628 American Literature
Tradition in American letters like Van Wyck Brooks. In the manner of those earlier writers, contemporary revisionists view the scholarly past as a period of interpretive harmony, a “Golden Day” of consensus predicated on the marriage of a nationalist faith in a unique American literary tradition with a formalist faith in the universal value of art. But in the past twenty years or so, they argue, that harmony has broken down under the pressure of (variously) the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the rise of feminism, increasing competition in the profession, and the influx of new theoretical approaches from Europe. As a result, American literary scholarship has lost its coherence. The field is in confusion, these scholars assert with one voice. It is a “babble,” wracked by “dissensus.”
Oddly enough, however, face to face with chaos, no one seems particularly worried. Indeed, no sooner do they alert us to the dire critical straits we are in than they reassure us that the fall we have suffered was a fortunate one. The loss of our familiar perspective and its replacement by this chaos may be distressing, they suggest, but it has also revealed to us how blind we were, in our earlier blissful harmony, to the dark side of American literary scholarship. Comfortable consensus, we are told, was purchased by an elitist ideology that repressed essential elements of America’s diverse culture. In giving up consensus, we have traded a pleasant lie for a troubling truth and so are ready, sadder but perhaps wiser, to work toward a better (if still cloudy) future.
What makes me uneasy about all this is the haste with which the New Orthodoxy would lead American literary studies out of interpretive uncertainty into an ethically sanctioned new order.
This portrait of the problems facing contemporary criticism is, as Dominick LaCapra observes, less a description than a way of making still more intransigent problems disappear. LaCapra’s point is so relevant to the subject at hand, that I quote it at length:
“The problem for the historian of criticism would seem obvious: how does one write a history of a radically heterogeneous and internally dialogized ‘object’? One way to simplify one’s task is to simplify one’s story. A traditional plot may serve here as it has served throughout Western history. The present ‘time of troubles’ may be perceived as an aberrant, babble-like era of confusion- a time of transition from a purer past to a repurified future. [Such narratives share] not only a convenient reduction of the complexities of the current critical scene, but an avoidance of inquiry into the sociocultural and political conditions that may actually be common to heterogeneous modes of criticism” (my emphasis). History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 99.