Saturday, 10 March 2007
Christian: George Will on literary theory and historical amnesia
When our copy of Newsweek arrives, the first thing I do every other week is flip to the back to read George Will's column. Will is old-style conservative — you may have read about them in books or museums — who still believes in such things as fiscal and legislative frugality; in other words, conservativism. (Some people have begun ridiculously referring to such things as "libertarianism," a word that appears in no history text I've run across.)
Will's latest column about Longfellow, literary theory, and historical amnesia is worth quoting in block:
Yeats ascribed Longfellow's popularity to his accessibility—"he tells his story or idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it." This angers today's academic clerisy. What use is it to readers who need no intermediary between them and the author? And what use is Longfellow to academics who "interrogate" authors' "texts" to illuminate the authors' psyches, ideologies and social situations— the "power relations" of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.? This reduction of the study of literature to sociology, and of sociology to ideological assertion, demotes literature to mere raw material for literary theory, making today's professoriate, rather than yesterday's writers, the center of attention.
Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, has written that "Longfellow's vast influence on American culture paradoxically makes him both central and invisible." The melancholy fact that the 200th birthday of the poet who toiled to create the nation's memory passed largely unremarked is redundant evidence of how susceptible this forward-leaning democracy is to historical amnesia.
It's too bad we don't have more conservatives like George Will, instead of the "conservatives" we're stuck with today.
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