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Sunday, February 01, 2004

A SUNDAY KIND OF POST

"Marxism has gone to the academy to die in comfort," wrote Irving Howe. It will die there without benefit of clergy.

Even in the academic left’s weakened body politic, ninth inning conversions just ain’t gonna happen. It would be a waste of time for Mormon missionaries to fan out to Comp Lit departments.

To be sure, conversions from Marxism to what people now like to call "chastened” liberalism are a dime a dozen these days. But it’s a long way from John Stuart Mill to Jesus H. Christ.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! No, what’s striking about this subject is the illiberality many academics bring to it.

Sounding every inch the fundamentalist, Jonathan Culler, in an essay called “Comparative Literature and the Pieties,” warns that for the “sake of the political and intellectual health of our nation,” university teachers must incorporate a thoroughgoing critique of religion into their classes. In practice, this would mean that when teaching Paradise Lost or the Inferno or the later poems of T.S. Eliot or Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory or fiction by Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, George Eliot, Charlottte Bronte, etc., humanities professors would be obliged to “compare Christianity with other mythologies [and] make the sadism and sexism of religious discourse an explicit object of discussion.” Professors in the humanities are particularly obliged to do this because, “almost alone in universities, we are the ones who explicate and decline to criticize religious conceptions, themes, and doctrines.... Instead of leading the critique of superstition, comparative literature is contributing to the legitimation of religious discourse.”

Rather than critique religion in the way Culler suggests (“Just as some people believe witches eat people and poison wells, so Jane Eyre believes God brought Rochester back to her.”), humanities professors - perhaps unwittingly - collude with repressive religious institutions. “The complicity of comparative literature with religion in our own day,” Culler writes, “is a subject that has scarcely been broached but that cries out for attention, not least because religion provides an ideological legitimation for many reactionary or repressive forces in America today and thus is arguably a greater danger than the ideological positions comparatists do spent their time attacking.”


Anyway, along these lines -- I’ve often wondered what would have happened if that industrious graduate student who went to Belgium a couple of decades ago and set going the series of revelations about Paul de Man - he was a fascist, an anti-semite, and, according to some sources, a bigamist; and, again according to some sources, he lied about his politics to the American immigration authorities - if this industrious graduate student had instead discovered that all of de Man’s adult life, despite what Harold Bloom calls his “serene linguistic nihilism,” his relentless rejection of all metaphysical consolation, he had in fact faithfully attended a Catholic church at a secret location in New Haven, would only hear Mass in Latin, and enjoyed biannual retreats during which much enthusiastic discussion of Thomas Merton went on. Talk about a scandal.