To the Editors:
Never until now have I felt impelled to register dissent from a too-enthusiastic assessment of my work, but D. G. Myers’s review of Politics of Letters (“Marx and English,” November 1988) taps reserves of modesty I scarcely knew I possessed. I accept with a blush the personal flattery—“passionate intensity,” “unswerving analysis,” “a bravura performance,” “invaluable”—and will pass these phrases on to my publisher for use in advertisements. But Myers has been heartened by my arguments to a degree that is unwarranted—and dangerous, in that overconfidence may easily subvert our Left project before it has ripened. I caution him against seeing us as a “party in power,” just yet, as “the ‘center,’ the normative position, in the university.” If we believe, in his optimistic words, “that radical ideology can now be taken for granted as the common opinion of readers of literary scholarship,” we may relax our guard and leave an opening for liberals and conservatives who, though admittedly in disarray, still occupy a small, marginal space in the universities and even in literary scholarship. Until the last one of these mastodons has either retired or spent time in our re-education camps, they will nag, they will nip at our heels, they will bite like fleas. So, Myers: vigilance and steadfastness, until we have finally won the day.
Richard Ohmann
Middletown, CT
To the Editors:
D. G. Myers approaches review assignments with all the finesse of a Mafia hit man, as I found out when he wrote a maliciously dishonest account in The American Spectator of a forum I moderated at the 1987 MLA convention on highbrow-lowbrow culture. His vulgar anti-Marxism is again on display in his review of Richard Ohmann’s Politics of Letters in your November issue. Myers’s M.O. is devoid of any semblance of open-mindedness; it consists of approaching any work or statement by a Leftist with the sole intention of finding confirmation of Myers’s preconceived stereotypes. Toward that end, he searches for a word here and a phrase there that can be made to sound lurid by making up his own context for them out of the repertory of conservatives’ simplistic misrepresentation of Leftists. His criticisms consist of derisive insults almost totally devoid of substantive support or rebuttal, and of ritualistic incantations of neoconservative accepted doctrines, such as the assertion that Ohmann’s Marxist ideas are “the accepted doctrines of literary study at the present time” (surely a surprise to those of us who teach English in the vast number of universities whose curriculum remains essentially the same as it was thirty years ago; I would be happy to arrange an exchange with any disgruntled conservative at Northwestern or Stanford, whose heart would be warmed today by the lily-white curriculum, faculty, and student body at Cal Poly).
Myers would have loved it if Ohmann’s book had been doctrinaire and arrogant. Unfortunately, it is low-keyed, tentative, modest, and qualified almost to a fault. Hmm, how to deal with this? Well, if Ohmann prefaces a brief digression on computers by admitting that he is not an expert on them, then says whimsically, “I may now air my prejudices with only slight interference from the facts,” Myers cloddishly takes it literally, as evidence for falsely claiming about Ohmann’s entire book, “He feels no need to argue his case.”
As for arguing one’s case, Myers makes exactly one substantial and accurate criticism of Ohmann: that he regards conventional humanistic education as wholly class-biased without acknowledging that it can also serve as a liberation from class bonds. Fine—I agree. Beyond that, Myers’s review is so rilled with inaccuracies that it would take more space to point them all out than he used to write them. I urge those interested to read Ohmann’s book against Myers’s travesty of it, and see for themselves whether the crudeness is in the author or the reviewer.
A sampling of Myers’s chronic dishonesty: he claims that Ohmann attacks William J. Bennett and E. D. Hirsch but “does not attempt to refute cither man.” Ohmann not only devotes five pages to direct refutation of Bennett and Hirsch but his criticisms of them form an introduction to two hundred and ninety-three pages of detailed case studies and eighteen pages of footnotes developing the point that Bennett, Hirsch, and Myers ignore: “Human values may be eternal, but cultural systems are not. There is just no sense in pondering the function of literature without relating it to the actual society that uses it, to the centers of power within that society, and to the institutions that mediate between literature and people” (page 5). Likewise for education, literacy, and mass culture, the other topics of Ohmann’s book.
Myers’s ideological blinders produce the following fictitious summary of Ohmann’s book:
Thus literature by definition is a commodity, the product of a social process (the writer who thinks he is the producer of his own work has only mystified his role); literary standards, the principles which govern the production of literature, are not really literary at all—in truth, there is no such quality as “literary”—but are rather a stratagem of the ruling class to extend its moral and political values into another domain; taste, traditionally described as the faculty of aesthetic judgment, “amounts to either class hatred or the snobbishness of the intellectual,” and therefore can be more accurately understood as one of the powers of the elite.
Myers seems to have Ohmann mixed up with certain post-structuralist theorists, for whom Ohmann and many other Left critics, myself included, have little use. I challenge Myers to produce direct quotes from Ohmann supporting any of the above account other than in a crassly decontextualized way. Ohmann, like most recent Marxist critics, eschews language like “stratagem . . . domain” in favor of the more complex notions of ideological hegemony and the mediating role of what neoconservatives call “the new class.”
Here, then, is Ohmann in person:
Although the ruling ideas and myths may indeed be, in every age, the ideas and myths of the ruling class, the ruling class in advanced capitalist societies does not advance its ideas directly through its control of the means of mental production. Rather, a subordinate but influential class shapes culture in ways that express its own interests and experience and that sometimes turn on ruling-class values rather critically—yet in a nonrevolutionary period end up confirming root elements of the dominant ideology, such as the premise of individualism. (page 91)
In the one phrase Myers directly quotes above, Ohmann is not discussing literary taste at all but rather the problem of how we can teach students to think critically about the manipulative rhetoric of mass culture (a goal one should think conservatives share, at least when it involves Leftist manipulation) without belittling them for having accepted that culture as their own: “Any criticism can seem a putdown of their own values. Most disastrously, our criticism can seem indistinguishable from highbrow scorn (toward mass culture) grounded in ‘taste,’ which usually amounts to either class hatred or the snobbishness of the intellectual” (page 208). In other words, Ohmann is making almost exactly the same argument that conservatives make against “elitist” Left critics of consumer culture. Aside from the intrinsic issues in this passage, it is clear that Myers has deliberately distorted its context.
Maybe Myers’s problem is that he just can’t read. He has Ohmann saying The Catcher in the Rye’s, “anti-capitalist message was blunted by critics,” whereas Ohmann’s criticism of the book and its critics is just the opposite—that they failed to identify capitalism as a source of Holden Caulfield’s malaise.
Myers is frighteningly typical of a younger group of critics who have jumped on the neoconservative gravy train—Smerdyakovs capable only of parroting the polemical style of better informed critics on both the Right and the Left with no apparent understanding of those they ridicule; thus they project their own incapacity for reasoned, documented argument indiscriminately onto whatever author they wield their hatchet against.
Donald Lazere
Department of English
California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo, CA
D. G. Myers replies:
I think I will stand by my original account of Richard Ohmann’s Politics of Letters. In fact, I believe the passage from the book quoted by Donald Lazere only confirms my account of it. He himself provides the “direct quotes” he challenges me to produce. Ohmann’s is not the “low-keyed, tentative, modest” book Lazere makes it out to be. It is a collection of vast claims about culture and society delivered by someone who is relatively secure in his assurance that none of his claims will ever be contested, because few persons engaged in humanistic study in the university are willing to dissent publicly from the ruling orthodoxy of the Left.
Now, Ohmann makes light of any suggestion that the academic Left wishes to eradicate all opposition. But then Lazere tries to do exactly that—to me personally. Read back to back, the two letters achieve an effect quite different from that intended by their authors. Ohmann’s wit turns sinister in light of Lazere’s vituperation. It’s not just that on Lazere’s testimony I am stupid or misinformed; I am “maliciously dishonest,” I “deliberately distort” things, I write with “the sole intention” of confirming my stereotypical anti-radicalism. (1 must be improving. In The American Spectator my anti-feminism was “pathological.”)
It might be asked how Lazere knows anything at all about my motives, to say nothing of my pathologies. But perhaps a better question would be whether Lazere really desires to see his style of rebuttal become the norm in critical debate. Would he prefer it if I had written not that Ohmann is mistaken in his interpretation of certain literary texts, but rather that he knowingly dupes the students in his classes at Wesleyan? Would Lazere like it any better if I were to reply to his letter by saying, not that he has misunderstood my argument about Ohmann’s rhetoric, but rather that he has maliciously defamed a young anti-Marxist critic with the secret hope of blasting his reputation? Unless those who question the motives and scruples of their opponents are willing to see their questions turned back on themselves, they would do better to confine themselves to a discussion of ideas and leave off the playground insults.