15 - 21 February 2001
Issue No.521
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 15 - 21 February 2001 Issue No.521 |
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Plain Talk
I must confess that, when it comes to literature and literary criticism, I am an old-fashioned conservative. Having been brought up on Aristotle, Johnson, Coleridge, Dryden, Racine and Matthew Arnold, modern trends in literary criticism invariably strike me as odd. Modern writing I can easily stomach, notwithstanding my reservations about the kind of language it often employs, but modern criticism is like a brick wall that I can only bang my head against.
In the context of academia, my knowledge of criticism extends to T S Eliot, whose books and essays on criticism I devoured. This is as far as I have gone, though. People like Derrida remain completely beyond me. I have no objection on principle to the new approaches, but after de Sauss and Nesfield my interest waned; I simply failed to appreciate it.
Within the American arena, criticism to my mind reflects a preoccupation, indeed an obsession with science and the methodology of scientific thinking. Language -- the most intuitive of the human attributes -- now has its own laboratories, experiments and tools; there is even equipment for analysing and assessing phonetics, the way one would analyse a compound.
As I said I am rather old fashioned. But it was a joy to encounter a young female student thinking along similar lines. I found an article in an issue of the Sunday Times, "How the Ivy League Strangled Literature". It is by Helena Echlin, an Oxford graduate who went to Yale to study English. According to her review of the experience, all that she learned amounted to gibberish.
In a window-less conference room, walls lined with sets of leather-bound tomes with gold lettering on the spines, one young man explains how the ode must "traverse the problem of solipsism, in order to approach participating in the unity which is no longer accessible." His professor replies, "Brilliant, very finely put." Yet Echlin does not quite understand the point. And when she asks the young student to reformulate it, the conversation that ensues is a laughable comedy of errors, Echlin explains.
On a fellowship at Yale, "the home of the most famous English Department in America," the writer observes that professors had the tendency to make simple words difficult. "Inert becomes inertia," she writes, "relation becomes relationality. Nouns are turned into verbs... solitude as a verb is to solitudinise." For weeks she listened, concluding that the lack of understanding was not her fault. "I am not stupid. I was educated to value clarity. My tutor at Oxford wrote 'Eh' in the margin when something I'd written wasn't clear. He taught me that you should be able to present even then most abstruse ideas in a language that one can understand."
Simple language made her look like the village idiot. It tired her out listening to long sentences that sounded like English but lacked all meaning. And resistance was not easy. When there is no clear meaning that one can paraphrase, dissent is impossible, because there is no threshold for attack. She stopped talking altogether during seminars. On the other hand, Echlin deplored the fact that nobody ever mentioned enjoying a book. Analysis was completely free of subjective evaluation. Commentary was more important than the texts themselves. Echlin discovered that her professors had long stopped reading literature for pleasure. One professor read popular science best-sellers in his free time.
One of her peers rhapsodised about the joy of analysis: "That's what it's all about. Pure intellectual play. Much better than reading." Critics, according to this view, are ranked first. Then come the readers, and last the writers. Although she was doing a Ph.D. in literature she was not allowed any graduate credit for Robert Stone's fiction, she was advised to follow a course in another department, like inorganic chemistry, but not creative writing.
The article ends on a despairing note: "I leave without finishing my PhD"
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