106 American Literature
Writers who transform political into universal norms- who portray American principles, as all ideology yearns to be portrayed, in the transcendent colors of utopia or millennium- may be just as implicated in the dominant culture as other, contextual writers, and in the long run perhaps more useful in perpetrating it.
To repeat: this is not at all to reduce their achievement to ideology. On the contrary: I believe that ideologically-aware analysis will show the special capacities of language in some sense to break free of the power structures which the language seems to reflect, and so will help us see more clearly, and to define more precisely, what we have found to be extraordinary, irreducible, and uncontained about our major texts. Nor does what I’ve said in any way denigrate the much-discussed subversiveness of our literary tradition. Again, quite the reverse: I believe we can enrich the discussion by subjecting familiar terms (utopia, actual versus ideal, radicalism itself) to closer scrutiny. More than that, we can thereby open directions in criticism which have been obscured, ideologically obscured, by the separation of art from politics. Here as elsewhere, to recognize the limitations of ideology is to open up interpretation; whereas, conversely, to deny those limitations is to subject interpretation to ideology.
The distinction here lies at the heart of the “solution” I ventured at the start of this paper. In its common meaning, I suppose, ideology precludes dialogue. It implies a programmatic narrow-mindedness; a closed and exclusive system of ideas, usually developed in opposition to alternative explanations, and militantly committed to partiality, in the double sense of the term, as bias (or special interest) and as fragmentation. All this, we know, is what the concepts “America,” “literary,” and “history” are meant to transcend. “America” has been presented as a mode of identity that obviates ideology, not only as vision and ideal but as an inclusive, pluralistic way of life- which is to say, as a culture that transforms multiplicity into complementarity, reciprocity, and ultimately (i.e., teleological), harmony and union. So, too, with our “history”: it has been presented as the objective account of national progress- an impartial, “factual” (i.e., disinterested) overview of the country’s growth from colony to world power. And so, too, with our literary heritage: it has been presented as a series of “classic writers” and “major works” authorized by standards that