Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 2, August 2005

Special Issue: Literary Universals

_______________________________________________________________

Roche, Mark William.  Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century.  New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004.  ISBN 0-300-10449-9.  ₤18.

Reviewed by

 

Gregory Vaughn McNamara

Clayton State University, USA

 

Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century by Mark William Roche is an ambitious and erudite gesture toward defining or redefining the moral matrix of literary, artistic, and critical expression for the new century.  Responding to what he perceives as a fundamental crisis in today’s “senseless, self-serving, and idle” literary establishment, Roche asks, “if literature and literary criticism are no longer anchored in the idea that the object of interpretation and evaluation is to garner a window onto an ideal sphere, why should we continue the enterprise?” (259).  This demanding book—more a work of philosophy than criticism—would have the reader see the social, intellectual, disciplinary, and even ecological consequences of what Roche perceives as irresponsible and misdirected critical practice.  It is notable that Roche chooses to evaluate twentieth and twenty-first century literature and criticism not so much on their own terms but from the more removed perspective of idealist philosophy, sometimes communicated through trans-historical metanarrative on the nature of artistic truth and sometimes through discrete labeling of the universal forms populating his overarching model.  Although it may be argued that Roche’s perspective and discursive mode lend an aura of objectivity and authority to his discussion, some readers may feel that his emphasis on specialized and highly allusive philosophic discourse belies the book’s implied subject and purpose; on a perhaps more problematic level, some readers may consider aspects of Roche’s method and message quaint.

In Roche’s view, contemporary criticism is too much removed from traditional aesthetic and moral examination of literature and has adopted an artistic and critical relativism that cannot but negatively affect literary studies and contemporary culture as a whole.  Has the literary and critical establishment become irrelevant as a moral touchstone for modern life?  Roche’s response to this and similar questions takes the form of a systematic meditation on artistic and intellectual integrity, primarily drawing upon his own expertise in modern German literature and culture but also engaging contemporary ethics and the history of ideas.  Perhaps the most significant critical problem Roche attends to is what he describes as a disconnect between nuanced, organically unified art—even of the most challenging and disturbing kind—and art founded in and illustrative of a kind of nihilism and dissonance that “may be a hidden reflex of our cynical unwillingness or inability to seek a higher level of symmetry in the world” (166).  Although Roche’s views into the origins of post-modernism’s creeping malaise resonate powerfully throughout this book and illustrate in complex ways the modernistic zeitgeist, his most fundamental premises (the quest for a zeitgeist among them) either insist upon the complete renunciation of post-structuralism’s emphasis on the particular, the culturally-located, and the chaotic or insist upon the reframing of those challenges to universal truth as its proofs.

Considering the canon, Roche offers the supposition that lack of discrimination in the assessment of literary merit in all aspects of content and form is among the chief failures of contemporary criticism.  “All topics,” Roche laments, “are now deemed equally worthy of study” (259).  In Roche’s view, this aesthetic and intellectual shift has countenanced irresponsibility in artistic production and betrays and, ultimately, alienates audiences.  This is the dark side of the modernist experiment—or, some might argue, its end.  Roche is concerned, justly, for the student of literature and the modern reader and, also justly, with the future of criticism as a viable discipline: “Literature is written not for the scholar but for the general public, and so the critic should speak not only to the scholar but also to the intelligent layperson.  Most literary criticism, however, does not satisfy the moral value of enhancing the reader’s understanding of the work” (76).  So in this intellectual—or anti-intellectual—context, “a simple scribble” or an expression of “unsublated evil” are subjects for analysis as worthy as Shakespeare in what Roche, in a moment of unfortunate hyperbole that has the unintentional effect of diminishing the most horrific events of modern history, calls “value free science at its most destructive level” (42).  Such moments frustrate the reader and cry against the objectivity Roche works so hard to establish.  On a more realistic level, Roche offers interesting, even absorbing, discussion of the place of eccentricity and play in artistic production and affords the fringe much room in critical reception and clearly appreciates its contribution to culture when it meets his terms.  More specifically, Roche argues that there is a significant difference between alienation and anxiety that produce works of greatness and moral distinction and the more pervasive alienation that merely replicates the values of abusive systems, dehumanizing technologies, and moral dissolution at the core of that alienation.

What is moral excellence in art?  What is the impact of the spirit of the age on artistic and critical production?  And how should we define great art, and why?  Roche does build his argument on time-honored questions, but it is exceedingly difficult to ignore the history of withering challenges, from Dada to deconstruction, to the mode of inquiry Roche endorses and employs.  Can the modern student of criticism—presumably the audience of this book—accept that true or great art must not only exhibit the unities of a transcendent aesthetic but also communicate a moral purpose beyond its social and material reality?  At this juncture we find the critic: “The endeavor of the literary critic,” Roche asserts, “is . . . not unrelated to the modern scientist who seeks in nature the hidden order and veiled patterns behind the seemingly arbitrary and chaotic” (33).  Roche’s vision of the universe—and of art—is tightly ordered, and he rightly expects as much of his reader, but it is possible that his exhortation toward the sacred truths of art—a major feature of the overall argument—may be the book’s greatest liability.

In terms of the specific structure of Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century, following a cogent introduction which engages the traditional and contemporary questions referenced above, Roche offers a “normative discussion of the value of literature and literary criticism,” which examines “more traditional questions and traditional aesthetics” (12).  The function of this discussion is the definition of key terms and assumptions regarding questions running the philosophic register from aesthetics to epistemology.  At its most basic level, this initial discussion asserts Roche’s understanding of organic unity and balance in content and form as among the most desirable goals of literary production and interpretation.  One will by this early stage of the book understand that Roche’s overall position is not so much about the twenty-first century or literature proper but rather that he has the more salient purpose of addressing the general crisis of faith and reason across history and as figured in a range of postmodern representations.  Herein we find art, artist, critic, student, and lay reader embroiled in an epic struggle against the unsettling figure of rapid change and the new and tempting but morally empty emergent paradigms.  To provide a picture of the problem from a critical standpoint, Roche dedicates the conclusion of the first half of the book to a classification of modern criticism, here represented in the direct and elegant if deceptively narrow confines of the historical and formalistic approaches and their natural descendants, cultural studies and deconstruction, the general nature of which will be clear to readers of this review and of the book itself, too; but Roche’s purpose is less to classify exhaustively than to broadly—and from a safe distance—suggest where modern criticism has come close to getting it right but missed.

The second part of the book, an extended meditation on “The Technological Age,” values contemporary over classical philosophic discourse as the primary mode of inquiry and offers a survey of the postmodern landscape through a humanistic, ecologically-sensitive lens.  The aesthetic and critical problems Roche isolates with respect to what he perceives as the moral significance of modernism and the crisis of meaning in modern and postmodern art and criticism are intensified under the pressures of his vision of unbridled technology and the waves of meaningless and alienating information accompanying that technological deluge.  The most distinctive aspect of this part of Roche’s argument—and possibly the book as whole—is his assertion of a symbiotic theory of art and ecology in which he suggests, “Artworks that evoke a concept of self-restraint and of embeddedness within the cosmos might better assist us in cultivating the consciousness that would resist overconsumption and limit indefinite expansion” (218).  Roche’s emphasis on social and geophysical balance neatly parallels and expands his positioning of organic unity as the most objective measurement and, paradoxically, most transcendent quality of artistic expression in the first part of the book.

While Roche’s general observations on the relationship between art and culture are insightful and offer a modern reframing of the classic concerns outlined early in the book, Roche’s implication that critical modes that do not meet his moral standards are not only socially but ecologically degrading pushes the boundaries of logic.  One might wonder at first, for example, whether Roche wrote with tongue in cheek when composing complementary paragraphs on the moral and intellectual emptiness of the New Historicism and the destructiveness of cancer-causing pollutions generated by unbridled industry, but the author, it seems, would have this parallel taken seriously (152-3).  Can literature and criticism have a direct impact on the degradation or reclamation of global ecology through the implementation and distribution of a universal moral frame?  Perhaps, but if Roche is looking for moral cancers in modern society, it might be cautioned that there are much more sinister locales to interrogate than the literary criticism section of university libraries or even the most morally objectionable art, so long as these expressions do not constitute actual crime.  To argue that the most baneful results of modern alienation emerge because criticism is sleeping on its watch seems to place an inordinate proportion of blame on an industry that even with all its warts does much good in the name of keeping art, thought, and intellectual freedom alive in contemporary culture.

The ideas at the core of this book link Roche to idealist thinkers who have questioned and attempted to prescribe the proper form, function, and morality of the arts—and technology—for millennia.  Right or wrong, and it would be hard to prove one way or the other, Roche claims that “Fewer and fewer works address the broader dimensions of literary history in their overarching scope, much as fewer and fewer works discuss the normative presuppositions and essential principles of the discipline.  The postmodern abandonment of metanarratives . . . and postmodernism’s embrace of the particular and local at the expense of the universal have given strength to this development” (165).  These developments, Roche argues, parallel and may even contribute to the ecological shortsightedness of the age.

Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century is a challenging book by a deeply learned author that, despite its trendy title, addresses issues of art and morality as old as the subjects themselves and at a level of philosophic discourse far beyond the scope of the lay reader Roche sometimes invokes to scold modern critics.  Audience considerations may prove a problem for this book: it may be that the potent subtext referencing the politicizing of modern art in early twentieth-century Germany will speak much more eloquently to ethicists and students of modern Germany than Roche’s primary argument will to the students of literature whose methods, taste, and morals concern Roche so profoundly.  Roche’s often stern indictment of contemporary literary criticism—and his somewhat dismissive method of summarizing developments in contemporary literary theory—may alienate the audience he should be most interested in convincing of his views, an audience steeped in post-structuralist theory, identity politics, and the post-modern unlikely to accept a prescriptive aesthetic based on organic unity and morally absolute standards of critical or cultural normativity.  While some objections will be raised in response to Mark William Roche’s Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century, Roche has written a timely, humane book and offered an analysis of critical culture that even readers who disagree with his methods and conclusions will benefit from considering.