RIDING TO BATTLE, AGAIN, IN THE ACADEMIC CULTURE WARS

Author: By Jay Parini

Date: SUNDAY, September 21, 1997

Page: E3

Section: Books

Delbanco writes in clear opposition to those critics -- feminists, deconstructionists, multiculturalists -- who (in his opinion) would restrict writers to a certain category, and limit the possibilities of interpretation. He is also consciously opposed to ``the postmodernist view of consciousness,'' which has challenged the notion of a stable ego (or self) that precedes language.

One has heard a lot about these conflicts before. The so-called culture wars of the '80s and '90s -- which have outlasted the Vietnam War if not (quite) exceeded its destructiveness -- have kept these considerations on the front burner. I suspect that readers (myself among them) may be getting tired of the clamor. Indeed, one wishes that Andrew Delbanco had liberated himself fully from the culture wars, since he has very little to add to the debate.

In ``Reading for Pleasure,'' his concluding essay, he lashes out at colleagues in the academy who condemn the way the world used to be organized: ``They repudiate the ways we used to organize the world along demarcation lines between, say, East and West, Male and Female, Good and Evil, and they demand that we give up the geography these terms once gave us. They scout old metaphors and decry them (as I discovered when I once used the word `emasculated' in a public talk to describe a weak prose style and nearly caused a feminist riot). And they brook no opposition.''

Dear me. It doesn't take a deconstructionist to see that Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia University, has felt beleaguered. In the above passage, he seems to imply that a world where the old antinomies of Male and Female, and so forth, were firmly in place was somehow a better world. Many would object. I, for example, have found the dismantling of these rigid dichotomies an extremely useful, productive activity. To be aware of the underlying ideology in a word such as ``emasculate'' is, I think, a good rather than a bad thing. Metaphors are powerful, and they must be used well. As Robert Frost once said, ``Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.''

Delbanco might have been wiser not to freight this book of essays with cultural warring. I found him at his best in the chapters where politics seems least intrusive, such as those on Wharton, Adams, and Thoreau, where he suggests that literature matters. To read Thoreau, for example, ``is to feel wrenched away from the customary world and delivered into a place we fear as much as we need.'' By the time he makes this extravagant statement, it has been thoroughly earned by precise grounding in Thoreau's writing itself.

The opening essay, on Melville's ``sacramental style,'' has moments of unusual insight, as when Delbanco suggests that ``Melville's instinct is more and more to deprive language of its air of authority by disrupting it at every level.'' He takes a close look at ``Bartleby, the Scrivener'' to illustrate this disruptive nature of Melville's language. Less successfully, he takes up the issue of ``truth'' and transcendence. That Melville is, in places, sublime, is a given of literary history, but Delbanco seems intent upon tearing down some unnamed deconstructionist when he writes: ``After such ferocious attacks on the fond idea that truth might be accessible through language, it is all the more remarkable that in his self-consciously final work, `Billy Budd,' . . . Melville comes closest to achieving the transcendence he had given up on.'' This kneejerk kick at literary theory (a reflex seen throughout these essays) is annoying, in part because it fails to engage theory on its own, more nuanced levels.

In spite of himself, Delbanco often succeeds quite well in celebrating good writing on its own terms. He has a remarkably well-stocked mind, a gift for close reading, and a humane desire to champion the ideal of individual freedom. The latter becomes his theme in essay after essay as he finds freedom-loving individualists in the Emersonian mode in unlikely places, including Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and Kate Chopin. In these latter three essays, however, the polemics intrude once again as Delbanco takes obvious pleasure in making points about these icons of multiculturalism or feminism who (in his mind, at least) appear to work against the grain of prevailing (i.e., politically correct) opinion. Maybe Chopin wasn't really a feminist? Perhaps Hurston would have been uncomfortable in the company of those very critics who tend to celebrate her now, given that she explicitly rejected race, class, and gender as defining categories? These are the kinds of questions Delbanco relishes.

These polemics actually raise more questions than they put to rest. Of Hurston, for instance, one might well ask whether her legitimate desire not to be defined by race, class, or gender had any effect on the way she was, in fact, seen by readers (and citizens) of the day. Delbanco seems to assume that intelligent ``multiculturalists'' (I hesitate to use such an absurd term) actually want people to be defined by these categories and not by their humanity. My own reading in this field suggests that, on the contrary, those critics Delbanco is resisting are more subtle than he is, wanting merely to suggest that class, race, and gender have been extraordinarily powerful coordinates in the creation of attitudes, and in the distribution of money, jobs, and cultural privileges.

``Required Reading'' is, overall, an odd book. It is highly readable, often entertaining, and learned in its way. Delbanco is a fluent, witty writer, and he holds our attention throughout. Nevertheless, his constant need to score political points off (usually invisible) colleagues finally makes the whole project less appealing than it might have been. And one is never sure why, exactly, he chose these particular writers and ignores other ``classics'' such as Whitman, Emerson, James, Douglas, or Cather -- all writers who championed individual freedom. What were his principles of selection, and why does he clot his reading of those he did select with polemics that are already well past their ``sell by'' date?