Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South

Faulkner and the Mosquitoes

The ridicule of literary theorists is a poor diversion, roughly as challenging —and as appetizing—as shooting box turtles with a machine gun. These scarcely moving targets, stumbling under their heavy burdens of calcified jargon and unjustified self-regard, have been perforated, pulverized, atomized by a battalion of smirking assailants across the light-year-wide intellectual spectrum from Harold Bloom to Rush Limbaugh. Since no one outside the academy ever reads them, there’s little incentive to blast them—their heads and pelts make trophies of no great prestige. Perhaps the last notable coup against their dismal tribe was counted in 1996 by NYU physicist Alan Sokal, who wrote a parody of cutting-edge theory in its own baroque patois, “privileging” and “valorizing” everything in firing range, and was rewarded with respectful publication in one of theory’s own journals of record. Sokal’s jape, celebrated in the late lamented Lingua Franca, presaged the breakup of the Duke University English department, where many of the celebrities of theory’s brief heyday had been cloistered in style. Duke’s star-heavy department was the envy of most fast-lane humanities faculties until a devastating outside review (1998), by professors from even more elite schools like Stanford and Faulkner and the Mosquitoes 46 Chicago, targeted “low morale, ine≠ective leadership, a weak graduate curriculum and an inadequate intellectual mission.” One of Duke’s theoretical heavyweights, Frank Lentricchia, also chose Lingua Franca to chastise his own colleagues and his theory-besotted graduate students who refused to read primary texts. Within a few months, many of Duke’s big names had defected, and more traditional scholars had reasserted their influence. Duke’s fleeting notoriety as the epicenter of postmodern heresy, producing scholarly papers like “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” marked a kind of Golden Age for local satirists, for which we were grateful. But by the spring of 2003, literary theory had fallen so far from its primacy in the eighties and nineties that a public symposium on its future, held at the University of Chicago, failed to elicit any obvious conviction that it had a future. A panel of prominent critics including former Duke chairman Stanley Fish and his erstwhile prize recruit Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (along with paleo-Marxist Fredric Jameson from Duke’s French department, once crowned “worst published writer in the world” in an Australian competition) not only declined to defend their trademark theorizing but seemed oddly reluctant to concede that they’d done it at all. “I wish to deny the e≠ectiveness of intellectual work,” said the slippery, ever-contrary Fish, whose most recent academic article argues that philosophy is irrelevant. (In his Durham days, Fish liked to disparage my naïve reverence for free speech.) An amused observer, reporter Emily Eakin of the New York Times, wrote a story full of condescension to these warriors of a vanishing Weltanschauung, portraying them as much sillier than I know some of them to be. Evidently the world of theory was ending with a whimper in the Windy City— an end unimaginable a decade ago, when its enemies were publishing Paul Revere–toned books like John Ellis’s anguished Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities. “The era of big theory is over,” Eakin decided. “The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century . . . have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight.” But just when you thought it was safe to read Kipling in the faculty lounge— Faulkner and the Mosquitoes 47 just when you thought it was safe to write a term paper without a nod to de Man or Derrida—a defiant theorist fires a broadside that leaves us wishing we’d buried “big theory” with a much bigger stake through its heart. Franco Moretti, a professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford, has capped a career-long crusade for “text-free” scholarship with a manifesto titled Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. Writing in Britain’s New Left Review, Moretti urges scholars to abandon reading altogether and get down to the serious task of counting books—counting and cataloging every book published , good, bad, or indi≠erent according to the outmoded culture of critical standards, since Gutenberg and the dawn of printing. Interpreted for the Times by the same astonished Emily Eakin, whose beat seems to be Quaint Campus Characters...