Recovering American Literature

0. Alan Weltzien
English
Western Montana College-UM

The name of Peter Shaw immediately evokes the National Association of Scholars (NAS), of which he stands as a charter member, so potential readers of his newest book might predict his critical disposition before getting started. Recovering American Literature gathers together previously published essays and continues the discussion begun in his last book, The War Against the Intellect (1989). Shaw joins a growing chorus of voices protesting the invasion of ideologies--deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, and the other usual suspects--in the practice of literary criticism. Shaw roundly asserts in his "Introduction," "It was not and is not necessary for critics to impose their ideologies on works of literature" (19).

Shaw wants to "recover" canonical 19th-century American texts from the increasingly muddied, and muddled, hands of those post-1960s academic radicals who, he claims, only impose their own political agendas onto these texts. In such hands, Shaw believes, these classics--dare one use this term in the '90s?--become a vehicle for sustained America-bashing. The kind of criticism Shaw practices and endorses would "recover" five of our best-known works from a deepening vulgarization yet "with no less involvement in social, cultural, and even political issues than revisionist critics insist on" (21). l am not sure that his own example manifests the flexibility he claims for it, but it provides a healthy tonic from recent critical excesses, or at least away to step back from some of our current critical vogues and cast a cold eye upon them.

Shaw's interests and examples bear more than slight resemblance to Frederick Crews's The Critics Bear It Away (1992), which I reviewed in the Spring 1994 issue of The Montana Professor. Shaw, like Crews, believes that within the past generation literary criticism has become its own meta-literature, and that in superimposing itself on a given canonical novel, say, the novel disappears from sight under the impress and polemical energy of the critical agenda. Many of the examples Shaw quotes in his chapters suggest to me acts of distortion, so I read Shaw sympathetically. However, he needs to be more honest and specific about the assumptions attending the particular high ground he stakes out for himself, however non-ideological he claims it to be. Many of those professing one of the "ideologies" he continually chastises would rebut Shaw by asserting that any literary criticism implicates ideology of one stamp of another, and that Shaw writes less than honestly in not citing his own allegiance to a modified New or biographical criticism.

Recovering American Literature includes essays on The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, Huckleberry Finn, The Bostonians, and (as an appendix) Typee. In each case Shaw traces the decline and fall of valuable, and valid, criticism, and certainly many of his examples strike one as silly stuff. He claims he is not "introduc[ing] interpretations of my own," but rather, is "attempt[ing] to frame the questions that need to be asked of each work" (22). Framing the questions certainly discloses preferred avenues of interpretation, but Shaw's avenues run wide and are well lit. There is room here for many, even if the given novel now resembles itself rather than a mirror for any critic to discern primarily her own features. To the extent that one remains more intrigued with the novel than the meta-Iiterature superimposed onto it, Shaw's version of the novel's questions sounds good, even if it is not the only one.

For example, in the Scarlet Letter chapter, Shaw traces the novel's critical history from the mid-1850s through the 1980s, charging critics of the latter decade with a myopia that "reduced to the single dimension of ideology a book whose central concern is precisely with the warping effects of ideology" (46). This recent reductiveness seriously lessens the novel's richness of implication, and Shaw sings this song in each subsequent chapter. In Shaw's view of Melville's major book, balanced readings that addressed its complexity and unsettled politics gave way, in the 1964-71 period, to disastrous "clarifications." Such "clarifications" inspired 1980s Marxist readings, themselves something of a return to 1930s readings (i.e., Moby-Dick, is all about, and against, capitalism USA style). Following D.H. Lawrence's cue, Shaw persuasively links Moby-Dick's epic ambitions with criticism of it that constitutes "an act of cultural self-criticism," and that has turned, in recent times, into "political sniping." Yet readers who accept Shaw's returning Moby-Dick to "cultural self-criticism" might chafe under such assertions as, "As it happens, privately Melville was by no means the critic of the status quo that his critics assume" (70, my emphasis). Maybe so or maybe not, but obviously Shaw, who does not present himself as a Melville biographer or scholar, knows better than the rest of us.

The sub-title of Shaw's Appendix essay on Typee, Civilization and its Malcontents, focuses Shaw's real anxiety and true colors. He believes the malcontents have taken over and that the traditional canon has been warped into a vehicle for something like sustained national self-Ioathing: "Toward the primitive, a stance of non judgmental scientific objectivity is assumed; toward the civilized, one of subjective morality.... So powerful have the imperatives of relativism grown, in fact, that not only can the norms of logic be suspended in its service, but also the cultivated sensibility that turns us away in disgust from civilization" (171).** We might not share his conclusion and we might reject his role as spokesman of "the cultivated sensibility," but this articulation of "the imperatives of relativism" should give us pause. I, for one, believe ongoing acts of cultural self-criticism vis-a-vis old or new members of our canon can take many healthier forms than self-loathing.

That elitist note sounds elsewhere in the book. At times Shaw writes as an impatient, scornful professor who knows better as when, after citing some examples of current criticism he thinks parody real criticism, he angrily dismisses such opponents: "The academics in question have neither experience nor standing when it comes to the aesthetic evaluation of literature" (15). Such tone will not endear Shaw to those who might give him a read, and only confirm others--those post-'60s academic radicals--who dismiss him in polemical terms. At least Shaw shows his cards, pledging allegiance to aesthetics and belles lettres, as he might say. And he does write as if he were an older voice quiet too long, under siege from several directions, absolutely certain of the rightness of his own critical persuasion and leading a countercharge. The sniff of the battleground lingering through the book will either amuse or sadden Shaw's readers, depending upon their orientation and degree of sympathy. Shaw's bristling hostility will turn off some readers who should study his readings. For one thing, Shaw pulls together a great deal of criticism in his chapters. If they do not always seem fairly presented, he always writes lucidly and gracefully, even if he lacks some of Frederick Crews's wit.