The Old Boys’ Last Bastion

Cambridge, Mass: A watershed in American cultural history passed unremarked over Labor Day weekend at Harvard: The thirty-eighth running of the bellwether English Institute admitted the existence of the twentieth century.
 
Black U Penn professor Houston A. Baker mounted the most amazing section of the conference—on English as a world language and literature, with Dennis Brutus, South African poet-in-exile (at Northwestern University), leading off with a brilliant analysis of how the unique polylingual mix of his country (Afrikans, English, Bantus languages, E. Indian tongues, and a bewildering mélange of blends of these) complicates the movement for political liberation.
 
Edward Braithwaite, with Derek Wolcott the premiere poet of the Caribbean, teaches History at the U of the West Indies, Kingston because British university tradition does not include our demotic “Creative Writing” strand. He made history at the conference, demonstrating brilliantly with the aid of a tape recorder allowing us to attend to the timbres of black Afro-Caribbean poets living and dead, as well as the remarkable convergence of high seriousness and pop art in Jamaican developments like calypso and reggae.
 
It was wall-to-wall epiphanies, and the gaggle of jaded metro sensibilities, desiccated by decades of footnote shilling, were visibly and audibly moved. A tough act to follow, but one which Leslie Silko, Native American storyteller form the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque), after a nail-chewing day of wondering how she had ever assented to appearing in this bear pit of Ph.D.s, topped easily. She put ethnologists and folklorists on the spot by explaining how the realities of her tribes and their clans and families are too big for the neat and tidy theoretical systems which prefer “exotic” origin stories. Ms. Silko insisted that the genius of Amerind storytelling was beginning in media res and never ending: process is all in pueblo narrative.
 
It was exhilarating to hear her tell how the oral network among even acculturated high school students (bound in the chains of rock and kitsch along with their (Anglo peers) still processes events that mean a great deal to them, such as the murder of a New Mexican highway patrolman by a small band of Indians. Storytelling is alive and well in their teepees and hogans. Mass culture only deadens Indians; it doesn’t kill them.
 
The most dramatic confrontation between the old boys network of preferment in English studies (which had been the covert mission of the Labor Day conference since it started during World War II) came when a large majority of the 250 conferees began to clamor outside the Third World Lit session to get in and start their session on George Eliot! The lack of interest in the Third World among the elegant Eliotites was emblematic of the narcissism of the Modern Language Association luminaries who have run this seminal seminar each year without interference, indeed without notice, from their inferiors.
 
Dennis Brutus explicated this little unplanned allegory wittily by assuring the Third Worlders being hustled into closing that George Eliot herself would have been on the inside not looking out at the genteel mob. Of such ironies is America’s high capitalist culture made.
 
The second “revolutionary” session was instigated by that dirty old manic, Leslie Fiedler, the Peck’s Bad Bully of American literature. His mission was to introduce, supervise, and sum up a series of talks on “English as an Institution.” Bruce Franklin, of Rutgers / Newark (he’s the only American tenured professor of international reputation to be sacked for political cause—Stanford has the mouldy distinction), took off from his contentious book that argues slave narratives and prison lit are not only the most ignored genres in the American literary canon but they are also the key texts.

Franklin doesn’t suffer learned fools easily, surely not gladly, and the hostility which greeted his presentation showed clearly how far English professors are from holding a session on controversial ideas and assenting to them. What Franklin says, if acted upon, would involve among men of good faith, a wholesale transformation of the ways things are done in English departments, especially at the key Ivy / Big Ten / UC top institutions.
 
I say “men of good faith” as a way of praising the most dazzling performance of the entire session—by an “unknown’ female assistant professor at Penn State / Erie, Diana George. As she put it slyly—her 70 page analysis of sexism, latent and manifest, in he old boys’ network of prestige and preferment, is what happens when the men teach women like her to think and express themselves. Her findings were devastating, and make the annual volume of papers (available next fall) as absolute must for all serious students of American culture let alone English studies.
 
The MLA hierarchy should hang its collective headlessness in abject shame over the tenure denial incidents at the Universities of Hawaii and New Hampshire. They are perfect examples of Hazard’s Law: Seventh rate people in Academe surround themselves with tenth rate people on the grounds that a valley makes a foothill look like a mountain. The more brilliant and productive a female English instructor is, especially the more articulate her feminism, the less chance she has of getting tenure.
 
The case of Annette Kolodny in New Hampshire is particularly galling. Her scholarship in my field—American lit—had impressed me greatly, and I was appalled to learn in disgusting chapter and verse in the George paper how cravenly (and probably anti-Semitically) the freedom fighters at UNH had abused due process to keep their clear superior from becoming their “peer.” I have never felt the animus of Voltaire’s “Ecrasez l’infame” in my gut until hearing George’s analysis of the Kolodny case. Never has a corrupt and insensitive aristocracy so blatantly abused its trust. The Kolodny scandal deserves a federal investigation violating as it does HEW and numerous other federal policies. It made me feel ashamed to be a full professor in such a crummy cadre.
 
Fiedler played the Borscht Belt Ph.D. in his amusing and controversial summing up. As he leaves middle age (he began teaching S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Action in mimeo forty years ago this fall at the University of Wisconsin), he perhaps plays the poor boy off the streets of Newark a bit too sentimentally! I mean it’s a long way from Samuel L. Clemens professorship of American Lit at Buffalo to Central Avenue, Newark! His shtick at the moment is a proselytizing for Sci Fi, Dracula, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and other books “that bring people together” rather than separating them like modernist classics do. Fiedler is no ghoul himself of course; and inasmuch as his programme for English studies would disemploy all the members of the audience (who have strained themselves to the breaking point all their lives to become Modernists with High Standards), one can predict the confused outrage that his call for the abolition of Standards brings among these most rigorous of knee-jerk Standard Barers. When pressed to the blackboard, the dybbuk of Am Lit admits that he wants students to evaluate their esthetic experiences; he just doesn’t want “standards” imposed ritualistically.
 
But he has Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the brain pan. He even admitted that it bothered him that Freud reported some compulsive masturbators found the book a congenial tool. An obscene wag in the now aroused audience yelled out, “Not to worry, that was a clear case of immature ejaculation.” Where Fiedler is very much on target is in his reducing the agenda of humane studies to the “Song and Story” impulses which began in some cave campfire, and as Leslie Silko’s testimony proves, endures through thin and thick. “Cabin” appeals to Fiedler because Harriet Beecher Stowe explained how the book began as a vivid image (of a slave being abused) during the longuers of a Sabbath Sermon. Her book then became stage play, movie, radio, and TV over the past century.
 
It’s the images in students’ heads which must concern the teacher. Get them together, and civilization ensues. Be rigorous out of context, and mortis sets in. it was a hard act to leave. When on irreverent auditor taunted him in disgust that if he were so high on pop lit why didn’t he give up his Buffalo professorship and we’d pass the hat for a Kate Turabian Chair of Pop Lit. (Ms. Turabian is the heavy in Fiedler’s melodrama because of her stature of Ms. Footnote of English Studies). Fiedler’s riposte was vintage Leslie: he had tried to get them to name his prestigious chair the Huck Finn Professorship. Aghast, the Buffalo prestige seekers wouldn’t even accept his proffered compromise—the Mark Twain Professorship. SUNY or later, every link on New York’s chain of graduate schools has got to exorcise its teacher’s college prehistory by snaring a Leslie Fiedler level luminary and putting him in a chair named after a great New Yorker. Maybe Annette Kolodny should become the Harriet Beecher Stowe professor of Feminist Lit at Storrs.
 
It will not be easy. In the fourth session at the English Institute, the endemic bad habits of the clerisy surfaced in ways that were self-parodying to all but the auto-novocained. “Allegory” is the hottest hot bed now for the seamiest of semiologists. There were so many Francophoney neologisms making their debut in this clutch of four papers that defenders of clear English proposed setting up a George Orwell Nurd Neologist Award for the most and lowest quality coinages in any fifteen minute paper. Unfortunately, the perpetrators were so fecund they brain damaged the putative jury on the spot. “Heard any good allegoremes lately?” became the whispered rhetorical question. I can’t conclude without observing that this session also showcased a genre unknown to me before—semi-hard core porn.
 
The relish with which these academic allegoreamers zeroed in on the private parts in Dante, Montaigne, Pascal, and others would cause Hugh Hefner to get it up pronto. You’d think the professors were discovering the damn things—I mean pricks, assholes and other apertures that give the isolated the sense that they’re dealing with Reality.
 
Ah well, meanwhile back at the pueblo, we have Leslie Silko’s word that the Indians are going to take back the Non-reservations, in narrative anyway. That’s good. The housebroken professors have abused their trust long enough.