MARK MIRSKY
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cease. Yet when I question whether issues of race, gender, or nationality
are primary in literature, when I scorn the notion that literature is best
dissected in Engl ish departments by political considerations, the hornets
begin
to
buzz. When I suggest that a certain epic is badly translated, or
minor, or that since the Western tradition has in fact shaped the lan–
guage we speak, English, we should give primary consideration to
teaching Homer, the Bible, Dante, and Shakespeare in our humanities
courses and be careful about too many side treks into the world of mul–
ticulturalism, I am met by a stubborn suspicion that I am anti-minority,
Euro-centered, clearly out of fashion. I see the various groups assemble in
department meetings by race and gender and wonder where I fit in
among these gaggles. Political correctness is a church-going. Since the
Bible, however, is the text of the congregation formerly in the present
worshipers' pews, it in particular is in a sorry state. The Bible, that cen–
tral literary text of so many centuries of literary men and women, and in
particular of English-speaking men, women, and children, is clearly out
of fashion in this secular Calvinism, relegated to a week of study in
world humanities courses - and here where indeed the study of its
"multicultural" milieu, its Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic linguistic back–
ground or its commentaries as developed by the rabbis and church fathers
might be relevant, there is rarely either time or will to do so.
It is always painful to be out of fashion. You feel stupid. Looking
back, however, over the last twenty years to reading lists which bowed
to expedient fashion, to the lowered standards, to the way students who
should never have been admitted to a college until they mastered the
rudiments of English were recruited, I feel anger. I fear the politically
correct on the campuses I have attended or where I have taught,
Harvard, Stanford, City College, because 1 look to these institutions for
challenge, stimulation, and the preservation of a very difficult literary in–
heritance, sanctioned by a judgment that is ruthlessly fair, free from the
politics of expedience and fashion. I look at the distortion of literature
not just today but in the past, by authors temporarily in the grip of po–
litical correctness, even masters like Isaac Babel, and I am dismayed. I
think of the havoc political correctness piayed in New York political
life, in American politics, hobbling the Democratic party in particular. (I
do not even allude to its distortions in the world of nonprofit founda–
tions and arts councils.) It does not try to address what is real, but to
disguise reality, to offer false hopes and romantic ideals of men's and
women's capacity for instant conversion and indefinite charity.
It is not in its aspect of expediency, or fashion, that political cor–
rectness is most dangerous but in these charlatan dreams into which it
lures us, flattering self-pity, encouraging a notion of moral superiority,
promising the imminent Messianic age. It is the brutal, ugly inquisitor of
