For all their sophistication about paradox, postmodern literary theorists seem not to understand one of the most basic of literary paradoxes: While each age exists as a unique moment in history, its particularity is defined by its non-particularity — by the particular answers it gives to those “perennial and universal concerns of humanity.” The great writers and artists are, as Ben Jonson said of William Shakespeare, both the “soul of the age” and “for all time.”
In his new At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal Education, the scholar R. V. Young has written a fine critique of contemporary literary theory, explaining both the causes and the consequences when theory fails at exactly this theoretical level. Treating jargon-filled authors with great clarity and wit, he moves from a philosophic reproof of postmodernism to a discussion of its effect on education and law. But Young is also a teacher, and he devotes many pages to close readings of various poems — reminding the reader that great literature offers us our best “insight into the human experience.”
For Young, the “postmodern project” stands out most clearly when contrasted with the “old New Criticism” that preceded it. The school of the New Critics — Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom, in particular, but stretched to include others from Allen Tate to T. S. Eliot — affirmed the ideal of artistic excellence. They believed in style and substance, and the responsibility of the critic to distinguish the profound from the shallow, the permanent from the banal.
When the postmodernists, by contrast, define literature as “a body of rhetorical strategies waiting to be seized,” they deny the idea of wisdom — and thereby lose any importance for the literature they wish to study. The archetypal postmodernist Jacques Derrida, for instance, Young describes as “a Moses who has broken the Tablets and will not reascend the mountain, who offers only more wandering — more erring — in the wilderness, with the Promised Land endlessly deferred.”
Many of the paradoxes supposedly revealed by postmodernism — about the incompleteness of being in time, the limitations of human reason, the partiality of language — have long been known. Socrates, after all, said his wisdom was knowing that he knew nothing, and St. Augustine, Young writes, “radically deconstructed the human condition” sixteen centuries ago. But what was new when the postmodernists came along in the 1970s was the enthusiastic affirmation of these paradoxes as proof that there are no transcendent or objective truths. As Derrida says, “The present alone is and ever will be.” And the present is always fading into nothingness. All that remains is the uncommitted subject, who lives in the “prisonhouse of language.”
The curious consequence is that, by denying the eternal, the postmodern literary critics lose the ability to describe the present in any meaningful sense. “The very incompleteness of being as it unfolds in time and space entails absolute Being as its ground,” writes Young. “The very realization of the inadequacy of our words provides a greater weight and credibility to the Word.” The postmodernists long, in the critic Stanley Fish’s words, for “a greatly enhanced sense of the importance of our activities.” But they end up with exactly the opposite: Taken to its “logical conclusion of illogicality — of nihilistic chaos — deconstruction will only succeed in canceling itself out along with everything else,” Young points out. Once good and evil are obliterated and meaningful choice denied, men are reduced to slaves of circumstance. Liberation turns out to be a fraud; we are free only because we are nothing.
Professors are particularly bad in this respect, reinforcing their pupils’s already ironic view that life is but a game:
Only a man completely caught up in the euphoria of professional prestige and affluence could be so utterly oblivious to the recurrent spiritual crisis of modern times — the sense of alienation growing out of the loss of meaning and purpose in life. It is, after all, a principal purpose of a liberal education to provide students with a breadth of learning and the critical habits of mind for reflection upon the significance of their existence. Scholars who have abandoned meaning and truth have effectively renounced the heart of their educational mission.
The irony is, of course, that the New Critics already knew the importance of literary paradox. In what is often taken as one of the founding essays in literary critics’ turn to deconstruction and postmodernism, Paul de Man twisted and twisted the ending of W. B. Yeats’s poem “Among School Children” to reveal an ambiguity in its famous concluding question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” But insofar as he was successful, all de Man did was a bad version of what the New Critics had already done in the 1940s and 1950s. The endless pages that, say, Cleanth Brooks devoted to literary paradox in such works as The Well Wrought Urn were an effort to reveal the extent to which good literature has always relied on ambiguity, difficulty, and dilemma.
But the deepest reason the New Critics were concerned with paradox in literature is exactly the reason that literature is so important — for it keeps us in tension between unchanging truths and changing particularities. For all their highlighting of our paradoxical condition, the postmodernists really wanted to end paradox; they couldn’t seem to live with the tension between the universal and the historical, and they resolved it by denying the universal. The service R. V. Young has done is to remind us of what literature is supposed to do: teach us about our humble greatness, our foolish genius, and our eternal transience — about the human paradox of having to live according to unchanging truths in a world of change.
Eric S. Cohen is assistant editor of the Public Interest.
