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between possessing an explicit, fervently nourished agenda, for which all
literary works become mere proof-texts and hence are made to sound
numbingly similar, and a commitment to values - no doubt, bourgeois -
like individual experience, reflectiveness, and aesthetic achievement, which
encourages one
to
attend to the nuanced articulations of the given text
with loving patience, an openness to surprise, and a capacity for delight.
At its worst, the current fashion of insistently reading for the agenda has
led to classes in literature that are little more than ideological indoctri–
nation sessions, or what may be even more ominous because of the way
it impinges on the freedom of privacy, sexual encounter groups. This is
precisely what I mean by a treason of the intellectuals.
Much of this reading for the political agenda can be sold to the
young through the sheer weight of authority exerted by their teachers,
but it also appeals strongly to one of the most venal instincts: the desire
not exactly to be virtuous but to feel virtuously superior to society at
large. The great intrinsic limitation of such moral self-confirmation is
that, like all elevating rituals, in the end it becomes boring.
It
is far more
interesting to discover in
The Sentimental Education
Flaubert's endlessly
inventive narrative deviousness, his elegant descriptive precision, his deli–
cate lubricity, the seamless transitions he creates between "solid" nine–
teenth-century reality and the phantasmagoric, than to see the novel as
still another confirmation of commodification under high capitalism or
the objectification of the female body. I have a stubborn faith that new
generations of readers do not have an infinite tolerance for ideological
tedium and are susceptible to the deep interest of great books, especially
if they get a modicum of encouragement from their teachers.
Marjorie Perloff, in a recent essay on modernist literary studies, attests
that her undergraduate students, most of them reading Joyce's
Ulysses
for
the first time, are completely captivated by it. "Captivating" is not a
word that has any status in current critical usage. Indeed, there are many
who would no doubt hasten to say that to be captivated by a work of
literature is precisely to succumb to the false consciousness that writers, in
unwitting and more or less helpless complicity with regnant ideologies,
foist on their audiences. As with all forms of fundamentalism, it is not
really possible to argue with adherents of this sort of dour ideological
puritanism. For students as yet not born again to political correctness,
and perhaps even for some already baptized in the new redeeming truths,
the best argument is the work itself. Captivation strikes me as an entirely
worthy aim of literary studies, and, to mention just a few novels in
English, books like
Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Emma, Bleak House,
Lolita,
and, of course,
Ulysses
deploy a dazzling array of resources to cap–
tivate the open-minded and discriminating reader. What a teacher can do
