since my last posting

About ten days ago, I tried to post some thoughts on Shakespeare from his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, but lost them in some sort of cyber mishap. Since then, I have seen Coriolanus-one of his "Roman" plays along with Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra--at the Royal Theatre in Stratford, visited a friend in Northern Ireland and am now heading into my last period of time in Galway.
I've also managed to get some reading finished, mostly about American Naturalism at the turn of the 20th Century, which I find infinitely fascinating and enriching. I'm not really an afficiando to some of the ways in which literary criticism has gone since--I think--certain parts of the academy reached the conclusion that universities are "businesses"--abut 30 years ago, I think--and any department or field of study that does not make a profit somehow is automatically suspect. That being said, I don't think a given work of fiction or drama (loosely, literature) can be read apart from its immediate historical, political, economic and theological context any more than I think the any part of the Bible can be read apart from those same influences. My academic education at Vanderbilt Divinity School helped me to understand that and it's a logical bridge to literature. What issues I tend to have, however, relate more to what the premises of a given critical school and, less clearly, what lengths its adherents are willing to go to implement their ideas. My cultural education at Vanderbilt Divinity School taught me to ask those questions.
Context matters: that's my starting point for reading a given work of literature. Context matters, at the same time, in how it stands in tension with the text being read and discussed. Using a text to make some claim about the critic's school of thought, however, is where my problems begin. To do so uses a text--say King Lear or O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night--for purposes other than what the play or novel or short story addresses in its own context. Such forms of criticism adapt the text for a specific agenda, usually having something to so with "radical politics" as defined by the given critic. Questions about the outcome of such "radical politics" tend to be dismissed or swept aside with bromides like one offered by my systemtic theology professor at Vanderbilt in the fall of 1987: once "liberation" occurs, "everything else will take care of itself."
My professor's context rooted itself in his "Hegelian-Marxist" reading of Christian theology vis a vis the politically-rooted theological movements of Latin America and various expressions of particularization throughout the United States. My professor believed, I think, that once liberation took place (he didn't say how it would take place, as I recall), human beings would somehow stop the behaviors which have defined our existence since we crawled out of the mud however many millions of years ago. I tried to ask "What happens next?," in an effort to get him to describe a society where "everything else will take care of itself." He smiled--condescendingly--and didn't answer my question. His lack of an answer was, of course, his answer in that he had none. From my experience these--wow--20 years later wth literary critics who espouse one form or another of "radical politics," they seem to have almost no answers apart from a designation that capitalism is the great evil in the post-modern world and somehow if we as humans divide ourselves into particularities of experience, we will somehow keep ourselves from doing to one another what we have done since we crawled out of the mud however many millions of years ago (repetition intended).
As a "card-carrying member of the religious left,"--as one of my current professors called me and God bless him--I certainly believe capitalism has more than its share of problems. My father grew up in near-poverty as the son of a sharecropper in Depression-era Missouri and his father worked sometimes three jobs to put food on the table (being white didn't hurt as Dad came later to understand). Wealth distribution is a terrible problem, especially when a few seem to live in conspicuous consumption while billions seem to be without adequate drinking water--never mind anything else. The biblical prophets from Amos and Hosea onward spoke loudly, clearly and with the power of God to the rampant inequalities that existed around them. Jesus from Nazareth, as the Gospels imply, didn't spend his time consorting with the powerful, but those who lived on the edge of starvation, exclusion and hopelessness. Capitalism is inadequate as a system.
To call for "radical--something beyond capitalism--politics," however, without offering specific policy solutions is for these current critics to express the same "defiant optimism" as my theology professor did, also quoting him from 1987. Both literary critics today and my professor then, in other words, were willing to propose next to nothing in the face of, as Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us, "what every page of human history attests" (paraphrase from The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness). Human will behave better, these people appear to say. The twentieth century not withstanding--or the previous 30 for that matter--surely with radical social change inspired by the right readings and inspired action of literature, history and theology, all will become well. I would, rather, continue to raise, hoist and waive the flags of caution, relying upon what has happened and that almost no one denies (these folks rationalize, but usually don't deny). That reliance tells me that how we humans have behaved is--with very, very few exceptions--how we will always behave and that is not a pretty picture. Capitalism, I am led to argue, becomes neither the problem nor the solution. Human beings are both the problem and the potentially mitigating force of solution.
Somehow, as you might have surmised, literature got lost in all of this. That's a good part of my point too.