“I know what you mean. Yes, I keep a journal and it hasn’t led me to care less about the common good.”
11. He had told me to record all my thoughts about Anna. Now, in prison, he talked to me about her, about my memories of her.
“Write it all down, the good and the bad. We’ll talk about it.”
There was so much, too much, to talk about. One doesn’t normally talk about the good times, not easily anyway. They’re not inherently interesting except to the dramatis personae themselves. One feels silly, trying to explain exactly what it was one felt, and why it felt so good. But he insisted. I had to assume his reasons were valid, but it made me uncomfortable. It trivialized it.
“Is that the point, Alex, to trivialize what you felt?”
“I’m asking the questions here. You were telling me, you were describing the mental images of her that remain with you.”
“This is ridiculous. There are too many. What’s the point of this?”
“Go back to the one you were telling me about. You were alone together at your parents’ beach house on the Mornington Peninsula. You said it was summer. You said you had the house to yourselves that time.”
“The house wasn’t anything special, not like some of them there.”
“You weren’t talking about the house. It was night.”
“It was night and we were in bed. We had been at the beach for much of the day. We had come home, showered, and made love. It was a long, long session, long enough to encompass different shades of mood, different types of lovemaking. We fell asleep, read, showered again, and made dinner. I barbecued lamb chops—she liked the taste of lamb—and she made one of her elaborate salads. We were drinking a little bit. After dinner we had some of my father’s scotch. I started a crossword and we read a little. We took what we were reading to bed. I think we might have played around a bit, not another marathon session but . . . we were always hungry for each other. Then I slept for a while. I don’t think Anna did. Maybe she did. I woke from my nap. She was beside me and I went on reading, I think it was Kundera. I felt I was the first person in the world to read Kundera, ahead of even the Czechs. Are people still reading him, do you think? I turned off the bedside lamp, the one on my side. Hers was still on and I remember just watching her, looking at her.”
“Why do you remember this?”
“I don’t know. I just do. She looked beautiful. I remember thinking that.”
“Didn’t you often think she looked beautiful?”
“Of course. I often did.”
“Why do you remember this time in particular?”
“It was the conjunction of things, I suppose. Isn’t that what it always is? I looked at her on the other side of the bed. I drank her in. She lay on top of the bed, smooth olive skin, interrupted only briefly by the white silk of her underwear and the silver bracelet I’d bought her. She had a beautiful shape, full, not overweight but not scrawny either. Her breasts were . . . unambiguous. She was unambiguously female, not just feminine, but entirely woman. There was nothing androgynous about her. I keep seeing her eyes, huge black eyes. They swallowed you. You wanted them to. I did. She was wearing her glasses, the tortoiseshell glasses, with her thick nut-colored hair tied back. I don’t know why, Alex. I just remember it. She had a pencil in one hand, doing a crossword. The whole scene appeared to me . . . I remember thinking . . . I was experiencing a moment of perfection. It’s not up to us to choose the visual images that stay with us. Everything I ever wanted just seemed to crowd into that instant.”
“Crosswords?”
“What?”
“You used to do a lot of crosswords.”
“Yeah, I was pretty good at them. I started doing them as a kid, the whole ‘word’ thing. You know—puns, palindromes, anagrams. I must have been quite a pain in the ass. I graduated to spelling puzzles, crosswords, cryptic crosswords . . .‘Rare ewes at one, three, and five.’ Seven letters. Give up? ‘Unusual.’ ”
“How do you get that?”
“Seven letters. Rare. Ewes, written as in sheep, but taken as a homophone to refer to the letter u, which occurs in the word unusual three times, at positions one, three, and five. It fits.”
“That’s very clever.”
“Yeah, like an idiot savant.”
“You were still doing crosswords when you were a university student?”
“Yeah. So? It didn’t consume my time or anything. It was just a bit of fun, you know, a bit of—”
“You said Anna was doing the crossword.”
“She was reading something.”
“You said Anna was doing the crossword.”
“I don’t think so. I was doing the crossword. She was probably—”
“You were reading Kundera, the first in the world ever to read him.”
“I don’t get it. What’s your point? So what if I said she was doing the crossword? What does it matter?”
“Simon, it only matters to you.”
“What are you talking about? Don’t get cryptic on me, Alex.”
“Was she doing the crossword or not? It’s your perfect moment.”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t change anything. Maybe she was finishing my crossword.”
“Simon, she never did crosswords, did she?”
“No, you’re wrong. She did. I think she did.”
“Did she read Kundera?”
“She had to.”
“Did you take any of the same courses?”
“We took English and politics together. That’s how we met. There was even a combined honors course we took in our third year, ‘The Politics of Literature,’ two two-hour seminars a week. Drove me crazy.”
“Why, too much reading?”
“There was a lot of reading, but it wasn’t that. My suspicions about the nature of the English Department were confirmed . . . it hurt. I took it personally.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let me give you an example. We had a visiting lecturer, a professor. Some escapee from the class of nineteen sixty-eight, he comes in wearing a cravat—”
“Oh, I see, pompous?”
“He was pompous, authoritarian, but not in the way you’d expect. It was that new breed of pomposity that smugly masquerades as a kind of matey egalitarianism. You were explicitly invited, encouraged, to call him by his first name and to participate in class discussion, but you were implicitly forbidden to publicly disagree with him by his manner, his body language, and his Sinaic delivery.”
“I see.”
“He was giving a seminar on George Orwell, and in particular the novel 1984. At the back of the book, Orwell put an appendix outlining the principles of Newspeak, the language of the novel’s totalitarian Big Brother. The idea posited in the book, one of them, anyway, was that by taking away the word for something you take away the concept. For example, Orwell has Big Brother outlaw the use of the word bad, which is replaced by the word un-good.
“The visiting professor, who subsequently made a home for himself in the department, rambled on asking the class a series of trivial questions which culminated in a consideration of what comes first, the concept or the word for the concept. Can “bad” exist without a word for it? When the class reached the conclusion, fairly quickly, that generally the concept comes first—we came up with the word bad to describe things that are bad—the professor triumphantly suggested that, together, we had proved Orwell wrong. Then I did what one was never to do. I objected to his characterization of what we had, together, just done. I told him Orwell can’t be wrong. He was a novelist, not a social theorist. He can be a good novelist or a bad novelist, he can create a world which is more or less convincing, he can even devise an implausible conceit, misrepresent reality, but he can’t be wrong. A novel, like poetry, can be more or less insightful, more or less profound. It can certainly be more or less moving. It can even be moral or immoral. But, being fiction, it cannot be true or false in the way that an empirical proposition is true or false.”
“Hold on, Simon. Isn’t that a bit extreme? After all, fiction is usually anchored to at least elements of reality to give it verisimilitude. And insofar as these real elements are concerned, surely their representation can be said to be true or false even if the work of fiction as a whole can’t be said to be true or false?”
“Yes, you’re right, of course. But what do you expect from a child who had to disagree just to prove he was there. Anyway, the professor became flustered. His face grew red. He started shouting, accusing me of either not taking literature seriously enough or not taking politics seriously enough. The man was an idiot.”
“But why were you so hostile in the first place?”
“The hostility wasn’t so much to him or to what he’d said. It was to what was happening to the English Department. Like so many others in the country, it was in the process of turning into a cultural studies department, with all that that implies.”
“What does it imply?”
“Where do I start? It implies a rigid doctrinaire embrace of certain amorphous schools of thought often grouped together under the mantle of postmodernism. Now, you’re probably thinking this is surely just another fad within the social sciences or the arts to which some people will subscribe and others won’t. Who really cares?”
“That’s not quite what I was thinking but if it had been, you would have put it very well.”
“The real and grave problem with this particular fad is what it includes and what it has come to exclude. When English departments become departments of cultural studies, it means that the decision makers within them embrace, adhere to, or, to put it more aptly, are under the sway of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism. Do you know anything about Derrida?”
“Not much. Just that you rail against him nearly as often as you sing the praises of Empson.”
“Yeah. But do you know what he and his deconstructionist friends have to say?”
“To be frank, not really. Nor, for that matter, do I know why anyone should be so upset by it.”
“Well, Alex, that only confirms that you don’t know anything about deconstructionism and the harm its wholesale adoption by the literary academy in particular has wreaked. And you don’t need to be actively involved in the study of literature to find it pernicious.”
“Okay. Enlighten me.”
“Deconstructionism or postmodernism, insofar as it pertains to language, is a doctrine originating with Derrida and others that asserts that every lingual statement, they call this a ‘text,’ has a large number of meanings rather than ‘a’ meaning, that every text is essentially ambiguous.”
“Isn’t that what your friend Empson was going on about in Seven Types of Ambiguity?”
“No, not at all. Empson merely suggested that what separates much of the very best poetry from the rest is the latent ambiguity within it. He was only talking about poetic language. He didn’t claim that all literature, let alone all texts, were riddled with ambiguity. For Christ’s sake, don’t ever confuse Empson with Derrida.”
“Sorry.”
“No, this is serious, Alex. Deconstructionists claim that neither the intention of the author nor any putative connection between words and some non-lingual reality will confer any more or less agreed definitive meaning to a text.
“They claim, on the contrary, that words only acquire any meaning at all by virtue of their relationship with other words, and these only with other words, and so on ad infinitum, and that this endlessly defers arriving at any agreed fixed meaning. Rather than arrive at ‘the’ meaning of a text, all you can do, they say, is to ‘deconstruct’ it, by which they mean to keep on endlessly uncovering the ambiguities and contradictions within it. The effect of this is that you are left with an infinite number of possible meanings or interpretations.”
“Okay, so they’re wrong. But why do they make you so angry? I still don’t understand why they make you so angry. After all, Simon, all they’re doing is taking the observation that many statements are somewhat ambiguous and open to a number of interpretations to an absurd extreme.”
“No, Alex. Don’t you see? What the deconstructionists are doing is much worse than that. By denying that there is a fixed correspondence between language and the world, and concomitantly, between language and meaning, they deny that there can be any objective facts or knowledge at all. Thus it is open to them to deny, for instance, that the Second World War occurred, to dismiss all science as just one of a limitless number of narratives, and to deny that Shakespeare’s plays are more significant than Enid Blyton’s stories.
“Deconstruction delegitimizes all that man has accomplished intellectually, morally, and aesthetically since he climbed out of the trees and began to walk upright. For them nothing is true or false, no political system is good or bad, no work of art is superior to any other.”
“In that case they’re completely crazy. But tell me, Simon, if, as they claim, complete ambiguity bestrides the world like a colossus and no text has a definitive meaning, then neither do the texts of deconstruction itself. It’s hoisted on its own petard. Not only does it dismiss science and everything else, it dismisses itself as well.”
“Exactly, Alex, exactly. So you’ll be stunned to learn the extent to which people swallowed it all. And no group of people swallowed it more than the academics in departments once devoted to the study of literature. These departments ceased being the home of literary critics and became the home of theorists of deconstructionist criticism who wrote about the ‘self-betrayal of the text.’ These new emperors of the humanities scorned literary excellence as elitist, entirely subjective, and a reflection merely of the dominant paradigm. And with their clumsy, jargon-ridden opacity they succeeded in intimidating those students and scholars not already under their sway. The term theory came to be understood as their theory.
“They all but refused to teach what had before them been regarded as the best that Western literature had to offer. They argue that no work of literature, not Shakespeare, not Dante or Donne, not Dickens or Hardy, has any intrinsic value. Value is for them a term reflecting the political interests of a particular group or class. There’s no premium on consistency. While they claim that it is impossible to discern definitive meaning in all the writings that distinguish us from the apes, including their own—which doesn’t seem to embarrass them—they nevertheless claim that it is possible to discern the way these writings function to covertly influence society in accordance with the interests of the established elites.
“Alex, these doctrines have savaged the teaching of literature in universities. A lot of the very best art will barely ever come to you. You have to come to it. You have to work at it or you will go without it. And if you do miss out, you will have all but lost in the never-ending argument with yourself over whether there is anything that redeems us.”
12. “It’s hard for people outside academia to believe the deconstructionists took over a whole field of inquiry. They overran university literature departments like an army of ideological storm troopers. Junior academics found it was much easier to join the party and trash a long-recognized classic in the name of deconstruction than to write something original and coherent about it.
“Perhaps worst of all for me, even worse than the realization that I would have to teach myself everything I’d hoped to be taught at university about literature, was the obscene self-righteousness of these people. They labeled themselves socially progressive. This was what had become of the intelligentsia of the left. They were completely totalitarian, again.
“I tried to argue with them in lectures and tutorials. At times I was ignored; at other times I was treated like an oddity, some sort of mattoid. Mostly I was ridiculed or gagged. I was made to feel a fool, not merely a fool, but a reactionary fool. This is when I decided not to pursue a career in academia but simply to teach children, to try to save them from the meretricious cant their would-be teachers were being fed.”
“Where was Anna in all this?”
??
?Oh, she agreed with me.”
“How do you know?”
“We talked about it.”
“Was she also appalled by deconstruction?”
“Yes, she was. She was.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not so sure, are you?”
“She hated that little smug pompous visiting professor.”
“Did she hate the way he spoke to you?”
“Absolutely. She was very upset about it, angry.”
“Who was she angry with, the professor?” “Of course.”
“She heard it all?”
“Everybody did. It was a public dressing-down. She was sitting next to me. It was embarrassing to see.”
“Embarrassing?”
“Very embarrassing.”
“Who exactly was embarrassed?”
“Probably everybody in the room, all the students.”
“Did anybody stick up for you?”
“No, the guy was a bully. People were too afraid.”
“Where was Anna?”
“I said. She was sitting next to me. What does that matter?”
“Was she afraid of this visiting Orwell-hating bully?”
“I’m sure she was.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m trying to think back . . . I’m reconstructing . . .”
“Let me help you—”
“What are you saying, Alex?”
“She’s sitting in the seat next to you. There must have been some people in the room who knew that you were a couple.”
“Yes, so?”
“A man, an older man, a teacher, an alleged expert in something or other, visiting from somewhere or other, is expatiating on that something or other to the whole group. He’s wearing a cravat, fancies himself as something of a raconteur. Everyone is listening politely to him.”
“Yep.”
“Until suddenly, someone challenges him, the authority.”
“Well, I would say that he was challenging the authority, the authority of the cultural canon.”