While a graduate student in English at Northwestern (late 70s early 80s), I had the good fortune to study with Gerald Graff and get acquainted with the criticism wars that were beginning to rage. If Graff had lived oh, say, 2,447 years ago, he and Socrates would have given each other much to think about. Like Socrates, Graff practices a method of query-based discussion or dialectic in which no one is allowed to finally rest in or on any single theory, image, or conclusion.The conversation can always continue. Graff has taught the conflicts or controversies from the earliest days of his career, long before the practice was coined as a slogan by various individuals and groups.

I agree to a point with those who consider it unfortunate that religious fundamentalists have co-opted Graff’s phrase, “teaching the controversies,” in their efforts to get creationist mythology (intelligent design) taught in public school science courses. But consider what violence religious fundamentalists of all faiths have resorted to when discussion stops. So, by all means, let the controversies continue to be taught and discussed, by everyone. The only way to determine whether someone or some idea is right or wrong is to test it in the laboratory of discussion. So let the discussions continue: teach those controversies! bring on the conflicts!

If I had continued with literary theory as a professional interest, Graff’s query-based, Socratic approach is most certainly the one I would have taken: not identifying with any one school of criticism, but, instead, continually questioning each school’s assumptions, methods, and conclusions. Taking such an approach you risk angering and alienating, but, what was it they called Socrates . . . oh yeah, a gadfly.

Let the controversies and the conversations continue.

I am sure I am not alone in saying thank you, Professor Graff.

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Wallace Stevens’ A High-Toned Old Christian Woman begins with a declaration of the “supremacy” of poetry as fiction. What, then, are lesser fictions? What makes poetry supreme in the realm of fiction? How is it fiction? Is “fiction” real? What is real? Of course, I know what is real, and so do you. But do they? Let’s conspire.

The soundness of the assertion that poetry is the supreme fiction is perhaps best determined by reading and re-reading and sharing one’s thoughts and reactions. The “fiction,” the shaped artifact, is the poem itself. An unread, or insufficiently and inadequately read poem, invites further reading. For until adequately read, a poem remains unrealized, unmade.

Perhaps that is what Stevens meant by a poem being the supreme fiction. It only becomes real through an adequate “supreme” effort and close reading. Prose fiction usually (not always) requires less interpretive effort and to that degree is a lesser fiction than poetry which requires “supreme” interpretive effort to become a real “fiction” living in the mind of a reader.

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

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It seems to me that those who take the ideas of Saussure, Foucault, Marx, Kant, Barthes, Freud, Aristotle, Plato, Derrida, et al and appropriate them for the task of interpreting literary texts, whatever the critical school — humanist, Marxist, feminist, Frankfurt, structural, reader-response, post-structural, ecocritical, new historical — are trying to do philosophy in the guise of literary criticism.

What I enjoy about reading and writing criticism — close engagement with a text — is lost in the approach of many of these schools of criticism; what I enjoy about reading and writing philosophy — careful reasoning in the service of defining or understanding truth, beauty, goodness, how to live the good life — is also lost in the attempt to meld critical and philosophical discourse.

Discourse! Just one of many words — agency, heterotopia, signs, trace, hegemony, play, etc. — appropriated in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s by literary theorists in the process of establishing a technical vocabulary with which to discuss the significance or reality-status of authors, texts, intentions, meaning, etc. The words that came to comprise this technical vocabulary, as they gained greater and greater currency, led critics, theorists, and other readers further and further from the texts being studied and read. Scholars outside of English and other modern language departments began to question, belittle, and, finally, simply ignore literary theorists, their writings, and their debates.

Parodies of and withering attacks on deconstructive critical writing are especially easy to come by. Recently I came across a blog-review by John Holbo, of Gerald Graff’’s recent Clueless in Academe. It contains a brief, understated observation that expresses, aphoristically, the gist of my conviction that literary criticism and philosophy ought to respect mutual boundaries. Holbo writes:

. . . trying to transmogrify literary criticism culture into argument culture is rather problematic.

There are different kinds or types of truths, each appropriate to a given realm, whether that realm be logical, physical, social, mathematical, psychological, aesthetic, or moral.

Literary critics should elucidate and evaluate texts and only foreground engagement with procedures, theories, and methods if such foregrounding serves to enhance our understanding of the text. Which athlete is more likely to catch the ball: the one who keeps an eye on the ball while running toward it, or the one who takes a moment, however brief, to first solve the calculus equations that predict its trajectory?

The question is not whether or not to appropriate theory or philosophy when analyzing literature, but when and how to do so. The text should remain the focus for the critic and reader. This is not to say that critical writing that foregrounds theory instead of the literary text being discussed is not interesting; it often is. But that is precisely the problem: engaging theoretical arguments, if not controlled by the critic, can lead the critic and the reader into paths that wander away from the text being discussed and analyzed. Again, it’’s a question of when and how, not if.

In any case, the conversation, the controversies, life–they all continue.

Thank you Professor Graff

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