Liahna Babener
English
MSU-Bozeman
During the last two decades, academic discourse in the humanities, and increasingly, across the range of scholarly disciplines, has been dominated by assumptions stemming from poststructuralist critical theory. The intellectual paradigms that direct discussion, drawn from thinkers such as Derrida, Lacan, Sassure, Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, Kristeva, and others, constitute a wide sweep of ideas, encompassing linguistic, psychoanalytic, Marxist, deconstructionist, feminist, and New Historicist perspectives. In spite of the diversity and complexity of these various conceptual models, many scholars view their academic primacy as, in editor Dwight Eddins' words, an "imperious...enterprise," one which has, in his view, constrained imaginative inquiry in general, and utterly appropriated the field of literary criticism in particular.
The Emperor Redressed represents an effort by a number of recognized literary scholars to jostle the foundation of the poststructural edifice. The contributors, most of whom made their marks as practitioners of formalist aesthetics and advocates of a humanist literary tradition, include such eminent critics as M. H. Abrams, Frederick Crews, David Lehman, Nina Baym, John R. Searle, and others. The volume is comprised of a series of nine interrelated essays originally presented as papers at a 1992 symposium at the University of Alabama. Preceded by Eddins' introduction, and followed by the transcript of a round table discussion featuring the nine critics that took place at the Symposium, the collection is a sustained exploration of what its contributors perceive to be the shortcomings of contemporary theory: inadequacy in the face of the richness and intricacy of literary experience; ludic and self-reflexive excesses; dour philosophical and political pessimism; diversion of feminist objectives; and other failings that they maintain ought seriously to challenge its ascendancy in academia. Though their approaches and emphases differ, all the essayists share a conviction that postmodern thought ironically has come to manifest the ideological rigidity and doctrinaire absolutism that it aimed to critique in prior intellectual traditions.
M. H. Abrams, in the opening essay, argues that contemporary theory has supplanted the experiential human world with a "theory world," one where discourse creates rather than reflects human agency. In such a world, Abrams contends, the recognizably human disappears; notions of the real elide into the phantasmal; and the interpretive laws contradict the linguistic practices of daily life. Abrams concedes the imaginative power and sheer inventiveness of deconstruction, and acknowledges Derrida's philosophic sophistication. But he maintains that the literary application of Derrida's grammatology has led to the conceptualization of an absurdist theory world internally stalled by "the essential undecidability of meaning," one where the critic cannot interpret the text--since the very act of interpretation deconstructs itself even as it construes. Abrams champions a humanistic criticism that "deals with the work of literature as composed by a human being, for human beings, and about...matters of human concern."
Frederick Crews' essay validates Abrams' notion of the alien nature of the theoretical universe, characterizing the critical practices that take place there as "self-ratifying," that is, "making the text a pretext for demonstrating a methodology that produces and elaborates an already known thesis." In the service of an intellectual construct, Crews maintains, deconstruction is oblivious to the abundant specificity, versatility, subtlety, and unpredictability of actual literary history. It suppresses or rather gainsays the empirical. But it is also on the defensive and on the decline, he asserts.
Richard Levin's essay explores the political divisions that ensue from the schism between contemporary theory and traditionalist precepts. Though he argues that the factions in the critical debates have been falsely polarized into the Right and the Left, a construct that is deleterious to productive discussion, to some degree he replicates these polarities in his analysis of the canon debates and the conundrum of authorial intentionality.
Saul Morson and Ihab Hassan both plead the intellectual inflexibility and reductivism of the postmodern model. Morson develops the notion of poststructuralism's historical fixity and apocalyptic determinism, while Hassan celebrates the "multivocal mystery" and "rogue power" of literature to move, befuddle, thrill, and vitalize us--experiences he suggests that are quashed or spurned by the ideological imperatives of deconstruction.
In "The Agony of Feminism: Why Feminist Theory is Necessary After All," Nina Baym posits a fissure between the feminist critical practices of an earlier generation of thinkers, whose tenets are grounded in a broad Western tradition of intellectual liberalism and human rights, and a more recent coterie of critics, whose foundations are in psychoanalytic theory. This vanguard of feminist theorists, she asserts, has diminished and dismissed the genuinely provocative and politically productive contributions of the old guard of feminist critics, disdaining their work as naive while embracing, ironically, the misogynistic postulations of Freud and Lacan. Baym, who identifies herself as one of the aboriginal group, devotes the body of the essay to vindicating the pioneering ideas of this "liberal feminism."
Poet and critic David Lehman critiques deconstruction for what is fundamentally a moral failing in his view. He suggests that the linguistic playfulness and the antic conflation of the real and the fictional that underlie the conventions of deconstruction--and inform his own poetic art--may originate as legitimate intellectual exercises, but they have transgressed the line into unethical practice. Addressing cases such as the historical chicanery in Oliver Stone's film JFK and the closeted anti-semitic past of postmodern critic Paul de Man, Lehman takes deconstruction to task, not only for what he contends are its infringements upon truth, but for its arrogance, elevating criticism above literature in the cultural pantheon.
This latter idea forms the central subject of Paisley Livingston's essay, which faults contemporary critics for muddling the distinctions between literary art and literary research, causing them to be inadequate practitioners of both. He maintains that poststructural analysts, enamored of ideas like the impossibility of meaning and the infinitely regressive play of metaphor, have brought such absurdist proclivities to the task of interpretation, thwarting in the process the appropriate critical criteria of rationality, cohesiveness, clarity, and documentation, upon which persuasive analysis must rest.
John R. Searle's closing essay lambastes Derrida for what Searle considers to be both fallacious and uninformed assumptions about textuality. Attacking one of deconstruction's crucial principles--that authorial utterances are beyond the author's control in light of the linguistic rupture of signifier and signified--Searle cites competing ideas from the last hundred years of the philosophy of language to demonstrate what he believes to be Derrida's methodological and conceptual vulnerabilities.
The value of the collection lies in its bringing together a range of sharply articulated and cogently presented critiques of contemporary theory by credible thinkers. On the whole, the rancor, misconceptions, and reductivism of much of the academic debate about critical theory that has surfaced in the popular media in recent years is thankfully absent from these generally well-considered and substantive essays. Most of the essayists are sufficiently proficient in poststructural thought to enable a worthy intellectual antagonism rather than the querulous carping and anecdotal tallying that has often passed for argumentation among the detractors of postmodernism.
Nonetheless, The Emperor Redressed does not persuade me that poststructuralism is either a deficient discourse or an "imperious...enterprise"; indeed, the systematic criticisms of modern theories offered here tend rather to vindicate the sheer conceptual power, the imaginative vibrancy, and the acuity of the the insights of poststructural thought. In some cases, the essayists fall into the pattern of defensively rehearsing the earlier critical assumptions that shaped their own training and practice; while these apologias are eloquent, they don't constitute a crippling rebuttal, nor do they undermine the efficacy of deconstruction or other modes as critical strategies. Crews, for example, accuses contemporary theorists of "self-ratification," a charge equally if not more emphatically applicable to formalist critics. Hassan's sense that deconstruction stifles the life and wondrous quirkiness from literature reminds me of the sophomore's complaint that to engage in literary interpretation is to "ruin" the work of art for the reader. In fact, the "rogue power" of deconstruction as a philosophical system may be the real victim of his analysis. Baym's essay is perhaps most problematical, engaging in the same supercilious oversimplification that she faults in feminist theorists today. Her central error is in assuming that by employing the psychoanalytic paradigm as a tool of analysis, current feminist thinkers uncritically verify or reenact its intrinsic misogyny; rather, theorists of this vein have used Freudian and Lacanian models to demonstrate the patriarchal--and thus endemically ideological--structures of knowledge that govern Western culture. Au contraire, it is contemporary feminist theory that has unveiled the phallocentric orthodoxies of liberalism itself, which explains why years of traditional feminist scholarship has done little to radicalize the academy.
On the whole, The Emperor Redressed is a collection worth reading and owning, though readers may find themselves in the position of Benjamin Franklin, who, studying some anti-Deist tracts, adjudged the Deist ideas, quoted for the sake of discrediting them, much more compelling than the refutations.