“A Democratic and Fraternal Humanism”: The Cant of Pessimism and Newton Arvin’s Queer Socialism

We are in the habit of assuming that the most serious and profound apprehension of reality is the Sense of Tragedy; but it may be that, in assuming this, we ourselves are mistaken. It may be that there are points of view from which the Tragic sense must be seen as serious and profound indeed, but limited and imperfectly philosophical. It may even be that there can exist a kind of complacency of pessimism as there is certainly a complacency of optimism; and that many of us in this age are guilty of it. We hug our negations, our doubts, our disbeliefs to our chests, as if our moral and intellectual dignity depended on them.

Newton Arvin, “The House of Pain”

What Newton Arvin wrote of his colleagues in the field of American literary studies in 1959 is equally true of many of its practitioners a half-century later. The language of tragedy, trauma, and cynical disbelief—what Arvin called “the cant of pessimism” (“The House of Pain” 38)—saturates literary criticism, to the point where it seems whole conferences comprise papers that use somber evocations of 9/11 or Abu Ghraib to preface timid textual analyses of antebellum fiction.

The work of revealing and critiquing the operations of national and global power is, of course, urgently important, perhaps never more so than in our age of imperialist militarism and overreaching state “security.” Over the past three decades, ideological critique, arising from a range of innovative methodologies drawn mostly from New Historicism, has invaluably broadened and deepened our understanding of suffering from injustice in the US and throughout the world. At the same time, however, ideological criticism has produced less salutatory effects as well. Privileging ever-more abstract concepts of global power, it implicitly dismisses as under-theorized, provincial, and narrow more local and detailed attention to injustice; focusing on the repressive and xenophobic operations of state and extra-state power, it too often overlooks local practices of resistance and alternative social formations that defy or simply ignore state power; finally, by making cynical disbelief the affective sign of muscular acuity and cosmopolitan high seriousness, it forestalls the optimism that makes thinkable such local resistances or social alternatives. This last consequence is sadly ironic, because the optimistic faith that the world could be organized in better ways animates much of the best work in American literary studies (much of which is, after all, currently produced by scholars who came of age in the 1960s). But we have closeted our hopes—vulnerable to critique and derision, fraught with imaginative responsibility—behind the harder-edged denunciations of critique. Perhaps, as the era of New Historicism draws to a close, it is time to remind ourselves of the methodologies that produced the field of American literary studies, where we find not the conservative nationalism of the Cold War consensus, but a dedication to a combination of social imagination (the power to envision more just and pleasurable social arrangements than the ones naturalized as “reality”) and humanist optimism (the belief that people might organize to give such visions material form).

One such methodology—put forth in the work of Newton Arvin, arguably the most important critic of American literature in the first half of the twentieth century—we might call an ethics of enhancement. An ethics of enhancement, as opposed to a utopian project on behalf of “equality” or “freedom,” accepts that such abstract revolutionary outcomes are most likely unattainable at this moment of global capital and ubiquitous state power. It also acknowledges that revolutionary rhetorics that pose a liberatory trajectory overlook the nearly universal state of alienation in modern society, among the elite and the middle class as well as among the abject and the working classes. Enhancement is a project with a mobile starting-place and a negotiable trajectory, leaving the creative and collective work of imaginative improvement of social life open to all classes and social formations in ways that necessitate local consultation, collective negotiation, conflict resolution, and collaborative imagination to generate (rather than “discover”) the truth...