Correspondence

Correspondence April 10, 1992 To the Editor: Robert Hughes, in the latest New York Review of Books, writes about the sad state of art criticism, squeezed between PC belief on the left and die "conservative view that any stick that you can beat liberals with is a good stick." The plot of criticism has moved from "style to gender and race, but the plot remains much the same" in the assumption that there is a "cutting edge," some vaguely warm notion of "hot new stuff slicing through the reactionary opposition , leaving the old stuff behind, shaping something, forging ahead." It is a broken model in art that cannot be revived, as he says; and I tried to challenge that model in my book, Making American Tradition. Alas, it seems to be very much alive in the world of lit. crit. that my reviewer, Granger Babcock, inhabits. He is certainly entitled to his belief in the value of contemporary literary theory, but he is not entitled to his assumption that I know "very little about these critical methodologies," especially when the evidence for his superior judgment is based on a straw man derived from misreadings of my text. His crude summation of my remarks about theory is derived entirely from a single parenthetical phrase contrasting the critics of an earlier generation who, for all their defects, had the merit of believing in a historical form of comparative criticism, with those for whom national comparison is no longer in fashion. Babcock responds to this point by ignoring the main part of the sentence and using the parenthesis to arrive at his conclusion that I lump together "structuralism , poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, and black studies" as being in general "ahistoric forms of theorizing," but I say no such thing, for it would be false. Indeed, I say nothing at all about Marxist literary theory in this book, though in my The Veracious Imagination (1981) I quote with approval the Marxist Robert Weimann and specifically say tiiat "the best Marxist theory can be an antidote to the recent intellectual tendency to aestheticize history and dehistoricize literature." Moreover, in the book Babcock is reviewing I quote with approval Henry L. Gates, Jr. and say that, in celebrating an anthology of black women writers, he "justly observes that it demonstrates how works configure into a tradition" in the same way that writers' works do in my book: by grounding themselves in models "provided largely by other writers to whom they feel akin." It may be too much to expect my reviewer to read my footnotes , since he has passed over the cmcial word justly in my text, but one of them (n.21, p.237) cites with approval for its insight a feminist reading of Meridian. My reviewer says tiiat he is in favor of examining the "unexamined practices that produced literary canons," as if I in some reactionary way were not. In fact, the canon I present is itself revisionary and is explicitly presented only as a possible and necessarily unfinished one. Babcock exhibits die lack of historical consciousness I complain of by failing to notice that I begin my book with a criticism of the powerful tradition (including the most notable critics of American literature from Trilling to Quentin Anderson over a period of thirty years) that created tiie "historical achievement" of putting American literature on the map, but at the price of minimizing or neglecting "the close attention to time and place" even in those writers who seemed best to illustrate Tocque- 204 The Henry James Review ville 's prophecies about our literature. The bulk of my book tries to rectify that distortion. He writes as if there had been no theorizing before the current coalition of Marxist, feminist, African-American, and post-structuralist critics dominated the literary academic scene. I do refer to "political suspicion" of the idea of the nation as a possible barrier to a contemporary reader's sympathy for my project; but I explain tiiat suspicion as a confusion of "national identity" with "ideological nationalism," a distinction Babcock has no time for in his anxiety about my "liberal values." What I said about them, however, entailed another ignored distinction: they...