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

Style, Fall, 1999 by Frank L. Cioffi

But let's see howl can respond to the rest of your questions. I think that I have marginalized myself, geographically and professionally--constitutionally, I am a loner. My independent stand (let's call it that) has been, paradoxically, more acceptable in Europe than in America. Why paradoxically? Because America, that old "willingness of the heart" as Scott Fitzgerald put it, has been most generous, most welcoming in every other way. I feel this strongly as a person, as an immigrant: I do not consider myself a hyphenated American.

But the profession, since Radical Innocence, has been more circumspect. First, there has been my advocacy of postmodernism, when it was still young, still unknown. Then came my paracriticism, with its dislocations of critical prose. Then my resistance to GRIM (the Great Rumbling Ideological Machine), as I call it, a juggernaut of intellectual conformities. And all along, there has been what some people perceived as a louche streak of mysticism, though I am not now, nor have ever been, a mystic--only, like all the rest of us, a wanderer in the cosmos, and so a wondering a-gnostic. Of course, I've also been intellectually reckless sometimes, impatient, provocative, and provocations in a fractious age, you know, can spring up from the earth like dragon teeth, fully armed. But I am not a creature of regret: I accept what is the case.

My "greatest academic achievement"? Some might say the criticism of postwar American fiction; some might say the early work on postmodernism; still others like the work on the literature of travel; and others, again, prefer the autobiographical work, say Out of Egypt or Between the Eagle and the Sun. I won't answer the question about "my achievement" myself, lest the answer strike you as a bit nihilistic.

By the way, there's a positive, almost holy or kenotic kind of nihilism that has increasingly engaged me--perhaps we can talk about that later.

Many of today's academics were 1960s radicals (after a fashion), and have embraced Marxist or neo-Marxist theories. Yet you resisted this overall political trend. What do you think is the attraction of Marxist theory, except that it helps provide "the obligatory rhetoric of packaged rectitude" (to use a phrase of your own)? Is it too ideological (what you call the "GRIM")? Do you think a leftist stance helps academics feel that they are still "activist"?

IH: First, let's distinguish between Marxism and the Left. (Isaiah Berlin, among many others, has written convincingly about this.) Next, let's recognize the changing character of Western Marxism over the last eighty years. Then, let's admit that theoretical Marxism--and it has never been anything but theoretical--has succeeded in becoming a floating Signifier of Resistance, a moorless Sign of Change, a flapping Banner of Discontent--like Islam now in certain parts of the world, without gulags. In fact, a Moroccan intellectual once said to me in Casablanca: "I've turned to Islam because the other [meaning Marxism] has failed."