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Wednesday, July 14, 2004
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MONKISH
Every couple of months, UD goes to Berryville, Virginia, to watch a small group of monks perform mass at Holy Cross Abbey. UD, as you may recall (see UD, 2/13/04), is Jewish; but for reasons obscure (how analytical about it can she be? She’s happy [scroll down to yesterday’s post].) she enjoys these Benedictines. Part of it is the setting. Hard by the Shenandoah River, at the end of a country road that runs past cows and corn, the chapel has the elegant cut of the monks themselves -- white lines, a soft flow. 
Part of it is the intellectuality. When they’re not working in the bakery or on the farm, these guys are reading. “Iris Murdoch was a seeker,” Brother Whoever began up at the little wooden podium the Sunday after Murdoch’s death. He reviewed her life and writings with a meditative intensity. He never presumed - as some religious do - that Murdoch was an implicit or yearning Christian; he merely treated her fiction and philosophy as a kind of lectio divina. Part of it is the chant. Led by a young British monk who manages Gregorian runs with ease, the brothers produce a calm lyrical music. But perhaps the most important part of it is the relative indifference of the monks to the people who sit in the pews at the back of the chapel. The monks are a self-contained community, speaking, in their sermons, to one another. Of course they are aware that their tres cool late antiquity is popular and draws a packed house every Sunday. Sometimes one or two of the monks can be seen under an oak tree chatting with visitors after mass, and the monastery has a retreat house where you can spend a few days living the way they do. But when they rise to give their little sermons, they primarily address one another, and their subject is often the prosaic business of their work lives: “Our fruit trees are doing well this year…” UD mentions this monastery because she wants to ease into a subject she’s raised before on this blog - the monastic nature of the university. Via John Holbo at Crooked Timber [click on its name on my blogroll], UD has just read a longish account - in the magazine The Believer - of the most recent meeting, in San Diego, of the Modern Language Association, the organization that represents most of the English professors in this country. [For an earlier UD account of this yearly convention, see 12/19/03.] Both the author of the piece, and a number of conference presenters whose papers he describes, pose fundamental questions about what universities are for, and, more specifically, what English professors are for. “The English professor occupies a place in the American imagination somewhere between a bumbling librarian and Vlad the Impaler,” the essay begins. Which is to say that the innocuous nerd we meet at the library or at Borders Books typically gains both an ideology and a certain professionalism when she becomes a university professor of English, and the mixture is at once ridiculous and unsettling [for more on this, see UD, 11/30/03]. In fact, the main point the essayist in The Believer wants to make involves what he considers the betrayal of the essentially withdrawn and self-contained nature of the American university: I've spent most of my life not criticizing academics, but romanticizing them. The majesty of quiet contemplation, you know, an Athenian courtyard, the faint hum of transcendence pursued—I bought all of that stuff. Like being a professor meant being above the fray—on some higher plane where truth seeped downward into everyday life. I thought it was infinitely, unfathomably relevant, because it dealt with these essential concerns…. But [the MLA convention] punctured all kinds of mythologies I once had about academia as this sublime place. …The ultimate justification for the continued existence of the humanities, the big dramatic answer to what the humanities are for, is they aren't for anything, at least not in the usual senses. Their use lies in the reminder that there is a certain grandeur in speculative withdrawal, that there are still refuges—and this sounds terribly corny, but it's true, and it's important—where reflection trumps activity. That last bit could be describing Holy Cross Abbey and its powerful appeal. The grandeur of the humanities as they traditionally presented themselves in the university was that they confidently defended the proposition that the noisy commercial world was not the only world; that within the ivory tower a student could, at least temporarily, suspend the outward, anxious, prosaic life she had always led and enter instead into an attentive silent concentration upon the poetry of “essential concerns.” [For more on this, see UD, 4/11/04.] You do not get at these essentials by breaking into groups in class and sharing your feelings about death and dying. You do not get at them by reading sentimentalists who want to console you. You do not get at them by reciting your heartfelt poetry to your creative writing class. You get at them slowly, privately, and through careful attention to your professor as he or she slowly, publicly, interprets great works of literature, philosophy, and history. This is the lectio divina of the serious humanities classroom, and it is less interested in particular human beings in that classroom and more interested in language and ideas that transcend particular human beings. It is interested in hard truths, not soft consolations; but it does not demand truths. Unlike the rest of America, it is not goal-oriented; it is engaged in the peculiar process I propose we call “education.” Dramatic self-righteousness is the great consolation of the modern academy as it politicizes itself in the ways the Believer’s essayist evokes, as he describes one MLA presenter, a foreign scholar: [A] stuffy, supercilious poseur, [s]he speaks as though she has cultivated a robust head cold; exquisitely calibrated sinus pressure steamrolls her vowels, so she holds the middle syllable of "university" for a full two seconds. Her words sound extruded rather than spoken. She gives a fairly standard "tasks of the university" talk: to aid critical reflection, to add to global knowledge, to promote multicultural awareness and cross-pollination, and to be a "laboratory exploring the self and the Other in a humanist framework." Humanities professors should help "oppose imperialist hegemony" with a "dynamic strategy of bringing subalterns into alliance." Then, after twenty minutes of talk about what a university is for, she comes to a melodramatic crescendo. There's a very long pause. She looks out at the thinning crowd and says, "What we do not ask ourselves is: what for is a university?" “Dynamic strategy,” “imperialist hegemony” -- this is language with which Leonid Brezhnev would be comfortable. These pompous cliches, which tell us right away that this woman has no sense of the complexity of the world, and, although a professor of English, no sense of verbal style, express the hyperworldly ambitions of a person, and an intellectual class, unsuited to them. Unsuited to them, but long since past any possibility of embracing the selfless monastic seriousness of the authentic university. And thus one perceives the spectacle that this essayist perceived at the San Diego MLA, a spectacle which prompts him to note, at the end of his essay, that “more and more people are wondering what the hell English professors are doing and why they should be allowed to keep doing it.” The Berryville monks have faith in what they are doing. You can reject every single doctrine upon which they have founded their lives and still intuit and admire the clarity, comprehensiveness, and humility of their effort. Their fundamental posture is a subordination of the self and its demands, a withdrawal from the world and its cheapness, for the sake of an opening out onto a larger and truer world, and onto a chastened, profounder, self. This same subordination - to great imaginative and philosophical writing - is the fundamental posture of the serious student and the serious professor of English. Events like the MLA Convention are absurd, ultimately, because they are exemplifications of everything humanists shouldn’t be -- self-promoting, celebrity-worshipping, worldly, anxious, competitive, trivial. “It's no wonder,” the writer from The Believer concludes, “that the MLA atmosphere feels so gloomy.” |