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Hating Literature, in Defense of Stephen Joyce, and Boycotting over the Oxford Comma

Everyone’s talking about Jeanine Cummins’s new novel, American Dirt, about a mother and her son who flee Mexico. Predictably, Cummins has been accused of “cultural appropriation,” and appropriation of a rather sloppy sort, it seems, including terrible Spanish dialogue. Writing in The New York Times, David Bowles critiques the “white saviorism” of the novel and […]
James Joyce

Everyone’s talking about Jeanine Cummins’s new novel, American Dirt, about a mother and her son who flee Mexico. Predictably, Cummins has been accused of “cultural appropriation,” and appropriation of a rather sloppy sort, it seems, including terrible Spanish dialogue. Writing in The New York Times, David Bowles critiques the “white saviorism” of the novel and takes the publishing industry to task for always doing this sort of thing—hyping a single book as the publishing event of year. Fair enough. The problem with Bowles’s critique is that while he is concerned to some degree with the quality of the work, ultimately his problem with the book is political—its “white saviorism,” its appropriation. What Bowles fails to see is that the politicalization of literature is the very thing that gives us novels like Cummins’s American Dirt and a publishing industry that can capitalize so easily on supposedly “revolutionary” or “boldly transgressive” works, which are, of course, anything but. He wants a more “ethical” publishing industry? Good. Let’s start with focusing in criticism on the quality of writing, which means that we stop giving unwarranted attention to politics and thus remove the incentive for publishers to do exactly what Bowles laments in his piece—cash in on trendy ideas.

Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s grandson and only surviving descendent, died last week. He was probably the most difficult and litigious literary executor of the past 50 years. B. D. McClay remembers him and defends his desire to keep some aspects of his grandparents’ lives private: “I sympathize more with him than I do with his detractors — at least where things like private letters are concerned. What characterizes him and all other obstinate literary executors is an insistence that their relatives are people who are entitled to privacy and consideration, not public property.”

A son writes about a letter his mother left his father before she was killed at Auschwitz. “We all lined up in front of notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death, who selected who would live or die. My brother John, who was four years older than me, was handicapped and he was chosen to die . . . But when my mother found out that John, who was 16, was going to be gassed, she decided to stay with him. She could not bear the idea of him going into the gas chamber by himself. About five days after the selection, she wrote a letter to my father, who had been moved to a medical camp because he was a physician.” (HT: David Mills)

Philip Pullman calls for boycott of Brexit coin over missing Oxford comma.

Tom Stoppard talks to Douglas Murray: “I aspire to write for posterity. I would like my plays to be done occasionally, not just be done when they’re brand new. I like the idea of them being part of the furniture. Which of course isn’t true of all of them. You’re just lucky if you have one or two which are there.”

 

Essay of the Day:

Do yourself a favor and read Jon Baskin’s essay on the instrumentalization of literature in The Point, which dovetails with today’s first item:

“When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called ‘New Historicism.’ The foundational assumption of this approach was that artworks were primarily of value insofar as they could offer us insight into the context and conditions of their historical production. The point of literary scholarship was to “unmask” these conditions—to show, for instance, how Mark Twain had unwittingly reinscribed the racist assumptions of his time, even as he attempted to expose them. It went without saying, on this theory, that literature was a conduit neither of timeless truths nor of trustworthy passions. Indeed our professors made it clear that, the more powerful of an imaginative experience a work delivered, the more important it was to learn to view it with skepticism and detachment. At best, and with the correct theoretical tools, what had been valorized as the height of literary culture in the past might offer us an unintended insight into what really mattered: politics, history, the shadow life of power.

“I can still remember when, at the end of one of the departmental survey classes—our teachers having delivered a lecture on New Historicism as the culminating achievement of twentieth-century literary criticism—a student stood up in the back of the room. Nearly giving way to what seemed to me at the time (but not now) an embarrassing overflow of emotion, she accused the professors of ‘hating’ literature. We had become English majors in the first place, she went on, not because novels and poems told us interesting things about history or politics but because they made us feel less alone, captivated us with their beauty, helped us to better know ourselves and the world. The professors, as far as I can remember, responded politely: after all, the student was only a sophomore. She would learn.

“It is no secret that in contemporary America there are many people who hardly read at all, and then another sizable group who, though they keep up with news, sports and the latest fads in self-care or technology, have little interest in serious fiction, poetry or literary commentary. It would be wrong to say such people hate literature, for one has to care about something to truly hate it. What my classmate in the survey course had precociously recognized was that we were being introduced to a phenomenon both subtler and more sinister than the neglect or ignorance of literature. Our professors had a great deal invested in novels and poems; and it was probably even the case that, at some point, they had loved them. But they had convinced themselves that to justify the ‘study’ of literature it was necessary to immunize themselves against this love, and within the profession the highest status went to those for whom admiration and attachment had most fully morphed into their opposites. Their hatred of literature manifested itself in their embrace of theories and methods that downgraded and instrumentalized literary experience, in their moralistic condemnation of the literary works they judged ideologically unsound, and in their attempt to pass on to their students their suspicion of literature’s most powerful imaginative effects.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Wildpark Dülmen

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