Postmodernism, Etc.: An Interview with Ihab Hassan - Interview

Style, Fall, 1999 by Frank L. Cioffi

IH: A Gedankenexperiment deserves another. We would get what I call Angelic Criticism, angelic reading of texts: total identification with texts, in silence. Or, if you wish, [Pierre] Menardian Criticism: rewriting the text in identical words. It would be better, wouldn't it, than the class that begins every "discussion" with, "Now, what's wrong with this book?"

Have you read anything good lately? Anything that pulls you up short, surprises you? Can you recommend any novelists, poets, or playwrights writing today--in any language--who speak to our condition with eloquence and concinnity?

IH: I have been reading Australians, lately. Patrick White's Voss, of course, overpowers, an astonishing achievement. But wonderful, too, are the works of David Malouf--I hope he wins the Nobel soon--and Thomas Keneally. And Murray Bail's Eucalyptus, recently published, is breathtaking in its indirection.

Returning to American fiction, the big books like Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and DeLillo's Underworld impress me, especially the latter, but do not always move me. I might say the same of Paul Auster's work, obsessive and intriguing, on a smaller scale. Still, I would give my vote--had I one--to Don DeLillo as the American successor of Toni Morrison for The Prize.

Whom to recommend for our time? How about a hedgehog and a fox: Nietzsche and Shakespeare? Or Beckett and Montaigne? Or Kafka and Zen?

Funny that you should mention DeLillo. I am working right now on a long piece about his work. What about his fiction do you find compelling?

IH: In brief, intelligence, imagination, integrity, social insight, a metaphysical surliness, and withal language, language, language.[ldots]

You have moved in a spiritual direction (yet not a religious one). Could you briefly discuss the relationship of aesthetics and spirituality? How does this spirituality connect with American culture and American life?

IH: Hold it, if I can answer one of your large questions, answer it half decently, both of us will sleep well tonight.

Human beings--it's that troublesome big brain--are multifaceted creatures. They cannot be reduced to material or political terms, as the Standard Model in Cultural Studies now strongly implies. They cannot be reduced to Spirit or Beauty or Truth or Language or[ldots]. They cannot be reduced, period--though once dead, they reduce to dust quickly enough.

Now, no culture, ever, has developed without some sense of the spiritual. Nor has ours. But this does not mean we can define the spiritual, or the sacred, or the numinous, as we can define circle or square. The spiritual extends over a broad band of noetic experiences, from common intuitions to mystical revelations, from aesthetic appreciation to the sentiment of the sublime, from inspiration in science and art to intimations of immortality, and so forth. Spirit, Emerson thought, has the "terrible power of self-change, self-accommodation to whatever we do." William James knew this, as did many others, from Plato to Heidegger, from Longinus to George Steiner (in Real Presences).