Desecrating literature: reading the PMLA

When gay critics use the term,

"queer," they often think they're

taking a defiant stand against the

mainstream; but in fact, they're

only making themselves and their

orientation sound trivial and marginal-which

is just what the

mainstream wants them to do.

They're being had.

And it's not that I have a prejudice against gay studies: I was committee chair of the first-ever Ph.D. dissertation on gay American fiction at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This isn't a matter of life style, but of prose style, which is just as serious--wouldn't you rather meet Oscar Wilde in heaven than, say' Theodore Dreiser?--and Donald Morton has not a chemical trace of prose style. Language like this would make even a senior prom in Babylon sound like a painful duty.

But I'm being unfair to Morton, too. I chose his essay because it was awful (one has read assembly manuals from Taiwan with more verbal energy and punch), but not egregiously so. "Egreegious"--ex gregis--means standing out from the herd." But how, in a flock of bleating sheep like the contributors to PMLA, like the current downs of the academic circus, do you single out one?

The answer is, you can't.

Here, from the March 1995 issue of Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, is a guy named Mark Jeffreys on lyric poetry: "I argue that the act of identifying lyric as either an oppositional genre or a reactionary one encourages oversimplification of the term's history and criticism and desensitizes readers to the ideological diversity of texts identified as lyrical."

Does anybody know what that sentence is trying, poor wounded thing, to say? I do, but only because I read it as a version of Orwellian "Newspeak," the official language of 1984, a language whose purpose is not to convey, but to obscure information. In newspeak translation, jeffreys is perfectly clear: I don't know how to talk about lyric poetry. (But, God help me, I still like it).

One's heart goes out to Jeffreys as to the other victims of the present virus; but one cannot ignore that they are also infecting others--namely, the students they teach and the other folks who read sentences like the one I have quoted and assume that that's the way humans are supposed to talk. It isn't, you know.

One more bleat from the academic sheepfold. PMLA January 1995. Here's Gwen Bergner, a graduate student at Princeton, concluding her essay titled "Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks." Okay, the title alone is off-putting enough, especially if you've read Fanon's book, and know that he really doesn't care about "gender--the term hadn't gotten hot by then-but was a serious, maybe great man writing about racism and colonialism. That doesn't stop Bergner from rereading him as a proto--but, natch, failed--feminist, only awaiting her interpretation of his work to liberate him, with the truly dopey sentence, "The most important effect of conjoining postcolonial psychoanalysis and feminist psychoanalysis may well be to dear a space for black women as subjects in both discourses."