Eugene Goodheart

Arnold, critic of ideology

ity, and universality, for they now turn out to be mystifications that conceal motives of domination. We may experience Jamesons claim that a universal agreement exists as coercive and may wonder how ideology critique itself escapes being ideological if everything is ideology. And if it doesnt, we may ask what in the way of understanding is accomplished by the critique of ideology. But I doubt whether any of us have been unaffected by views such as Jamesons. We have all become to one degree or another suspicious of objectivist and universalist arguments. And Arnold, because of his centrality in the history of literary studies, continues to be a magnet for our suspicions. Arnold has in fact become the victim of a historical irony. Contemporary ideology critique has turned the tables on the cultural criticism practiced by Arnold. The idea of culture came into being in the nineteenth century as an optic through which the mechanical degradation of human life was seen and judged. In arrogating to itself the spiritual authority of failing religious dogma, culture claimed or aimed to be disinterested, free of the contaminations of the social and political practices it scrutinized. What has virtually disappeared in the current scene is the sense of culture or art as a force resistant to ideology. The task of the ideology critic is to demystify the ways in which cultural expressions conceal or deflect class, race, and gender interests. Arnold has his vulnerabilities and has been the target of a demystifying criticism, though often it seems to me on the basis of mystifications of his meaning by his critics.

The Failure of Criticism

H UMANIST CRITICISM, which has as its object the quality of life as well as works of art, no longer has authority. By humanist criticism I mean something richer and more significant than fault-finding literary journalism or even than the academic study of books, though it is possible for literary journalism and academic study to rise to the condition of humanist criticism. Matthew Arnold, F. R. Leavis, and Raymond Williams in the English tradition, Lionel Trilling in the American, and Ortega y Gasset and Walter Benjamin in the European are major instances, though they are by no means exhaustive nor do they together express a single ideological point of view. The most impressive expression of humanist criticism occurs in nineteenth-century England. The work of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold has as its major theme the spiritual consequences of the new mechanical civilization and the French Revolution. It is a criticism inspired by a positive order of values, nourished by a moral understanding of the religious tradition and by a profound appreciation of the works of art and intellect of past and present (in Arnolds words, the best that has been known and thought). Its principal expression is the essay, but it may express itself as a novel or a poem. The authority implicit in such criticism has been beautifully stated by I. A. Richards:

Modernism and the critical spirit

Complaints about the decline of critical standards in literature and culture in general have been voiced for much of the twentieth century. These have extended from F.R. Leaviss laments for a lost center of intelligence and urbane spirit, to current opposition to the predominance of radical critical theory in contemporary literature departments. Humanist criticism, which has as its object the quality of life as well as works of art, may well lack authority in the contemporary world. Even amid the disruptions of the industrial revolution, nineteenth-century humanists such as Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle could assume a positive order of value and shared habits of imaginative perception and understanding between writers and readers. Eugene Goodheart argues that, by contrast, contemporary criticism is infused with the skepticism of modernist aesthetics. It has willfully rejected the very idea of moral authority. Goodheart starts from the premise that questions about the moral authority of literature and criticism often turn upon a prior question of what happens when the sacred disappears or is subjected to the profane. He focuses on contending spiritual views, in particular the dialectic between the Protestant-inspired, largely English humanist tradition of Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and D.H. Lawrence and the decay of Catholicism represented by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Goodheart argues that literary modernism, in distancing itself from natural and social vitality, tends to render suspect all privileged positions. It thereby undermines the critical act, which assumes the priority of a particular set of values. Goodheart makes his case by analyzing the work of a variety of novelists, poets, and critics, nineteenth century and contemporary. He blends literary theory and practical criticism.

Jew d'Esprit

This essay is an offshoot of a memoir I recently published with the title Confessions of a Secular Jew. Here is a confession that I did not make in the memoir: the title was an afterthought. I did not set out to write about being a secular Jew -- as if it were a phenomenon as definable as being an Orthodox or Conservative or even Reform Jew. We know what a secular Jew is not, a religious Jew. We might rest perhaps with the positive idea that he is a worldly Jew, but is that sufficient to define him? Religious Jews may also be worldly. Hasidim, for instance, are famous as diamond merchants. If worldliness were all that secular Jewishness comes to, it would seem not to come to very much. Notice I refrain from speaking of secular Judaism, because of the religious connotations and associations of Judaism. Abstract definition is a fruitless effort. So perhaps I should begin by describing how I came to write the memoir and how after much straggle I arrived at the title -- that is, at the meaning of secular Jewishness. The germ of the memoir is a personal essay I published with the title I am a Jew, enclosed in quotation marks because it is a translation of the title of a Yiddish poem by a once famous Soviet Jewish poet, Itzhik Feffer. The poem is a celebration of Jewish straggles for liberation from the time of Moses through the Maccabean uprisings against the Syrian-Greeks, from Bar Kochbahs revolt against the Romans to the struggle against Nazism. Here are two of the many stanzas of the poem (my translation.) The forty years in ancient times I suffered in the desert sand Gave me strength. I heard Bar Kochbas rebel cry At every turn through my ordeal And more than gold did I possess The stubborn pride of my grandfather I am a Jew. I am a Jew who drank From Stalins magical cup of happiness. To those who wish to destroy Moscow And turn us out of our land To them I shout, Down with you! I march together with the peoples of the east. The Russians are my brothers. I am a Jew. As a kid, I attended a Yiddish shuleh where I learned to recite, better to declaim, Yiddish poems in public. One of the poems I learned was Ich bin a Yid. When Feffer came to America during World W II to raise money for the Russian War Relief, he visited Camp Kinderland, a summer camp in upstate New York where I was a camper. One of my gifts was the possession of a Yiddish diction that one hears on the Yiddish stage. How I acquired this precocity I cannot say, but I had an extraordinary ear for the words and cadences of Yiddish poetry and was in demand by Yiddish-speaking clubs to recite Yiddish poems. When Feffer arrived at Camp Kinderland, I was asked to recite the poem to a large audience in his presence. As you can imagine, it was one of the great events of my childhood. I have a photo of myself age twelve reciting the poem with clenched fist in the air on a stage draped with Soviet and American flags. Ich bin a Yid is not a good poem, filled as it is with banal sentiments, but it has an impressive and stirring sound in Yiddish. Its most memorable line is the unfortunate: I am a Jew who drank from Stalins magical cup of happiness. What a terrible irony! Feffer was an apparatchik and a wordsmith. He knew more than he spoke. He certainly knew enough or thought he knew enough to survive in Stalins Russia. Despots love to be celebrated in poetry. While Feffer focuses his bravado on the grave the Nazis are preparing for him and his fellow Jews, without his knowledge a grave is being prepared for him by his own god, the being from whose hand he has received, so he tells us, the cup of happiness. Some time after he wrote the poem, Feffer was denounced under the red flag. Joshua Rubinstein of Amnesty International has recently published a book, Stalins Secret Pogrom, about the persecution and prosecution of fifteen Soviet Jewish writers on trumped-up charges of treason. …

The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism

Eugene Goodhearts remarkably compact and penetrating analysis examines the skeptic disposition that has informed advanced literary discourse over the past generation.Originally published in 1985.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.