OK... I’ve been totally remiss: just returned from Montreal where I attended the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and also did a lecture on Racial Fever at McGill University’s Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI).
Up next: The British court case on the (Jewish) question of race vs. religion... (The short version?: Please read Racial Fever. Or maybe that’s the long version... The short version [with specific commentary on the present case] is imminent. I promise.)
I’ve been promising to do a blog-post on something other than male genitals... so... without further ado:
A couple of weeks ago, I listened to a fascinating talk by Josh Lambert, drawn from his dissertation on obscenity in Jewish American literature. He definitely made me want to go back and read Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, and he certainly taught me a thing or two (or three or four or more) about obscenity: the legal definitions (and their ramifications), the purposes and motivations and more... Josh gave a super-presentation, with lots of interesting details and facts and questions and citations... it was an academic presentation, but I sort of felt like there was something just a tiny bit missing.... the juiciness or the graphics or the grossness or erotics or disgustingness... but then, I may be more interested in those things than most people. Or I may just enjoy talking about such stuff because it’s the uncomfortable stuff that I find most interesting...
Afterwards, we got engaged in a heated discussion about the relationship (or lack thereof) between a) serious critical scholarship on literature, and b) writing on literature that allows affect—the effects of reading, the rhythms and associations and textual sensuality—into the scholarly conversation. In this conversation, all quotations are approximate—no tape recorders or phonographic memories...
From what I understood, Josh sees the second kind of reading as something that is great in undergraduate classes—“you have to excite them somehow and show your enthusiasm etc.”—and fine in journalism or creative autobiographical writing, but irrelevant in the context of serious scholarship. As Josh humbly explained it, since he is not an “ideal reader,” he can’t pretend that his responses are “valid” (not sure if he used that word), or representative in any way. “You’d have to do a sociological study of how people read this book in order to use those responses in scholarship,” he explained. “I’m interested in actual material things that can be substantiated through archival work or reviews from the time period and so on. Not ‘how it made me feel’—that’s just not relevant.”
Here’s where I got a bit huffy and puffy (and perhaps a tiny bit defensive): First of all, there is no ideal reader. Second, even by avoiding affect, Josh (and all other readers) are taking a particular position vis a vis affect. Third, I realize it’s dangerous to suggest that all texts are completely open—a la Alice in Wonderland—but it is important to realize the mechanics of what makes a particular interpretation valid—the work of literary scholars often validates (or presents) particular ways of reading—sometimes this means incorporating archival documents, sometimes this means studying the author’s neighborhood or notes or boats or coats. The real challenge is to convince others that one’s own interpretation is valid—this, I think, is really difficult to determine: what makes a reading convincing? (It’s a question I’ve often asked of my students.)
I, too, do not like the kinds of writing on literature (or really on anything) that begins, expands, and ends with “how I felt.” “What it did for me.” And lots of flowery language about the erotics or beauty or warmth or any of those sorts of adjective-heavy ways of describing the effects of literature. Yes, sometimes, this kind of writing finds its way into “serious scholarly” journals, perhaps more so in the 80s, when many scholars seemed to have (re-)discovered that their arguments were being made from specific “subject-positions.” (Wow! Lo and behold, people read things differently, and this is sometimes somehow related to your socio-economic-ethnic-national-linguistic position in the world.) Yet there is no one African-American and no Chinese- or Jewish- or Latino- American mode of interpretation. Quite often our own sense of these categories and where we fit in them also subtly shapes our reading and our scholarship. And, our own sense of what is “valid” is shaped by our knowledge and experience of languages and dialects and jokes and foods and histories and so on. For awhile there in the 80s and early 90s, I think many people were thrilled to discover that they could reveal “who they are” in their scholarly writing—they could say, Hey! I’m a Latino-American woman, and I read this or that text differently than that there old white man who’s been reading Milton his whole life. I read in a Latino-American way! The way that everyone else has been reading is white and staid and old.
But lo and behold: there is more than one Latino-American woman. And lo and behold, they think, read and write differently. And lo and behold, they even have different senses of what makes a particular piece of literature Latino-American as opposed to Mexican or Spanish or whatever. So to “announce” one’s position—I’m a straight-ish, Jew-ish, white-ish female from the suburbs who went to an Ivy League school—oy, now that’s just boring. But I won’t pretend that this background in some way limits me as much as it opens doors and avenues of understanding.
I think perhaps that scholars have become a bit allergic to any elements of literary scholarship that don’t hold up in court. What is the court? Who are the judges? I’m not entirely sure of the answers to these questions, but most definitely it must have something to do with the sense that the humanities—particularly those loosey goosey subjects like art and literature and music—are no longer necessary, that they are not “productive.” The complaint runs as follows: “They don’t generate income or patents or cures or solutions. They simply muddy the waters and provide nice entertainment. So if we’re going to do serious scholarship, we should at least take ourselves seriously and work like serious historians (specifically, super-positivistic somewhat boring historians who use a particular form of science as their model), and at least then, we’ll be contributing to the collective knowledge of the world. We’ll produce new discoveries; we’ll show those historians and scientists, we’re very serious over here in the Literature department.” See, for example, Mark Slouka’s essay, “Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school” in Harper’s Magazine (September 2009).
I’ll admit that there are (at least) two sides of research (in the arts and humanities): a) the “serious” historical research, the reasoned comparisons to other literature of the same time period, genre, geography and so on... and b) our gut feelings, the ways in which a text depresses us, or reminds us of our parents, or turns us on, or grosses us out, or maddens or frustrates us....
But try as we might, there is no way to keep these two sides separate. You can try to build a wall, but every wall is porous. Stuff leaks through whether you like it or not. Stuff that you can’t even see or sense leaks through. And the question is how? And what is this stuff? And what’s the nature of those holes in the screen that it slips through? The most interesting writing (or reading? or interpretations? or re-writings) are those that take us through the holes...
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