SANFORD PINSKER
445
Nonetheless, S. Levin, Malamud's protagonist, dreams of a richer, more
intellectually attuned life than that which his colleagues dully live:
He considered a philosophy project, to work toward a unity of Plato
and Aristotle? Or maybe learn Russian and read Pushkin in the orig–
inal? Or take up the guitar or recorder, Bach on both? Maybe paint
weekends, not that he could weekdays. He had no heart for any of
these things, then wondered if he could begin to collect material for
a cri tical study of Melville's whale. ..but gave up the whale when he
discovered it in too many critical hats. He wrote down possible other
titles for a short critical essay: "The Forest as Battleground of the
Spirit in Some American Novels." "Stranger as Fallen Angel in
Western Fiction ." "The American Ideal as Self-Created Tradition."
Levin is a product of the age of criticism, and I was probably more right
than wrong when some years ago I pointed out that "one has the sinking
feeling one has encountered such titles before." Mter
all,
Levin's works-in–
progress
(?)
are awash with speculations about American guilt and Edenic
innocence. He means well, but nothing he has reveries about is likely to
appear in print.
What I had not bargained for, however, is the way that enemies of the
humanistic spirit would erect their various tents
within
English depart–
ments-not, as was the case at Cascadia, because the claims of science and
technology, of engineering and agriculture, are what butter parsnips, but
because the news from the cutting edge is that literature no longer speaks
to the individual heart. Indeed, when texts are properly understood, there
are no authors, no readers in the old-fashioned sense of the term, no tran–
scendent meanings. What we have instead, many literary theorists would
insist, are social constructions of reality, slippery linguistic slopes, and most
important of
all,
thinly disguised political agendas. Levin conducted his
comic battle for literary value at a time when most English professors
probably cheered him on from the sidelines of their respective institutions.
One wonders if that would still be the case now. Not only do his project–
ed articles seem time-locked and entirely retrograde, but his blathering on
about the humanities is the stuff that fighting words are now made of. A
Levin worthy of wide support would be cooking up articles such as
"Otherizing the Other: Melville's Marginalized Sailors"; "Revolution and
Hegemony in Hawthorne's Victimized Imagination"; and, of course, the
all-purpose "Race, Class, and Gender in Damn Near Everything."
In
short,
the age of theory can be at least as insidious to everything Levin once held
dear as was the soul-shriveling atmosphere he encountered at Cascadia.
