Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(82)
Consider the language of computer communication, the use of words as blunt instruments—you type the fewest needed to trigger the electronic impulse and provoke a response. Blithe souls on the Internet can communicate in a language that seems to be in its infancy, and in the very process of learning itself: “Say, Cherry Red, does mountain air cool?” “Yes, Blue Fox, and anger messes.” I beg your pardon? This is not Milton, and not even Beckett, but so what to the souls who’ve bumped electronically? Will there someday be collections of e-mail sendings to rival the great correspondence collections of the past? What a lax and indifferent archivist the SAVE key may prove.
Our civic discourse is bland and evasive. “Senior citizens,” the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head for the family dog, gets the tone just right. Every wrenching issue invites a pulled punch, like this from a pro-choice advocate explaining a particularly grim abortion practice: “The foetus is demised” before its skull is cracked. We’ve recently seen a million-man march that wasn’t quite, and we read daily of presidential hopefuls who seem neither. Even the most celebrated of our political figures doesn’t help. We have a president who’s wound up to talk without taking a breath into the new millennium, but for whom words and their intent have the substantiality and the staying power of soap bubbles; to be told by this man “You have my word” is to know true fear.
The most high-minded culprits in the drive to sideline literature work at institutions that once knew better, our universities. We read (accurately?) of faculty members in literature classes who are there not to celebrate texts, let alone be in awe of them, but to unmask them, like so many yapping Totos pulling the curtain. Language is construct, snare, and subterfuge. Every text is just a text, to be eyed with suspicion, every sentence much as good as any other. You are taught not to love literature but to be wary of it. Words subvert the intention of their author, and they will trick readers too. The value of a work is not aesthetic but mechanical—artifice maybe, art surely not. This seems akin to ignoring a great building’s breathtaking shape, elegant skin, and material audacity to study its elevator shaft. One does not wish to impinge on the freedom of these folk to give students the shaft, so long as they situate it in its proper place. We live in an “age of theory,” and we’ll just have to muddle through, as past ages endured massive outbreaks of plague. The great mystery is that theory should have had such ascendancy in the academy when so many of its exponents cannot speak or write plainly about what they do: language takes revenge on them by simply crossing its legs to their blandishments.
If true, it is depressing that teachers should be reluctant to make aesthetic judgments about the worth of words, to say that these, arranged in a line, a chapter, a book, have a beauty that is worth your attention, as those do not, and to explain why that should be so. Beauty, truth, preference, order, value are words to make the new-knowing wince and wink. Uncomfortable with style, these individuals leap instead on lifestyle and fey anthropology, which may explain some of the strange scholarship that’s bred in literature departments these days: stuff on cross-dressing, the iconography of Jackie Kennedy or Madonna, the imperialistic reach of Walt Disney. Will anyone read these books in five years? They should be carried by skeletal models on fashion runways, for they will stay current no longer than the season’s prized synthetic.
Have the universities engaged in a great leveling process in the presentation of literature, as in much else, and, by so doing, have they forsaken traditional notions of what a liberal education should be? Such an education has to be about discrimination, dismissive and embracing judgments, differences calculated with an unclouded eye. Let technical vocational skills be uniformly imposed: the bridge should remain suspended, the tunnel unflooded, the spacecraft aloft, the ship afloat, the accounts in balance, the patient alive. Let liberal education champion value, disagreement, rank, all the elements celebrated by guileful Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: degree (not the same thing as a university’s production-line piece of paper), priority, place, course, proportion, form, office, custom, in all line of order. He could be offered no campus presidency, this eloquent, slippery man (“Wouldn’t he be a good fund-raiser?”), but universities have done worse: “Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy.” Which is where a lot of America meets now.
The “canon,” about whose hegemonic hold on curricula we have heard too much in recent years from those uneasy with degree, is really no more than an A-list of things to consider reading. Life is choice, you have x amount of time to spend reading, apportion it wisely. If you’re a serious reader, look here. It’s a list both porous and expansive. What’s canonical is so, by and large, because it has for some time satisfied minds and hearts, not because it has met some Noah’s ark notion of inclusiveness. Those who scorn the very idea of a canon had better come up with a powerful alternative. It won’t do to mandate that work be read because it represents the category of, say, hermaphrodite fiction—and right-handed hermaphrodite fiction at that, sinister hermaphrodite prose being a separately privileged genre. All literary texts are not created equal, and their worth is not in their provenance or their good intentions, just as their achievement is not to be gauged by their conformity to the moment’s panethnic pansexual Panglossian social or political enthusiasms.