Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth, Donald Trump, Wai-chee Dimock, and the Death of the Modern Language Association

Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth, Wai-chee Dimock, and the Death of the Modern Language Association

        The TLS for 27 July 2018 devoted a full page to “Deconstruction  industry: Issues with truth in modern America,” an excerpt from Michiko Kakutani’s  book THE DEATH OF TRUTH,”--available from Amazon Prime  for $14.12 

            Kakutani  points to the way the 2016 Trump campaign echoed the “postmodernist arguments” of the academic elite in the preceding decades:

It’s safe to say that Trump has never ploughed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard, and postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land. But some dumbed-down corollaries of their thinking have seeped into popular culture and been hijacked by the President’s defenders, who want to use its relativistic arguments to excuse his lies, and by right-wingers who want to question evolution or deny the reality of climate change or promote alternative facts.

            Kakutani goes on to discuss Jacques Derrida and his academic followers: Derrida, she says, “used the word ‘deconstruction’ to posit that all texts are unstable and irreducibly complex and that ever variable meanings are imputed by readers and observers. In focusing on the possible contradictions and ambiguities of a text (and articulating such arguments in deliberately tangled and pretentious prose), it promulgated an extreme relativism that was ultimately nihilistic in its implications; anything could mean anything; an author’s intent did not matter, could not in fact be discerned; there was no such thing as an obvious or common-sense reading, because everything had an infinitude of meanings. In short, there was no such thing as truth.”

            In July 1990 in American Literary Scholarship (55) Brian Higgins printed my warning that Neal Tolchin’s transcriptions from family letters in Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville were not to be trusted, specifying a particularly disastrous misreading of a letter Melville’s mother wrote inFebruary 1846. In December 1990 the Melville Society meeting was packed with new New Historicists, second-generation New Leftists (who had fervor but less purpose than the first), and a large group of second- and third-generation New Critics who had never done archival research and had certainly not been taught to do responsible research. I misread the atmosphere in the room as one of free-floating political correctness, not sharply focused, but the mood of the audience was hostile from the start. When Wai-chee Dimock resurrected Lewis Mumford’s long-refuted claim that Hawthorne had based Ethan Brand on Melville (before he met him or  read anything but Typee), Hayford mildly reproved her, saying that if she thought it was acceptable to bring forth the Ethan Brand claim as a serious possibility, she was using a different standard for evidence than he used. At that, there was a subterranean murmur of anger in the audience like the incipient rebellion in Billy Budd, the mood hardening into fury that anyone’s idea could be considered invalid on grounds of biographical evidence. In the new post-scholarly climate to point out errors was to violate the playground rules: one should always enhance one’s playmate’s selfesteem. The audience was further incited when an onlooker, a satanic red-bearded stranger (more mildly described by Robert K. Wallace in Melville and Turner (611) as “the petulant stranger in the doorway”)  kept crying out, with regard to Melville and history, ‘THE FACTS DON’T MATTER.’” Accepting reality, I never attended another Melville Society meeting in the United States.   

            Already, Wai-chee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty (1989), an early contribution to the New Historicism, had been blurbed by Sacvan Bercovitch as giving “a model of a new kind of historical scholarship that has absorbed (as distinct from imitated) ‘European theory’ and whose historicism is a form of sophisticated multidisciplinary analysis.” This is from her second paragraph (3–4):

Far from being a liability, territorial expansion had come to be seen, by the 1830s, as a basic requirement for the nation’s well-being, so basic that it became practically an alimentary need. Major Davezac, a speaker at the 1844 New Jersey Democratic State Convention, proceeded from just that premise when he alluded to America’s “pasture grounds”—invoking, in his zeal, if not the “mighty bulk” of the whale, then something almost as bulky: “Make way, I say, for the young American Buffalo—he has not yet got land enough; he wants more land as his cool shelter in summer—he wants more land for his beautiful pasture grounds. I tell you, we will give him Oregon for his summer shade, and the region of Texas as his winter pasture. (Applause.) Like all of his race, he wants salt, too. Well, he shall have the use of two oceans—the mighty Pacific and the turbulent Atlantic shall be his.”

Melville, Dimock declared, “could not have known about a speech at the New Jersey convention,” but he and Davezac, “the enshrined writer and the forgotten speaker,” together inhabited “a historical moment” (4). Davezac was worth recalling, “obscure as he once was and discredited as he has since become” (5).

            In Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (2012) I looked at Dimock’s assertation that  Davezac had become discredited—discredited by her personally stringent standards of political correctness in which anyone is evil who advocated expansion in the 1840s. Her “historicism” had not driven her to find even the first name of this man who was anything but obscure. The great adventure of Auguste Davezac’s life was being aide-de-camp to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and every American in the 1840s knew that whatever credit some precisionists gave to the Treaty of Ghent the war was really won at New Orleans on January 8, 1815. Davezac was also a prominent literary man, capable of writing learnedly on Froissart’s Chronicles in the November 1843 United States Magazine and Democratic Review, one of his favorite places to publish. His contemporaries would have hooted at the idea that he was obscure. Melville, Dimock was sure, “could not have known” about a particular 1844 speech of Davezac’s. But how far-fetched is it to think that Melville may have known a good deal about Major Davezac, and perhaps might even have read some of his speeches, perhaps even that particular one?

            Melville’s older brother Gansevoort in his instant-retrieval Index Rerum (now in the Berkshire Athenaeum) which he used in 1840 and 1842 noted a speech by Major Davezac “of New Orleans” and just where to find it (“the whole speech is contained in Bell’s New Era for February 29, 1840”). In the 1840 election, while Herman was in the United States, Gansevoort had campaigned with Davezac, according to what Davezac wrote to Robert J. Walker, the secretary of the treasury, on April 11, 1845: “Soon after my arrival in the State of New-York, I became acquainted with Mr. G. Melville, by being fellow labourers in the cause of Democracy, in the canvass of 1840. Young as he then was, he gave indications of talents, as a popular orator, which his mature exertions, in the last memorable contest, have proved not to have been fallacious” (letter in the National Archives). As reported in the New York Tribune of June 15, 1843, on the previous day Davezac and Gansevoort both championed the dissolution of the union between Ireland and Great Britain at a great Repeal meeting, Davezac speaking at length as one of the stars and young Gansevoort speaking more briefly. During the final days of the 1844 campaign Herman was in New York with Gansevoort and Allan, the next younger Melville brother, and would have been aware of his older brother’s association with a hero of the Battle of New Orleans. During that campaign Allan had saved in a “bushell” basket dozens of thin newspapers containing Gansevoort’s speeches, and might well have saved some of Davezac’s along with his brother’s, since the two were political allies.

            When Davezac rode in the great Democratic torchlight procession in Manhattan on November 1, 1844, in which Gansevoort and Allan Melville also took part, and which the newly returned from whaling Herman witnessed (having missed Gansevoort in Lansingburgh and hurried down to see him), he carried a banner and a flag, the banner proclaiming “this flag was at the battle of new orleans 8th january, 1815: major a. davezac.” For all Democrats he was a national hero. Early in 1845, while Melville was writing Typee in Manhattan, Davezac was everywhere in the press. The Democratic Review in February, out in late January, carried an article on him accompanied by “a Portrait on Steel,” and the article was reprinted in the Broadway Journal and the New World and perhaps elsewhere. Davezac in the April 11, 1845, letter to Walker championed Gansevoort Melville for an appointment from President Polk on the basis of his great services in 1844. For a time Gansevoort had possession of the strong letter of support which Davezac wrote for him, and typically would have shown it to Allan. Herman might have been in Lansingburgh by then, but he might have heard of the letter from Gansevoort or Allan if he did not actually hold it in his hands and read it. Certainly to Melville there was nothing obscure and nothing discredited about Auguste Davezac. Dimock, however, seems arbitrarily to have declared Davezac discredited because he believed, half a decade before the admission of California to the Union, that the United States should expand to the Pacific. Harboring in Morro Bay, California, as I do, I feel more than a little distressed at Dimock’s implicit condemnation of California’s having been brought into the Union. Can Californians ever redeem themselves to her level of politically correct purity?

            What Dimock practiced in Empire for Liberty, and what many of her New Critical and New Historicist peers practiced, was historicism without historical research. Names of historical figures? pieces to be used as decorations. Yet she traveled to libraries: “I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Melville Collection at the Newberry Library, which has compiled the nineteenth-century reviews” (228 n. 16). “Which” is revealing: the impersonal “Collection” had compiled “the” reviews. She had the thrill of discovery by opening a drawer and finding reviews compiled by the “Collection”! She could not visualize my compiling the files during repeated trips to the New York Public Library Annex, the New-York Historical Society, and many other repositories. The “Collection” had compiled “the” reviews—meaning all the reviews that existed? I was engaged in an ongoing compilation of reviews but it plainly never occurred to her that she could have joined in the hunt, perhaps in papers especially apt to take a political slant congenial to her. “Which has compiled” reveals her failure to visualize real scholars doing productive work in her own time. Similarly, she is thrilled by dipping into books written by people who have gone to libraries more remote even than faraway Chicago and have handled expensive books with their own hands. She cites a book by R. W. Van Alstyne for the source of her quotation from a 1776 book, not just any old book but “a rare book in the Huntington Library”—’way out in California, near the City of Angels (217)! Dimock breathlessly flirts with the trappings of scholarship.

            Dimock had absorbed without question her New Critical and New Historicist training. For her there were no living researchers engaged in ongoing archival scholarship, and there never had been living writers engaged in ongoing creative projects. For her (223), the “standard critique of the notion of ‘creativity’ is Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production” (which she cites in a late translation). She cites approvingly Jerome McGann, a follower of James Thorpe’s theory of the socialized text (which denigrates the creative process), and cites Paul Feyerabend’s 1987 “Creativity—A Dangerous Myth” (223). In that article Feyerabend declares that “the view that culture needs individual creativity” is “not only absurd but also dangerous” (701). The creative author is a myth (the reader, trendy academics had known since the 1970s, creates meaning, not the writer) and the idea of individual creativity is dangerous, at least to current critical theory. As Joel Myerson said in Text (1993), McGann suggested “an almost Marxist, collective ownership of the text among the authors and other participants in its creation: the ‘workers’ of the text have indeed united” (115). Dimock does not cite the great 1979 book by Albert Rothenberg, The Emerging Goddess, which she ought to have known as the “standard” book on the creative process, and does not cite exciting new work done on creativity and in the cognitive sciences in the 1980s, particularly on perception and memory.7 She apparently had no practical information about the creative process and no idea at all about what real scholars do, no idea that real scholars compile evidence exhaustively before daring to try to interpret it. No wonder she typically takes her quotations at second hand, from people who have quoted passages from other books: picking her quotations from other books distances her from real scholars working with real documents. As Robert D. Hume says in Reconstructing Contexts, among New Historicists literary criticism becomes “an elaborate game played for the self-glorification of the participants” (190).

            Remember Sacvan Bercovitch’s praise of Wai-chee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty (1989), as an early contribution to the New Historicism, “a model of a new kind of historical scholarship that has absorbed (as distinct from imitated) ‘European theory’ and whose historicism is a form of sophisticated multidisciplinary analysis.” A Historicism in which no one does any historical research.

            In 2016 Donald Trump was elected President of the United States and Wai-chee Dimock was elected Editor of PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION. In 2018 Michiko Katutani published THE DEATH OF TRUTH.