After scanning down Greg Lennes's site this morning (MOBY-DICK sung in Chicago--and on and on) I thought about how in the 21st century Melville has been absorbed into American life as never before.
I remember when the flagship journal of American Literature, the one named AMERICAN LITERATURE, devoted an issue to showing why Melville should not be taught in any classroom and incidentally why my biography should be blocked before it could be published ("We already have full scale biographies of Melville"). You don't remember? Here is Paul Lauter at the start, writing with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities:
The article that set the tone for the March 1994 issue of AMERICAN LITERATURE was written by Paul Lauder under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Called "Melville Climbs the Canon," it was cleverly designed to throw Melville back out of that canon. Lauter recounted his polling some 100 students as to "the names of five or perhaps ten American books or writers" they thought "an educated person should have read—'educated' being defined as having completed a B. A. degree." He reported that Melville was never listed—"left off—with not a single vote among the one hundred or more registered in" the poll. Lauter selected some comments meant as representative: "You really feel belittled when you're reading Melville." Lauter continued sympathetically (no one wants to feel belittled): "My students seemed actively to dislike Melville, to feel humiliated by the prose and ignorant before the dense web of Melville's allusive, syntactically intricate style and his convoluted plotting."
This was the opening piece in a deeply distressing campaign to drive Melville out of the classroom. It did not happen very often. Most students, and not only white upper-class students, love Melville, given the chance. If you want evidence, look now almost weekly in Greg Lennes's Melville site at classroom projects where students are involved in reading and responding joyously to Melville. It seems to me that giving the ADE March award to Lauder is one of the indications that the ADE, like the Modern Language Association itself, has marginalized the very people who formed it, people, even some from lower classes, even back then, who have gained enough education to love great stories greatly told.
I remember when the flagship journal of American Literature, the one named AMERICAN LITERATURE, devoted an issue to showing why Melville should not be taught in any classroom and incidentally why my biography should be blocked before it could be published ("We already have full scale biographies of Melville"). You don't remember? Here is Paul Lauter at the start, writing with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities:
The article that set the tone for the March 1994 issue of AMERICAN LITERATURE was written by Paul Lauder under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Called "Melville Climbs the Canon," it was cleverly designed to throw Melville back out of that canon. Lauter recounted his polling some 100 students as to "the names of five or perhaps ten American books or writers" they thought "an educated person should have read—'educated' being defined as having completed a B. A. degree." He reported that Melville was never listed—"left off—with not a single vote among the one hundred or more registered in" the poll. Lauter selected some comments meant as representative: "You really feel belittled when you're reading Melville." Lauter continued sympathetically (no one wants to feel belittled): "My students seemed actively to dislike Melville, to feel humiliated by the prose and ignorant before the dense web of Melville's allusive, syntactically intricate style and his convoluted plotting."
Melville, concluded Lauter, "had become
for them" (his students) "a representative of what they hated about
their academic training." He knew when this had come about—in the Melville
Revival of the 1920s: "I want to argue that, in the main, 'Melville' was
constructed in the 1920s as part of an ideological conflict which linked
advocates of modernism and of traditional high cultural values—often connected
to the academy—against a social and cultural 'other," generally, if
ambiguously, portrayed as feminine, genteel, exotic, dark, foreign, and
numerous. In this contest a distinctively masculine, Anglo-Saxon image of
Melville was deployed as a lone and powerful artistic beacon against the
dangers presented by the masses; creating such an image entailed overlooking
issues of race, eroticism, democracy, and the like."
Lauter suggested "that much of Melville's
appeal, especially in the critical period during which he was being established
as a 'classic' writer, has precisely to do with the validation of boys' tastes
in mens' criticisms." Masculinity (as the enemy of feminism) "was
precisely part of Melville's appeal to twenties critics." Melville, in
fact, was an oppressor of young, poor, minority students (including numbers of
children of recent immigrants). Lauter explained his students' "distaste
for Melville": "For them, the modernist preference for difficult,
indeed obscure, texts is no virtue; it may, in fact, reflect a process deeply
inflected by class standards, whose effect is to marginalize them
culturally." No wonder Paul
Lauter's students hated Melville! So well had
the National Endowment for the Humanities spent our money! Down with anyone who
marginalizes all students culturally!
This was the opening piece in a deeply distressing campaign to drive Melville out of the classroom. It did not happen very often. Most students, and not only white upper-class students, love Melville, given the chance. If you want evidence, look now almost weekly in Greg Lennes's Melville site at classroom projects where students are involved in reading and responding joyously to Melville. It seems to me that giving the ADE March award to Lauder is one of the indications that the ADE, like the Modern Language Association itself, has marginalized the very people who formed it, people, even some from lower classes, even back then, who have gained enough education to love great stories greatly told.
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