the Wilderness, A Map of Misreading,
or Saving the Text.
I
selected works of “criticism” – or “secondary literature” in German
parlance, or again “literary theory”, each term imbued with its own
implications – whilst mentally keeping basic terms like “read” and
“analyse” in bracketed quotes to remind me not to suppose I could slickly
take their meanings for granted. After all, I was no ordinary or intended “reader”,
and my motives and goals were correspondingly unorthodox. So also were my
methods of “analysis”: arranging authentic passages from works of each
“critic” or theorist” into a temperately seamless narrative whilst trying
to preserve the original wording. Doing so might secure me against the routine
complaints about over-relying on my own interpreting and inferring; and might
suspend the accountability to read the himalayan accretion of “tertiary
literature” of criticism about criticism, plus further spirals engendered by
the self-indulgent or careerist reciprocity in the wildering safari parks of
Publish-Or-Perish.
Some
of my “critics” were conspicuous targets, such as René Wellek and Austin
Warren, Northrop Frye, E.D. Hirsch, and Kate Millet, and assuredly Leslie
Fielder. Some were singled out to represent contrasting approaches within the
ostensibly same theoretical region, such as the “psychoanalytic” critics
Norman Holland, David Bleich, and Bernard Paris; the “reader response”,
“reception aesthetics”, or “Konstanz” critics Wolfgang Iser and Hans
Robert Jauss; and the uncanny “Yale school” of (perhaps??)
“deconstructionist” critics – soon to undergo a quite literal “dissémination”
– Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman, plus that canny Cornell
chaperone of deconstruction, Jonathan Culler.
My
selection was in part opportunistic, though not adventitious. I had completed my
PhD and the
The
works of my selected “critics” have been more or less consistently
classified under the heading “literary theory”, which had long been a
pretermission in “Departments or Institutes of Language and Literature” (and
in many still is), but was now proffering star-salaried bully pulpits. At its
best, I imagined, it might be a renewed and sustained meditation upon the
essentials of “literariness” in its widest linguistic, cognitive, and social
contexts, and thus also upon the hitherto mainly implicit and diversiform
enterprise of literary criticism. At its worst, it might be a faddish
metamorphosis or at least camouflage whereby one conventional “literary critic”
is gussied up in a fresh raiment of high-flying, jargonising authority. Many
degrees beckon in between these extremes, the more so as many such
“theorists” inaugurated their careers with the conventional dissertations,
theses, and “scholarly books” exacted for the credentials of “serious
academics” by a volatile and somewhat bollixed generation gap inside the
academies themselves.
The
prospect of intimating where my own analysis might have led me to position these
“literary theorists” was a challenging one. None of my chapters turned out
as what journalist call “puff pieces”, of which a bountiful crop could, I
suspect, be reaped at, say, the annual Post-Yuletide Beanos of the MLA (Mutual
Literary Adoration) Society. I construed my own consignment as reporting what I
found in the grainy texture of these written discourses, including
overstatements, non-sequiturs, self-contradictions, and so forth, though I
generally allowed myself my own light-hearted and sometimes puckish tone as a
foil to the gauze of solemnity cloaking much of what I read.
All
things considered, I thought it politic to ask for feedback. The critics/theorists
were all still alive at the time I was working (though Austin Warren passed away
in 1986), and I tried to submit what I had written in case they cared to comment
or demur, which certainly occasioned some skittish ups and downs.
On
the down side, Hirsch and Bleich (utterly unlike each other as they were)
ignored my chapter, though we had gotten on genially enough in personal
conversations before then. I couldn’t reach Millet at all, who, unbeknownst to
me, was then in the throes of what she would later denominate a “loony-bin
trip”. Frye dourly told me he had “said all he was going to say” about
comments upon his work. Bloom murmured, in his sepulchral voice, that whatever
he might say would not “make me like him any better”. Hartman told me, in a
contrastingly chirpy voice, that he “never comes clean”, so I went back to
my chapter to check, and, sure enough, he seemed to have disappeared; I started
over and finally uncovered (at least to Culler’s subsequently declared
satisfaction) his centre of gravity in a submerged personal theology. Culler
himself expressed objections to specific formulations, which I promptly modified
to accommodate him.
More
on the up side, Wellek sent me an urbane and affable commentary, and mentioned
some points where he did not agree with Warren.2 Iser seemed
gratified at my pointing out how far his “implied reader”, like himself,
relishes innovative (and untypical) authors like Bunyan and Becket.3
Jauss said I had “understood him so well that I raised problems he himself has
attended to in his more recent work”.
Fiedler’s
response intrigued me in particular. He affirmed that “no one had ever take
quite such a close look at what I have written”; and that my work was “the
fullest and fairest” of his then current crop of works he’d received about
him. I had not written – though it was true enough – that reading Fiedler
was the most diverting (fun, in fact, a shtik naches), appealing, and imposing
all at once, whereas I had to wonder why anyone being paid less than I was to do
so would slog through, say, Saving the
Text. Yet I had had to struggle and scramble at times to take Fiedler on his
own terms, which is more difficult than it might sound for a man who whose own
person(s) and persona(e) are so disarmingly omnipresent in everything he has
written (and spoken). If, as W.H.
Auden remarked, W.B. Yeats “became his admirers”, Fiedler’s admirers may
feel a sensation, upon contact, of becoming
Fiedler (on one of his serial incarnations): even if you don’t agree with him,
you are animated, for the nonce, to take on his lines of exposition and argument
in order to accompany his intellectual sallies, however quixotic (in the
originary and eponymous sense of Cervantes), and however
disruptively unwelcome the darkness he has brought to light may have
seemed for American “letters” and for America as the vertiginously ambiguous
– and perhaps undiscoverable – country he has revealed it to be.
Most
fundamentally, then, his modest aspiration to “read his country’s books”
was, and has remained, de facto, the task of reading
I
confess I a twinge of poignant
bemusement facing this self-image of a man who was not even “typical” of my
little redl
of Jewish-American(ised) shriftshteler-critics: besides Fiedler, there
were Bleich, Paris, Bloom, and Hartman – not a bad plurality of 5 (out of 17)
in my group; nor did he seem really typical of the far-flung makhne of
distinguished Jewish
writers in America, arrestingly farsheyden
among themselves in any case; nor again of his own facetious
yet touching prototype Louis
Himmelfarb, dubbed the “Last Jew in America”.
Contrasting
some polarities among my just-cited critics may clarify my conjectures. Fiedler’s
own polarities seem disconcertingly blurry: his central poles extend across “light”
versus “dark”;
“dream” versus “nightmare”;
“innocence” versus “guilt”;
and “salvation”
versus “damnation”.
American literature seems foredoomed to strive, or at least hope, for the former
of each, and yet fall (not so unwilling) victim to the latter. Such is the warp
and woof so masterfully unravelled and re-ravelled in Love and Death in the American Novel.
In
Bloom’s singulary (and solitary) world, God and the Devil are far from dead,
though they are somewhat fobbed off into recondite or humanoid cameos: we read
that “the candle of the Imagination as God” may yet “light the dark”;
that Milton was the “god” or “sub-god”, “the awesome blind ancestral
bard”; and that his Satan was the “archetype of the modern poet at his
strongest”
Hartman’s
world, in the discourses I studied, certainly proffers no “map” like Bloom’s,
though other resemblances impend. “Poetry”, we are enlightened (or is it
endarkened?) to read, is a “working through of voices, residues as explicit
and identifiable as the usurping passage from Milton, or as cryptically mnemonic
as rhythm and dream phrase”.10 Derrida is hailed for a
“deconstruction” that “reveals” the “wrong turn, at once rhetorical
and conceptual”, “being taken, not only against the will of the author,
since it is pre-inscribed in language, but because any author who stands in that
turn cannot express” the “experience” of “impersonification, except by
words that sound, willy-nilly, mystical, like a displaced or negative theology”.11
Wordsworth is tapped for the testimony that “imagination” yields to
“quotation”, so that “an unmediated psychic event turns out to be a
mediated text: words made of stronger words”.12 The poet's
“voice” is set against “his experience” of “mutterings, sobbings,
yellings, and ghostly blowing echoes”.13 The divine is called to
witness as well: “the Logos dwells with God and when it comes to men is not
understood”.14 Wordsworth himself “sought to convert a divine or
willful imperative into a responsive or timely utterance”, but “utterance
itself” “blocks or delays the wish or alters it”.15 Moreover,
“the fiat is waylaid on its way to utterance because the poet is anxious lest
he speak the opposite of a creating word”.16 No wonder Wordsworth’s
poetry seems often either flat or uneven; the wonder is he managed to
“utter” anything at all beset by so much static interference.
“Dreams”
ride along too, when the “frame” of “writing” is compared to the
“voices that enter through dreams and psychotic states”.17 Now,
the witnesses are “Lacan and Derrida”, who “derived” their
“indeterminacy principle” “from dream logic and literary language”.18.
Also, “Freud's genial analysis of the latent content of dreams” is deemed a
“persuasive mode of allegoresis”; his “Eros and Thanatos are drives with
the names of gods”.19
Though
I found no mentions of “nightmare”,
nor of “guilt” and “innocence”,
the skies look grimly and threaten present blusters. Feeling reassured
is temerarious when you have been alerted that “returning
to a larger and darker view of art as mental charm, war, and purgation” may
prescribe a “terrorist style” in which “humanism” is “attacked by name”.20
Or incited to adjudge whether “art constitutes a region” “in which the
human desire for omnipotence is still in force, but as a counterneurosis”.21
In Bleich’s Subjective Criticism, the polarities constitute an essentialist movement
variously (though maybe just synonymously) termed toward “communal” from
“individual”;
toward “consensus”
(or “collectivity”) from “diversity”; and toward “public reality”
(or “mutuality”)
from “private reality”. To shepherd this movement toward authentic “knowledge”,
Bleich himself portends to expound nothing less than “new conceptions of the
act of interpretation, the act of reading, and the pedagogy of language and
literature”.22 The optimism of this secular salvation seems oceans
away from Fiedler, as some further frequencies again attest: I found only
cursory mentions of “dream” and “guilt” in Bleich’s discourse, and
none at all of “nightmare”
or “innocence”, much less “salvation”
and “damnation”.
For
Paris
himself has applied these notions to literary authors and their characters, but
not to other critics, which he once told me would be “unseemly”. Nonetheless,
we could plausibly venture that they are primarily expansive types from the exigencies of their calling and its institutional
ambience. Once ascended to the lecture platform (literally or via the proxies of
publishing), they are conventionally expected to draw and please crowds with
such dodgy feats as materialising the “correct interpretation” that
generations of previous critics have unaccountably missed; knowing “what the
author meant” but didn’t (or couldn’t) say: adducing some fresh bit of
biographical evidence to substantiate one particular “reading” or
“intention” – all in all, as I once heard Robbe-Grillet tell us in a tone
of the gentlest irony imaginable, “un métier difficile”.
Among my gallery, Bloom has been the most strenuous artisan of all three
expansive solutions. One primeval three-tiered move in the works I analysed was
to frame his peremptory avowals as flatly inescapable, preferentially armoured
with the adverb “necessarily”, e.g.: “imagination's gift comes
necessarily from the perversity of the spirit”; “any critic necessarily
tropes” in “giving a reading of a specific poem”; and the poem “is
necessarily still further troped in any strong reading”.27
Discussion seems to be pre-emptively debarred, as are protests from any gentle
reader who never heard of “zimzum”,
“shevirath hakelim”, and “tikkun”, said by Bloom to constitute
“the best paradigm available for a study of the way poets war against one
another in the strife of Eternity that is poetic influence”;28 and
just being gentle should doom you a loser anyway in the crennelated grist-mill
of such “war” and “strife”.
Fiedler
too is expansive, deploying all three solutions, but thankfully without the
lowering, leaden apparatus Bloom has trundled hither and yon like a
lattice-worked casket of emulsified asphalt, as when he intoned that “the God
of poets is not Apollo, who lives in the rhythm of recurrence, but the bald
gnome Error, who lives at the back of a cave, and skulks forth only at irregular
intervals to feast upon the mighty dead, in the dark of the moon”.29
I can't imagine Fiedler writing this way unless he were spoofing, perhaps to ape
the portentous mouthings of his “Last
WASP in the World”. Nor can I picture him mounting the august(an) MLA dais in
the sombre garb of a Rabbi, which Jauss reported to me, in tones of blank
amazement, that Bloom had contrived to do.
All
I saw Fiedler vowing what is “necessarily” so was that “literature asserts”,
if “anything”, “the impossibility of unqualified assertion, the ambiguity
of all moral imperatives” (WL 129); “the burden of any system of morality
becomes finally irksome even to its most sincere advocates, since it necessarily
denies, represses, suffocates certain undying primal impulses” that “need
somehow to be expressed”.30 I shall return to this progress from
frank pessimism to guarded optimism later on.
Now
if, as I believe to have shown, Fielder may not appear “typical” so after
all, to me he does appear archetypal,
numinous even (or especially) when he may sound more darksome than luminous. At
the age of 34, he embarked “the discovery of America” – actually an
“Italian pilgrimage” – by sailing in the opposite direction from signore Cristoforo
Colombo of Genoa and, for “shipboard reading”, leaving behind Innocents Abroad in favour of The
Marble Faun. What he said of the “American artist” at the time seems signally revealing for himself as
well: “the end of the pilgrimage to Europe” “is the discovery of
With
his signature ambivalence, he acceded in Italy that he was “never able to
doubt that the portrait of America I find reflected here” “is a portrait of
my own America; unfair I may find it, even occasionally dishonest, but it never
seems to me the limning of someone else”.32 Only momentarily did he
ponder whether “there is only one
America”; on very the next page he grouped two into a favoured thematic
polarity: “if the mythic America has seemed for the Italians an inferno, it
has also seemed to them a symbol of salvation”.33 And as “for
most Italians, the voyage to America is a cinematic one”.34 Both
remarks seem to me trenchantly apt for many Americans too, ever more as their
realities grow starkly unbearable to confront.
Geographically at least, the young Fiedler was an Easterner (from
His
cultural analysis was not (in his words) merely “disturbing to good Montanans”
but downright infuriating to many not-so-good ones “who
have never read the Partisan Review – indeed by
some who, I suspect, do not read at all”.36 Here
was a whirlwind which, unlike the travails of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, was
unleashed all from his own breath.
He unceremoniously heard himself “reviled for putting in print my (I had
supposed) quite unmalicious remarks on the ‘Montana Face’” delimned
as “the outward symbol of “inarticulateness, the
starvation of sensibility and inhibition of expression.”37 It
looked “at first glance, reticent, sullen, weary, full of
self-sufficient stupidity; a little later simply
inarticulate, with all the dumb pathos of what cannot
declare itself: a face developed not for sociability or feeling, but for facing
into the weather.”38 He “felt a kind of innocence behind
it, but an innocence difficult to distinguish from simple ignorance.”38 This was, according to one anonymous
commentator on the Internet, “un essai qui heurte ses lecteurs de plein
fouet.” Indeed.
From the start, the Fiedlerian “Discovery of America” was arguably not merely allegorical more than
geographical, but devoid of and discernible point of departure or arrival: “America
is the land for which we can only set out”.39 As
a schoolboy, he was already prodded toward inner travel as he endured the
tutelage of “teachers from
the WASP world”, “suburban Gentile ladies” who “tried to teach me to
talk right” and thus “took my mother tongue away from
me”.40 His later vision of the role of “‘literature’”
“in English classes” suggests an ominous complicity (or duplicity?): “the
claim to full cultural American citizenship depends not just on speaking the
right dialect but on distinguishing, as the unlettered cannot, between what is
really ‘literature’ and junk, schlock, mere entertainment”.41
Such skills have been supposed to result from working through “a canon of OK
books, along with a normative or correct way of reading them: an official
interpretation, authorized by what-ever school of scholarship or criticism is
momentarily in the ascendant.”41
By
this stage of his voyage of discovery, he had undertaken an “advocacy” for “an approach
to literature” whereby critics can “speak for ourselves”, not “in the
name of some impersonal tradition”, to “the mass audience”, and perhaps
thereby assist in “easing” an “intolerable” “classroom situation”
and “joining together the sundered larger community”.42 Whereas
his status among “intellectuals” had rendered him “notoriously set apart
from the general public”, “living” “by different values and speaking a
different language”, he now sought “a sense of at-oneness” with “the
majority audience I was long taught to despise”.43 Within
his personal discovery of America, such might be either one more extension or
else an ultimate arrival. He might, to be sure, fall under Bloom’s censures:
“The rabblement, the barbarians have taken over the academy”; "the
battle is lost, these resentniks have destroyed the canon." 44
But then Bloom straightfacedly swore that “to read in the service of any
ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all” 44 – as if no
ideology were the basis for blitzing “rabblement” and “resentniks”.
Yet
after three decades in “English Departments”, I see compelling reason to
doubt they would be disposed to welcome Fiedler’s advocacy. The blooming
majority view is still to sustain an embattled bulwark for “high culture”.
If many academics would hesitate to say so in these terms, the perhaps because
“at a time when a good public image is essential for universities, English is
unable to explain itself in ways immediately intelligible to the outsider, is
notoriously riven with doubts and disagreements that prevent it from having a
shared sense of purpose”.45
Not
so the longest stretch of Fiedler’s voyage of discovery on the trails of Love
and Death in the American Novel. His notions of “high”
or “great” literature were explicit enough, but far from the fare of “English
classes”, even though revealingly consistent about “the critical
importance of childhood experiences”, whence America had already figured as
“a society whose values are largely set in boyhood”.46 Thus, the
“great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s
section of the library their level of sentimentality precisely that of a
preadolescent”; the “novelist” “compulsively” “returns to a limited
world of experience, usually associated with his childhood”; and “America”
is “a nation sustained by” “the dream of an escape from culture and a
renewal of youth”.47
Revealing too, geographical voyages of characters
and authors alike inhabit American novels: Huck with Jim on a raft, then with
Tom on a steamboat, then with both in a “noble big balloon” “with wings
and fans and all sorts of things”; Ishmael on a whaler; Kenyon, Hilda, and
Miriam in “old Rome”; Gordon Pym; Washington Irving touring the prairies;
Bill Dana before the mast; Mark Twain along the Mississippi and innocently
abroad; and many more. Besides, explorers who literally discovered
This manifest reconciliation with “Pop” marks a dramatic turning
point in his personal voyage of discovery. “Aesthetic” and “ethical”
“standards” become abruptly “irrelevant”, as do “probability and
rationality”.52 “Gifted oneiric writers” may have “no
understanding of human nature or of the functionings of society”; “nor does
it matter”, since “they move us viscerally rather than cerebrally.” 52
Sadly, I fear that the
Myself
struck dumb by this brutally literal end
of the very possibility of innocence – this unfettered perversion of
cataclysmic xenophobia turned backwards, this final jackbooted smashing and
stomping of the lamp beside the golden door, this startlingly daemonic breaking apart of the vessels
(“shevirath hakelim”)
contravening Rabbi Isaac Luria’s story of creation – brings agonisingly home to me what we have lost in the irrepressible,
unmistakeable, and courageous guiding and protesting elocution of Eliezar Aaron
Fiedler, the
“insatiable seeker and man of many voices” (to borrow his words).54
He
more than any other among my gallery of critics could be acknowledged, in all
respect and seriousness, to represent that thoroughly un-typical
“self-actualizing” person of “third force psychology”, who feels no
“inhibition” in “experiencing and expressing the real self”: such a one
“presses toward” “truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness”, “uniqueness,
perfection”, “justice, order”, “playfulness, self-sufficiency”, “
kindness, courage, honesty, love, unselfishness”.55 What he once
declared of “poets” has journeyed full circle back home to him: his
“life” “with his work” “makes up his total meaning”; and “a sense”
of that life” “will raise” “to higher power” “the larger meanings”
in “a whole body of work”.56
Notes
1.
Robert de Beaugrande, Critical Discourse
(Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1988).
3.
However, a study by a research group at the
4.
Leslie Fiedler, An End to Innocence (New York: Stein and Day, 1971 [originals
1948-55])m p. 93
5.
Ibid, p. xiii.
6.
Ibid., p. 100.
7.
Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp.
66 and 144ff; The Anxiety
of Influence: A Theory of Poetry ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1973),
pp.
8.
Bloom, Anxiety, pp. 35,
103, 25, 58, and 100.
9.
Bloom, Anxiety, pp.
10.
Geoffrey Hartman, “Words, wish, worth: Wordsworth”, in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction
and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp.
11.
Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 7.
12.
Hartman, “Wordsworth”, pp.
13.
Hartman, “Wordsworth”, p. 195. Compare
the invocation of haunting noises in his
Criticism
in the Wilderness (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 68,
97, 100, 152, and 266.
14.
Hartman, “Wordsworth”, p. 195
15.
Ibid., p. 199.
16.
Ibid., p. 201.
17.
Hartman, Saving the Text, p. xxi.
18.
Ibid., p. 98.
19.
Hartman, Wilderness, p. 180.
20.
Ibid., pp. 101 and 151.
21.
Ibid., p. 263.
22. David Bleich, Subjective Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 9.
23. Bernard Paris, Third Force
Psychology and the Study of Literature (
24. Bernard Paris, A Psychological
Approach to Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), pp. 55,
57, 59, and 63.
25.
26.
27. Bloom, Anxiety, p. 85, and “Breaking”, pp. 10 and 16.
28. Bloom, Misreading, p. 5.
29. Bloom, Anxiety, p. 78.
30.
Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 129
and 50.
31.
Fiedler, Innocence, p.124.
32.
Fiedler, Innocence, p. 93.
33.
Ibid., p. 94.
34.
Ibid., p. 96.
35.
Ibid., p. 131.
36.
Ibid., pp. 131 and 134.
37.
Ibid., p. 134.
38.
Ibid., p. 135.
39.
Leslie Fiedler, No! in Thunder (New York: Stein and Day, 1960), p. 152.
40
. Quoted in Bruce Jackson, “Conversations with Leslie A. Fiedler:
41.
Fiedler, What Was Literature? p.
42.
Leslie A. Fiedler, ‘Teaching English’ ADE Bulletin Sept. 1980, 6-10.
43. Fiedler, Innocence, p. 93.
46.
Fiedler, What Was Literature? p. 46; and Thunder,
p. 14.
47.
Fiedler, Love and
Death, pp. 24 and 37.
48.
Fiedler, What Was Literature? p. 227; Love and
Death, pp. 100, 120 and
463; Thunder,
pp. 91 and 272.
49.
Fiedler, Love and
Death, pp.
50.
Fiedler, Innocence, p. 188.
51.
Fiedler, What Was Literature? pp. 138,
52.
Fiedler, What Was Literature? pp. 138,
53.
For full discussion, see Robert de Beaugrande, “Critical
Discourse Analysis and the
‘New Patriotism’”,
posted at
www.beaugrande.com.
54.
Applied to Brockden Brown’s Carwin, in Love and Death,
p. 150.
55.
56.
Fiedler, Thunder, p. 317.