Timeless Truths

Kevin Holtsberry alerted me to this article at National Review Online. As much as I tend to avoid NRO (mostly because, like The Nation on the left, it relentlessly politicizes literature and the arts, when it deigns to discuss them at all), I must say there are some things in it with which I can't help but agree, although I think much of the analysis it contains is based on insufficient familiarity with what actually goes on in contemporary literary scholarship.

Written by Albert Keith Whitaker, a philosophy professor from Boston College, the article describes the author's visit to the 200th birthday celebration of Nathaniel Hawthorne at Salem, Massachusetts. Suffice it to say that he doesn't see enough celebration of the Hawthorne his stories and novels reveal him to really be, and sees too much celebration of a Hawthorne distorted by left-wing politics: "They don't demonize Hawthorne; they don't kick him out of the liberal canon. Instead, they poison him with their praise and turn him into nothing but a mouthpiece of contemporary 'wisdom'".

Whitaker introduces the article with a reference to the recent NEA report, "Reading at Risk." He maintains that what he observed at the Hawthorne celebration perhaps explains the decline in interest in literary writing the report discusses: "Schools that teach only with a view to 'race, class, and gender' — in other words, only with a view to contemporary fixations rather than to timeless truth and beauty. You can more easily find race, class, and gender in the pages of the New York Times — so who needs a book?" This seems to me far-fetched, although I do agree that the dominant approach to the study of literature in both colleges and high schools has become essentially a political approach--that is, literature is used to illustrate ideas and themes that are external to the actual experience of reading works of literature. But why would a focus on "race, class, and gender" be any more damaging to a cultivation of the reading experience itself than a focus on "timeless truth"? Don't the advocates of r-c-g consider their concerns to be a version of such truth? The right-moralist critique of literature is no less a substitution of doctrine for reading than the left-moralist critique. Both encourage readers to ignore what literature can really do for them aside from the imposition of such doctrines.

Further, Whitaker seems to take from his experience the impression that Hawthorne is a universally acclaimed figure in contemporary academic criticism. He observes, "You might think feminist and other countercultural literary critics would take a hard line on an author who loved cigars, acquiesced in slavery, and often poked fun at women in his notebooks and even his published pieces. But Hawthorne gets a pass. He's a good guy. I suspect that's due in part to his being a lifelong democrat and strikingly handsome. I even heard one scholar claim that he supported abortion rights. But most of all it's due to his creation Hester Prynne, she of the scarlet letter. You see, by wearing her brand of shame proudly, as one presenter put it, 'She took a stand for all women.'" But Whitaker seems to forget he's attending an officially sponsored "celebration" of Hawthorne. Dissenting voices aren't going to encouraged at such an event. (They wouldn't do much for the tourist trade in the long run.) I can assure the author that the kind of mindless praise he heard is not typical of current scholarship on Hawthorne. (And at that time the Democratic party was the conservative party. I'm not sure what Whitaker means to imply by the observation that Hawthorne was "strikingly handsome.) He's more likely to be condemned as a reactionary white guy.

In his e-mail to me calling my attention to the article, Kevin suggests that the sort of thing Whitaker witnessed is what alienates many conservatives from literature and from discussions of literature. "It seems to me that far too many students (left and right) are turned off in high school and college by the types this article describes and then never find their way back to these classics," he writes. If this is true, I can understand why many conservatives would come to the conclusion that academic literary study has little to offer them. But to the extent that students (all students, as Kevin points out) are put off by what they hear in the classroom or read in critical essays it's due more to what has become the anti-literary mindset of literary study than any particular political dogma. And if the literary academy has any responsibility for the declining interest in literature the NEA report alleges, it lies here as well. How can new generations of readers for serious literature be encouraged when educators don't take it seriously themselves?