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

[pseudonymous in nc]

marc page: well, not really, because Eliot's own literary criticism doesn't always match what he said it was, or what he was.

Even running with your model, 'Protestant' is absolutely not commensurate with 'anglo-catholic'. That's where JCD Clark is interesting, writing on institutional strength in contrast to Whig models of progress.

[marc page]

" ... Eliot's own literary criticism doesn't always match what he said it was, or what he was."

Well, that is a problem any critic/theorist who is also an author will have that the man who only writes theory or criticism will not. And it's a whole 'nother discussion whether Eliot's theory and his own work rhyme.

And, I was thinking of Protestant/American as analagous to Briths/Anglo-Catholic in my comparison. (Not that it helps, really, on second thought.)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

When I wrote this post, I didn't have a problem wondering what I meant by "conservative." I thought "whatever Kline was angling at" would suffice. Sure, it's incoherent, but so is the predominantly liberal theory we have today. On the one hand, I think it absurd to hold a prospective conservative scholarship to different standards those by which we abide; on the other, since (as Luther notes) one of Kline's objections is the inherent pluralism of contemporary literary studies, I don't think those standards even apply. Building on Waxbanks' elegant defense of Bloom, I think we know where we can start:

Conservative literary theory cannot be based on a particular canon. The Culture Wars and the fetid miasma of its trenches will do us no immediate good, since few believe that Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Melville shouldn't be taught—that'd they're somehow inadequately "literary" in some regard—only that they should be taught alongside Behn, (George) Eliot and Stowe.* That Dickens has acquired literary imprimateur suggests that the criteria are malleable. As does the inclusion of any novels, which until the modernists were considered hybrid beasts; capable of fleeting moments of literariness, but on the whole mere prose, constructions of the sort anyone who could read a newspaper could write. All of which is beside the point, as the article Paul Cantor article Andrew linked to lays plain. Still, even Cantor relies on a pluralistic model of cultural production:

The historicist model of culture is fundamentally flawed. Far from being self-contained and monolithic, most cultures are open to outside influences and as a result become multivalent and hybrid in character.

Shakespeare is universal because he embraced cultures and traditions outside his own—although his argument suffers here from being too quick on the triumphalism. Not that he's necessarily wrong—I have a friend working on the appropriation of Shakespeare by Nigerian authors in the 19th and 20th centuries—only that Shakespeare translating well in Germany, the former Soviet Bloc and Japan is not evidence of universality. The fact that Kurosawa's Ran translates King Lear into 16th century Japan may say more about plots involving the abdicaton of power in clan societies; such plots may only resonate "universally" in those countries in which clan obligations are symbolically operative, a source of nostalgia in largely alienated lives. It could be many things, none of them necessarily having to do with the universal quality of the Shakespearean text.

But then there's the problem of what else should be included in the canon. We all agree that Shakespeare should, but what about all those books written by brown people who live on islands we've never even heard of. Can they possibly produce great literature. This is where arguments like Cantor's can easily be reversed: if the power of an individual voice living in a culture in which multiple traditions vie for cultural supremacy is what it takes to make a Shakespeare, there's absolutely no reason Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home couldn't be a work of "universal" genius. Were someone to argue that "our" cultural tradition isn't represented, the claim to universality could be wielded as a multicultural cudgel: It doesn't matter, we could say, swinging, because it tells a universal story, as applicable to us and our lives as any native Jamaican.

Kline, I assume, would not be impressed. Frankly, this is because he's intellectually dishonest. He would claim the elevation of Brodber to Shakespeare's status is unjustified, the result of a godless theoretical pluralism finding more value, more complexity, in a work than it actually contains. (He would say this despite elsewhere having trumpeted Dickens, about whom many of the complaints he would make about Brodber were made—and by far superior thinkers.) Complaints about deconstructionism would surface, followed by multiple references to the Sokal Affair, and that poll indicating that Gavin P. Albright is the sole remaining conservative employed by an English department in the United States. In other words, when it came to the difficult questions—that is, when it came to that most difficult of questions, namely, the definition of literary, he would retreat into tradition instead of philosophical aesthetics, engaging in rear-guard offenses all the while.

None of this proves that a political conservative couldn't practice a politically conservative literary theory, only that none have up to this point. By which I mean, none of the usual critics of academia have attempted to define the literary in such a way that Shakespeare and Dickens are in, but Brodber and the rest are out. Or, they could have the courage of their convictions and say that if Shakespeare and Dickens are in, so are Brodber and the rest, but I haven't seen that argued either—and doubt I will, since doing so would run contrary to notions of tradition.

In this respect, I think the multiculturalist have cornered the cultural traditionalists, forcing them into a position either visibly incoherent (the false universalism of Shakespeare) or spectacularly racist (Dead and White, That's What's Right! Dead and White, That's What's Right!). The latter's utterly untenable in this political climate; the former's philosophically incoherent and intellectually dishonest in the extreme. They may have people whose goals seem consonant with theirs, like Harold Bloom, but were they to read Bloom, they'd find him equally objectionable to the critics they'd hoped he'd replace.

Where do they go from here?

*I'm being flip. Practical issues obviously abound. I'm talking about the hypothetical canon here, not what can be covered in a ten or eighteen-week survey.

[pseudonymous in nc]

But even if you take Eliot's prose criticism in isolation, The Sacred Wood and the pre-1928 essays are closer to pure literary theory than the cultural crit of later years. I do think you're right to see 'For Lancelot Andrews' as significant, and there's a path from there to 'History is now and England' and becoming Westminster Abbey in a three-piece suit (following Wyndham Lewis). So if you want to run with 'Eliot without the backward glance towards early Eliot', I'll certainly give you that.

And you probably now understand my point that American Protestantism isn't institutional; Eliot's adopted Anglo-Catholicism is.

[marc page]

"And you probably now understand my point that American Protestantism isn't institutional; Eliot's adopted Anglo-Catholicism is."

Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | Monday, 26 February 2007 at 04:30 PM

Agreed; at least one good reason why my analogy falters. But I do think if Eliot's criticism is taken independently of his poetry, it is decidedly 'conservative' (at least in his selection of what he believed 'classic' in the literature that preceded him, if not how we might be using the term politically in the U.S. today.)

"The mind of Europe changes, but abandons nothing en route." (TSE)

For recreational reading, Eliot is said to have favored Dickens and Conan Doyle; and so I would take that to mean he would exclude both authors from Olympus.

[pseudonymous in nc]

And again, I'm going to take issue, and direct you to The Sacred Wood, which is nothing if not radical in its assault upon nearly half a decade's English poetry, even if done under the auspices of setting things straight:

"Swinburne's intelligence is not defective, it is impure."

"...with one or two other writers, whom I have not had occasion to discuss, literature is not so much a collection of valuable porcelain as an institution — accepted, that is to say, with the same gravity as the establishments of Church and State. That is, in other words, the essentially uncritical attitude. In all of these attitudes the English critic is the victim of his temperament."

That's within a single paragraph: the invocation of 'purity', as if Swinburne is letting the side down, followed by the sentiment that literature-as-institution equals 'uncritical'. And so you have this ambivalence towards institutionalisation which, I suppose, is ultimately resolved when TSE becomes the institution's (or institutions') self-declared critical gatekeeper. But at that point in time?

[marc page]

I have no argument with that. The young Eliot (who later cheerfully confessed to pretending to a knowledge he did not at the time possess) was trying to get attention, make a name for himself in literary London, which, for an American, was an uphill climb.

However, the Swinburne example is a bit weak. Algernon was lusus naturae in his own time, and it wasn't as if Eliot was being as radical as Pound was when he wanted to outlaw Milton.

Although he certainly came to different conclusions, Eliot's assessment of 'the canon' began from Pound's insistence on bothering only with the artist who created something new (the Troubadours, Dante, Villon) and leaving aside all the imitators who followed behind.

The simple point is that 'Homer' (whoever he or they might have been)
is not good because it is European and assumed to be written by Caucasian males. Homer is good because there is nothing remotely like it from its time, and no one has outdone it yet. And so, it must be included in the (so-called) canon.

And we proceed from there. through each period of time, each age, from anywhere on the globe where human beings produce literary 'works,' and we set them side by side, select the best, and pass them on.