What happens when the marketing managers of academic publishing
meet
up with the partisans of radical multiculturalism? One result is
the new Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries, surely among
the most cynically spurious volumes to have rolled off a
university press in recent years. Edited by T. V. F. Brogan, a
co-editor of the latest edition of The New Princeton Encyclopedia
of Poetry and Poetics, the Handbook is a compilation of
articles from that venerable reference work, repackaged to appeal to
the multi-culti, politically correct market. What seems to have
happened is this: noticing that the Encyclopedia was selling
rather well, someone had the inspired idea of peddling the same
thing twice—simply dress it up in native garb, plaster the word
“multicultural” on the cover, and presto! another $45 per volume
($17.95 in paper). Mr. Brogan says the editors of the
Encyclopedia discerned a “need” for “smaller and more focused
child-volumes on specific subject areas.” What need? The
Princeton Handbook is simply a reprinting—“without redaction,” as
Mr. Brogan slyly puts it—of the articles on national poetries from
the Princeton Encyclopedia.
Except, that is, for Mr. Brogan’s own contribution to the
Handbook. Our edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia was
published before Mr. Brogan became involved. It begins with a
straightforward preface, cast in staid, scholarly tones, which
outlines the scope of the book. Drawing on the title of a novel by
C. S. Lewis, Mr. Brogan introduces his Handbook not with a preface
but a “Pre (Till We Have Faces) Face: Culture, Poetry, the Other,
‘Sexy Ideas,’ ‘Clerical Work,’ and Genuine Savagery.” One can
just imagine poor C. S. Lewis, that most fastidious of writers,
turning in his grave. Mr. Brogan castigates “the narrow
and
conformist ways that the academy construes thought.” But his
preface—if we may call it that—is a veritable repository of
contemporary academic poetry-speak, full of the cutesy,
pseudo-breathless rhetoric of a pedagogue desperate to appeal to
the
adolescents whose sensibility he never outgrew.
Accordingly,
Mr. Brogan comes through with the requisite quota of political
grandstanding. He even manages the mandatory knock against Ronald
Reagan (in a reference book about poetry!) and fulminates against
American businesses for “proving Marx right after all about
capitalism (though wrong about communism).” Replete with an
illustration of a broken chain on its cover (signifying liberation,
you see), the Handbook pretends
to be an exciting new aid to existential
awakening: “This is, most immediately, a book about poetry and
culture(s). On a deeper level it is about life, about the
meaningful rendering of life into few and memorable words that
drench and abide, and—not least—about the experience of the
Other.” In fact, though, this book is simply a series of
encyclopedia
articles. Here, to take an example at random, is the beginning of
the entry on Byelorussian poetry, which “expresses the spiritual
richness and resilience of a small East Slav country set between
Poland and Russia, formerly the westernmost republic of the
U.S.S.R. The earliest examples of verse in B. belong to
Franïcisk Skaryna, . . . the Bible translator, publisher,
and
engraver, but he had no successors as a poet,” etc.
All true, no doubt, and
eminently informative. But it is
pretty far from Mr. Brogan’s state of emergency. Some books come
with epigraphs; in a more appropriate gesture,
Mr. Brogan has furnished the Princeton Handbook with an
“epitaph,” which our dictionary defines as “an inscription on a
tombstone in memory of the one buried there.”
