Michael Keefer

L U N A R PERSPECTIVES
Held Motes from the Culture Wars

Michael Keefer

Introduction One way of characterizing the arguments I offer in the following chapters might be to say that in my recent wanderings through the literary-critical and cultural-political landscape of our time, I have found that bridges I used to cross without a second thought appear during the past few years to have acquired a growing population of trolls, many of whom bear an uncanny resemblance to prominent partici pants in the PC controversies. In my encounters with them in these chapters, I have been willing to allow my opposite num bers to embrace their own trollhood as fervently as they desired, though in other respects I may have been less accom modating to their wishes and opinions. But the allegory is perhaps unfair. However strong my own commitments may be, I would not want wholly to obscure the fact that in such meetings on a bridge or culvert something more distinctly rhetorical than the simple matter of who rst or most powerfully threatened, clawed, or butted whom is at stake. The larger question to which I thus allude, of establish ing who in each instance is the troll and who the billy-goat, is best left for the reader to decide. 6. Lunar perspectives The title of this book amounts to an acknowledgement that to many readers the trajectory of my argument may seem orbital and eccentric. Why not lunar, then? Recent travellers to the moon Neil Armstrong and his successors have (to judge by the banality of their reports) not proted greatly from the experience. But some of their precursors made better use of a lunar perspective. Menippus, who in the second century A.D. ew there on wings appropriated from an eagle and a vulture, gained piercing insights into the intellectual and cultural life of his time: "I turned my eyes down earthwards, and with ease discerned cities, men, and all that was going on. ... I saw Hermodorus the Epicurean perjuring himself for three hundred dollars, Agathocles the Stoic suing a pupil for his fees, lawyer Clinias stealing a bowl from the temple of Asclepius, and Herophilus the cynic sleeping in a brothel."45 19

Social Reproduction and Cultural Memory "I like to think of it as creating a useful crisis.. .. Creating a useful crisis is what part of this will be about. So the rst bunch of communications that the public might hear might be more negative than I might be inclined to talk about [otherwise]. "Yeah, we need to invent a crisis. And that's not an act just of courage there's some skill involved."" Despite their different inections, what all of these voices share from Bloom and D'Souza to Panabaker and Snobelen and the anonymous bureaucrat who may well have been in Snobelen *s appreciative audience is a common exclusivism; all of them presumably nd it convenient to their purpose that attacks upon political correctness have shaken the public's sense of the legitimacy of universities and colleges. Two questions then impose themselves. Setting aside the very rich (who are always with us, and can take care of them selves), to what proportion of our population beyond that self-sufcient group do we want to impart the benets of higher education? And do we wish to retain some measure of public control over the contributions our universities make to the reproduction of our social order and to the production and dissemination of knowledge, or are we willing to allow these functions to pass ever more completely into the power of corporate interests? A recent article in The Economist which celebrates the apparent decline of European and North American universi ties claims that while their role "In producing graduates thanks to their legal monopoly and in conducting basic research" remains crucial, "in other respects, when it comes to producing and disseminating knowledge, they are moving to the margins." 'Today," the article continues, knowledge is too important to be left to academics. To make money, more and more companies need to know immediately what is going on and why. Investment bankers employ economists to plot the movement of everything from broad money to lead concentrates. 57

Nice Work If You Can Get It century of the institution of literary patronage, these over tones in the relationship between the poet and the man whose "sweet love rememb'red" makes him "scorn to change [his] state with kings" have become inaudible to readers of the sonnet.20 The other aspect of context what I have called "the context of our own receptions" is perhaps best explained in a more indirect manner. In my childhood I had two recurrent nightmares. One was of a awlessly clear summer sky, in which a small black dot suddenly appeared. Growing at rst very slowly, then with accelerating speed, it clotted the entire sky, enveloping me and my entire dreamworld at which point I would awake, breathless and terried. The other was of a cityscape, viewed from a third-oor window (the level of my own bedroom): the streets of this city, bathed in an unearthly blue light, were empty except for police cars or ambulances, whose wailing sirens lled me with inexpressible horror. Remembering the bedroom in which I awoke from these dreams, I can date their recurrence to the years between about 1954 and 1958: I was six to ten years old. But only in retrospect can I guess that they may have been related to those strange "civil defence" rituals, the nuclear air-raid drills for the sake of which the children in my school were period ically herded into the basement or to the air raid sirens that were installed in Toronto during these years, and on sev eral unearthly occasions tested. And only quite recently has it occurred to me that there might be some link between these nightmares and another later episode of my childhood a moment of casual terror which occurred in 1962, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. For some reason our grade nine Latin teacher was late arriving in class. As my friends and I chattered together about the television news, it suddenly seemed overwhelmingly likely that we would all be dead with in a week. But what does this have to do with understanding or with teaching literature? Robert Jay Lifton, the psychologist who in 1962, a full seventeen years after the bombing of

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Monster Zombies on Campus

became rmly established as the dominant mode of literary interpretation in the North American academy, and along with its offshoots, such as archetypal and phenomenological criticism, it retained this position for well over a quarter of a century. As one contemporary critic remarks, it thus became, "for a time, transparent, naturalized, and self-evident."23 Interpretive procedures that had initially appeared jargonridden and rebarbative are now the lost paradise of those academic traditionalists who call for a return to "natural com mon sense," but who forget that their own new critical assumptions are by other standards neither commonsensical nor natural. By the early 1970s, the presuppositions of the New Criticism began to seem increasingly questionable. Is it really the case that the texts we choose to call "literary" are organically unied? Or might we nd it more interesting to consider the manner in which they are riven by contradictory impulses? In what sense can we describe a literary text as autonomous? Are its meanings not always a matter of intertextuality and context? And is there any reason for saying that the exploration of cultural context should stop at a particular point? Is the proper and original signicance of a text a mat ter of authorial intention alone? Or is authorship itself a historically determined category, our understanding of which might well have seemed bizarre to William Shakespeare in the sixteenth century or to Geoffrey Chaucer two hundred years earlier? If textual autonomy, organic unity, and authorial intention are no longer secure criteria for delimiting the range and play of meanings within literature, can there be any further excuse for refusing to explore the material and ideological conditions surrounding the production, transmis sion, and reception of literary works? And what, if any, are the categorical differences between literary texts and other kinds of writing? On what basis, then, do the New Critics presume to tell us that only a certain canon of texts deserves our atten tion? Is there any connection between the predominance of conservative, white, middle-class males among the New Critics and the fact that their canon contains so few writings by 8 3

Monster Zombies on Campus If this example is in any way typical, the question of whether literary studies have become politicized can only be answered with what may seem a paradox. They have indeed tended to become more openly political than before. But more political? Perhaps not Let me illustrate what I mean. E. M. W. Tillyard's The Eliza bethan World Picture can safely be termed a classic of twentiethcentury criticism: it is still in print more than fty years after its rst publication. It is also a book which, until quite recently, few students of English Renaissance literature would have described as having any discernible political tendency.54 As Tillyard explains in his preface, this book arose out of a larger study of Shakespeare's history plays: "In studying these I concluded that the pictures of civil war and disorder they present had no meaning apart from a background of order to judge them by." The Elizabethan World Picture, then, is an account of this order, which Tillyard discovered "was much more than a political order, or, if political, was always part of a larger cosmic order."35 His opening move is to assert that there is no substantial difference between this Elizabethan political/cosmic order and the static, hierarchical "world picture" he regards as characteristic of the Middle Ages. He demonstrates this continuity by setting Hamlet's celebrated assertion of the dignity of man What a piece of work is a man: how noble in reason; how innite in faculty; in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals alongside a similar encomium written by Nemesius of Emesa, a fourth-century Syrian bishop: No eloquence may worthily publish forth the manifold pre-eminences and advantages which are bestowed on this creature. He passeth over the vast seas; he rangeth about the wide heavens by his contemplation and

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Yesterday's News ghter-bombers from Britain, Germany, and other NATO countries practised and continue to practise low-level deeppenetration tactics, in rehearsal for a war against what used to be the Soviet Union? Is there some connection between the terrifying sonic-boom effects of these tree-level flights against which Innu people who wish to travel unmolested within the land they call Nitassinan have protested in vain and the social stresses experienced by communities that have been denied access to their traditional hunting lands? And what of the other intrusions, by hydroelectric projects and lumber and mining companies, into the lands claimed by the Innu? Is it relevant to note that at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1991, the government of Canada agreed that "the lands of indigenous people and their communities should be protected from activities that are environmentally unsound or that the indigenous people concerned consider to be socially and culturally inappropriate"?5 These are all questions which in 1993, the year Innu suicides came to public attention and also coincidentally the United Nations' 'Year of the Indigenous Peoples" the mainstream Canadian print and electronic media chose to ignore. 1. Oral culture: The self as daimonic other Many, perhaps most, journalists are honourably devoted to the cause of informing and enlightening, as well as entertaining, the public. However, their employers' principal aim is neither to inform nor to enlighten, but rather to deliver as large as possible an audience or readership into the hands of the advertisers who make the enterprise protable. This purpose is no doubt better served by narrative fragments offered without context or analysis than it would be by narratives containing a greater causal depth, and hence also a critical dimension that corporate advertisers might nd troubling. Thus, whatever the good intentions and often admirable achievements of journalists, I would propose that the media in which they work, taken together, constitute a powerful institution devoted to the fragmentation of narrative, the 101

Y esterday's News unjustly taken from him. Caliban's claim is not upheld in The Tempest, but neither is it simply dismissed, and at the enigmatic close of the play all of the Europeans every one of them leave the island."51 Only by not knowing or by forgetting all of this is Will able to describe as "politicized" interpreta tions which take this aspect of The Tempest into account. On reection, however, Will's anxiety (in the midst of his own forgetfulness) about a collective amnesia induced by his opponents is perhaps not very surprising. He is attacking the manner in which feminists, social historians, cultural materi alists, and others approach the past, not as an array of monuments to which one could appropriately respond only with gestures of deference and submission, but rather as a sequence of unconcluded struggles and contests, the dimen sions of which are social as well as internal and aesthetic. As I have suggested, Will's position itself involves acts of localized amnesia. But since he espouses a recognizably Platonizing view of knowledge as a reminiscence or recollection of some mythical originary unity, of culture as a posture of deference to authoritative recollections of tradition, and of tradition as something passively inherited, rather than transformed by the energy of each successive appropriation of its changing pat terns, his position also allows him to stand forth as a defender of memory. The fact that the memory he defends is a wholly metaphysical category, and that its defence involves (as with his comment on The Tempest) a determined suppression of historical memory, does not trouble him in the least. What interests George Will about literature is its "authority," its power (as he believes) to unite, dene, and constitute the collective mind of a class of people. He wishes to control the manner in which literary texts are interpreted, as well as the manner in which the texts to be interpreted are chosen. And by a larger, perhaps more strenuous act of forgetfulness, he is able to evade any acknowledgement of the fact that this stance is a wholly political one. In Books II and III of Plato's Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors express similar con cerns about the power of poetry to shape people's minds in a way that affects the constitution of the polity. They denounce 123

7 Canonical Subversions: Boring from Within

Now the New Moon is hanging, having cast away his bone: Gradually he grows larger, taking on new bone and esh. Over there, far away, he has shed his bone: he shines on the Place of the Lotus Root, the Place of the Dugong, On the Place of Evening Star, of the Dugong's Tail, of the Moonlight Clay-pan ... His old bone gone, now the New Moon grows larger, Gradually growing, his new bone growing as well. from The Song of the Moon-Bone," sung by the Sandfly clan of the Wonguri People of Arnhem Land1 In chapter six I argued, among other things, that the efforts of neoconservative polemicists like Roger Kimball to represent themselves as defenders of the traditions of humanistic study hinge upon a profound ignorance of the very things they are striving to defend or, more accurately, to appropriate. Kimball's exaggerated reverence for "the tradition of high culture embodied in the classics of Western art and thought"2 may reveal another related kind of incomprehension. Some of the most astonishing and satisfying moments in the "classics" of "high culture" are those in which the "high"

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Canonical Subversions foreigner in another country, you would most likely be arrested as a wizard.47 Plato, that consummate and spell-binding rhetorician, is quite clearly playing the same game. Some of his readers can be expected to succumb to his wiles (this was the fate of Allan Bloom, and the basis of many of the sillier passages in The Closing of the American Mind)*8 But another stance is possible: one which, incorporating a lucid recognition of Plato's anti democratic dogmatism, can at the same time encourage a delighted participation in the convolutions of his texts and perhaps in the end permit the reader to assess with greater clarity what is at play, and what more exactly the relations in these dialogues may be between wisdom and deceit. 6. STC: From reeking plains of France to the halls of academe I now ask you to take a ying leap across more than two thou sand years of cultural history and from the first week of our academic semester into the eighth. Between the last para graph and this one my students and I have toiled through Aristotle's Poetics, Longinus' On the Sublime, shorter texts by Horace, Plotinus, and Dante, Sidney's Apology for Poetry, Henry Reynolds' Mythomystes, Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Pope's Essay on Criticism, and Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, not to mention excerpts from writings by Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. These students have also had to endure lectures on (among other things) classical rhetoric, midrash and allegory, carnival and the neoclassical aesthetic, and gender in Romanticism. Landing sure-footedly in the corridor outside our lecture hall, you enter the ill-lit room (the maintenance people, if the university still employs any, have not yet been able to replace the row of ceiling lights which quietly expired a month ago) and slip into a seat near the back. As several students turn in their seats to take note of your arrival, you in turn observe their bemused, in some cases, bleary-eyed

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Conclusion Remarks of the kind I have quoted do not in any case amount to evidence of engagement, critical or otherwise, with feminist literary and cultural theory. Thus, when Fekete writes that "Biofeminist patriarchy theory, abducting the last third of this century, is exactly as divisive, exactly as false, and exactly as reductive as theories of racial supremacy and class supremacy have been in the rst and second thirds of this century,"281 am not convinced by his scanty references to fem inist theory that he knows what he is talking about but I hope he would acknowledge that language of this kind amounts to panic rhetoric. If Moral Panic contained no more than shaky political theory and overcharged rhetoric, it would not deserve our attention. However, Fekete's charge that "Biofeminism has much to answer for, for hijacking the discourse of women's 'libera tion,' diminishing and redirecting the concept of liberation to aim at 'equity,' and deforming and abusing the goals and practices of equity to assault all the libertarian principles that could provide meaning and moral value to it"29 is backed up by ve chapters that criticize recent studies of violence against women, and by a further three that explore the impact of feminist advocacy on Canadian universities. The main target of chapters two to six of Moral Panic is the 1993 Report of the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women30 which as Fekete demonstrates does indeed engage in statistical panic-mongering on a large scale. For example, the panel's claim that 80 percent and 50 percent respectively of Canadian Native girls and boys under the age of eight are sexually molested turns out to be derived third hand from an estimate by one physician practising in the Mackenzie Delta.31 The no less distressing claim that 83 percent of disabled Canadian women will be sexually assaulted during their life times is again derived, at several removes, from a single study that reports interviews with fewer than three dozen institu tionalized mentally handicapped women in California. (Not content with generalizing from this tiny sample to the Cana dian population at large, the panel subsequently inated the prevalence of sexual abuse gure to 90 percent in its training 193

Notes
(February 12, 1994): Bl. "Stephen Richer and Lorna Weir, "Introduction," in Richer and Weir, eds., Beyond Political Correctness, 8. "Randal Martin, "Ontario's proposed antidote looks more dangerous than the disease," Ottawa Citizen (February 13, 1994). John Fekete remarks that "The issue is not discrimination, which is illegal anyway; nor the mis chief of harassment, which should and can be redressed, though with a sense of due proportion. The issue is that we must learn to be sufcient ly precise and delimited about prohibited harassment so as to permit our expressive rights to thrive outside the prohibitions." See Fekete, "Zero Tolerance by Any Other Name," acotte Newsletter (June 1994): 4. "Booth, 2. "Furedy made this statement during the discussion period which followed the presentation of his paper, "Is an Iron Curtain of Political Correctness Being Erected in North American Universities? Some International and Historical Perspectives," at the University in Jeopardy Conference held in the Royal York Hotel, Toronto, on March 12,1993.1 was there. "Fekete, Moral Panic, 301. More on Fekete's Moral Panic in chapter eight 'There was of course a parallel development in Canada. See Stevie Cameron, On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years (2nd ed.; Toronto: Seal Books, 1995). "Ellen Messer-Davidow's article "Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education," Social Text 36 (Fall 1993): 40-80, provides a brilliant and exhaustively researched analysis of the structure a complex net work of foundations, think-tanks, and other institutions that enabled and spearheaded the ideological offensive of the American right which in 1990 evolved into the PC debate. "John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1995) 17, 27-28. "This interpretation of the active involvement of Bush and senior members of his administration in the early stages of the PC debate was quite wide ly shared in 1991; see for example Fred Bruning, "Playing politics with political correctness," Maclean's (June 10, 1991): 11. "Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 41. By "social imaginary" I mean (to bor row the words of John B. Thompson) "the creative and symbolic dimen sion of the social world, the dimension through which human beings cre ate their ways of living together and their ways of representing their social life." See Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984), 6. "See Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). "Reich's estimate, from his book The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1991), is quoted from Maude Barlowe and Heather-jane, Robertson, Class Warfare: The Assault on Canada's Schools (Toronto: Key Porter, 1994), 175. MSee John W. Warnock, Free Trade and the New Right Agenda (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1988), 151. 40Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought to Be, 45-46. "For lucid analyses of this issue, see Linda McQuaig, The Wealthy Banker's

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