Trying On: The American Education

… how could I hate the one and be so wholly taken by the other? Probably because the former seeks clarity, and the later rests in that greater eternal rocking-chair that is American folk music. Err. Obscurity. 

Come now. I’d take White over Nussbaum anyday. 

… which, I suppose, brings me to another problem. That I’ve been three years now, post-initial violation, picking battles. Cf.: I almost cited a review by Professor TK, which directly criticized old Nussbaum’s approach (while affirming her general orientation towards the public humanities–O! We adore you still, even though your face is a little cracked, The Public Humanities!), for a paper for Professor AK, even when I know that one asked the other to teach it in his class, and the other refused.

(The other is always refusing.)

How to be generous to the people one reads. As people. As… people? It’s hard enough to open an ear to the text, to pay attention for the time that is required in a way that is required. Some texts require more. From me. Less from you. Etc. Honestly, though: I feel that I was bad to Martha Nussbaum. I feel that I owe Martha Nussbaum an open apology. What am I really trying to do here? Get literature out of the law schools? Turn the whole world into Peter Stallybrass, if not kazoo-blowing members of the “Pete” Stallybrass Fan Club? No, no. There’s some good in what she’s doing. She likes books. I mean, what can be wrong with it? It can be bad–boring, unliterary, in fact (which just might be the problem–I’m much more attuned, especially this semester, to receive Heidegger in one ear and almost automatically given the critic who breathed it my other cheek; kiss it or slap it–): still, though, as Bob Dylan once said: 

It’s got to be good for somebody. I know it’s good for somebody.

So what’s my business knocking her down with my small qualms? I know that I’m not on board with Nussbaum’s project. And, to confess a bit more (this is not, you may have noted by now, a literary review), I started reading less and less carefully the more it became apparent to me that disproving utilitarianism was not a particularly urgent (or interesting) question for me. I just became more and more miffed that literature was the rear-guard soldier-hero pulled out to do the trick, who triumphed by way of omniscient courage and the hand-me-down blanket of the bold knights of realism. Yes, Martha, you’ve sold me now. You’re in my metaphors. You’re all over my High Victorian: literature, dear readers, is a person. 

(Or better yet, a picnic–a whole park of people for you to meet and greet! To learn moral lessons from! Make sure to try the chicken salad bake! Don’t eat that mayonnaise that’s been too long out in the sun!)

Forgive me: I am still not being generous. What I meant to say, I suppose, was that I think I pinned Nussbaum’s work as not only bad but really quite immoral–a transgression against the literariness of the literature! A violence against the irreducibility of style! You passed it by like it was a cloud of gnats, a diaphonous veil, Martha! Don’t let Charles trick you, Martha! This house of pure presence, Martha! We built it just for you! 

…and I did this, largely, as a sort of messy Pollock projection of my own readerly immorality. Bad reading makes for angry criticism. (I’ll reiterate that below.)

And: // I am not even sure that I want to be forgiven.

Conclusions, moral and otherwise:

1. Listening is difficult, always and anyway.
2. There is an immoral sort of listening–one that fakes interest, even when one isn’t interested. I think each reader knows–and, I hope, knows how to moderate–her own closedness to the text. (I hope, too, that this is a lesson that we might work here in conjunction to non-literary life. Let’s all get open.)
3. Immoral listening is slippery–like différance, it moves around. It gets in your stuff. For example, your critical reviews. It makes you angry and ungenerous. It turns your expansive scholarly motivations into: destroy.
4. I’m honest, brutal and afraid of you-ou.
5. There’s too much love to go around these days.

Time for a baptism and some clarificatory prose; real reviews will follow. Look for a man descending from the sky with bright red Ray-Bans. 

JLR