|
Jewish World Review /Dec. 11, 1998 /22 Kislev, 5759
Ben and Daniel Wattenberg
Better dead than read?
In 1996, the Georgetown English department dropped its Shakespeare
requirement for English majors. Later that year, the neo-conservatively
tinged National Alumni Forum published a study showing that of 70 elite
universities surveyed, just 23 required English majors to take a Shakespeare
course.
Of course, given the way he is read by fashionable literary theorists in
today's academy, the Bard might be better off dead than read.
For example, Harold Bloom, author of the new Shakespeare: The Invention of
the Human,recently received a letter from Anthony Hecht, poet and retired
Georgetown professor, telling of a Georgetown professor teaching Romeo and
Juliet who "tells the students that Juliet and her nurse are having a
lesbian affair."
But maybe, just maybe, the tide is beginning to turn. The Duke University
English Department -- exemplar of the academic nouvelle cuisine in the
humanities (feminist criticism, pop culture, Queer Studies -- chicks,
flicks, and...) -- is "self-destructing," according to a recent New York
Times article. An external review team "found the department 'without
anything we would be disposed to describe as an undergraduate or graduate
curriculum.'" Under "something resembling receivership," the department is
being led by a botanist who specializes in plant respiration, until a new
chairman is found.
And Bloom's magisterial new book on the Bard is itself an implicit and
valuable answer to the reductivist literary theorists of the academic left.
Like the great Shakespearean critics Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt and
A.C. Bradley, Bloom reads Shakespeare from the inside out. "Immerse yourself
in the text and its speakers, and allow your understanding to move outward
from what you read, hear and see to whatever contexts suggest themselves as
relevant," he writes.
He contrasts his traditional approach with that of the now fashionable
historicists and social determinists. The latter method is "to begin with a
political stance all your own... and then to locate some marginal bit of
English Renaissance social history that seems to support your stance," he
writes. "Social fragment in hand, you move in from outside on the poor play,
and find some connection, however established, between your supposed social
fact and Shakespeare's words." Outside-in. Or, as we non-academic critics
say, ass-backwards.
Bloom sees fatal flaws in the historicist or determinist approach. For one
thing, it's absurd. Yes, Shakespeare -- and his largely forgotten
contemporaries like Thomas Middleton, George Chapman and Thomas Dekker --
were all in some sense influenced by the social conditions of Elizabethan
England. Therefore, Middleton, Chapman and Dekker were all in some sense...
like Shakespeare? Certainly not in the sense they might have wished.
"Individual genius disappears completely" in this approach, said Bloom in an
interview. "Originality is destroyed."
Another big problem: the determinist approach is... arrogant. Shakespeare,
Bloom maintains, is not just the Western tradition's greatest poet, but its
greatest thinker also. He had our ideas before we did. Indeed, we have them
because he had them first.
The book's boldest and most distinctive argument is that Shakespeare
invented us. The greatest Shakespearean characters, he holds, did not merely
represent existing states of consciousness; they embodied new ones created
first by Shakespeare. In particular, they embodied a new self-awareness.
Because of their self-awareness, they were able to "reconceive" themselves
and, thus, change themselves by acts of will. Literary characters and people
underwent change before Shakespeare -- but these were understood as mere
changes of fortune precipitated by forces outside themselves -- disease,
aging, the caprice of the Gods. Shakespeare creates the first characters
that are the authors of their selves, and in their image were born the first
fully individual, fully human beings.
If Bloom has little use for determinists (Freudian, Marxist or otherwise),
perhaps this is part of the reason. Shakespeare invented exactly the kind of
self-aware and changing personality that resists deterministic explanations
and schemes of control. Shakespeare can tell us far more about determinists,
Bloom seems to say, than determinists can tell us about Shakespeare.
Bloom's book was #12 on the New York Times bestseller list last week and has
sold, he says, 101,000 copies in five weeks. And it is the kind of classic
study apt to remain in print and sell for a long time. Who reads the Marxist
and feminist critics? "Nobody," answers Bloom. "They sell three or four
thousand copies, when they sell well, mostly to librarians and to one
another."
But Bloom remains deeply pessimistic about the survival prospects for true
literary scholarship in the academy. As long as the academic tenure system
survives, he says, "these covens and sects can propagate themselves, choose
their own kind and only their own kind as graduate students, new assistant
professors and people promoted to tenure."
Maybe. But if Shakespeare can invent the human, surely someone can invent an
alternative to tenure. Let's hope so. Because if we're left with English
departments that don't need Shakespeare, then who needs English
ALACK. SHAKESPEARE HAS NOT HAD A VERY GOOD CULTURE WAR.
11/25/98: Polling the Pilgrims
11/13/98: The icon and the iconoclast
11/06/98: What happened? Nothing!
10/28/98: Two billion never-borns!
10/22/98: Election pundits know nothing
10/15/98: The too-big-to-fail doctrine
9/29/98: The Jerk Factor at work
9/24/98: American civic engagement thriving
9/16/98: Anatomy of a cover-up
9/09/98: Draft Joe Lieberman!
9/03/98: Get over it, folks
8/28/98: McGwire. Maris. Ruth. Clinton.
8/20/98: Is consuming a Big Mac eating?
Ben Wattenberg is a senior fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute
and is the moderator of PBS's "Think Tank." He wrote this column together with his son, Daniel, a regular writer for The Weekly
Standard and a contributing editor for George.