Recovering American Literature. - book reviews

National Review, June 27, 1994 by Jeffrey Hart

This book is much more than literary criticism, though it comments brilliantly on five major American novels and one important novena. It is a cultural moment. Mr. Shaw is like Conrad's Marlow journeying up the Congo River to Mr. Kurtz at the Inner Station. Here, the Inner Station is our current academic culture, and its Professor Kurtz is indeed a "remarkable man," or, more frequently, a remarkable woman. As Irving Kristol has written of this book, "Even those who try to keep up with what is happening in American literary studies will be enlightened and appalled by Peter Shaw's superb analysis."

Yes, appalled. Literature is in the foreground for Mr. Shaw, but behind that discussion is the general state of academic culture, and, beyond that, the way academic culture affects people who could not name a single literary critic or tell you about the plot of The Bostonians. Or even Huckleberry Finn.

Mr. Shaw's argument goes as follows. After the 1960s, the serious discussion of literature in the universities was interrupted, and has not been resumed. A straitjacket has been imposed. Subtle discussion of the moral balances in, say, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter has given way to what can be called bumper-sticker Marxism. Hawthorne, according to this philosophy, "failed" because he did not present Hester Prynne as an outright feminist heroine. Thus Hawthorne was a fink. Mr. Shaw has read widely in contemporary academic literary criticism, and he has not come back from Hell empty-handed. Just imagine Professor Susie Mudpuddle (let's call her) "flunking" Nathaniel Hawthorne because he falls short of feminist orthodoxy.

The literary fact - and is there anyone in the house who cares about literature? - is that Hawthorne wrote a nuanced and ambivalent fable about the claims of the self and the claims of the law. These never are easily adjudicated. Hester Prynne belongs with Antigone, Dido, and Juliet.

Likewise, Melville's famous novella Billy Budd becomes in the hands of the Professor Mudpuddles a mere tract about injured innocence and the evils of "the system." The whaling ship Pequod in Moby Dick is thought by the bumper-sticker thinkers to represent the American ship of state and, beyond that, Western civilization. When the Pequod sinks, good riddance to it. (Admittedly the homophile critics find some things in Melville's novel that please them, obscure and marginal though they may be.)

The major American authors under discussion-Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James - all flunk the ideological tests. They do not hammer away at the new academic themes of race, class, and gender. Sometimes the critics try to let the poor saps off the hook - they were radicals, after all.

Only, after all, they weren't. Within Moby Dick, it is evident that Captain Ahab is not a "capitalist," never mind what the "critics" say. He is not in it for the cash. Ahab is an epic tragic hero and could have slept in the tents of Agamemnon's army in front of Troy. He could have fought Grendel in Beowulf. Melville makes it unmistakably clear that he is writing, consciously so, in this epic tradition. So he flunks. Perhaps he should have written a tract about Chase Manhattan and the CIA.

Mark Twain flunks, too, according to the principles of bumper-sticker academic criticism. Just listen to this: Jim, the escaped slave, talks, of all things, like an escaped slave. Not like Samuel Johnson. This "demeans" Jim, and Twain himself is thus complicit in slavery. In literary fact, the powerful core of Huckleberry Finn is the trip down the Mississippi on the raft, fed by Twain's own memories as a riverboat pilot. The novel brings Jim's humanity powerfully forward.

What bumper-sticker criticism does with Henry James's great novel The Bostonians is absolutely breathtaking. The true heroine of the novel turns out to be Olive, a lesbian. Only poor James did not write the book right. Olive and her lesbianism should properly have been front-and-center. Henry James flunks.

But wait. The "critic" Jonathan Arac is close at hand with a "theoretical" life-preserver. His position goes this way. An idiot like Nathaniel Hawthorne certainly flunked with Hester Prynne, and these other authors also flunked. Nevertheless, a novel can be read in terms of its "ideological possibilities."

What does that mean? It means that although poor old bedraggled Hawthorne flunked with Hester Prynne, failed to "actualize" her, the reader, standing in for Hawthorne, can "actualize" her. Yes, we can "actualize" Hester, even though she is one of the most vivid figures in the history of the novel.

Peter Shaw's journey up this Congo River of the mind accumulates excitement and intensity. These academic critics at the University of This-and-That view American history through the lenses of Oliver Stone. For them, the history of this republic is a movie consisting of outrages and slaughters.

What these bumper-sticker critics do is comb the American classics for an indictment of America. Sure, all the great writers had a quarrel with social actuality, but it was a oomplicated quarrel, not a bumper-sticker quarrel. When the bumper-sticker critics do not locate a simple indictment, Mr. Arac and company come to the rescue. They can "actualize" one.