The state of the literary union

I want to start by stating my general definition of literature and its aims. Literature is an expression of a characteristic which I deem humanity. The characteristic is ineffable but its sum total is the element of our psyches, our personalities, our souls, what have you, that constitute our being human, and thus literature constitutes the study of the human.

Does it constitute, as well, a study of culture? Yes, because part of what it is to be human is to develop culture. Does it constitute, as well, a study of gender? Yes, because part of what it is to be human is to attain, either personally or socially, identity and behavioral tropes associated with sex and/or gender. Does it constitute, as well, a study of race? Yes, because again, race is part of the human identity, both personally and socially. But, and this is important, these fragments do not stand in for literature as a whole. That is to say that mastery of literature grants mastery over these sub-disciplines. Whereas, mastery of these sub-disciplines does not grant mastery over literature as a whole and is, therefore, not transferable to other aspects of the human.

If one studies, Afro-Caribbean woman-woman relations, rather than literature, one may say a great number of things about Haitian lesbians, but little or nothing about Bulgarian lesbians, and likewise, even less about hetro-sexual despots of mid-century India. The subject in this example is not the human but rather a limited and specific group of humans, and little can be gleaned by moving upward from specific humans to the general state of humanity. Whereas, the exact opposite is true--the more one knows about humanity, the greater the degree of understanding is afforded to any one of humanity's constituent parts.

Now, obviously, one may argue that this philosophy is not internally consistent. They may say, for instance, that what literature does is precisely the thing that I presume cannot be done--the move from specific to general. Each bit of literature (poem, story, play, etc.) renders a specific picture and, my opponents would argue, cannot, according to my own theory, create an overall general image of the human--an image rendered only by a general literature (which is, in itself, a paradox). I concur.

However, the aim of literature is always to create realistic portrayals of characters and situations, and it is in this aim that I create the generality. That is to say that, yes, the literature itself is fairly specific--Hamlet is about a character named Hamlet--but the desire to make Hamlet seem real elevates this task to a general, and internalized, set of criteria. Put simply, Hamlet either seems like a real person or he doesn't based on our own intuition about what it is to be human, an intuition that is shared by every human being, and it is on this intuition which the general lesson of literature is based.

If, so called, literary experts are unconcerned with this general aim then the results are disastrous. People become experts at lesbianism, or Afro carribeanism, or Laconism, at the exclusion of the human. The very choice of picking such a specific is to say that it is alienable from the greater mass of humanity. It is to say that one cannot understand hybrid cultures simply by understanding what it is to be human, though cultures, even those which are hybrid in nature, are made up of human beings.

However, we find that now, in our post-modern culture, the very aim is to contextualize, and having lost sight of the point of the discipline, we find it necessary, some may even say admirable, to contextualize the human. We have no great honors to award the student of the human qua human, but rather, we only exalt the work of some scholar working on sodomy taboos as revealed in ancient Sumerian love poetry. But what can this student say about the needs of the human being, all human beings? What can this student say about emotion, experience, ethics, all of the grand trophies that are set high in the temples of literature? These things are, to this scholar, nothing but bygone relics, ribbons for honorable mention in some bumpkin fair's contest for "important features of life." They do not believe that general versions of these concepts even exist. The only way that we can say anything about some random human being, some Bob Smith, is to study Bob specifically, to write books on Bob and attend conferences about Bob, and to vehemently deny that anything we have said about Bob, that any of the countless works we have produced to explain Bob, can be used to create even a moment of understanding with his brother Jim, or God forbid, his sister Eileen.

If this didn't represent enough calamity within the discipline then add to it the self-centering that is the result of this philosophy. If there is no human qua human, then it only stands to reason that one can only study particular varieties of human, the more specific the better, and if this is so, then it is obvious that the particular focus of that study ought to be the variety of human to which the student belongs. That is to say, if you're going to study only a handful of human beings, you can only expect a payoff from your new found wisdom if you are among that handful.

And thus, we have homosexuals studying Queer studies, women studying women studies, African Americans studying African American studies, and so on. At the master's level, they learn to get more specific. Are you gay and African American? Study social acceptance of homosexuality within the African American ghetto. At the Ph.D. this becomes further specified, until someone may say, without flinching, that they study the role of "the bitch" within American descendents of Haitian culture. If you were to ask such students what their findings have said about humanity as a whole, they would look at you confused. This was never their aim.

Rather their aim seems to be a validation of their own cultural identity. The Ph.D. has become a sort of 8-10 year collegiate mission of self-help. The old school of thought on this subject was that such education should empower a student of literature to say helpful things for humanity as a whole. The new school makes no such concessions--and likewise, has no such pragmatism in mind. The new literary student is only prepared to answer the question, "what have your years of study taught you about yourself?" But herein lies the problem, there is little reverence for having gained information about you qua you. The assumption is that you should have been able to answer such questions at 18 the way that your parents did, as did all succeeding generations before your parents. Furthermore, there is still the stigma that getting a Ph.D. in "ME" studies is somewhat limited in its scope, and so the question must be rephrased in order to make it sound worthwhile: "what have your years of study in Afro-Caribbean transvestitism taught you about gender identity concerns such as you yourself face as an Afro-Caribbean transvestite?" And that is the best that we hope these people will be able to do.

Of course, the worst that we hope that these people will do, or rather fear that these people will do, is canon reform. Because all the "good" books are not about them, they need to be thrown out immediately. We need to burn Shakespeare and Chaucer and replace them on the shelves with limitless accounts of Afro-Caribbean transvestites. If such books cannot be found, we need to widen our search. Some Afro-Caribbean transvestite must have written a poem at some point--Find It!!! The very future of Afro-Caribbean Transvestite Studies (a specialization within literary studies) depends on our presentation of some work that we can study.

And so a veritable cavalcade of horrible authors are paraded before the eyes of the literary critic, all equal in the eyes of the new guard literary critic, who does not raise protest against the pre-eminent genius of the Afro-Caribbean Transvestite poem--not for its content, form, or sentiments, but simply because of the "cultural work" it does. Of course, there is no protest raised. If protest is raised against the Af-Cab trannies then where will the protest end? The critic who supports High mountain Bulgarian diphthong arrangement amongst shepherds will also be taken to task. As will the critic who studies allusions to window sills as metaphor for clitoral mutilation. Clearly, we don't want to question the clitoral mutilation camp, do we?

We no longer concern ourselves with terms like "good" or "bad" or "thought provoking" or "important" or even "readable." Having giving up these terms for the meaningless idea of doing "cultural work." And as this parade of obscenities moves past the literary community, we find the new guard nodding at whatever self-pleasuring trivialities pass under its collective nose--or rather, the place where the nose once was before it was removed to spite the face (for one assumes, had we noses, we might smell this shit for what it is). Meanwhile, the old guard stands silent, sheepishly degraded by the basest and most pointless of human endeavors because it could never answer the question, "what is literature," and so now phone books are literature, and 14th century parlor games are literature, and alphabetical order is literature, and the variation of beige in Mid-Western office carpeting is literature.

And so, though we stand in a time when answers are most needed to the great questions about what it is to be human and how a human is meant to be treated, we have no such possibilities. The study of literature was supposed to supply these answers, but the study of literature no longer exists except in pockets, and we wonder why the rest of the world doesn't see the merit of our endeavors. The answer is simple, too busy stroking our own sense of individuality, we no longer can answer the world's questions about humanity at large, and when they ask us what literature we think is most important, we hand them autobiographies of semi-literate cross-dressing slave ship owners, and then we mock them when they do not comprehend our meaning.

I ask, who finally have we vindicated with all this bullshit? Cultures that are dead and gone do not revel in our ability to discern from the size of their pottery their cultural concerns about which king they revered over which king. What do we learn about human sexuality by studying the size of Catholic confessional booths in predominantly Buddhist Figi-an hamlets? The culture at large is starting to believe that the study of literature is a pointless discipline. Have we made a single argument against that? We are faced with shrinking English departments, but why should the public be expected to endorse our need to identify the social forces constructing the nature of left-handedness. Why haven't supplied a reason to read Homer in thirty years. In fact, most of our "experts" haven't read Homer either. They're too busy becoming experts in the treatment of crabs in 15th century Belgium prostitutes as a partriarchal narrative silencing the "feminine cultural voice." Our newest students haven't read anything worth while because their teachers haven't any idea what books to suggest.

So, I finally bring this back around to my original thought. The study of literature should be about the study of human beings. As it deviates away from this central goal, those endeavors should be considered counter productive, should be frowned upon, and should be censured. If we do not, we may find our discipline stupidly nodding and tickling its intellectual genitals while falling into a void.