Soul and reason in literary criticism: deconstructing the deconstructionists.

• Author: Chaves, Jonathan
• Position: Brief Communciations

I begin with a poem:

Sonnet to a Postmodernist

--variation on the 43rd Sonnet from the Portuguese

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. I hate thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach--and yes, you heard me right, I said my soul, the part of me that prays-- I hate thee for denying words of praise To words, to language, wasting day and night Denying meaning, claiming wrong is right, That brilliant colors melt to murky grays. I hate thee for insulting Milton's muse, For sentencing our Shakespeare to a death Of sick perversion--but his shade now sues Your empty mind for slander, and his wrath Shall force you in the end to pay your dues: You'll realize that you've just wasted breath. I am delighted to be able to present my thoughts on the role played by literary criticism over the last three decades or so, even though I am hardly qualified to do a systematic analysis of all the questions involved. By training and profession, I am a scholar of classical Chinese poetry, in itself and in relation to Chinese thought and Chinese art. But I can say that my field, like all others in the Humanities today, has been infiltrated by the approaches to literature that may have originated in departments of English, but are now universal.

The most influential of these modes of literary criticism have been "Deconstructionism," "New Historicism," feminist criticism, and the sexual and "body" criticism of Michel Foucault, all of which actually overlap and reinforce each other. They have all but swept from the field traditional approaches to literature, and, even more importantly, have spilled out of literary studies altogether into art history, history proper, and indeed all the humanities. What is more, they have further spread to such fields as the law; one of the leading deconstructionist literary critics, Stanley Fish, when he was at Duke University, held chairs in both the English Department and the Law School. This fact alone serves to make a crucial point: that the distinction between reality and fiction is simply denied by the likes of Fish. Their idea is that there is no reality, only interpretation. The "stronger" interpretation wins out, in "real life" as in "literature." And while the abstract version of this doctrine may originate in the groves of academe, it easily spills out and affects the popular culture. In the realm of art and entertainment, a Woody Allen is able to make a film called "Deconstructing Harry." And in the realm of law, we have seen one outcome of this mere willfulness in the jury nullification during the O. J. Simpson trial: the jury had simply made up its mind that it would acquit him as a statement against "racism," despite the DNA evidence linking the blood in his vehicle to that of the murder victim. Will trumps reason; thus the triumph of postmodernist criticism throughout the intellectual world has contributed to the general decadence of our times.

But I get ahead of myself here. I have used the term "postmodernist" (always to be understood with quotation marks around it when I use it; our side can use ironic quotation marks too) as a catch-all phrase for the types of literary criticism I am discussing. This word, however, is a misnomer, a chimera of no substance. Those features which it is alleged to possess have all along been part and parcel of the modern era, in which we are still living, whenever one may date its point of origin, and however much our jaded intelligentsia may yearn for radical change.

One may say that the triumph of postmodernism has occurred on the watch of the Baby Boomers, since the 1960s, really coming to full fruition from, say, the mid-'70s through the '80s, '90s, and to the present moment. And so it may be taken to be the intellectual equivalent of the general Long March through our institutions that has been conducted so successfully by this radicalized generation. I can remember when I was in graduate school, studying Chinese literature at Columbia University, from 1965 to 1971, being told by fellow graduate students of mine that they were fascinated by the writings of Michel Foucault, a French thinker I had never even heard of. When I started teaching at SUNY Binghamton, in a department of Comparative Literature, I was asked by a colleague whether I had read a book called Of Grammatology, by a certain Jacques Derrida, again of France (and, as I later learned, Jewish, like myself), in which he developed some kind of idea about Chinese characters as representing a stage or level of language anterior to speech. I admitted that I had not, and that I thought it strange that a man who did not in fact know Chinese or Japanese would put forward a highly suspicious idea based upon the characters used to write these languages. Later, of course, I would discover that Derrida and his followers simply dismissed the idea of factual knowledge as a basis for thought: for them, expertise itself was part of the discredited past! The "thinker" is essentially at liberty to "play" with ideas at will, and see where they will take him ...

Little did I realize that these passing mentions of Foucault and Derrida were harbingers not merely of a burgeoning interest in them and others like them, but of their establishment as the foundational figures in a new and perverted orthodoxy that would sweep through virtually all departments of language and literature, and beyond, within a matter of just a few years.

Because I was not a participant in my generation's veneration of these men, it took me a very long time indeed to grasp what was happening. On the few occasions that I attempted to read anything by them, I was immediately and thoroughly repelled by the jargon-ridden, and just plain ugly, impenetrable prose that they wrote. I was appalled to think that my contemporaries were attracted by this stuff. But I realized that I needed to figure nut what was happening, and why. What I hope to share with you are some of my conclusions, arrived at in the course of years of attempting to come to grips with the phenomenon.

To begin with, I think it needs to be recognized that we are faced with a nearly classic example of "The Emperor's New Clothes." As my colleague, Emmet Kennedy, a historian of the ideological aspect of the French Revolution, has most cogently put it in a forthcoming book on secularization:

With hindsight, one can assert that universities today are often more concerned as to whether a lecturer is exciting and dynamic than whether he is truthful, because they have largely despaired of teaching the truth. If one proposed searching for the truth in philosophy or literature, for example, one would be considered naive and laughable. On the other hand, if one can wrap lies in a tightly-wound, sophisticated discourse, chances are that it will succeed. But such discourse reveals a lack of ontological nerve. It represents a sophist's disengagement from what is to what appears, from Being to Semblance, from Socrates to Protagoras, from Plato's form to Plato's shadows. This statement helps us to position ourselves both historically and philosophically in dealing with the intellectual--and I would argue, moral and even spiritual--catastrophe before us. Kennedy is correct in realizing that Postmodernism, ultimately, represents a reappearance in our time of the ancient error, the ancient heresy, sophistry, as taught in Greece by Protagoras and Gorgias: the claim that there is no reality (anti-ontology) or at least if there is, we can have no access to it (anti-epistemology). These views in antiquity were successfully defeated by Socrates. In their Chinese guise, as argued in the fourth century B.C. by the Chinese pien-chia (Hui Tzu, Kung-sun Lung), they were defeated by the Taoist Chuang Tzu (in one of his modes of argumentation, at least (1)) and by Confucianism as a whole. They resurfaced in the Christian era in the form of various heresies, and then with particular power in the Nominalism introduced by William of Occam in the fourteenth century, as shown by Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences, 1948). But in the modern era they have resurfaced again, reformulated by thinkers as apparently disparate as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and even Hume and Locke, all of whom at base represent an epistemological retreat to the...