American Audacity by William Giraldi

Author:William Giraldi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2018-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

IF YOU’RE LOOKING to trace the more recent history of how the English department came to be known as a bastion of unloving and unlovable tweeds, you might begin with those two paladins of postmodern theory, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Their deconstructionist shenanigans, their absurd and absurdist skepticism, posited that language doesn’t really mean what it says, that language must always be a puzzle pointing to other puzzles. The real puzzle was how anyone could have erected a theory upon a void, a theory that chose to ignore what lay on the page and focus instead on what wasn’t even close to being there.

To deconstruct was to be deluded and then call those delusions conclusions. (Remembering Elias Canetti’s useful phrase “the smashers of language,” I’ve always thought that a better term to describe deconstruction would have been “pro-destruction.”) Theirs was a crusade to demonstrate the essential vacuity of sentences, but of course the only vacuity to be found was in their own obscurantist pages, language that assaulted everything you knew and admired about words. Clive James: “How did literary theory get started? Because the theorists couldn’t write.” Deconstruction began as a breed of nihilism born of cultural despair and, it must be said, pure silliness, an inability to appreciate the aesthetic beauty and intimations of wisdom all good books have to offer.

No one, I hope, will dispute that language has its inadequacies, its organic shortcomings, but to have built tedious theories upon its wholesale contamination was to show how quickly casuistry leads to calamity. Derrida’s and de Man’s cynical rhetoric against meaning, against the significant struggle every good writer goes through in order to arrive at le mot juste, had a calamitous effect in English departments across the land from the 1970s to the 1990s. You could have spotted those darkening skies in the 1960s, the political perversion of literature in outfits such as the MLA—Edmund Wilson tussled with the MLA in 1968 over their “unreadable articles”—and as far back as the 1930s and 1940s you could have found critics such as R. P. Blackmur and René Wellek warning against the folly of employing literature for ulterior purposes.

Derrida’s and de Man’s was a vampiric campaign that sucked the lifeblood and beauty out of great books, and the damage from that campaign can still be seen today every time some tenure-track hopeful belches the word “iterability.” (You can always reply to that word with Shelley’s line from A Defense of Poetry: literature “creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.”) Show me someone who can no longer recognize beauty and I’ll show you someone who has lost faith not only in writing and reading and loving but in living, too. That so many academics fell for the postmodernist ruse, and then passed on the nonsense to their eager and ovine grad students, was yet another indication that academics can be as maniacally inept as members of Congress.

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