My Five-year-old Could Do Better Than That!; or, Don't Be A Dick, Dawkins!

Dawkins strikes again!  I feel guilty for giving this tweet attention, but I'm procrastinating very hard on a more serious post, so I beg your indulgence.

Worse yet, Dawkins is deliberately trolling here, just trying to get a rise out of people like me: it's a mistake to take his remarks seriously enough to rebut them. 

I'll begin by saying that (to my shame) I have not yet read Kafka's "Metamorphosis."  That means I have no stake in defending its excellence, but then I don't think anyone could get a rise out of me by attacking the value of any work of art, even those I know and love very well.  You disagree that such and such a work is great?  Fine, go be somewhere else now.

I imagine that Dawkins has somewhere told us which works of literature he considers great, and I'd bet they're unrelentingly middlebrow.  His reference to Animal Farm here is all I have to go on.  I'm very fond of Animal Farm, which I first read on my own in fifth or sixth grade, but I don't consider it a great or "major" work; I'm not sure what those words mean in this context, but I think it's a minor work, very teachable, and the sort of story that people who don't care about literature are apt to like.  People love to find correspondences and secret messages in art, from biblical apocalypses to Dylanologists and those who believe that the Beatles' later work is full of coded references to the death of Paul McCartney to The Da Vinci Code to The Lord of the Rings.

The same might be true of "Metamorphosis."  It's reasonable that the premise - an ordinary man wakes up one morning to find he's been transformed into a giant bug -- would grab the ordinary reader's imagination. It's hard to see why even Dawkins would miss that.  Some commenters on his tweet replied that it's an allegory of a low-level clerk's life, which is a fair guess from what I've heard.  Even if that's true, however it doesn't confer greatness on the tale.  And pardon me for not believing that Dawkins has put much effort into understanding the "scholarly answers."

It happens that I just finished reading David Lodge's novel Nice Work (1988), about a feminist literary scholar and a Thatcherite businessman who are thrown together and learn to look beyond their respective fields.  Like the previous two novels I've read by Lodge, it's characterized by a humane generosity that is conspicuously absent from the writings of Richard Dawkins. I'm also working my way slowly through John Rodden's The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of 'St. George' Orwell (1989), of which I may have more to say later.  So far Rodden is summarizing the often contradictory meanings people have found in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and in the word "Orwellian," which he notes "constitutes a supremely ironic instance of doublespeak" (34).  That's less because of Orwell's literary brilliance than his nose for the Zeitgeist, but maybe that's what makes a literary work "major."

So far it doesn't appear that Dawkins has posted again to scold Twitter for failing to understand the "obvious" intention that he hid very well in the original Tweet.  It's always entertaining to watch him digging himself in deeper.  Don't let me down, Dick!

All Critics Are Equal, But Some Critics Are More Equal Than Others

I hope I can wiggle out of having to read this book, and even more I hope I can wiggle out of having to buy it.  I suppose I can just request that the library get a copy...

What I'm talking about is something called This Thing We Call Literature, by one Arthur Krystal, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press.   It got a laudatory review from Micah Mattix at The American Conservative, and you know, slogans like "In Defense of Great Books" are a red flag for me.  So for the moment, I'm just reviewing the review.  If Mattix misrepresented Krystal, I beg pardon, but the position sketched out here is one I've encountered before.

According to Mattix,

... Krystal’s main concern is not to chop individual writers down to size and extol others—though he does do some cutting—as much as it is to defend the value of hierarchical thinking with respect to literature. “The prevailing mood,” he writes, “regards hierarchies with suspicion: Who’s to say who is worth reading and who isn’t?” While a willingness to include “formerly disenfranchised artists and writers” in the canon is a good thing, “the fact that writers are all entitled to a fair hearing doesn’t mean that they are equal.”

I wonder if Krystal actually backs up the insinuation there, that "the prevailing mood" is that all writers are equal.  It sounds like he's buying into the widespread if not prevailing notion that equality means sameness.  The quotations indicate a fondness on his part for the gaseous cliché and le mot injuste, but then you don't have to be a good writer yourself to appreciate good writing by others.

Maybe I got it wrong, but I always had the impression that the call for reconsidering "formerly disenfranchised [not really the right word, Arthur] artists and writers" was motivated not by the belief that they were all equally good, but by the very reasonable belief that some good writers had been ignored because they had chosen to have the wrong skin color or genitals.  Granted, in the heat of the politicking, some people probably overstated the virtues of the artists they championed, but it's not as if that didn't happen with the usual white male suspects as well.  And the racism and sexism of the literary establishment was never really a secret; in the good old days, white men could and did openly dismiss work by women and Negroes and homosexuals and the Irish, just because they were women and homosexuals and Negroes and Irish.

I admit, I "regard hierarchies with suspicion," and I think that "Who's to say who is worth reading and who isn't?" is a fair question.  From Mattix's review I am not sure Arthur Krystal is one to say it.

Unfortunately, Krystal doesn’t help his case—which I think is almost entirely right, by the way—by often failing to demonstrate in detail how canonical writers are actually better than the minor writers who were forgotten ... But in these first two essays, he mostly lists writers and critics or turns to ex cathedra pronouncements—“War and Peace is objectively greater than The War of Words”—which are rarely very satisfying, however correct they may be.

When he does get more specific, things can get a little thorny. Is it true, for example, that great novels “rely more on accuracy of characterization than on the events that their characters react to”? I suppose it depends on what “rely more” and “accuracy” mean. Without further explanation, questions abound: Is Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment accurate? Does the novel rely more on characterization than events? How about in classical drama? The Iliad and The Odyssey? Pamela and Jane Eyre?

... Krystal notes in passing that some fiction that goes by the name “literary” isn’t, but he doesn’t explain why, give examples, or offer even a brief analysis of the failures of literary fiction.

I feel about the claim that some works just are great rather the way I feel about claims about objective reality: yes, I can go along with that, but how do you tell what's really great, and what's really real?  In the case of art, we're talking about value judgments rather than measurements, and those judgments must function within traditions.  They also change over time.  The canon, which both Mattix and Krystal admit has "sociological roots," changes.  Krystal says that those roots don't mean the aesthetic judgments are invalid, but how can you tell?  He invokes "a credible, if not monolithic, consensus among informed readers," which is plausible, except that informed readers disagree with each other and change their minds over time.  Numerous authors who used to be canonical aren't anymore.

Mattix's questions might well be supplemented by others about different artistic traditions, such as Chinese poetry.  Much if not most poetry doesn't translate well, and I still regret not having stuck with Russian long enough to read Pushkin in the original.  Mattix quotes Krystal's lament that today's poetry lacks "music."  Music is generally the first thing you lose in translation.  Which is true of prose too, if less so.

An interviewer asked Gore Vidal about his claim that, "when it comes to matters of prose and of fiction at this time and in this place, I am authority."  Whence, she inquired, comes this authority?

It is earned, mostly, but it is also a matter of temperament. The critic must know more than either writer or academic. He must also value experience and have a truth-telling nature. I think I have that. In their youth most people worry whether or not other people will like them. Not me. I had the choice of going under or surviving, and I survived by understanding (after the iron- if not the silver- had entered my soul) that it is I who am keeping score. What matters is what I think, not what others think of me; and I am willing to say what I think. That is the critical temperament. Edmund Wilson had it, but almost no one else now does, except for a few elderly Englishmen. 

I still agree with Vidal, but I'd add that he wasn't the only authority.  Others would disagree with him about the value of different writers, and I disagreed with him about some of those he recommended -- Italo Calvino, for example.  But still, the job of a critic is to persuade, by explaining why and how he or she thinks this particular work functions and succeeds (or fails).

One thing that seems increasingly important to me is that a critic, who reads widely and deeply, may forget that most people don't.  As Edmund White has said, "A canon is for people who don't like to read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in order to be considered polished, well rounded, civilized. Any real reader seeks the names of more and more books, not fewer and fewer."  And, I'd add, a real reader in this sense isn't all that concerned with greatness, though he or she won't be undiscriminating or non-judgmental either.  But most people aren't, and never will be, "real readers" in this sense.  It's up to teachers to try to guide as many of their students as they can toward a sense of what reading, or Literature with a capital L, has to offer.  (I wonder, though, how many teachers really know that themselves?)  If greatness is a thing, then it should be detectable by any reader, not declared ex cathedra.

It sounds as if Arthur Krystal lacks the capacity to do the critic's job, at least in Vidal's league.  Maybe I'll read some of his other work.  This Thing We Call Literature is only a little over a hundred pages long.

There's Gold in Them Far-Out Hills

I've begun reading Gerald Graff's Literature Against Itself, originally published in 1979 but reprinted in 1995 with a new preface by Graff that I'm saving until I've read the rest of the book.  I like Graff, and have read several of his other books, but this is the first of his scholarly books I've gotten into.  It's dense, and will take me a while to read, but it's also very entertaining and quotable, including when Graff is quoting someone else.

For example, early on he quotes the critic Harold Rosenberg, who wrote in 1972:

Social and/or aesthetic far-outness is a public relations technique aimed at the presumed indignation of a stable middle class that ceased to exist four decades ago [2, footnote].

Graff also cites evidence that outraging the middle class was exhausted at least as far back as the 1920s.

I mostly agree with this, though immediately after I read it with approval, it occurred to me that there is still an American middle class, ready and eager to be indignant at the performance art of various political and media celebrities.  Ironically, given, the traditional association with this indignation with conservative and reactionary sectors of the population, today's cultivators of the ragegasm are mostly liberal, while those who feed their indignation are on the Right.  This was true even when Literature Against Itself was originally published; it hasn't become less true in the years since then.

A page or so later, Graff himself remarks:

Some scholars in this group [those who feel little affiliation with the literary or critical "vanguard"] applaud attacks on deconstructionism and other fashions as proofs that they need not bother to read the critics in question.  It would be self-deluding to pretend that in attacking "fashionable" ideas, one is not oneself doing something fashionable [3-4].

Of course this cuts both ways and up and down, as Graff goes on to note:

Both the "conservative" and the "vanguard" factions in current cultural quarrels use the word "fashionable" as a stick with which to beat the other side, yet both sides can substantiate their usage convincingly enough [4].

And that's just in the first few pages.  I'll be taking a lot of notes as I proceed.

And Howe!

I just finished reading Florence Howe's new memoir, A Life in Motion (Feminist Press, 2011), which left me feeling inspired and exhausted. Inspired because she's done so much, though she's not as famous as many of the Second Wave feminists: she was a pioneer of Women's Studies, and a founder of the Feminist Press. That may not sound like all that much, but it kept her quite busy, which is why I feel exhausted after reading the book. A Life in Motion is almost literally what she's led since the late 1960s, traveling around the country and the world to do research, to network, to coordinate the research of others, to raise money for the Press -- she's a regular feminist dervish, and seems to have slowed down only a little at the age of 82.

I first became aware of the Feminist Press when the local women's bookstore stocked its early reprints of neglected, nearly forgotten works by women: Life in the Iron Mills, by Rebecca Harding Davis; The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; and Daughter of Earth, by Agnes Smedley. They're well-known and readily available now, but before about 1970 they were nearly impossible to find. Howe tells of searching for copies of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God "in secondhand bookstores ... [which her students] had to return to me before they could have a grade in my course" (133). The press survived arson, sabotage by a commercial publisher, funding difficulties, disorganization, and a couple of moves before setting in at their present base, the City University of New York. They've published a remarkable range of material, and I noted several interesting titles as I read A Life in Motion.

Among their biggest projects were anthologies of works by Indian, African, and Chinese women. On her first visit to India in 1977, she visited

two women's colleges, both relatively impoverished. I began a new quest, asking students what they were reading in literature courses. I was both surprised and disturbed by their responses. They read British male writers. When I asked about Indian writers, they said sometimes they were assigned Tagore and sometimes their most daring teachers gave them American writers, predictably Hemingway or Faulkner.

In Delhi, the university was on strike, along with forty-seven other universities, but I met with feminist faculty and graduate students. Two of the people present were Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Paul, both teachers of English literature. I wanted to talk with them about writers and the curriculum they taught. I had by then talked with faculty in other English departments, all of whom had assured me that there had been no women writers ever and, even if there were any, they would not be worth reading. Madhuri and Ruth were not interested in that issue, even though they were soon to found Manushi, the first feminist journal in India [316-7].

Not too surprisingly, Susie Tharu and K. Lalita and their colleagues found more than enough work by women writers to fill two big volumes of Women Writing in India. When work began on women writers in Africa,

... many of the scholars we met with insisted that African libraries and archives had been "wiped clean" by Western scholars either for their own personal files or for library collections in places like London, New York, Washington, and Chicago. We wouldn't find enough material to fill a large volume, they told us. I laughed when I heard these stories, and sometimes I said outright that since men had been the primary scholars of African history and literature, most of them would not have touched materials relevant to women. And I was usually correct [427].

The same attitude is still with us in the West. Women do write, but their work isn't given the same respect or attention that men's work gets. Recently the Guardian had an article about "the incredible shrinking presence of women in SF", which began by asking, "Is science fiction sexist?" Much of it is, of course, but the problem isn't so much the abstraction SF as it is the very concrete readers, publishers, and fans. Some notable comments: "When I scanned the names, I just saw people. Never imagined that this could be an issue..."; "I don't get it. So... there are plenty of female SF authors, but since none of them are any good the readers must be sexist because when they buy books they don't use gender quotas and positive discrimination to decide what to read?" and my favorite, "[Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing] didn't write SF, they wrote, unwittingly, historical pastiches of SF." Historical pastiches of science fiction and fantasy by men dominate the SF and fantasy sections of the bookstore and library; for a start, think of the many Tolkien imitators out there; then think about steampunk; then think about cyberpunk, which is basically noir in SF drag. These male writers nevertheless sell well and get critical and fan attention.

I can't find now the place where an African scholar told Howe that women's studies is "Western." I think the proper response to such claims is, "Oh, you don't have women in Africa?" Or China, or India ...?

Then there's the matter of class. Howe was born to Jewish parents who could be categorized as working-class or working-poor, and it surely didn't help that she was born on the cusp of the Great Depression. Her father was a taxi driver, and her mother returned to wage work when the factories opened to women during World War II. Howe was always bright, and did well in school despite some discouragement from her mother. She attended Hunter College, and to her surprise some of her professors encouraged her to think of graduate school; she never finished her Ph.D., and her teaching career, in small, non-elite schools, was constantly diverted by her husbands' pursuit of their own careers. (She married four times.) Like a good 1950s wife, she moved with them.

In college she rebelled against racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, helping to found the first interracial sorority at Hunter. In the early 1960s she went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, where she learned a different approach to teaching that she took back east with her.

So, should Florence Howe be considered working-class (because of her background) or middle-class (because of her profession)? As she tells it, she's never really gotten over the insecurity she felt about her origins, and has been surprised when people take her for the educated, cultured person she's worked so hard to appear. Even as an academic, she's worked mostly at levels below the elite universities, and struggled to ensure that women's studies as a discipline and the Feminist Press wouldn't ignore working-class women, women of color, immigrant women, women in other countries and cultures.

This weekend, in a post on "Feminist SF conversations worth reading," Nicola Griffith linked to and quoted Cheryl Morgan, who wrote of Second Wave feminism that although "[i]n theory it was about equal rights for women in all areas of life[, i]n practice it was sometimes more about equal rights for middle class white women, and occasionally about the rights of middle class white lesbian separatists." I was annoyed by that weasel-word "sometimes." This is a complaint that has often been made about American feminism of the Sixties and Seventies, not without some accuracy. For obvious reasons, American mass/corporate media preferred to focus on middle class white feminists: they were from the same class that manned the American mass/corporate media, they were colorful and articulate and media-savvy. (The Miss America protest of 1968, for example, was planned with TV and the newspapers in mind, and many feminists consciously developed ways to play the media -- by refusing to speak to any but female reporters, for example. A number of female writers who'd been confined to "lifestyle" pages found themselves shifted to the news beat for the first time, and many of them stayed there.) Given the way that even dissidents tend to believe the corporate media's claim to be reporting the news, it's hardly surprising that many Americans assumed that what they saw on TV was Feminism. Nor is it surprising that educated foreigners, including feminists like those Howe talked to in India, China, and Africa, mistook corporate media's depiction of American feminism for its reality -- they had personal and professional reasons of their own for doing so.

But while American feminism "sometimes" was indeed "about middle class white women," it was also "sometimes" (in fact, quite often) about women who were not white or middle class. I suspect that Florence Howe was one of the women that Cheryl Morgan had in the back of her mind in framing that accusation; most people who encountered Howe must have mistaken her for a white middle class woman, instead of the working class Jew she actually was. And the Feminist Press was only one press publishing the writings of women who were not white or middle class, alongside the writings of women who were.

A Life in Motion is, among other things, a valuable corrective to the record on the history of Second Wave feminism, which a surprising range of people have preferred to view as nothing but a bunch of spoiled co-eds invoking white middle-class privilege. Interestingly, Cheryl Morgan also wrote in the post linked above that Third Wave feminism "grew out of a cross-fertilization between feminism and the civil rights movement. Basically feminists realized that discrimination against women was just a small part of a much wider social problem." Well, no; Morgan's chronology is a bit off. As Howe reminds those who needed to be reminded, many Second Wave feminists (including but not only Howe) came to feminism by way of the Civil Rights Movement. (And from what I've seen, Third Wave feminism is "sometimes" a bunch of spoiled college girls complaining that their hippie feminist moms have ruined feminism for them. But only sometimes.)

There's so much more to A Life in Motion than I've mentioned here -- Howe's accounts of her marriages, of her difficult relationships with her parents, of her family of choice, of her women friends (I was especially moved by her account of Tillie Olsen, another working-class Jewish feminist of note), and more. It's a dauntingly large book, nearly 600 pages long, but those who want to know where feminism came from and where it's going ought to read it.