Frank Lentricchia, a prominent literary critic who teaches at Duke University, made news recently by confessing that he loves literature: a retrograde sentiment in English departments nowadays, and maybe even subversive. The sway of “theory” in the academic study of literature is usually accounted for in culture-war terms, as one manifestation of the sweeping changes that began in the sixties; but here Alan Jacobs sees it in a different context, as the latest episode in a perennial contest that predates Plato.
Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry By Mark Edmundson Cambridge University Press 243 pp.; $59.95, hardcover; $17.95, paper
Modern culture seems doomed to the perpetual re-enactment of a tense and suspicious dance, a dance with which Christians are thoroughly familiar. There are only two partners in this dance, though they are known by various names: Theory and Practice, the Head and the Heart, Contemplation and Action, the Abstract and the Concrete. Christians use these names, and add some of their own: Theology and Piety, for instance. Not everyone would agree to the names I have given–few people want to stand for Abstraction–but we all understand what this dance is about. The proponents of Column A (Theory, Theology, etc.) fear unreflective and heedless activity and boldly assert that “the unexamined life is not worth living”; while the proponents of Column B fear, as Hamlet put it, that “conscience [that is, reflection] makes cowards of us all” and causes “enterprises of great pitch and moment” to “lose the name of action.” Or, as Wordsworth pithily says, “We murder to dissect.”
It is no accident, I suppose, that when I try to sum up the second position, quotations from poets immediately come to mind, while the first camp finds its representative in Socrates. For Plato, more than two millennia ago, could already refer to the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” Mark Edmundson’s book gives every appearance of rejoining that venerable antagonism–but, as we shall see, appearances can be, and in this case are, quite deceiving.
One must begin by noting the lack of fit between the book’s title and its contents. Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida. That second phrase suggests considerable historical scope, but in fact, Edmundson is concerned almost totally with contemporary figures. His treatment of Plato and Aristotle takes up about a dozen pages in his “Prologue,” and he refers occasionally throughout the book to Kant and Hegel; but each of the book’s five main chapters focuses on current thinkers: Paul de Man; Jacques Derrida; a set of Marxist, feminist, and New Historicist critics; Michel Foucault; and Harold Bloom.
This list also reveals a problem with the title’s first phrase: most of these people are not philosophers, but rather literary theorists. On his second page, Edmundson yokes–without definition, argument, or even comment–philosophy and literary theory together, and never questions the yoking. Moreover, though Edmundson does define “literature,” he defines it as “any revitalizing cultural activity.” Thus the book’s title is misleading in at least three ways.
Edmundson’s conflation of philosophy and theory deserves further consideration. While it is obviously true that most current theory resembles, in its vocabulary and its procedures, philosophy more than literature, it is not clear that either philosophers or literary critics would be eager to accept the equation of the two pursuits. The belief that theory is a cheap and insufficiently rigorous simulacrum of philosophy has become axiomatic among many philosophers; and while Edmundson stresses the scorn that theorists tend to have for literature, they have been scarcely less hard on philosophy. The essay that made Derrida famous, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” is the inaugural statement of his contempt for the “onto-theological tradition,” which means most of Western philosophy since Socrates plus the whole of Christian theology. And de Man repeatedly contends that literature is a Hydra whose heads grow back faster than philosophy can cut them off: in the end, philosophy meets its death at the hands of an eternally self-renewing literature. (Theology succumbs too, but de Man would scarcely bother to note that; as Albany says, when he hears of Edmund’s death in King Lear, “That’s but a trifle here.”)
But of course, de Man’s celebration of the powers of literature lasts only as long as he is writing about philosophy; when he turns his attention to literature it falls victim to criticism, while mere criticism is slain in its turn by theory. Philosophy is just the first victim in a chain of murders, distinctive only in that it does not experience the thrill of killing; while theory, conversely, remains unslain and victorious among the corpses. Similarly, for Derrida, the poems of Valery or the narratives of Rousseau are useful insofar as they reveal, or revel in, the instability of language that traditional philosophy struggles helplessly to master; but in the end, Derrida stands in theoretical judgment over literature, too, having trumped its inconsistent playfulness with his commitment to pure play. Philosophy and theory indeed both claim to be more rigorous pursuits than literature; but theory sees traditional philosophy as just another one of the many disciplines that it has overcome.
Now, one might contend that philosophy’s claims to superiority over literature mask a profound dependence on literary means. Derrida was scarcely the first to point out the paradox that Plato’s most extended and bitter attack on poetry appears in a work (the Republic ) whose form and structure are wholly literary. But even so, philosophy’s relation to literature is very different from theory’s. In the university, philosophy has always had a distinct disciplinary identity, while theory is institutionally linked with, and dependent on, literature and literary study. Thus the history of literature-against-philosophy is distinct from the history of literature-against-theory. Edmundson’s title claims to tell the first story; his book tells part of the latter one.
Having taken this long to consider Edmundson’s title, we may now turn with more confidence to his subtitle: “A Defence of Poetry.” Here Edmundson is on firmer ground, because he does stress repeatedly the gap between theory’s claims and its achievements; that is, he emphasizes those elements of literary form and experience “that fruitfully exceed destructive norms and pass beyond theory’s reductive explanatory powers.” Though, again, he claims to think of literature as “something of a synecdoche” for “any revitalizing cultural activity,” in practice, as he admits, his examples are almost always taken from his primary area of academic interest, Romantic poetry; and in his actual use of the word poetry, it means literature generally (as it did for most pre-Romantic writers, including Sidney, from whom Shelley borrowed the phrase “defence of poetry”). For Edmundson, the poems of Wordsworth and Blake and the essays of Emerson seem to stand with particular firmness against the depredations of theory. When we hear from them, they do indeed make a good case for themselves–but I wonder if we hear from them often enough. For every page that Edmundson devotes to the poets he devotes a dozen to the theorists, which gives the impression that, whatever his putative purpose, he is more interested in theory than in poetry.
Indeed, at times it seems that Edmundson’s chief goal is less to defend poetry than to find a theory that gives more credit to poetry. At the beginning of chapter 4, which treats Michel Foucault, Edmundson says not only that “Foucault might still get us asking profitable questions about the limits and promise of criticism,” but also that he finds in Foucault “the basis for a philosophical critique of poetry that need not end in reductive disenfranchisement.” Implicit in this statement, and in much of the book, is something more than the claim that contemporary theory has made significant contributions to the study of literature and culture (a claim that I wholly endorse); Edmundson seems to think poetry needs theory, requires a “philosophical critique.” One would like to find, in a book that claims to be a defense of poetry, an acknowledgment of poetry’s self-sufficiency, its ability to persist even without the support of theorists; but when Edmundson offers so much less attention to poetry than to the theories that it is his announced purpose to restrain, his method reshapes his message. (And if Edmundson does want primarily to provide a theoretical justification of poetry, why is Mikhail Bakhtin, the one modern theorist who has done more than anyone else to establish just what Edmundson most wants to establish-the inability of any systematic, totalizing theory to account for the force and beauty of literature–completely ignored in this book?)
Edmundson is at his best as an intellectual historian, and woven through his book is a sophisticated answer to the question of how theory achieved the dominance that it held in the 1980s and continues to hold with only slightly di-minished authority today. For Edmundson, three factors have ensured theory’s rise to power: first, the nineteenth-century “crisis of cultural authority” that produced the humanism of Matthew Arnold, the tradition of which modern theory is the heir; second, and in Edmundson’s view most important, the Freudian understanding of the unconscious; and third, the transformation of literary criticism into a specifically academic profession.
Edmundson is quick to note that “few critics working today will be pleased to acknowledge themselves as [Lionel] Trilling’s descendants, much less Arnold’s”; but, he argues, an impressive range of critics agree that “we are enmeshed in a general crisis of authority” and that any serious attempt to extricate us from that crisis will find criticism and theory necessary to its project. Poetry can be central, too, but in a different way: “poetry is a marvelous raw matter that cannot be left in its unprocessed state.” Deep within poetry is the pure “ore” of truth, but the critic must first mine it and then “refine away,” with the intense heat of social commitment, its “distracting dross.” In this respect, then, even the most apparently radical theorists can be found on a continuum with Arnold, the great conservator of culture.
Perhaps the boldest element of Literature Against Philosophy is Edmundson’s attack on the theoretical and critical use of the Freudian unconscious. “Once fully in play,” he claims, “the theory of the unconscious would do more than any other intellectual development to shift the power relations within criticism”–that is, to give critics the upper hand over poets. After all, the subject of analysis-whether a person analyzed by a psychotherapist or a poet analyzed by a critic–is by Freudian definition incapable of self-understanding without the analyst-critic’s work. Edmundson does a nice job of showing how the theory of the unconscious (with its whole conceptual apparatus, especially the notion of repression) becomes an almost universal tool by which critics can identify the blind spots not just of poets but also of all previous critics.
Edmundson is sharper still in outlining the costs and benefits of academic professionalism for literary critics. Professionalism means, among other things, the development of certain public standards of achievement by which critics and scholars can be measured and, if necessary, defended against wielders of budgetary bludgeons:
The story is frequently told of how Cleanth Brooks kept the English program at L.S.U. alive by demonstrating to the dean–with copious use of blackboard diagrams–how the New Criticism he had helped to devise was a coherent, cognitive discipline, not unscientific at all. Literary studies could thus be conceived of as a branch of knowledge, with a place among those other forms of knowing that make up the liberal arts curriculum. To thrive as a university discipline, the study of literature had to look as serious as its competitors, and, if possible, more so.
But when one seeks to reckon the price at which this rescue was bought, one finds that it did not come cheap. For one thing, there is the programmatic exclusion of aesthetic pleasure, not only from “serious” criticism, but from almost any critical discussion. More disturbing still is the general stifling of anything in literature that might bid to evade the grasp of systematic, pseudo-scientific, or theoretical discourse. One of the most telling passages in Edmundson’s book addresses just this point:
Paul de Man is a more difficult critic to read and understand than a responsive, rather impressionistic essayist like Virginia Woolf. But one can teach intelligent students to do what de Man does; it is probably impossible to teach anyone to respond like Woolf if he has little aptitude for it. And how could we sustain the academic study of literature if we were compelled to say that a central aspect of criticism is probably not teachable?
It may then be, as Edmundson says in another part of the book, that “we in literary studies are in the university under some false premises.”
Edmundson then gives this counsel to his fellow literary academics: since “our attraction to metaphor, genius, the incommensurable, the weird, places us at odds with our colleagues in other departments,” we should stop “borrowing our intellectual apparatuses from them” and instead “declare amicable war” in the name of the “potent structures of the imagination” that we find in the greatest literature. As some of my previous comments suggest, Edmundson rarely follows his own counsel–a particular shame given the incisiveness of his analysis. But that point aside, why does Edmundson think it so important that literary scholars follow his advice? The passage I have just been citing provides a clue:
The best works that we teach will shrug off their finest theories, and too show our colleagues why they might think twice about promulgating their models in the world outside the university gates. The literature department ought to be where the disciplines go to die. Or at least to be made more flexible, modest and humane.
In other words, the chief reasons for rescuing poetry from theory are political and pragmatic. It gradually emerges in the course of Literature Against Philosophy that Edmundson is working directly in the tradition of his colleague at the University of Virginia, Richard Rorty–whose endorsement of the book is prominently displayed upon it–and Richard Poirier. (Edmundson praises and thanks both men in his acknowledgments.) Indeed, Edmundson’s most obvious influences are Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and Poirier’s The Renewal of Literature and Poetry and Pragmatism. From these thinkers Edmundson inherits a notion of pragmatism, and of literature’s pragmatic function, that draws in some ways on Nietzsche but that also uses Nietzsche as a lens with which to identify a distinctively American strain of pragmatism. Rorty and Poirier share a vision of a post-Christian–indeed, postreligious–West in which democratic openness and toleration are the highest possible values, and the avoidance of violent conflict the most reasonable goal of politics.
The success of Edmundson’s “defence of poetry” (such as it is) depends on the reader’s willingness to accept these premises–and further to accept that pragmatism’s shoulders are broad enough to uphold these values without the aid of more traditional forms of belief and commitment. Rorty himself has admitted that pragmatism’s refusal to accept any commitments as absolutely binding limits its powers of moral suasion; which causes one to wonder how pragmatic pragmatism really is.
But even the reader who is skeptical of pragmatism’s validity or usefulness can appreciate the stylistic consequences of Edmundson’s adherence to this philosophical tradition. Indeed, Edmundson writes about theoretical matters with unusual clarity; and one could plausibly argue that his book is more directly and obviously a defense of literary journalism than a defense of poetry. It is not just literature that Edmundson (a contributing editor to Harper’s ) wishes to rescue from the clutches of theory, but also the critical and belletristic traditions of Lionel Trilling, Virginia Woolf, and Edmund Wilson. “One thing that has certainly aided this process whereby . . . philosophy has gotten the upper hand on poetry,” Edmundson remarks, “is the disappearance of a culture of informed literary journalism,” a disappearance due in large part to the aforementioned professionalizing of literary study. At one point Edmundson gets almost starry-eyed as he imagines a heroic race of teacher-scholar-critics, engendered presumably by Rorty and Poirier, who in their turn send an army of charming and conversational pragmatists into the world to transform it:
Such critics would, without sacrificing their intelligence and learning, engage on equal terms with the surrounding culture. They would be less interested in making themselves and their students into a self-contained elite through harsh philosophical discipline than in having an ongoing effect on the thinking of their fellow citizens. Such intellectuals would see television and electronic culture not as fearsome opponents or . . . the all-conquering wave of the future, but as opportunities for exercising responsive critique, and too for disseminating their ideas.
That last clause, with its bashful confession of an interest in political influence, is a nice rhetorical touch, though it does make nonsense of those modest earlier claims for literature’s usefulness in helping us pass the time. But whether pragmatism passes itself off as revolution or distraction, one whose allegiance is to thicker and more substantive accounts of the Good–that of Christianity, for example–finds it difficult to take Edmundson’s vision wholly seriously. That the vision seems once again to forget not just the poets but also their works, which Edmundson is supposed to be defending, causes additional concern.
Meanwhile, for most of us the old suspicious dance continues. I call it a dance, though Plato called it a quarrel, because I think that we would like to believe that we need not choose between philosophy and poetry, any more than we need choose between theology and piety. But we fear, and with reason, that if we are not vigilant and careful, one partner in the dance might come to dominate the other; which is why I use the adjective “suspicious.” At some point in the composition of Literature Against Philosophy, the productive tension I favor was lost, for, though Edmundson insists that poetry lead the way, by the end of the book theory seems to be carrying poetry bodily about the ballroom floor. The dance has become a wrestling match, and an unequal one at that.
-Alan Jacobs is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. His essays and reviews appear regularly in First Things, The American Scholar, and other publications.
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
