Paul Trout
English
Montana State University-Bozeman
A lot has changed in literary studies over the past twenty years or so. For one thing, traditional beliefs about literature and the value of studying it--that literature enriches life, that it enables us to see ourselves in perspective, that it encourages us to think more deeply about important issues in our lives, that it promotes social and democratic values and nurtures an enlightened citizenry--are now largely repudiated and ridiculed by many who teach it.
What has happened is that over the last two decades the humanities and some of the social sciences have become highly politicized. Growing numbers of academics, according to John Ellis, are convinced that "the universities should have an overtly political function, work directly for social and political change, and inculcate a particular political viewpoint in their students" (8). In literary studies, this means that growing numbers of professors, influenced by such left-wing European intellectuals as Marx and Foucault (or their epigones), now examine literary works for how they depict or comment on power and dominance, and in particular, how they contribute to racial, class and gender oppression. Questions of artisitic quality are dismissed as irrelevant or as covertly serving the ruthless ideological agenda of the patriarchy. As transformative intellectuals engaged in counter-hegemonic praxis, those who embrace this approach examine literary works--especially the canonical works written by Western civilization's dead white males-less to place them within a rich historical context or to explain how they might ennoble the civic mind, and more to put them on "ideological trial" (34). To actually defend such works, or to teach them honorifically would amount to an elitist complicity with social injustice.
In Literature Lost, John Ellis, professor emeritus of German at the University of California (Santa Cruz), subjects the widely held assumptions and fundamental arguments of this politicized view of literature to rigorous logical analysis. The result is a systematic discrediting of many of the broad notions that underly race-class-gender criticism (now often called "cultural studies"). A defender of literary theory as it was once practiced in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Ellis argues that what now passes for "theory" is a "degraded and corrupt shadow of what theory should be" (203), often marred by logical inconsistency, reductivism, ahistoricism, and herd-think. As if this were not bad enough, the politicization of literary studies, and now of other areas of the humanities, is having, according to Ellis, a harmful effect on academic culture, undermining respect for, and intellectual commitment to, knowledge, common-sense, rational thought, scholarly integrity, and collegial debate.
Race-class-gender critics believe that the most important aspect of any literary work is what it says or reflects about political power. But what's the warrant for this belief? Yes, power is certainly a factor in many situations, Ellis concedes, but it is never the only factor and rarely the most important. Indeed, the very fact that one is concerned about what literature says about power entails a commitment to standards or values that transcend the issue of power (163). People care about the exercise of power, then, only because they already embrace values that precede and are more important than power. There is simply no logical reason to assume, as so many critics now do, that this single-minded and narrow focus on power politics should trump all others.
It is also reductive and simplistic to assume that literature, especially the much-maligned canonical literature written by dead white men, inherently abets social oppression. First, as Ellis and others have pointed out, the canonical and non-canonical works that make up the Western literary tradition are enormously and ineluctably diverse in content, meaning, and effects. Some of these works sang the praises of the ruling classes, but many others irritated and threatened those classes, and were viewed in their own times as dangerously subversive (52), in part because they articulated the very same humanitarian values that race-class-gender critics also claim to espouse. "By broadening our horizons and giving us access to a wider range of thoughts and attitudes, literature has always been likely to shake the conventional pieties: it is liberating and subversive, not repressive. That is why dictators, fearing that literature will subvert the status quo, try to restrict access to books" (53).
To reduce all literary works to their "politics," and then to reduce the "politics" "to oppression and victimology" (63), is to seriously narrow and distort the nature of literature and human experience. It is also to practice, Ellis insists, the most simple-minded sort of literary "criticism." In the past, criticism was primarily concerned with the content of a literary work--with its unique stamp, the individual meaning that made it unlike any other work, the specific qualities that made readers return to it again and again (34). But race-class-gender "critics" know before even looking at an individual work that the most important aspect of its content will be the politics of race, class, and gender, regardless of how unimportant or trivial any of these turn out to be to the meaning of that particular work. In essence, race-class-gender criticism fails the test of significance; it says almost nothing specific about the particular qualities of the work at hand. Instead of criticism that tackles the still unresolved issues of aesthetics or the unique aspects of given works, it has become a careerist game of "knowing the right answers and applying them..." (183). As a result, the herds of independent minds that embrace the race-class-gender approach to literature come to essentially the same conclusions in article after article after article. "If criticism is to be reduced to results that are largely predictable before we even begin," Ellis asks, "what is the point of it?" (34).
The "progressive" political bias so obvious in most race-class-gender criticism, according to Ellis, is an expression of a deep hostility to Western civilization. Ironically, this hostility is itself an old tradition in the West. Periodically, "alienated insiders," usually intellectuals and writers have turned on the very civilization that nurtures and rewards them (12). Their animus, Ellis suggests, is the result of anger and frustration over the flaws, inconsistencies, and retrogressions of their culture. Although these flaws and inconsistencies exist in every society, they provoke a more angry response in the West because this civilization promises so much, and its failure to fulfill this promise seems all the more unforgivable. At some point, anger about the "establishment," or "patriarchal oppression," or "racism" spins out of control and puts an end to clear thinking. At this point, these alienated (or adversarial) intellectuals, disillusioned and bittered, are unable to recognize let alone value the greatest achievements of their civilization. They rivet on whatever seems negative. To point out to them just how much progress Western civilization has made, and how enlightened it is when compared with other cultures on the planet, "simply angers" them, for they know "that the core of Western society is rotten, however rosy its surface appearance" (31).
Ellis has little trouble discrediting the assumptions and biases underlying the anti-Western animus of race-class-gender criticism. One anti-Western charge after another loses much of its pith when Ellis examines Western values and progress in an historical and comparative context. If we resist judging Western civilization by unreasonable utopian standards, as race-class-gender intellectuals are prone to do, but instead examine its steady development through history and in contrast to other cultures, then Western civilization and American society stand out as eminently enlightened in their social, racial, gender and class attitudes (171):
"Enlightned" attitudes toward the relations between men and women; social justice; torture, rape, and other forms of physical brutality; tribalism; and even imperialism have slowly coalesced in Western societies. Only someone who reads history blindfold[ed] could think that the absence of these evils is a normal state of humankind from which the West deviates (26).
In fact, the Third World, often invoked to berate the West, is politically incorrect to a shocking degree. And women fare very badly in non-Western countries (25).
Ironically, when race-class-gender critics condemn Western civilization for its misdeeds, hypocrisies, and failures, they do so, Ellis observes, with values and concepts derived directly from Western civilization ("racism" and "human rights" make no sense unless one accepts Enlightenment ideas about our common humanity). "To demand an end to racism and sexism is not to reject Western society but, on the contrary, to ally oneself with certain Western values" (26). It was the Western tradition, and especially the European Enlightenment (irrefutably the work of dead white males) that "socially constructed" those liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, gender equality, and cultural freedom that constitute the precious legacy to which most of the world aspires (110). On this point Ellis quotes the forceful words of Arthur Schlesinger from The Disuniting of America:
These are European ideas, not Asian, not African.... There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism.... The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those 'sun people' who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it...who still keep women in subjection and cut off their clitorises, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but also against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes...and who in their tyrannies and massacres, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights. (in Ellis 109)
Should a race-class-gender feminist, let's say, be ripped from the safety of her cozy campus and transported to Rwanda, who could doubt that she would soon rediscover the values of the Enlightenment and begin to protest the uncivilized behavior of the Tutsis and Hutus (164)? Indeed, Ellis asks us to imagine a world "in which European expansion had never happened, one in which there had been no influence of European ideas beyond Europe. Without European influence, the world would be much less to the liking of race-gender-class scholars than it is today" (106). Since "Western literature is a record of our progress toward the kind of society that race-gender-class critics want," "those who want social justice in matters of race, gender, and class should be the loudest voices raised for the Western canon--source of, and the support for, their egalitarian ideals" (55).
According to Ellis, the politicization of literary studies, which is now spreading to other disciplines including math ("ethnomathematics"), poses a significant threat to academic culture. It is, he says, corrupting research and the liberal knowledge-making enterprise of Western society. It enduces scholars to find only what they want to find; to avoid following evidence and arguments to uncongenial conclusions; to impose simple and tendentious interpretations on intellectually complex phenomena; to ignore discomfiting alternative explanations; to use arguments in an opportunistic, unprincipled way to support politically desirable conclusions; and, to ignore the arguments and evidence of critics, who are often demonized as immoral (141-154). Ellis contends, and provides ample evidence for doing so, that these shabby, "might-is-truth" practices are now brazenly embraced by growing numbers of scholars. No matter how one might try to square such practices with one's conscience, "a researcher who knows in advance she must always reach the conclusion that women are victimized is not engaged in genuine research" (146).
The politicization of the knowledge-making enterprise increasingly prevents the university, Ellis points out, from functioning as it once did, as an arena where divisive social issues can be dispassionately and incisively analyzed and debated. On the divisive issue of race, for example, the campus now generates and retails all manner of racial hysteria, while the people in the street keep their cool. The campus situation is so bad that the university is now the "last place one would now expect to have a rational discussion of affirmative action" (217).
The politicization of scholarship also has done much to muzzle dissent and prevent the clash of opinion that is necessary for intellectual health. Critics who dissent from the current orthodoxy are routinely met with ad hominem attacks denouncing them as both moral outcasts and unsophisticated simpletons, hostile to progress for women and minorities or simply conservative, as if no further analysis of their arguments were necessary (11, 202).
Perhaps the gravest threat posed by the politicization of academic scholarship mentioned by Ellis is that it invites a backlash from external authorities. In the past, the university's commitment to non-ideological teaching and research (for the most part) protected it from the worst intrusions of the government. But now that more and more professors argue that universities should have an overtly political function, work directly for social and political change, and inculcate a particular viewpoint in their students, the university is bound to attract the attention of political forces opposed to its social agenda. For Ellis, this attitude amounts to an academic deathwish. "It is...simply foolish for professors--especially political radicals--to endanger their protected haven in this way. For although they deride the ivory-tower concept of the university, the truth is that they are uniquely the protected inhabitants of that ivory tower" (158):
The freedom of scholars to follow where the argument leads, without political guidance or interference, is essential both to its internal functioning and to its hopes of support by society; taxpayers--whatever their political persuasion--will not be willing to support universities on any other basis for long (158).
For all of its common sense and forthrightness, Literature Lost is not going to have much of an impact on the practice of race-class-gender criticism. For one thing, almost no one who subscribes to this brand of criticism will read it, an effective strategy for minimizing "cognitive dissonance." For another, the book comes too late in the day to do much good. The race-class-gender approach to academic issues has had ample time to entrench itself in English departments and to colonize other departments, including the social sciences, history, and legal studies. As race-class-gender scholars fashion undergraduate and graduate programs, they insure a continuing supply of true believers like themselves socialized in their approach. Too many careers have too much invested in the race-class-gender mindset to let a few arguments or some evidence disturb business. All indications are that the race-class-gender perspective will dominate the humanities for a very long time.
Throughout Literature Lost, Ellis seems somewhat bemused by the fact that although race-class-gender academics spout radical left-wing politics, most live unpolitical, Leave-it-to-Beaver private lives. To understand this anomaly, one has to probe the academic psyche. Almost all academics are decent middle-class (and middle-brow) people who embrace with almost religious fervor the liberal values of the Enlightenment. So for them, just about the worst thing in the world is to be thought a "racist," or "sexist," or "elitist" or "homophobe." They will do almost anything to avoid such a charge, and they look for every opportunity to display their right thinking on such matters. This is where race-class-gender criticism comes in. It allows academics to ritualistically denounce "racism," "sexism," "elitism" and "homophobia" in article after article (and lecture after lecture), and thus to display, over and over again, the fact that they are presumably untainted by such notions. It provides a handy therapeutic way to side with the angels and to demonstrate one's politically correct purity within a highly censorious and punitive academic culture. In an essay entitled "Defending Literary Studies Has Become a Lost Cause" (The Chronicle of Higher Education 3 October 1997: B6), Michael Berube, a widely respected advocate for race-class-gender criticism, excoriated Literature Lost as an "awful book" that amounts to nothing more than "intellectually irresponsible tripe." "Profoundly depressed" that Yale University Press would publish it, Berube throws up his hands and sarcastically confesses to being guilty of all the wrong-doing that Ellis heaps at the feet of race-class-gender critics.
This dismissive response, however unsatisfactory, points to the two principal flaws of Literature Lost: l) the book does not carefully enough distinguish between criticism that is overly politicized and criticism that examines literature within its social and cultural context; and 2) the book makes no concession that any development in literary studies for the last twenty years has any merit whatsoever. Ellis's methodical counter-assault gives the impression that this approach has added nothing to our understanding of how literature works, and that every essay reflecting this approach is merely another ditto to Foucault. Unwilling to concede that this approach could ever lead to any insight worth hearing, Ellis comes across as unyielding and close-minded, inviting the defensive and sarcastic dismissal he gets from Berube.
For race-class-gender critics still willing to re-think some of their biases and assumptions, Literature Lost will prove a bracing experience; for traditionalists who feel beleaguered, it may remind them why they have held out for as long as they have. For those concerned about the long-term future of the university, it will serve as a tocsin of the danger ahead.