Railing at Greatness: Why Critics, Educators, and Readers are so Touchy These Days

[AuntShecky]

I agree that if a writer is racist or anti-semitic it should be identified. My point is that it better be clear and distinct or one is slandering another person's reputation. I do not believe that Huck Finn or Heart of Darkness is racist. It may be a little paternalistic but that doesn't make it racist.

Yes, it's certainly acceptable to identify a writer (or artist, film director, etc.) as racist, sexist, anti-Semitic whatever, as long as we make the distinction between the individual and the work he creates. This is one of the points I tried like holy hell to demonstrate in the "Railing at Greatness" essay. T.S. Eliot is a prime example, from what he espouses in
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" but especially in what is imbedded in
Four Quartets -- a mystical communion with divine love which is totally contrary to any human prejudices, including anti-Semitism. Vince Passaro is absolutely right in that anti-Semitism really does not exist in Eliot's poetry.

Again, let's try to keep the artist and his work separate.

[Drkshadow03]

Yes, it's certainly acceptable to identify a writer (or artist, film director, etc.) as racist, sexist, anti-Semitic whatever, as long as we make the distinction between the individual and the work he creates. This is one of the points I tried like holy hell to demonstrate in the "Railing at Greatness" essay. T.S. Eliot is a prime example, from what he espouses in
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" but especially in what is imbedded in
Four Quartets -- a mystical communion with divine love which is totally contrary to any human prejudices, including anti-Semitism. Vince Passaro is absolutely right in that anti-Semitism really does not exist in Eliot's poetry.

Again, let's try to keep the artist and his work separate.

Well, okay, but in many of these cases people are pointing to the work rather than the artist's background for their claims. The work is anti-Semitic, the work exhibits racism, the story revels in its misogyny, etc., hopefully with examples from the text and an explanation of why those examples constitute such an "ism."

Not to mention people fail to separate the writer from the work all the time when it's convenient for their argument. For example, you did so yourself. I think it's bit hypocritical to say Mark Twain had strong anti-Imperialist views, therefore his work cannot possibly be racist, and then be critical when someone does the opposite when they see evidence of an artist expressing stereotypes or hateful ideas about a group of people in their private life and then find evidence that these views find their way into their fiction.

[AuntShecky]

I think it's bit hypocritical to say Mark Twain had strong anti-Imperialist views, therefore his work cannot possibly be racist, .

How is the above statement logical, and more to the point,who said it? Vince Passaro didn't write that, and neither did yours truly.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows racism for the evil that it is, as manifested in the characters and prevailing culture which oppresses Jim. Simply showing racism in a culture is not the same as endorsing it!

The contemporary objection to that particular work is a specific epithet, considered to be anathema in the mores of the present day. Both Vince Passaro's article and my lesser essay which forms the first 4 postings in this thread attempt to point out the fallacy of expecting works written 100 years or more previously to reflect the same social values held today.

[OrphanPip]

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows racism for the evil that it is, as manifested in the characters and prevailing culture which oppresses Jim. Simply showing racism in a culture is not the same as endorsing it!

The contemporary objection to that particular work is a specific epithet, considered to be anathema in the mores of the present day. Both Vince Passaro's article and my lesser essay which forms the first 4 postings in this thread attempt to point out the fallacy of expecting works written 100 years or more previously to reflect the same social values held today.

The fact that Huck Finn has an anti-Racist message doesn't preclude the work from having racist undertones or from indulging in the promotion of patronizing racial stereotypes. I wouldn't be the only person to read Twain as using racial humour in a way that indulges in racism, even if Twain's humanist tendencies make him take a stance against the more sinister aspects of institutionalized racism.

It is not the N word alone that has caused people to react to Twain as possibly reinforcing racial stereotypes. The fact that it resists extreme forms of racism, which are already broadly unacceptable in contemporary culture, is hardly redeeming of the subtler aspects of racism that pervade the work.

It's not an either or thing, the work promotes certain elements of racism, just as it criticizes others.

[Drkshadow03]

How is the above statement logical, and more to the point,who said it? Vince Passaro didn't write that, and neither did yours truly.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows racism for the evil that it is, as manifested in the characters and prevailing culture which oppresses Jim. Simply showing racism in a culture is not the same as endorsing it!

The contemporary objection to that particular work is a specific epithet, considered to be anathema in the mores of the present day. Both Vince Passaro's article and my lesser essay which forms the first 4 postings in this thread attempt to point out the fallacy of expecting works written 100 years or more previously to reflect the same social values held today.

Actually you did:

Yes, Mark Twain's works should be taught. But I see that I have to say it again: Mark Twain was NOT a racist; in fact there is no other non-minority writer of his time that came down harder on racism and imperialism as Mark Twain.

Okay, I suppose what you wrote isn't exactly what I described above, but close enough. I suppose you could be implying that his work rather than his separate personal being came down hard against racism and imperialism. But this only goes to show why there isn't as hard a divide between the writer and his work as you're asserting. Although I understand the problems involved with relying too heavily on biography when interpreting and do essentially agree we need to rely on the work first and foremost.

But once you cut out the author and this problem leads to the very thing you're railing against since then the text needs to speak for itself. But what happens when a large portion of the population reads the text very differently than you do?

Obviously Mark Twain's work is criticizing slavery and certain forms of racism of his time, but as Orphanpip notes it's more than possible to criticize certain aspects of racism and reify others. I have no opinion right now on how I feel Twain handles it in his story because to be honest I haven't read Huck Finn since 11th grade. That would be almost 11 years ago.

[JBI]

And, by extension, even if it is racist, what effect is that of the work? And if it is an anti-slavery affirmation, what does that mean? You are writing on the reaction of contemporary readers, even if one is going to do what almost every critic and historian does and put the text and the acts within their historical frames as part of the time, there is still the question of what does that mean to a modern reader, who is reading a book, and usually a young reader at that who is not taking in history as a post-modern textbook reading, but rather as a narrative that is part of her - how is she to react?

I do not advocate censorship, but it is easy to see how the issue emerges within a frame that teaches the text before the background, yet emphasizes the background over the text.

The real problem with Finn is that the text, from what I can recall, is so much about racism and the American past, but the American past is now being distanced to "overcome" racism - simply, if one is not part of the historical background, to what extent is the historical background relevant as a text in itself.

The power of Finn is in narratology, I would argue, not on its political themes, but you commit the exact same crime that those who criticize it do - you read it for the politics, and not for the narrative, and you instead make an affirmation to its political goodness within its own context, rather than its racism within a different context, when, arguably, if you wish to talk about greatness, you should affirm that its racist or not racist content are part of a discussion, but are not the essence of the book, the same way antisemitism is not the essence of the Merchant of Venice, despite that Shakespeare's writing of Shylock as such a powerful character has forced the play to be read as such (we all know the merchant is not Shylock, and the bulk of the plot is centered on a series of romances, rather than on Shylock's bond, which merely serves to bring a frame to the tragicomic - the end is not in Shylock's defeat, but rather in the lover's defeat.

Likewise, the power of Eliot is not in his Christian affirmation, or anti-semitism, and rarely do people read him for his antisemitism. The reason for a career decline is the fact that poetics moved differently in the United States than in Britain, as did culture - the great modern poets of the States were Frost and Stevens, not Eliot and Pound, and as such the tradition moved away from the Romantic works of Eliot, and the archaic works of Pound to the more Whitman-heavy works of Frost, and the more contemplative and meditative works of Stevens (with perhaps W. C. Williams coming in as a third voice).

In Europe, the take was perhaps different - Eliot holds a lot more with English poetics, so it is perhaps easier for someone like Geoffrey Hill to hold him in his great esteem - but there there is also a tradition of local born poets to put into the context - as such, Eliot went from being THE English poet, to one of a series of modernist voices - his antisemitism did nothing really, as his poems are relatively free of an antisemitic voice.

In terms of political correctness - the actual extent of it is quite misunderstood - it does not actually mean killing texts in the vast majority of its contexts - simply put, English departments are too big, and English Ph. D.s to numerous, so it became fashionable for trends to emerge - for instance, the Showalter followers who decided to just look for any female who ever penned a verse. What that did really was just to broaden the Canon for a couple of decades, with, other perspectives such as post-colonialism coming in, bringing more topics to discuss. Did that really kill reading greatness though? Well, I had an Edmund Spenser specialist explain that the amount of writing on him was never more numerous than in the past 50 years, but what it did was just to focus people's attention to other aspects of his work - mainly his colonialism, rather than the structuralist readings that dominated before.

Likewise, Shakespeare was never abandoned - nor was Conrad - reading greatness was never killed, though in certain institutions there was a shift more to look at contemporary works - that was the big strike to the canon, namely, American authors becoming a much bigger part of the American curriculum.

In that vein, the number of scholars working on Milton in American institutions are far lower than those working on 20th century American fiction. There was a post a few years ago detailing the simple fact that the more "dated" your specialty in English is, the less people there are competing for faculty positions - and I think that is the main root of the question. Why are we so preoccupied with fiction, and, by extension, 20th century fiction?

For people coming out of that mold, and students entering that mold, it is hard to ignore modern critical opinions, as they are so much of the context of the 20th century world. The older texts really haven't changed much, but the newer ones have gained undeserved exposure because of academic fixation - that is not true of all institutions, but it is particularly true of American ones, though still not all. The focus on American reading makes American modes of reading, and American issues in the forefront, whereas the focus on classical reading moves classical issues to the forefront.

But who is going to sit there and read books on Neoplatonic notions of love in Edmund Spenser's Four Hymns, or read the religious debates, still in archaic spelling, of Tyndale and More, which go on for pages, yet were the big issues of the time. And to what extent does that leak into the popular culture - the culture of the contemporary, from my reading, especially of the States, is one where an individual must contemplate the role of their country, and their society, and the issues of homophobia, racism, and sexism. Canada is different, as we have come above that to an extent, but still Canadian literature would focus on our issues, as that is what is of concern at the moment to the youth, who, seeking something from text, will turn to something that speaks to them.

Spenser is hardly accessible, he is difficult reading. In that sense, you go to the institution to learn about him, rather than read him at home at the age of 15, missing everything. Huck Finn is accessible, so it is criticized, since its context is not defined, and the relationship between it and its readers not one of distance but one of closeness - it speaks of current issues that should not be current issues, and is, as such, hard to contextualize - racism exists in the forms within the book, whereas colonialism in Spenser, or misogyny in The Taming of the Shrew are now so distant as to be read from a distance.

You call it railing at greatness, I call it yelling into the mirror. When one sees ones own flaws in a text it is easy to yell at the text - how can one affirm the greatness of Moby Dick without seeing in it the self-loathed repugnance that is a culture that contains the same tropes.

Beyond that, the rest of the world does not do that, as the rest of the world's literature is not the same, nor the world they live in. The States has issues, and expresses them through their academy - Canadian literature study is more keeping with a sort of post-post-modernism, that gets beyond the issues, which is where the American academy is heading, and many already have headed - the text of The Western Canon, or even of The Closing of the American Mind are so dated already that it is ridiculous.

Simply put, the essay to me seems to ride a bandwagon of 20-odd year old criticism that has gone as out of fashion as what it is criticizing. Even Harold Bloom seems to have shut up about it, and those who are still writing it are either aged, or, if young, archaic.

The canon did not die either, as it cannot die, nor has reading died, nor has the aesthetic died - merely, the shift in culture that was the post Cold-War generation has occurred - and now the post-post-Cold-War generation is finding its relationship to a) history, and b) literature.

The irony is, those critics who focused so much on yelling have shifted away too - nobody is writing the polemics they did before in the same way - it is now too an historical narrative, to an extent, which is emerging in a new aesthetic.

I read a couple of years ago in Canadian Literature of how Al Purdy is now published, along with other Canadian poets, in selected volumes that feature their best, and show a tradition - the point was his racism in his works was removed, and less focused, to bring a new audience to read Purdy as the elegiac poet of a shifting Canadian identity - he has moved, with the Canadian identity, through the transition, and as such the critic argued, so has the tradition, that looks at him as an historical pivot, rather than as themselves, and therefore goes over the racist undertone as historical, rather than personal.

By extension, similar things occur in Eliot, where to me mention of not liking him because of Antisemitism is as laughable as mentioning not liking Dickens because of antisemitism (I know people who went to private Judaic high schools who were taught him in class, without his antisemitism being an issue) - likewise, we have moved beyond even Marlowe's antisemitism, and Said himself stated his great love for the French writers who he criticized in his Orientalism, with an extended point that his book was aimed at addressing how the same tropes he found within them are still apparent, and not at killing the authors, nor at writing a "positive" view of the "orient" (a place he argues does not exist). The trend is to break things down until they become part of an historical narrative, not to bury them in the ground - Said's Flaubert is a great author, Said's Naipaul is a Racist "witness for the prosecution". The distance and history between the two figures is worth pointing out, where one is within a context that has been breaking for a while, whereas one is within a modern context who tries to reaffirm racism.

To sum it up, Huck Finn is read as racist, and therefore bashed as such, because the world it is read in is still so heavily dominated by its tropes - the critics and the political correct police will break away at that, and will be broken, and are being broken, and out of that emerges a literary historical context and identity, and a new cultural identity, rather than a new canon, as that was never the goal.

Hence why I pushed this far more on the American academic establishment, since they have a more repressed cultural identity that does not wish to really move forward, only bury things within the culture and ignore them. (and what better way than yelling at everything that could look offensive, rather than addressing how these things are still ingrained in the culture).

[Drkshadow03]

Hence why I pushed this far more on the American academic establishment, since they have a more repressed cultural identity that does not wish to really move forward, only bury things within the culture and ignore them. (and what better way than yelling at everything that could look offensive, rather than addressing how these things are still ingrained in the culture).

Oh, I don't know. I think most so-called "PC" critiques do more than just yell at anything that looks offensive and in many cases actually delve into how those things are still ingrained in the culture.

[JCamilo]

North America is no more PC than many countries in the world, neither invented it (a capriche of any culture powerful enough to consider others as their small kids needing protection). It is just the dominating culture in the western world and any aspect of it - be it revolutionary like in the 60's or conservative like now - will have a huger impact in the world.

[mortalterror]

Obviously Mark Twain's work is criticizing slavery and certain forms of racism of his time, but as Orphanpip notes it's more than possible to criticize certain aspects of racism and reify others. I have no opinion right now on how I feel Twain handles it in his story because to be honest I haven't read Huck Finn since 11th grade. That would be almost 11 years ago.

It's not just in Huck Finn. It's all throughout his work.

The great bulk of the savages must go. The white man wants their lands, and all must go excepting such percentage of them as he will need to do his work for him upon terms to be determined by himself. Since history has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it certainty, the humanest way of diminishing the black population should be adopted, not the old cruel ways of the past. Mr. Rhodes and his gang have been following the old ways.—They are chartered to rob and slay, and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and Christian spirit. They rob the Mashonas and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories in the hallowed old style of "purchase!" for a song, and then they force a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand. They rob the natives of their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. They issue "regulations" requiring the incensed and harassed natives to work for the white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery, and is several times worse than was the American slavery which used to pain England so much; for when this Rhodesian slave is sick, super-annuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself or starve—his master is under no obligation to support him.

The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a discredited time and a crude "civilization." We humanely reduce an overplus of dogs by swift chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted Australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. All these are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I would rather suffer either of these deaths thirty times over in thirty successive days than linger out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the victim hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage, and puts the right stain upon it.

-Following the Equator

The earl put us up and sold us at auction. This same infernal law had existed in our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that they were freemen had been sold into life-long slavery without the circumstances making any particular impression upon me; but the minute law and the auction block come into my personal experience, a thing which had been merely improper before became suddenly hellish.

-A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

[Virgil]

North America is no more PC than many countries in the world, neither invented it (a capriche of any culture powerful enough to consider others as their small kids needing protection). It is just the dominating culture in the western world and any aspect of it - be it revolutionary like in the 60's or conservative like now - will have a huger impact in the world.

We don't usually agree Camilo, but we do here. Thanks.

[AuntShecky]

Re: Response #40 from MortalTerror (above.)

These were both good examples of Twain's condemnation of slavery, expressed in an ironic tone which most discerning readers would be able to catch. The irony is not unlike that Swift used in "A Modest Proposal."

cf. Reply #2 of this thread, in which Vince Passaro explains how irony is often misinterpreted:

". . .the issue of irony in the sense that some readers are incapable of recognizing irony when they see it--unlike potentially offensive passages which supposedly jump off the page into the eyes of those who make a practice of looking for them. Passaro’s takes irony to an exponential level; he believes that irony is “what we despise about literature, and what exhausts us about modern literature in particular,” and “ its acknowledgment that in. . .the beautiful process of creation is tinged with something slightly immoral, something exploitative of intimacies and experience, rude, vain, self-justifying, disloyal, brutal, unrestrained. . .Modern art insists on making something significant and even beautiful out of ugliness, dissonance, fever, hatred, anger, failure, and pain.”

[Cunninglinguist]

Perhaps to open up a new vein of discourse.....

I think it's part II and II of your post where you address … that we shouldn't encourage undergraduates to see canonical authors as "like" themselves … I'm more than fine with this approach. I encourage it. I think it's important for new and potential readers of literature to see how great artists and writers have dealt/expressed feelings or ideas similar to our own. Often such a companionship, between author and reader, is the start of a more advanced study. But more than that. . .it's where the "value" (an idea you don't like that much) of literature lay.

I disagree with your disagreement. There is a fundamental problem with embracing art as a “mirror,” as it were, unconsciously imposing a personal and cultural context onto a work. Of course we’re always bound to a context, but this is no excuse to indolently accept it, to enterprise no further than it. When you do not try to go beyond your context, you fail to see the work as it is, as the artist intended it, and you rob the artist of the very capacity to express. In believing that the artist is “just like us” we’re depriving him of his ability to persuade us, to show us something new; we’re lowering his art to a status of merely a static affirmation instead of letting it be a dynamic force of influence, causing us to entertain fundamentally new ideas about life. We believe that the artist cannot teach us anything new about the content of life; rather, he can only teach us how to better express that content. In a word, the conviction kills the art, or, at least, castrates it. Conversely, great art is done by those people who fundamentally differ. Those who see things from a highly unique perspective and have the ability to show others that perspective. It seems as if when people can’t shake that perfunctory assumption, their interpretative faculties are crippled, and they start censoring things that are superficially obscene.

[AuntShecky]

Perhaps to open up a new vein of discourse.....



I disagree with your disagreement. There is a fundamental problem with embracing art as a “mirror,” as it were, unconsciously imposing a personal and cultural context onto a work. Of course we’re always bound to a context, but this is no excuse to indolently accept it, to enterprise no further than it. When you do not try to go beyond your context, you fail to see the work as it is, as the artist intended it, and you rob the artist of the very capacity to express. In believing that the artist is “just like us” we’re depriving him of his ability to persuade us, to show us something new; we’re lowering his art to a status of merely a static affirmation instead of letting it be a dynamic force of influence, causing us to entertain fundamentally new ideas about life. We believe that the artist cannot teach us anything new about the content of life; rather, he can only teach us how to better express that content. In a word, the conviction kills the art, or, at least, castrates it. Conversely, great art is done by those people who fundamentally differ. Those who see things from a highly unique perspective and have the ability to show others that perspective. . .

Amen.

[sparrow6224]

Dear Aunt Shecky,

You'll be amused to know two things, I hope: the first being that just tonight, after supper, I was discussing with my Jewish in-laws the comedian Shecky Green and the Yiddish nickname Shecky: my lady's mom had a cousin named "Sheicky" and his real name was Littwak. That's as far as we got. The second is that I am the author of the Harper's piece you quote here and clearly have read with great interest and great care. And I am most grateful to find your thoughts on it, which are solid and provocative. I would throw two remarks into the discussion that followed: one, I cannot emphasize enough, the problem is not political correctness, the problem is much larger than that and it is identical on both sides of the political correctness debate: the problem is wanting literature (and now, I'd add, even "facts") to be limited to that which confirms one's already established beliefs; two, if I had it to do over, I'd give considerably more credit to the Goonetilike edition of Heart of Darkness, which really does have a lot of fascinating stuff in it, and helped my aforementioned mother-in-law, on her second or third try, to finally feel she had a grasp on the novel.

I should also tell you that while I disagreed with him on the small point you mention, Edward Said was a teacher of mine, and later a friend, very dear to me, himself a huge fan of Conrad; and quite simply he was the greatest literary mind I've ever been in the presence of, by a good margin, and I've been in the presence of some very good ones. I have written an Afterword to the Signet edition of Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer. It describes, in a way that will amuse you, how I first met Said. I was reading Heart of Darkness at the moment in question.

Thank you so much, lo these many years later, for your close and high-octane reading of my essay.

Vince Passaro

[ralfyman]

Too much commercial mass entertainment coupled with consumer spending.