Conservative Literary Theory: William Faulkner now, Dave Sim shortly

I often wonder what conservative literary theory would look like.  Reading through Malcolm A. Kline's complaints about the MLA—which continue well into February—I gather that it would emphasize the appreciation of great literature.  What would qualify as great literature is obvious: Dickens, for one; Shakespeare, for another.  But I come here to bury Kline, not point out the obvious fact that his paragons of literature were considered base in their own time.  (Doing so would mock his kicker of a finale to that second article, in which he laments the erosion of historical knowledge.  I do too.  Only it seems we read different histories.)

But  I feel constructive tonight, by which I mean: I want to say something positive about the tension necessarily created by the representation of "core values" in literary texts.  In the classroom, I would teach this by having the students read Faulkner's Light in August (1932).  That there on your left is the cover to the first edition.  Click on it and examine with care.  Can you tell the race of the man it depicts?  If you haven't read the novel, the answer should be firmly in the negative; but if you have, you'll be no less confused.  The race of the protagonist, Joe Christmas, is both specular (in the novel) and speculative (to the readers).  So maybe you can't tell anything about his race, but what about his class?  Does the tilt of his hat signify?  The cut of his clothes?  What about his slumped shoulders?  The gentle forward cant—half performed cool, half pure exhaustion—does it signify?

It should.

What happens in Light in August—not to mention much of what follows—is that Faulkner forces himself to consider the disconnect between his sympathies with poor itinerant whites and the casual racism which life in Oxford demanded.  In fine, Light in August is the book in which you can see sympathy and ideology clash in the philosophical mess of an artfully constructed novel.  If pressed, I would argue that Faulkner emerged from his racism sometime in the writing of this book.  The brilliance of this novel—as well as the five to follow—are born of his struggle against the values he'd uncritically breathed living as he did, when he did. 

And they are, by far, the height of his artistic achievement.  Someone like Kline, for whom all art is instrumental, ends up parroting the claims of the liberal ideologues he denounces.  All his high-minded talk of high literature obscures the conflict of conscience implicit in its creation.  By advocating this purity of spirit approach, Kline accepts the assumptions of his ideological opponents.  Thus, my kicker:

He doesn't desire Shakespeare so much as an ideologically inverted Mike Gold:

America, O step-mother, you struck us from the light,
You made us slaves and clowns, you kept us in our place.
But History has spoken, and breaking thru the night,
We artists and thinkers shall bless our martyred race.

That's from Gold's atrocious Hoboken Blues: or The Black Rip Van Winkle: A Modern Negro Fantasia on an Old American Theme (1930).  You see my point.  Literature as ideology?  Dull.  Literature as the struggle against ideology?  Alright.  Literature as the struggle against one's own ideology?

Awesome.

All of which is a prelude to a couple of posts about anti-feminism, Dave Sim and Cerebus. 

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

"I often wonder what conservative literary theory would look like."

Isn't Harold Bloom now the best-known representative of serious conservative literary theory? As an outside observer, that's the impression I get. He can be counted on for the usual conservative defenses of the Western canon, or for gibes about those newfangled forms (poetry slams are the death of poetry!), but you can't say that he's unintellectual or unserious or merely political.

Of course, I haven't actually *read* any Bloom. I figure that I should at some point, given that he's apparently made some connection between Gnosticism and SF long before I did, so I've been stockpiling whichever of his books I've happened to see at $3 used book stores -- but, as always, the time for serious reading is deferred several months into the future.

[Thomas Elrod]

...you can't say that he's unintellectual or unserious or merely political.

I don't know, I think Harold Bloom is pretty unserious these days, or at least deserves to be taken unseriously. All he seems to do his beat his chest and shout "Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare!" which, more than anything, is just boring.

He may be a "conservative critic," but I think that it's certainly possible to have serious conservative criticism that engages with "Literature as the struggle against one's own ideology," and is much more than an old, stuffy "Appreciating the Classics" shtick.

Can anyone think of a critic you may be conservative but is not irrelevant, like Bloom? Someone who actually has interesting ideas?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Bloom is old, and I don't think it's fair to judge someone's work by their elder years. From what little I know of his work about the anxiety of influence and about creative misreading, it certainly seems to be a serious attempt at literary theory, even if you disagree with it.

[SEK]

I don't think anyone's going to deny the seriousness of Bloom's early work. For example, here's Said on Bloom, circa 1976:

[O]ne thing that strikes many of Bloom's readers is the extravagance of his theory, or to use your expression, its prophetic quality. One impression is that Bloom seems to have allowed his theory to take over his criticism completely, if by criticism one means the making of discrete judgments, rationalistic analysis, and so on. Moreover the complex variety of literature appears to have been reduced by Bloom to an endless instance of the theory ... but all of these objections are mainly, I think, a result of the difficulty that people have both with theory as such, and with the (to them) impertinent pose of a critic who believes he is getting to the very heart of the poetic process.

So yes, in his heyday, Bloom was certainly considered a "serious" scholar. He was listed among the Yale School, after all. That said, I don't think what he's doing now is necessarily unserious or unsophisticated, in that from what little I've read, it didn't seem to be mere appreciation. It's appreciation inflected, as Said notes, by the severity of his critical model -- actually, "inflected" is a poor choice of words: "overwhelmed" is more like it. So despite looking like the sort of appreciative critic Kline and his ilk would consider acceptable, Bloom's far too theoretically-minded for them. What would they do with his talk of Romanticism, which is, shall we say, not altogether quaint? His love of Blake stands out, or his reading of Byron the Bulb in Gravity's Rainbow -- the former long-standing, the latter from his later, I-only-write-introductions period -- neither of which celebrates traditional values or even tradition, per se. (The Byron the Bulb bit is exactly what you'd think it is, it being Bloom and all: Romanticism plus Gnosticism.)

All of that said, I'm really not well-versed on Bloom enough to push this much farther. Not that this answers Thomas' questions:

Can anyone think of a critic you may be conservative but is not irrelevant, like Bloom? Someone who actually has interesting ideas?

I can't think of one, to be honest. I can think of some self-styled libertarians, but no actual conservatives. I'd love to be proven wrong, though, but I don't think I will. (William Gass maybe? No, wait, he writes pornographic novels, plus he's not treated seriously as a literary critic, which is a shame, but understandable. More eclecticism, now! People take to the streets: "We have the windbags! We want the Gass! We have the windbags! We want the Gass!) Part of the reason I don't think we will is, well, do you see any conservative literary bloggers? If they existed but felt oppressed, wouldn't they set up their (presumably anonymous) shops?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Scott, I think that you may be choosing too many criteria, such that you can find nothing that fits them. If you want a conservative, then Bloom appears to fit that criterion in most respects. And it seems that you agree that he's done literary theory. I don't think that you can then disqualify him by listing some of his pieces "neither of which [celebrate] traditional values or even tradition, per se." A conservative who is limited to an unthinking celebration of traditional values could not really be a literary theorist. Or to put it another way, if you're looking for an intelligent conservative, I don't think that you can disqualify them for being intelligent.

Come to think of it, I don't think that Bloom even now is solely restricted to shouting "Shakespeare" or dissing J.K. Rowling. Having shelled out the big bucks for a copy of John Crowley's deluxe to-be-published edition of Little, Big, I know that Bloom is supposed to be writing an introduction for it, and in general thinks that it's one of the great books of recent years. That's not quite the same as what Thomas depicts above.

[Thomas Elrod]

Yes, I really should have made a distinction between old Bloom and new Bloom, and that there are certainly valuable things in old Bloom. New Bloom is very prolific, so that the interesting things he's writing (e.g., the Pynchon criticism Scott mentions or the Little, Big introduction Rich mentions) I simply haven't heard about (if that makes my anti-Bloomism appear unsound, that's because it probably is), but all of his western canon appreciation stuff is typically what I associate with new Bloom, and gives one the impression that he's a bit, if not irrelevant, unimaginative (of course there's a continuity between old Bloom/new Bloom, but I don't know what it is and am not really interested in pursuing it).

As for the conservative critic thing, Scott's point that "If they existed but felt oppressed, wouldn't they set up their (presumably anonymous) shops?" is a good point. Conservatives read books, after all. I have no answer except that a coming up with a definition of "conservative" would be a good place to start. Does such a definition have to include terms like "nostalgic" or "reactionary" in regards to cultural artifacts? Can we have a conservative critic who's interested in a serious exploration of race and gender (I would say yes), or does an interest in such topics immediately label one liberal, regardless of where you go with it?

The recent blog discussion among the medievalist bloggers (I won't link to it but I'm assuming you saw it Scott, at least at In the Middle) may provide an answer to this: are medievalists interested in exploring primarily language conservative scholars? Again, however, this seems to be a nostalgic position, since philology was the prime work of medievalists "back in the old days." So maybe conservatives are inherently nostalgic, and we have to start a definition from there?

[Luther Blissett]

It all depends on what you mean by "conservative critic," right? A critic who votes Republican? A critic who espouses conservative artistic ideas? A critic who reads literature according to a conservative political (social/economic) platform?

Dana Gioia is certainly a conservative critic in the second sense, as are most lyric poets of the past 50 years. But while Gioia might vote Republican, I don't think many other lyric poets in America would. Erin O'Connor would be a conservative critic if she actually wrote any criticism anymore; her post-postcolonialism piece, while not all that interesting, would at least be a starting point.

As far as Harold Bloom goes, he's a conservative by 1890 standards, not by today's. He believes in what we might call the energetics of art and puts himself in a line from Longinus to Pater. And while he has choice words for left-wing politicized criticism, he's never struck me as someone who'd get in bed with Republican political ideals (far too barbaric for his taste). Same for his student, Camile Paglia. Again, some conservative artistic principles, but not conservative politically.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Dana Gioia might be a good example, but as the old saying goes, everyone's a critic. Scott's original line was about conservative literary theory.

I can't help but be amused and somewhat sympathetic at the fact that Bloom has written an SF book -- not just that, but a fan sequel SF book -- called The Flight To Lucifer. Sure, he's disavowed it, and says that he wishes that he could recall all the copies, but since he wrote it when he was 50 it wasn't a youthful indiscretion. I have a copy, and I plan on reading it after a couple of his theoretical works.

[Wax Banks]

So I'm a lover of Harold Bloom's writing, and have a bunch of the old stuff and a bunch of the new. Frankly I like the new stuff better - it's more infuriating and a more enjoyable read (those qualities being not unlinked, of course). I find the ancient jargon-riddled stuff irritating, in all honesty; as he's gotten more tired he's gotten less concerned with impressing people in general and utterly unconcerned with impressing his professional peers, so Bloom now counts as one of the few literary theoreticians I can dip into without feeling like I've walked in on someone masturbating.

And look...

Bloom's not a 'conservative.' Which is to say, he doesn't seem to hold conservative political views - indeed he's an old-fashioned bourgeois lefty-of-privilege, dismissive of orthodox liberal identity politics and associated pieties; and he seems to hold 'conservative' aesthetic judgments only incidentally. Remember, the highest honor he can bestow upon a literary work (other than 'Shakespearean') is 'wisdom literature,' a term which means (I take it) something like 'literature grappling with an authentic original vision, morally prophetic, necessarily staged as a confrontation with older aesthetic/moral models.' Which is only a small step from...

Literature as ideology? Dull. Literature as the struggle against ideology? Alright. Literature as the struggle against one's own ideology?

Awesome.

Now Bloom seems to relish these moral struggles, acts of staged heterodoxy. But he's 'conservative' in that he doesn't see vulgarity (or boilerplate contrarianism) as an authentic moral outlook. In his evaluative system the old aesthetic forms don't just have value, they're the source of value - a link not to the Way The World Was, but to other artists' Ways of Trying To Change Things. His history of great literature is a history of heterodoxy, in which the artist is still a rebel, and (for a touch over 400 years) pretty much everyone's rebelling against Shakespeare and Shakespeare's way of understanding and writing about the world. Silly? I'm inclined to say that depends on how good you think Shakespeare was and is.

Bloom is 'nostalgic,' sure - nostalgia defined as 'longing for a past that never existed.' He's got a theory of art, somewhere between mechanism-for-authentically-embodying-one's-conflicts-with-one's-time (politically and aesthetically and morally) and that-by-which-we-know-the-mysteries-of-God. And the God bit is nostalgic by definition. Bloom's most radical position, to my eye, is that it's perfectly acceptable to worship a literary character the way your neighbour worships God, because God is a literary character (several actually). That's not a conservative view at all, it's a crazy one! Relatively speaking.

The man comes under fire all the time for passing off opinions as analysis, but that says more about our tendency to use the notion of literary 'analysis' as a smokescreen for wild-ass guesses and political posturing than anything else, I think. In Bloom's case anyway. I get the sense reading his later books, dealing directly with Wisdom and prophecy, that he thinks of criticism (didactic topical parasitic prose poetry) as a project of pointing uninformed readers toward sources of wisdom - Theory as Talmud, a juridical view of the stuff. But when he talks about the history of literary judgments, he does so with an eye toward inescapable precedent, not just to find support for his own views. Yes, he claims that some literary works have transcendent canonical value. (Well don't they? Some of them?) But he's also clear that the nature of that value is understood over time through a process of negotiation, that moral fixity is a fiction wrongly conflated with aesthetic seriousness, and that the Canon is not fixed. Only that its general shape can be known and should be systematized according to authenticity (of vision and of craft).

Which doesn't sound 'conservative' to me - only in comparison to the dull catch-as-catch-can pluralism of the 500-channel era. What it sounds is crazy. And there are crazy 'conservatives' aplenty, but their craziness isn't the source of their conservatism, the carping of faux-Left bloggers to the contrary. The Wisdom celebrated and pursued in Bloom's vision of literary history isn't old-fashioned at all - indeed, I admire his insistence on the value of individual, idiosyncratic, even incorrect heterodoxies. The man idolizes Falstaff; his pleasure in ideological mischief, and belief that throwaway fragments (the unwieldy bits hanging off the edge of a piece of Art) are fine as long as they're the remainders of a consistent and serious Vision of some kind - as well as his genuine teacherly generosity with his learning - might not be Falstaffian, quite, but they're nothing to be ashamed of. They are anything but conservative.

Where's James Wood fall on this scale anyhow?

[Luther Blissett]

I think that's the problem with the question: conservatives take issue with the entire idea that one needs a theory to guide action. By definition, conservatism means that one is guided by convention, tradition, ritual, and so on. This is why so many people called "Against Theory" a reactionary essay. And one way of understanding theory is as a concerted effort to become reflexive about practice and the assumptions underlying practice so as to challenge and transform tradition, convention, ritual, and so on.

We can't assume that there *would* be conservative literary theory. It's a left-wing assertion that all practice implies a theory.

This is another reason why Bloom's "anxiety of influence" is not conservative, even if it deals strictly with canonical figures ('tho most conservatives would have a hard time with his raising of John Ashbery and Philip Roth to the top of the pile of living authors in their respective genres).

[Wax Banks]

Also, Scott:

While I'm ecstatic to see one of my [gushing praise deleted] writers taking on Jaka's Story, this might be the place to point out that there's basically no good criticism of Cerebus as a whole. Not that I've seen anyway, and as a Cerebus lover (no I didn't get through all the Woody Allen bits but I made it through a lot of that stuff - and all that came before and after) I've tried, I really have.

Especially since the Sim who started the series and the one who ended it are two different people, and if memory serves Sim had his schizophrenic episode long before chronicling Jaka's Story but may not have fully gone 'round the bend to his later 'antifeminism' at that point. He says he had, but frankly I'm a little bit disinclined to believe him, largely on the strength of Jaka's Story and Melmoth...

[Thomas Elrod]

Bloom's not a 'conservative.' Which is to say, he doesn't seem to hold conservative political views

I don't think that whatever definition one has for "conservative critic" is simply linked to political ideology. There's more to it, as Luther mentioned: It all depends on what you mean by "conservative critic," right? A critic who votes Republican? A critic who espouses conservative artistic ideas? A critic who reads literature according to a conservative political (social/economic) platform?

Of course Bloom wouldn't vote Republican, and I don't mean to imply that he would by saying he was conservative. I'm going to stop talking about Bloom and read more of him now, since I've clearly let on how little I actually know about him.

An aside: Someone mentioned James Wood. I don't know where he fits, but he DID write a review of Bloom's Jesus and Yahweh for The New Republic a few months ago. I don't remember what Wood had to say about it, but it may be an interesting place to start. (I enjoy reading Wood, but I've only ever read his reviews, spread out, once every couple of months, and thus don't have a coherent picture of where he's coming from. Does he have a book or collection of essays out?)

Also, before I get attacked about the medievalist blogger thing, for the record: I don't think Michael Drout and Richard Scott Nokes are conservative critics. Drout for one is extremely eclectic and constantly trying to do new things with Anglo-Saxon Studies. I don't know much about Nokes's scholarship, but on his blog he doesn't come across as a grouchy curmudgeon but as someone wanting to reach out with his work. But if you wanted to find a definition of "conservative critic" that is separate (as much as anything can be separate) from political ideology, then maybe a language-centered approach would be the place to look for it.

[Andrew Haggerty]

Scott, one place to find literary criticism in a forum that's explicitly tied to current conservative politics is the Claremont Review, which sees itself as sort of the shadow New York Review. For instance, look at Paul Cantor's defense of Shakespeare as a "universal" author, as opposed to what he sees as the desire of "fashionable" critics to isolate Shakespeare in his historical moment.

Of course this isn't "theory," exactly. Cantor goes after historicists for having a false vision of cultural production and reception, but he doesn't directly define what a proper understanding of these would be. This leaves him open to the kind of circularity you mention, of repeating the claims of a liberal ideology he might otherwise take issue with. I mean, if I felt mischievous I could imagine writing a response to his essay from a very conservative British nationalist position, blasting away at his implied "multiculturalism."

[Jeff G]

I don't think of any recent theory as inherently "conservative" in the modern political sense of the word. I do, however, think that certain schools of theory, once adopted, are fairly reliable predictors of their adopter's political identity.

Not a hard and fast rule, obviously - WB Michaels, Scott, and I have all agreed, at one time or another, on basic theory. But from that agreement comes the next step: what to do with what we've learned from it. And that can take us down radically different political paths.

Then, of course, there's the problem with people who misunderstand the theory they are using. I think Scalia, for instance -- though he considers himself a "textualist" (a new critic, almost) -- nevertheless practices intentionalism. He just doesn't recognize it as such.

I have a conversation with a steamed dumpling somewhere that spells this last out quite clearly.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Apologies for not responding sooner -- I'm not happy with the Cerebus post and spent some time today re-reading Bloom. (I'm not sure how I feel about that now, either. Funny how information ruins our lovely, calcified notions.)

So, yes, response tomorrow.

[pseudonymous in nc]

Ignoring the reek above, I'd probably hover around a certain strain of New Historicism as the best place to dig out conservative theorists: perhaps not conservative theory, but theory that's taken a conservative turn.

(To me, that's more satisfying than canonists or the nth iteration of boiled-down Richards and Leavis, which isn't 'conservative' criticism so much as EngLit As She Is Taught To Bored Fifteen-Year-Olds.)

Perhaps you can jokingly call it neoconservative theory, a power analysis that's as far a remove from Stephen bloody Greenblatt as Greenblatt was from Foucault by the time Renaissance Self-Fashioning appeared on its mission to beat undergraduates into textual and analytical compliance.

(I see, on Googling, that Suzanne Gearhart made this point to some extent in NLH back in 1997.)

But then I wonder whether that's part of the life-cycle of most theoretical movements, tending towards recapitulations in ever-decreasing circles that are conservative by necessity, and bearing little correspondence to the adopter's political identity, but plenty to his or her academic background.

So, conservative literary theory might just be the output of humans who sought to emulate the heroes who took inspiration from the divines, if you pardon my Vico.

But then I think of someone like JCD Clark, who's hard to pin down, and certainly both radical and influential. Neoconservative? Not convinced by that. Neo-Burkeian might be closer. But that's not to be considered bizarre when dealing with the long c-18.

[LWM]

Maybe Peter Viereck, but what do I know?

[Adam Stephanides]

Wax, have you seen The Comics Journal #263, which contains a series of essays by various critics examining the series as a whole? I don't remember them well enough to say how good they are, though. (Not to mention that I haven't read all of Cerebus.)

There was an article about Cerebus in The Believer too. It came out after Cerebus finished, iirc, but I didn't read it so I don't know if it covered the whole series or not.

[Daniel]

"Especially since the Sim who started the series and the one who ended it are two different people, and if memory serves Sim had his schizophrenic episode long before chronicling Jaka's Story but may not have fully gone 'round the bend to his later 'antifeminism' at that point. He says he had, but frankly I'm a little bit disinclined to believe him, largely on the strength of Jaka's Story and Melmoth..."

Sim's schizophrenic breakdown happened really early on -- he was still with Deni at the time. (This history is covered in the "Why An Aardvark?" essays published around the time of the end of Minds/the start of Guys, as I recall, but apparently only part of those have been put up on the internet.)

I don't think he'd gone completely "round the bend" by the time of "Reads", even; Issue #186 is pretty loopy, but it's not even close to what we later see in "Tangent". Dave's mentioned that he started reading the Bible/the Q'uran during Guys (as research for Rick's Story), and he pretty early-on decided that the Utterly Fucking Nuts interpretation he gives in the Cerebexegesis bits (the tiny tiny type in issues 280-288) were the only way to make sense of the books -- and also that these books finally "explained everything." (As I recall, the way he puts it is that the Bible/Q'uran are "The story that all other stories have always been trying, and failing, to be." As a guess at a citation, it's from a lettercolumn response during the middle-part of Latter Days, as part of the backlash from "Tangent". Or it might be from his "Islam, My Islam" essays, a little later on; I know he details his conversion there.) I think that Dave starts to go Totally Off His Rocker (the feminist-homosexualist axis etc.) only after his conversion; so, sometime a little after Mothers & Daughters wraps up.

Dave claims that his current views are to be found in his earlier stuff, but this extends to claiming utterly implausible things like "The Big White Glowing Round Strange Thing back in Church & State was Yoohwhoo." I think he probably held most of the opinions he sets forth in Issue #186 back during Jaka's Story/Melmoth, but "Artist Dave" beat out "Thinker Dave" in those books. I think it's not at all plausible that the "feminist-homosexualist axis" nonsense had occured to him in the Jaka's Story/Melmoth era.

(It's kinda scary that I can still remember issue numbers and essay titles; I haven't read Cerebus since shortly after #300 came out. But I did read the whole dang thing three times, not counting the Cerebexegesis, and I read all of that junk twice. I suppose these things leave scars. Ah, wasted youth!)

(This has been a rather jumbled comment! Ah well, 'tis a blog comment box. I figure so long as I'm not the ToS I should be okay. dontmentionquinedontmentionquinedontmentionquine....)

Looking forward to the Cerebus post(s).

[marc page]

Recalling that T.S. Eliot described himself as " ... a classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion," could he be taken as the very model of the "conversative literary theorist?" And assessing contemporary thinkers on literature, if they 'match up' (... classicist in literature, Republican/Conservative in politcs, and Protestant in religion) could we say 'close enough?'