Critique Has Its Uses

Nutters continued from previous page search for new directions for literary study tends to rest on the academy’s teleological narrative of self-identiication that moves from the New Critics through structuralism, post-structuralism, New Historicism, and its various manifestations in cultural studies. It is too often a story of emancipation from naïve assumptions about the autonomy of art. As a consequence, scholars championing new methodologies reproduce generational divides and occlude alternative styles of criticism that do not conform to those that ground their polemics. By not presenting counter-narratives—we might look to Trilling’s cultural critique, the idiosyncrasy of Burke’s playful dramatistic thought, the uncanny (and unacknowledged) resemblance between Frye’s universe of literature and the current ixation on planetary or world literature, the relation between surface reading and the aesthetic movement’s valorization of surface, Said’s secular criticism, or even Bloom’s antithetical criticism—we are liable to sacriice the great intellectual and creative achievements of the past and unwittingly legitimate our current crisis of self-identiication. Nevertheless, the ultimate takeaway from Criticism After Critique is that a self-conscious recognition of that crisis constitutes the ironic ground for renewed critical activity. R. M. Berry’s afterword suggests as much when it describes how each of the volume’s essays “transform[s] what might otherwise be a rariied conlict over subsequence—over what if anything comes after what—into a struggle for criticism’s possibilities.” We see this struggle in terms of Simek’s pursuit of “ironic utopias,” Chodat’s fallible irst person subject, Lee’s ongoing dialectic between the need for, and constraints intrinsic to, value judgments, Melehy’s emphasis on our inability to step outside the very history we wish to organize, Zalloua’s belief that “critique’s perpetual negativity… energizes literary criticism,” or O’Keeffe’s claim that “arguably, the condition of the possibility for criticism is that it constantly performs its own self- critique.” Shumway puts the matter succinctly: “We cannot get beyond the reality that our project is deined by tensions between fact and value and criticism and critique. The hope of doing only one or the other is in vain, for it could only lead to the disappearance of the disciplines we practice.” Acknowledging the irony in the eponymous “after” is, in other words, what will allow critique to remain fecund at a historical moment when it is surely needed more than ever. Daniel Rosenberg Nutters recently received his PhD in English from Temple University. His work is forthcoming and has appeared in the Arizona Quarterly, Henry James Review, Journal of Modern Literature, and symplokē. He is currently working on two book projects: The Man of Imagination: Transformations of Romanticism in Late Henry James and The Humanist Critic: Lionel Trilling and Edward Said. Critique Has Its Uses Lee Konstantinou Is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) fake news? I haven’t been able to stop asking myself this question since the election of Donald Trump in November. Whitehead’s novel is, after all, constructed around an historical falsehood. As a kid, the author reports, he thought that the Underground Railroad was a literal subway slaves used to escape to the North. Many children who learn about the Railroad make the same mistake (as did Porsha Stewart in an episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta). Taking his former confusion as a point of departure, Whitehead literalizes the metaphor. His protagonist Cora escapes from slavery in Georgia on an underground steampowered locomotive. Fleeing the slave-catcher Ridgeway, she traverses a variety of states, each of which skews from the historical record in more or less dramatic ways. “Every state is different,” one character in the novel suggests. “Each one a state of possibility.” Historically informed readers will note that Whitehead’s novel incorporates anachronistic references to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Nazism, as well as twenty-irst-century modes of oppression (such as stop and frisk and mass incarceration) into his vision of the 1850s. My opening question is, of course, ridiculous. After all, everyone knows (or at least all literary critics know) that we don’t turn to iction for a strictly factual report about the world. Philosophers and narrative theorists have long cautioned against asking whether ictional utterances are true or false. These are exactly the wrong questions to ask; the truth of iction—whether in the mode of realism, magic realism, or science iction—is in no case reducible to the truth status of its individual sentences. Meanwhile, almost everyone knows (and not just literary critics, this time) what fake news is. For the Macedonian teenagers in Veles who disseminated it, its purpose was to make them money. For those of us who consume it, fake news reinforces our political biases; it promises comfort, titillation, shock, delight. It helps us feel as if we’re reading the news—we are, after all, starved for real news—without having to confront the unwanted narratives of oficial media. The difference couldn’t be any clearer. On the one hand, Whitehead offers a fantastic world whose distance from our own is carefully staged as iction, and which is meant to be interpreted as different from the historical record. On the other hand, disseminators of fake news offer an alternative world of ersatz facts designed to go viral on Facebook, which is meant to be mistaken, even if only briely, for truth. And yet this distinction doesn’t wholly satisfy me. As a novel about slavery, The Underground Railroad arguably has a special place in US literature and culture. In the absence of more signiicant memorials or reparations, the neo-slave narrative has for decades been a major political staging ground upon which we have reenacted and reconsidered the history and consequences of our nation’s founding sin. And for a long time, Whitehead has resisted stepping onto this staging ground. His previous novels have addressed race, as many critics have noted, more obliquely. Indeed, I would venture an even stronger claim. Whitehead didn’t only avoid writing about slavery; his early iction sought to resist the literary equivalent of We need readers who care about the distance between the real and the fake. what in the realm of criticism has come to be called the historicist-contextualist paradigm. As Mitchum Huehls argues, Whitehead has long approached race in a way that resists “representational forms of meaning-making.” That is, the novelist has rejected the view that how we represent race determines (or is, in an uncomplicated way, equivalent to) how race is lived. I read the author’s The Intuitionist (1999) as a satire of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In her slim but inluential book, Morrison argues that the American literary canon must be reread in light of what she terms a disavowed “Africanist presence.” Drawing on a powerful tradition of African American literary criticism, Morrison transforms the paint factory scene of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) into a critical credo. Playing in the Dark is a paragon of suspicious hermeneutics. We think we’re reading canonical texts in which African Americans play little or no part, but Morrison teaches us we’re actually reading a text whose whiteness requires a complex disavowal of blackness. Blackness is the racial unconscious of whiteness. The job of the critic becomes to attend to the historical deinitions and contextualizations of race across our literature. The Intuitionist resists this imperative in amusing terms. The book’s African American protagonist Lila Mae Watson discovers that James Fulton—the founder of the Intuitionist school of elevator inspection—passed for white. His great theoretical treatise on the ideal elevator, which he called a “black box,” seems in the inal analysis to be a coded racial allegory. Theories of elevator repair come to represent debates about racial uplift. But the allegory is obscure, and one comes away from the novel feeling unsure how Lila Mae’s revelation might change her life. Whereas for Morrison history’s disavowed presence is determinative of contemporary racial dynamics, for the Whitehead of The Intuitionist history has present-day consequences that are far from clear. History is an alien visitor whose language we ind dificult to comprehend. But with The Underground Railroad, Whitehead has taken on a seemingly different view of history’s power. In this novel, history doesn’t so much revisit the present as never depart in the irst place. Cora escapes slavery only to discover that the slave system’s boundaries extend well beyond the geography of the plantation. Formal emancipation guarantees nothing. Whitehead here seems to revert to the sort of ideology critique—the historicist-contextualist paradigm—he previously repudiated. This is a surprising turn. We are, after all, reading a novel by the same author who, as Thomas Chatterton Williams has noted, once wrote an editorial mocking the very notion that he might write a novel about slavery. In the editorial, Whitehead jokes he might someday write a “Southern Novel of Black Misery” that would “investigate the legacy of slavery that still reverberates to this day, the legacy of Reconstruction that still reverberates to this day, and crackers.” He warns his imagined reader, “[b]ut hurry up—the hounds are a-gittin’ closer!” One way to read Whitehead’s apparent shift is as an allegory of the fate of postcritique. Like Whitehead once did, many critics have mounted intelligent attacks on the historicist-contextualist paradigm, of which Morrison’s Playing in the Dark was just one prominent example. This moribund paradigm has, they say, failed to theorize the speciicity of literature and the uses to which readers put texts. Rita Felski argues that we should analyze how readers identify with characters, are enchanted by texts, learn things about the world from novels, and so on. Caroline Levine has suggested that our historicist-contextualist inclinations predispose us to overlook how forms persist across time. And Joseph North has recently arrived at a similar conclusion, Konstantinou continued on page 18 July-August 2017 Page 15 Konstantinou continued from page 15 though as a leftist he otherwise distances himself from the political liberalism of many postcritics. Nonetheless, he argues we have not strayed far beyond Fredric Jameson’s old slogan, “Always Historicize!” We offer endless diagnosis, but never any therapy. Looking back to I. A. Richards as his guiding light, North wants to reconstruct literary aesthetics on properly materialist grounds. Literary study should help us cultivate “new collectivities” and help us pursue “modes of life deeper than any that the existing order is willing to allow.” The lesson that The Underground Railroad teaches may be that the postcritical themes Huehls rightly identiies as central to Whitehead’s prior work also have their limits. New collectivities, and deeper forms of life, may be unattainable without the tools that the historicist-contextualist paradigm created. Critique might have its uses, after all. Indeed, I’d venture (albeit without suficient justiication in a short essay) that political action dissociated from ideology critique offers cultivation without content. North retreats into vague generalities about deeper modes of living. Felski emphasizes that literature can do something but says little about how it has acted or should act. Levine emphasizes that forms travel, but where are these forms going and on what grounds should we care about their journeys? I may experience deep collectivities as a member of the altright; I may be enchanted by Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (2015) and then enthusiastically vote for Marine Le Pen. North is correct in his claim that an earlier generation of critics often mistook diagnosis for cure; but postcritique risks dispensing cures without diagnosis. At the same time, Whitehead’s example suggests that our encounter with postcritique might change how we do historicism. I would argue, in fact, that Whitehead offers more than a return to the position Morrison developed decades ago. He offers instead a new literary vision of historicistactivism. Neo-slave narratives written in the mode Page 18 American Book Review of historiographic metaiction, such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), tended to target historiography as such. That is, such writers used anachronism to expose historical writing as just another genre whose discursive construction of reality should be resisted. The Underground Railroad, by contrast, depends at every moment on the reader’s knowledge of the actual history of the Underground Railroad. Even if we’re not in possession of the facts, we are being told that such knowledge is a necessary precursor to interpretation. The necessity of such knowledge highlights how the novel’s Museum of Natural Wonders differs from a run-of-the-mill postmodern simulacrum. The point of this episode, where Cora goes to work pretending to be a slave for the entertainment of white audiences, is to highlight how the Museum unambiguously falsiies slavery. Cora’s knowledge that her performance is a watered-down version of slavery’s depredations comes to be an allegory for the knowledge Whitehead is asking his audience to acquire. By iguring his position in this way, creating this mise en abîme within his novel, Whitehead draws attention to the literary falsiications we’re enjoying. In becoming so aware, we glimpse briely, albeit in a negative form, a reality of slavery to which, we are reminded, we have no access. Let me now return to the ridiculous question with which I began my essay. Is The Underground Railroad fake news? I initially asked the question wondering whether some readers might take the book not as an ingenious work of historical science iction but rather as realism. My question here degenerates into a fantasy. I imagine Donald Trump somehow getting his tiny-ingered hands on the book. (Maybe Obama left his copy behind.) On Twitter, our president learns that the novel has won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, and so, hungry to associate with prize-winning literature, he reads the book, or has it read to him. And like many others, he’s mesmerized. Indeed, he is so taken by the story of Cora’s escape from slavery, and he so admires the helpful service kindly white conductors render her, that he determines to rebuild the railroad. Some of his political enemies, after all, might soon want to escape to Canada. He adds Underground Railroad reconstruction to his infrastructure bill, alongside the concrete wall he has promised to build on the US-Mexico border. Congress gets to work, and soon enough our president signs the legislation in the Rose Garden. Not long after, wearing a yellow hard hat, he cuts the ribbon at the grand opening of his big, beautiful Underground Railroad. It’s a scenario straight out of a Colson Whitehead novel. Or rather, it’s a scenario out of any Colson Whitehead novel except The Underground Railroad. We can only mistake The Underground Railroad for fake news—or mistake fake news for iction—if we think the uses of a text can be separated from the ideological purposes of that text. To determine those purposes, we need ideology critique. And for readers who care about the distance between the real and the fake, The Underground Railroad might itself be quite useful. The novel teaches us that what might be most useful when confronting the menace of our political moment is neither a new deconstruction of our nation’s founding myths in the mode of the historicist-contextualist paradigm nor a modest literary instrumentalism in the mode of postcritique, but rather a historically informed commitment to political action and institutional transformation of the most ambitious sort. Lee Konstantinou is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park and author of Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (2016) and the novel Pop Apocalypse (2009). He is also co-editor with Sam Cohen of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012).