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Frank Lentricchia, a prominent literary critic who teaches at Duke University, made news recently by confessing that he loves literature: a retrograde sentiment in English departments nowadays, and maybe even subversive.
The sway of "theory" in the academic study of literature is usually accounted for in culture-war terms, as one manifestation of the sweeping changes that began in the sixties; but here Alan Jacobs sees it in a different context, as the latest episode in a perennial contest that predates Plato.
Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry
By Mark Edmundson
Cambridge University Press
243 pp.; $59.95, hardcover;
$17.95, paper
Modern culture seems doomed to the perpetual re-enactment of a tense and suspicious dance, a dance with which Christians are thoroughly familiar. There are only two partners in this dance, though they are known by various names: Theory and Practice, the Head and the Heart, Contemplation and Action, the Abstract and the Concrete. Christians use these names, and add some of their own: Theology and Piety, for instance. Not everyone would agree to the names I have given--few people want to stand for Abstraction--but we all understand what this dance is about. The proponents of Column A (Theory, Theology, etc.) fear unreflective and heedless activity and boldly assert that "the unexamined life is not worth living"; while the proponents of Column B fear, as Hamlet put it, that "conscience [that is, reflection] makes cowards of us all" and causes "enterprises of great pitch and moment" to "lose the name of action." Or, as Wordsworth pithily says, "We murder to dissect."
It is no accident, I suppose, that when I try to sum up the second position, quotations from poets immediately come to mind, while the first camp finds its representative in Socrates. For Plato, more than two millennia ago, could already refer to the "ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry." Mark Edmundson's book gives every appearance of rejoining that venerable antagonism--but, as we shall see, appearances can be, and in this case are, quite deceiving.
One must begin by noting the lack of fit between the book's title and its contents. Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida. That second phrase suggests considerable historical scope, but in fact, Edmundson is concerned almost totally with contemporary figures. His treatment of Plato and Aristotle takes up about a dozen pages in his "Prologue," and he refers occasionally throughout the book to Kant and Hegel; but each of the book's five main chapters focuses on current thinkers: Paul de Man; Jacques Derrida; a set of Marxist, feminist, and New Historicist critics; Michel Foucault; and Harold Bloom.
This list also reveals a problem with the title's first phrase: most of these people are not philosophers, but rather literary theorists. On his second page, Edmundson yokes--without definition, argument, or even comment--philosophy and literary theory together, and never questions the yoking. Moreover, though Edmundson does define "literature," he defines it as "any revitalizing cultural activity." Thus the book's title is misleading in at least three ways.
Edmundson's conflation of philosophy and theory deserves further consideration. While it is obviously true that most current theory resembles, in its vocabulary and its procedures, philosophy more than literature, it is not clear that either philosophers or literary critics would be eager to accept the equation of the two pursuits. The belief that theory is a cheap and insufficiently rigorous simulacrum of philosophy has become axiomatic among many philosophers; and while Edmundson stresses the scorn that theorists tend to have for literature, they have been scarcely less hard on philosophy. The essay that made Derrida famous, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," is the inaugural statement of his contempt for the "onto-theological tradition," which means most of Western philosophy since Socrates plus the whole of Christian theology. And de Man repeatedly contends that literature is a Hydra whose heads grow back faster than philosophy can cut them off: in the end, philosophy meets its death at the hands of an eternally self-renewing literature. (Theology succumbs too, but de Man would scarcely bother to note that; as Albany says, when he hears of Edmund's death in King Lear, "That's but a trifle here.")
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