Thursday
It’s clear George Floyd’s murder has had an impact when certain professors start listening to their students and rethinking the literary canon. That, at any rate, is what I carried away from an American Scholar article by University of Houston history professor Robert Zaretsky.
While Zaretsky has long championed Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he’s now prepared to throw it out of the canon altogether. Given that American Scholar tends to lean conservative, it’s a startling declaration, and even though Zaretsky concludes his article somewhat timidly, I see such declarations as a sea change. Many white Americans are now thinking, “So this is what African Americans have been so upset about all this time.”
Zaretsky begins by setting forth the vision that he is now questioning:
In 1994, the [humanities] industry was given a shot of adrenalin by the publication of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. In his uncompromising defense of the great literary works of Western civilization, Bloom denied any political or ideological purpose. Instead, all the canon can teach “is the proper use of one’s own solitude.” As for what he called “the School of Resentment”—the motley crowd of feminists, African-Americanists and the like responsible, in his view, for the “Balkanization” of literary studies—Bloom devoted much of his own solitude to denounce them.
Bloom’s book appeared shortly after I started my career as a university professor. As part of my teaching load, I participated in a team-taught course devoted to the Western canon. Though I did not read Bloom’s book, I found myself teaching many of the same authors that constitute his 26 immortals. From Dante, Shakespeare, and Montaigne through Goethe, Austen, and Dickinson to Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett, our teams have lectured on the works written by Bloom’s “happy few.” These writers, we believed, took on universal themes in uniquely powerful fashion.
To be sure, Zaretsky did not slavishly follow Bloom but worked to “expand” the canon (as did Bloom himself) by adding such authors as Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. Such professors saw themselves as “reformers—big tent canonists dedicated to diversity and intent on inclusion.”
Zaretsky did not reject Heart of Darkness, however. That occurred only when, following the Floyd murder, he started listening to his students in a new way.
He begins his article by noting how Kurtz’s dying words–“The horror! The horror!”–came to him as he watched tapes of Floyd’s murder. Kurtz, who at one time is regarded as the man who will introduce Christianity and Western Civilization into barbaric Africa, is horrified in the end at how he has descended to the level of a savage. Marlow applauds him for this honest self-assessment.
But what if the horror really lies in Marlow’s racism. Zaretsky doesn’t exactly say this, but following Black Lives Matter he starts hearing his students when they voice dissatisfaction:
One student, looking down at her hands, declared, “I am so tired of reading books filled with the n-word.” Another student, also African American, sighed: “I’m tired of being told the classics are good for me.” Yet other students of Arabic, Hispanic, or Asian backgrounds aired their anger not just at the story, but at its author.
While Zaretsky put forth the defenses many of us have used in teaching the work–that Marlow is horrified by Belgian colonialism, that his view isn’t necessarily the author’s (although it comes pretty close)—he began to realize that the racist depictions of Africans outweigh the book’s positive attributes. As I noted in a recent post, Michael Dyson believes that the book should be removed from reading lists altogether because of the negative stereotypes of Africa it perpetuates.
In other words, dislike of the work can’t be attributed only to schools of resentment or the Balkanization of literary studies.
As I argued in my post, Heart of Darkness is very good at capturing the existential crisis of colonialist Europe and perhaps should be retained for that reason, even if demoted from its former lofty status. But after a while, if a work speaks only to white men—and not even to all of them—then it probably should be relegated to historical document status. It now is obvious to Zaretsky that people of color bridle at being depicted as a howling mob and women object to being portrayed as either mantel piece ornaments or African sex goddesses. The “fascination of the abomination,” which provides the novella’s underlying drama and which relies on the horrifying realization that civilized whites might have something in common with African savages, is less fascinating and less abominable when Africans are given faces, names, and complex cultures.
Zaretsky’s awakening leads him to conclude that
we must treat writings by marginalized and oppressed minorities not as supplements to a white canon, but instead as essential representations of our political, social, and cultural traditions.
I don’t hold it against Zaretsky how long it has taken him to arrive at a position that those of us who pay close attention to student responses reached years ago. Life is complex and the paths to awareness take many twists and turns for all of us. I just want for Zaretsky to do more than conclude his article with tentative questions. His literary allusion in the following passage is to Gieussep Tomassi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, “in which the young aristocrat Tancredi, facing the revolutionary tumult of the Italian Risorgimento, tells his uncle Don Fabrizio, ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’”
As 21st-century America begins its own Risorgimento, one leading to national unification based on a truer understanding of equality, do we have a role to play? If so, do we believe that falling back on gestures of change—a modern-day Tancredi, no doubt working as a marketing consultant, would advise deans to reaffirm their commitment to “diversity and inclusion”—is enough? Finally, should we continue to profess what we always thought to be true about the canon when our students tell us they are tired of being told that certain texts, though riddled with the n-word, are good for them?
Let’s try answering these questions in a more robust way. First, Bloom must be rejected forcefully. What he called “School of Resentment” was people drawn to different works than he was—and being drawn to the same works for different reasons. Bloom may have been very smart, but he was guided by internal narratives no less than the rest of us. That he saw resentment in angry women and people of color says more about him than them.
Second, all authors must be put to the test all the time. Literature teachers play a key role in that process, especially those who listen to their students. As I tell my classes continually, their responses help us see who is worth keeping and who is not. Each generation must interpret the classics anew.
A note: Their feedback can be hard for older generations to accept. I chose the British 18th century as my field of expertise because I was in love with Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and I still consider it a comic masterpiece. But after 30 years of teaching it, I began having reservations comparable to those that Zaretsky has with Heart of Darkness. There’s too something a bit too entitled about Fielding—fellow novelist Tobias Smollett picked up on this right away—and his old maid jokes also fall flat. He’s still worth reading, but he doesn’t shimmer quite so brightly in my firmament as he once did. My students helped me see this.
Finally—and this is a proposal that Zaretsky does in fact make—universities must hire more diverse faculty. Otherwise, we too often foist our own dramas upon our students—and upon the reading public—rather than honor emerging perspectives. Women academics rediscovered Aphra Behn, not because they were resentful, but because she spoke to them as many canonical authors did not. When college faculties diversify, new life is pumped into literary studies.
Canon defenders need not panic. Most of Bloom’s immortals will not disappear from humanities courses for the simple fact that most of them still find ways to speak to core parts of ourselves. As I can testify from having taught a “Representative Masterpieces” class this past semester, however, Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare look very different now than they did 45 years ago when I entered graduate school. They’re still great, only in different ways.
For that matter, the 17th century preferred Virgil, the 18th century Homer. Literary revaluations are nothing new.
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