The New Traditionalists

...But one might yet hesitate to designate this a "literary Right" without taking responsibility for the political resonances of the phrase...

...Hence the apocalyptic quality and the taste for entropy that characterizes so much of the end-of-literature criticism in the more advanced academic journals...

...He argues that the high functions of literary art have been degraded...

...During that period the teaching of literature was partly shifted in the direction Graff deplores (I deplored it myself at the time, and continue to...

...The 19th-century realist novels defy the polemical use to which we are inclined to put them...

...they didn't want to see life reflected in the glass of art...

...Postmodern criticism is related to '60s activism as the eraser is related to the blackboard scrawled with yesterday's lecture...

...This left me wondering what that was—and especially who it was...

...They had read the latest issue of Tel Quel but not Sophocles, or, for that matter, Marx...

...There are, however, good reasons for finally rejecting Graff's hypothesis...

...involvement with the real world had proved sadly disappointing and even tragic...

...Gardner does admit that novels do not simply exemplify or enact moral theses...

...As such, he is in a tradition that includes Ortega y Gasset and Georg Lukacs—opponents of modernism who were somehow clearer about its means and ends than its own defenders...

...Thus Graff would have us believe that the American attraction to those mostly European philosophies is a symptom of defeated Leftism gone underground...

...True, the appearance this year of Gerald Graffs Literature Against Itself (University of Chicago, 260 pp., $15.00) and last year of Gardner's On Moral Fiction (Harper & Row, 214 pp.,* $8.95) does in fact suggest that a new traditionalism is emerging to confront the modernist self-absorption, faddish nihilism and autotelic form of Roland Barthes, Samuel Beckett, Donald Barthelme . . . and John Barth...

...Did Barth simply mean those writers and critics who champion novels with "real people" in them...

...It is for having taken seriously the relationship of academic criticism, in particular, to the political culture that Gerald Graff's Literature Against Itself merits attention and admiration...

...They may lend toward moralism and political simplism but this is outweighed by their emphatic call for realism and responsibility in the literary act...

...What no one studied anymore was how literature might be located in the historical world of real men and women...

...For Tolstoy, the great task is to act morally without moral teaching...

...You can only know how much admiration if you have ever subjected yourself to the study of avant-garde European and American criticism...

...I have a number of problems with the latter...

...They are morally and esthetically self-conscious and oblique in a way that we don't always care to see when we're holding them up as examples for our fallen contemporaries...

...As one might have expected from this author, the book is extraordinarily well-written, and it richly deserves the controversy that has swarmed around it...

...The new radical "textuality," by insisting on the self-referential nature of texts and of language itself, guaranteed the exegetes safety from history, from political and social responsibility...

...John Gardner's On Moral Fiction also attacks postmodernism, but it does so on a more popular level than Graff...

...I was a graduate student there from 1970-75...

...By moral fiction he means, first, fiction that is "life-giving—moral in its process of creation...

...This style of thinking can be found today in structuralists and post-structuralists, phenomenologists, post-Freudians and Jungians, existential and Hegelian Marxists and John Romano, our guest columnist, teaches English at Columbia and is the author of Dickens and Reality...

...Second, he means fiction that is "moral in what it says...

...They preferred criticism to literature, and the text to the world...

...As marginal justification for this self-indulgence, I'll plead that the institution in which my reminiscence is set happens to be Graffs own example of deconstructive criticism, of a pure case of criticism as cultural radicalism, in a well-known essay on "The Yale School...

...a more jargon-bound and self-addressing prose than that of, say, Jacques Derrida and Jonathan Culler cannot easily be imagined...

...New criticism gave way to French-influenced, narrowly "textual" and linguistic study, or otherwise to "influence study" and "criticism of consciousness...

...It represents the death, not the hiding place, of commitment...

...The change in the faculty, or the evolution of the thought of individual professors, began to be reflected in the attitudes of my fellow graduate students...

...Nevertheless, they address the world in the firmness of its actuality with a vigor that might not be impossible in the future, especially if critics like Gardner and Graff have an impact...

...Novels do have a grand moral function in the history of our culture, at least as grand as Gardner wishes for them—but that function has been to complicate morals, to make judgment not only necessary but also nearly impossible (to modify a formula of Gabriel Marcel's about the uses of philosophy...

...Literary texts were understood to be "about" themselves, if indeed they were "about" anything at all...

...rather, they test them against real-life situations...

...I had only a wobbly perspective on the inner life of the faculty, yet I knew my own generation well enough to feel that I could understand its being drawn to these new critical methodologies...

...Barth told an interviewer that the novelist and critic John Gardner, by his polemical advocacy of "moral" fiction, was making a pitch to the "literary Right...

...Graff, it seems to me, has crucially misread this development...

...The masterpiece of the genre, War and Peace, concludes famously with Pierre's conversion to a know-nothing, peasant code of ethics...

...that, distressingly, the literary elite has ceased to talk about art as if it had real consequence, moral consequence...

...Its central contention is that the moral universe is a vaster thing than the human mind can comprehend...

...They knew Roland Barthes' S/Z but not Balzac's Lost Illusions—and S/Z was "about" Balzac...

...What Gardner says has needed saying, even though I think he is profoundly wrongheaded on a central issue...

...Graff intimately knows the work of a wide range of advanced theoretical critics, and he is largely capable of containing his contempt for their collective "anti-realism" long enough to be instructive and lucid about the depths (and shallows) of their writing...

...By way of giving them, let me refer to my own experience...

...Or is there actually a true and necessary connection between the renewed defense of traditionalism in literature and the resurgence of the political Right...

...More broadly still, the patterns of radical cultural thought have become part of the folk mythology of intellectuals as a group—and of those whose outlook is shaped by intellectuals...

...And this is supported, seemingly, by the iconoclastic style, if not always by the particular content, of the latest issue of Diacritics, or New Literary History, or any of the dozen journals with "Semiotics" in their titles...

...Cultural radicalism' and 'cultural revolution' are vague terms, of course...

...They denote no particular school of thought but rather a certain style of thinking, a pattern of typical oppositions and identifications whose rationale is usually left unformulated...

...I intend to mull over a smaller matter than this, but the question can serve to show that the seemingly in-house squabbles of much current criticism, academic and popular, might be large in their implications, if only the implications were made plain from time to time...

...Because of this, On Moral Fiction has a "one man's opinion" feeling about it that won't go away...

...In effect, then, he is calling for the revival of a style of novel writing he does not well understand...

...Moreover, the strength of the realist novel of the 19th century wasn't its moral teaching but its moral concern, a concern that typically did not end in paraphraseable moral resolutions...

...As a result, the disillusioned students began trying to divorce themselves from all the specifically mimetic aspects of reading...

...The radical legacy of the New Left and the counterculture seems increasingly to lie in the sphere of culture rather than of politics...

...innumerable other manifestations of the vanguard spirit in art, criticism and social thought...

...Yet in the end it is precisely the moral thesis he wants to evaluate...

...An increasing number had read Derrida in French but not Racine, not even in English translation...

...There is a tension between realism and moralism that Gardner gives no sign of perceiving, much less resolving...

...He has taken it upon himself to re-establish the faded connection between Left politics and avant-garde literary trends, especially in an essay called "The Politics of Anti-Realism": "With the waning of the political radicalism of the sixties, 'cultural radicalism' has grown proportionately in influence...

...At the center of Graffs book, though, is an indictment, not an elucidation...

...But Tolstoy, of course, wrote precisely the sort of novels Gardner wants to revive...

...And there is something pragmatic or bottom-lineish or perhaps merely philistine about that criterion...

...The idealism of the collegiate experience in the late '60s had come to grief...