100
PARTISAN REVIEW
But for Hermstein Smith to speak of "standards" amounts to abandon–
ment of the relativist argument.
Stanley Fish has retreated even further. He, too, was identified with
the poststructuralist assault on standards that enabled the assault on the
classics. But now, along with his reversal on political correctness, he de–
fends the canon (albeit without quite abandoning his poststructuralist–
relativist habits). "The Great Books," he now says, "are never going to
be dislodged, not necessarily because they're great with a capital G, in
some way that could be confirmed by God, although I happen to think
they are." Speaking at the paradoxically concessionary "rally of the left"
Fish went yet a step further - to disparaging that most privileged of all
educational nostrums, "multiculturalism." And while he was making a
foray into political incorrectness, it seems, he decided to be as
(temporarily) shocking as he possibly could be to liberal sensibilities by
pronouncing multiculturalism as a "flat-out zany" idea.
Fish submitted defenses of multiculturalism by Gerald Graff and Betty
Jean Craigie to logical scrutiny of the kind Graff himself had once used.
He summarized Graff as wanting to elevate the appreciation of cultural
differences to a central role in education. He quotejlCraigie's wish to
replace the canon with a curriculum that "would foster a tolerance -
and, ideally, an appreciation - of cultural beliefs and behaviors different
from our own." But, Fish pointed out, both the idea of tolerance and
the elevation of differences are "the kind of normative and transcendental
standards to which [Graff and Craigie] are putatively opposed." Thus,
two professors, like Barbara Hermstein Smith, inadvertently accept the
existence ofjudgment and standards.
To be sure, Fish is not only notoriously self-contradicting, but also,
as he freely admits, a careerist. Yet his repositioning, even if it means that
he does not intend any real change in the relativist status quo, points to
a profession-wide intellectual retreat. Two prominent critics have joined
this retreat not only in theory but, it is said, in practice as well. Frank
Lentricchia and Harold Bloom, previously associated with poststructural–
ism, have written books that not only abandon relativism but also appear
to adopt traditional scholarly discourses and values.
In an enthusiastic review of Lentricchia's
Modernist Quartet,
a study
of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, Jeffrey
Hart has celebrated this critic's putative reformation under the title
"Prodigal Son." Hart writes that Lentricchia "has returned home from
the tinkling cymbals of 'theory'." And Hart adds that Lentricchia, no
longer employing the abstractions of theory, "stitches the literary text
finnly onto the canvas backing of the historical tapestry."
