Trojan Flags for Cultural Study
When policemen turn their backs to a mayor at the funeral of
a police officer slain in the line of duty, is this symbolic act to be “read”
as a sign of anger, disrespect, and resentment?
Is it the equivalent of a jazz musician’s turning his back to an
audience as he produces exquisite sounds?
Is this positioning of the body in uniform, an embodiment of law and
order, subject to decoding? The gesture is broadcast in the public sphere of
television. Is it to be interpreted as a
warning that American social dynamics are minimizing prospects for civic
communication? Is ours a society wherein
anything is everything? Is the turning of the back actually a turning back to a
pre-history?
These dense questions haunt us. When we hear answers from the right wing, we
hear the speech of Eugene O’Neill’s Robert “Yank” Smith. From the left side of the house, room or
aisle, we hear the arcane mutterings of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss. The confusion of messages regarding the will
of the American people inspires distrust among citizens. We begin to fantasize that the old days were
good and that future-oriented ideas stole “our country” and that we should take
it back by any means necessary. The most
militant patriots wave Trojan flags, convinced that prophylactics and petitions
to marketplace gods pave the way to salvation. Our public educations have armed
us with a few facts but not the critical strength to construct, embrace, and
sustain civic virtues. We turn our backs
on a future and smile in the faces of golden age idols. We hear but refuse to understand how
discomforting questions at once inscribe and authorize a terror-laced future.
Each week, The
Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the trajectory of intellectual
life in America, on the progress which is symbolized by flag-waving. The New York Review of Books, The Economist,
Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal,
however, are the sources of choice for those who dwell in the international
cartels of real power. Thus, The
Chronicle serves as a marginalized forum for those who are assigned or who
volunteer to bamboozle the American public about intellectual cultures,
especially those sectors we deem to be “literary.” They wave their Trojan flags
vigorously as they descend into Renaissance Dreams.
Professors Jeffrey Williams and Arthur Krystal recently
donated flags of some merit to the January 5 online issue of The Chronicle. Williams faithfully
preserves the connotations of Jonathan Swift’s use of the word “modest” in his
essay “The New Modesty in Literary Criticism.” He fears that such methods as
surface reading, thin description, new formalism, book history, distant
reading, and new sociology of literature are clear, evident threats to the
canon and traditional cultural values.
In his mind, Sharon Marcus, Stephen M. Best, Franco Moretti, Heather
Love, and Rita Felski are among the younger scholars who have sinned by
exposing the hubris of a dubious tradition that used bad faith to serve
deodorized public ends. The conclusion
embroidered on his flag is instructive:
It
remains to be seen, though, whether surface reading and allied approaches
re-embrace a more cloistered sense of literary studies. I’d like to think that
criticism has more to do than accumulate scholarly knowledge, at the least to
explain our culture to ourselves, as well as serving as a political watchdog.
Today’s modesty may not bode an academic withdrawal from public
life. It may simply register an unsettled moment, as past practices cede and a
new generation takes hold. The less-optimistic outlook is that it represents the
decline of criticism as a special genre with an important role to investigate
our culture. While realism carries less hubris, it leaves behind the utopian
impulse of criticism.
It is difficult to believe that modesty can
survive in twenty-first century America.
We can, nevertheless, let Williams have his donnée as we scrutinize how “the utopian impulse of criticism”
serves the special interests of neo-hegemony.
Krystal waves a flag that is rhetorically forthright
in sending its message, a message that drums and trumpets genuine disdain for a
public that lacks discrimination in making choices about reading, or seriously
misreads the nature of literature. His
essay “What We Lose if We Lose the Canon” is partly a Puritan jeremiad, partly a
tribute to the Americanized intellectual and political legacies of Leo Strauss
and Allen Bloom. Krystal’s final paragraph is a jewel:
Although serious writers continue to work in the hope that time
will forgive them for writing well, the prevailing mood welcomes fiction and
poetry of every stripe, as long as the reading public champions it. And this I
think is a huge mistake. Literature has never just been about the public (even
when the public has embraced such canonical authors as Hugo, Dickens, and
Tolstoy). Literature has always been a conversation among writers who borrow,
build upon, and deviate from each other’s words. Forgetting this, we forget
that aesthetics is not a social invention, that democracy is not an aesthetic
category; and that the dismantling of hierarchies is tantamount to an erasure
of history. –
Krystal sends us an honest
message about what is brewing and fermenting in the right wing of American
cultural, literary and political life.
We should listen carefully to Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” to be sure we
do not miss the ideological nuances threaded on Krystal’s flag. And we should
be generous in allowing him to sit in the darkness of thinking the history we
are writing can be erased.
We injure ourselves if we turn
our backs on the raw process of how history continues its evolving in the
United States of America in 2015. We
will do greater injury to ourselves if we fail to learn what vexillology can
tell us about the Trojan flags, for now is the moment for relentless
interrogation of the environments in which we attempt to live.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
January 7, 2015
