Cultural Politics - Queer Reading

Alan Sinfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134837656
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Following a first edition that generated wide-spread debate, Cultural Politics– Queer Reading is a bold study of the future of critical theory and the role of gender, ethnicity and cultures within academic literary studies.An illuminating introduction to the second edition revisits the book's agenda for a new form of cultural critique and a truly political lesbian and gay studies. Sinfield renews his call for an 'Englit' that incorporates ongoing study of the cultures of ethnicity, gender and sexuality.Challenging the assumptions that have shaped the study of English literature, Sinfield engages provocatively with topics such asthe gendering of literary culture, the sexual politics of psychoanalysis during the Cold War andthe history of cultural materialism. He discusses such key figures as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Arthur Miller, Holly Hughes, Audre Lorde and Jeanette Winterson.This influential investigation of the principles and practice that may form dissident reading, forms compelling argument for intellectual allegiances beyond the academy.

1. Shakespeare and Dissident Reading

Flying Visit

Last time I traveled to the United States, before I could reach the airline desk in London, I met with the additional checks that have been provoked by fears of terrorism. Who was I? Why was I traveling? To the young security guard, I evidently didn’t look like his idea of a professor. Anyway, professor of what? This was where the trouble really started. English Literature—he’d really hated that subject, he’d flunked out in that, he just couldn’t stand English Literature.

Disaster: this man could detain me till it was too late to catch my flight. Another problem was that he couldn’t work out why I might be going to talk about English, when they have lots of people there doing it already. Well, he was quite cute, and of course I was charming, so we joshed around a bit; eventually we were getting to be buddies. So he said: “OK, I’ll test you. Who was the guy who wanted his pound of flesh?” “Got it!,” I exclaimed: “Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.” And, exhilarated that I was on the point of winning through, I added: “Isn’t that a horrible play?” “YES!” he shouted, astonished at the convergence in our judgments, “Isn’t that a horrible play!”

The young man was Jewish, I deduced. And my journey had been threatened by the insults he had experienced as a student, and by his belief that I must be committed to the universal wisdom and truth of The Merchant. “We don’t do it like that any more,” I told him: “now we talk about how Shakespeare got to write it that way, and why we don’t like it. Cultural politics.” “Is that what you do now?” he enthused, “That’s what you do? That’s just great!” So I gained an endorsement for at least some humanities work, and caught my plane.

There are various thoughts to ponder in this story. One group concerns the relationship between Englit in the U.K. and the United States; that underlies a good deal of this book. Another group of thoughts, of course, is about the still-dominant way of considering literary texts—as if they transcend political questions. For instance: in the midst of a shocking survey of anti-Semitic uses of The Merchant—from the eighteenth century to the present, from Nazi people to nice people such as Muriel Bradbrook and C.S. Lewis—John Gross proclaims: “Shylock would not have held the stage for four hundred years if he were a mere stereotype. His greatness is to be himself, to transcend the roles of representative Jew and conventional usurer.” Louis Simpson, reviewing Gross’s book in the New York Times Book Review, agrees: the play is “protean,” “unexhausted,” an “apparently timeless subject.”¹

For Philip Roth, in his novel Operation Shylock, it is the other way round. The powerful imaginative realization that Shakespeare has achieved is the problem:

To the audiences of the world Shylock is the embodiment of the Jew in the way Uncle Sam embodies for them the spirit of the United States. Only, in Shylock’s case, there is an overwhelming Shakespearean reality, a terrifying aliveness that your pasteboard Uncle Sam cannot begin to possess. . . . only the greatest English writer of them all could have had the prescience to isolate and dramatize as he did. You remember Shylock’s opening line? You remember the three words? What Jew can forget them? What Christian can forgive them? “Three thousand ducats.” Five blunt, unbeautiful English syllables and the stage Jew is elevated to its apogee by a genius, catapulted into eternal notoriety.²

It is not a question of accusing Shakespeare of “being racist”; he lived a long time ago when people thought differently about all kinds of things, and doubtless did his best to make sense of it, like most of us. And, as Gross observes, the Jewish stereotype does not derive from him. But, Gross admits, “he endowed it with his fame and prestige, and in a sense his humanising it only made it seem more plausible” (p. 287). It is a question of what the play tends to do, and may be made to do, in our cultures.

Of course, it might be objected that my security guard wasn’t very well educated; that he wasn’t reading “properly”—i.e., in the manner of Englit. Perhaps he had not been told, as Lillian S. Robinson was, to set aside anti-Semitism and address “the real point of the work.” He had not been persuaded, as Lionel Trilling was, to embrace the reduction of “cultural diversity to what appeared, from an intellectual standpoint, to be the highest common denominator, the English cultural tradition.” Trilling is famous partly as the first Jewish person to be hired to teach English at Columbia University; he is not known to have complained that The Merchant was pressed upon him in high school.³ The guard had not been trained to identify with the Christians against the Jews, as Adrienne Rich was. She recalls being given the role of Portia, despite being perceived as the only Jewish girl in the class, and urged (by her self-oppressed father) to say “the word ‘Jew’ ” with “more scorn and contempt.” She was encouraged “to pretend to be a non-Jewish child acting a non-Jewish character”—for “who would not dissociate from Shylock in order to identify with Portia?”⁴

If we accept any responsibility for the way our prized texts circulate beyond the academy, the routine classroom humiliation of ordinary readers from subordinated groups is our concern. That is why Shakespeare is political.

The reason for additional airport checks is that some people from other parts of the world feel so hijacked by the imperial pretensions of “western values” that they are prepared to blow us up. I can’t even be sure the security guard was Jewish. He may have been an Arab annoyed at the representation of the Prince of Morocco, a feminist sympathizer objecting to the lively Portia marrying the unpleasant Bassanio, or a gay man affronted at the casual handling of Antonio’s love for Bassanio. Observe the weakness of his position, though. He was protecting the physical security of “western values” and hence of the system that promotes The Merchant—as enshrined in the customary deference toward Shakespeare and largely reinforced by professional Englit. Yet, at the same time, there is cultural dissidence: there are radical readings, and a security guard can repudiate a part of Shakespeare. That is the field over which this book will be working.

Cultural Production

The ostensible project of literary criticism has been to seek the right answer to disputed readings, but in fact, we all know, the essay that purports to settle such questions always provokes another. This is because both literary writing and Englit are involved in the processes through which our cultures elaborate themselves. Three further things follow from this involvement; three central tenets of cultural materialism (which I discuss further in the next chapter).

First, the texts we call “literary” characteristically address contested aspects of our ideological formation. When a part of our worldview threatens disruption by manifestly failing to cohere with the rest, then we reorganize and retell its story, trying to get it into shape—back into the old shape if we are conservative-minded, or into a new shape if we are more adventurous. These I call “faultline” stories. They address the awkward, unresolved issues; they require most assiduous and continuous reworking; they hinge upon a fundamental, unresolved ideological complication that finds its way, willy-nilly, into texts. Through diverse literary genres and institutions, people write about faultlines, in order to address aspects of their life that they find hard to handle. There is nothing mysterious about this. Authors and readers want writing to be interesting, and these unresolved issues are the most promising for that.

Second, literature is only one of innumerable places where this production of culture occurs, but it is a relatively authoritative one, and Shakespeare is a powerful cultural token. He is already where meaning is produced, and people therefore want to get him on their side—to hijack him, we might say—as they do Madonna or the pope. Finding that Ben Jonson’s Sejanus is against tyranny is worthwhile, but not likely to move people strongly. Consequently, publishers like books with Shakespeare in the title, examiners set him, the National Endowment for the Arts funds him. . . . It is only the person without cultural power—the security guard—who believes the repudiation (rather than the appropriation) of Shakespeare to be his best move.

Third, and consequently, there is no disinterested reading. Of course, we all know this, though it has been the historic project of Englit to efface it. But how could it be otherwise? The “universal” Shakespeare usually means the one we want to recruit as ratification for our point of view; with stunning presumption, we suppose that we have discovered the true version, whereas earlier generations were merely partial. Actually, Shakespearean texts, like other texts, are embedded in the histories from which they derive. Indeed, it is because of this that we can appropriate them so conveniently—it is the mismatch with present-day assumptions that allows us to make what we will of them. There is a continuity of sorts, to be sure; the wish to victimize outgroups, for instance, is found in many cultures. But that is not sufficiently specific. Of course The Merchant of Venice doesn’t anticipate the Holocaust, or, indeed, Nazi persecution of homosexuals, but we may find it hard to approach the text without such an issue coming to mind. The inventiveness of directors and the subtleties of critics are designed, precisely, to bridge the historical gap. Shakespeare keeps going because these strategies keep him going; he is relevant because he is perpetually interfered with. Somewhat strangely, it is supposed that it would be better for literature if it were otherwise—if writers such as Shakespeare manifested a static and unchanging truth. But literary writing is interesting when it is in the thick of cultural production, along with movies, soaps, anthropology, religion, science fiction.

In India, Saguna Ramanathan explains, Jane Austen’s Persuasion reads differently. Anne Eliot, allowing herself to be persuaded by Lady Russell not to marry the man she loves, “strikes the average Indian student as moral and correct; Indian society leads her to believe that her elders are to be respected and obeyed; they can, and must, determine her marriage choice.” Again, Ania Loomba remarks, John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi has specific resonances in India, where intra-familial violence may provoke recognition of a comparable oppression of widows today.⁵

Those should not be regarded as eccentric instances—there are more students reading English in the University of Delhi than in England. They point to just the kind of cultural contest in which literary writing has always been involved. For hundreds of years, whether you should marry someone you love or someone your parents approve was unresolved in western European and North American culture. It was held that the people marrying should act in obedience to their parents, so as to secure property relations—and also that they should love each other. Dutiful children experienced “an impossible conflict of role models,” Lawrence Stone says. “They had to try to reconcile the often incompatible demands for obedience to parental wishes on the one hand and expectations of affection in marriage on the other.”⁶ At this point, patriarchy had not quite got its act together. The “divided duty,” between father and husband, was not peculiarly Desdemona’s problem, therefore, or Cordelia’s; it is how the world was set up for women in that society. This faultline was explored in literary writing through the ensuing centuries. By the time of Jane Austen, most of the sentiment is on the side of the young lovers—though still it is better if the match turns out to be socially appropriate as well. The question dies out in fiction in the late nineteenth century because, for almost everyone, it is resolved in favor of children’s preferences, and therefore no longer interesting. For North American or British Asians, however, it may well be a live question today—and hence appears in the film Mississippi Masala (1991), and in Hanif Kureishi’s novel and television serial The Buddha of Suburbia (1991, 1993).

The Merchant, too, is a place where we have been working out our cultures. Since Henry Irving’s stage interpretation of 1879, Shylock has often been presented more “sympathetically”—as provoked by Venetian hostility, perhaps achieving “tragic” stature. This approach is encapsulated in Helen Vendler’s remark, which Christopher Ricks (in the course of a discussion of T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism) has endorsed: “Shylock, in Shakespeare’s imagination, grows in interest and stature so greatly that he incriminates the anti-Semitism of Belmont.”⁷ In a paradoxical sense, therefore, Shylock wins—not in the world, of course, but “in Shakespeare’s imagination.” In practice, I believe, such readings can be achieved only by leaning, tendentiously, on the text. Until Irving’s 1879 production, Shylock had been presented as a monster; Irving’s innovation was regarded with scepticism by such literary figures as Lord Houghton, James Spedding, John Ruskin, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, William Poel, F.S. Boas, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Frank Harris, and Elmer Edgar Stoll.⁸ It is the same today. “I am against rewriting Shakespeare,” declares David Thacker, director of the 1993 Royal Shakespeare Company production, “but I have only been able to direct The Merchant of Venice by shifting its perspective.”⁹

Yet even a “sympathetic” presentation, with Shylock as victim, is not good enough. However cunningly slanted, it can hardly avoid some version of the proposition that the Christians are as bad as the Jews—who function, thereby, as an index of badness. Typically, this notion will be accompanied by an assertion that we possess a common humanity (or inhumanity—it comes to the same thing), but still there is an underlying us-and-them pattern. The liberal reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness works in this way: we (i.e., we Europeans) are as bad as, or even worse than, the savages over there. The Jewish playwright Arnold Wesker objects that “sympathetic” versions of The Merchant are patronizing and, anyway, don’t actually work. However the play is handled in the theater, “the image comes through inescapably: the Jew is mercenary and revengeful, sadistic, without pity.” And “the so-called defence of Shylock,” Wesker says, with Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre production of 1973 in mind, “was so powerful that it dignified the anti-semitism. An audience, it seemed to me on that night, could come away with its prejudices about the Jew confirmed but held with an easy conscience because they thought they’d heard a noble plea for extenuating circumstances.”¹⁰ In Shylock, Wesker’s rewrite, the normally kindly Jew is angry at just one point: when Lorenzo embarks complacently on the topic, “After all, has not a Jew eyes?” Shylock says: “I do not want apologies for my humanity. Plead for me no special pleas. I will not have my humanity mocked and apologized for. If I am unexceptionally like any man then I need no exceptional portraiture. I merit no special pleas, no special cautions, no special gratitudes. My humanity is my right, not your bestowed and gracious privilege” (p. 255). The speech that humanists generally celebrate as redeeming Shakespeare’s play is, by virtue of such a program of redemption, perceived as condescending.

Wesker contests The Merchant by rewriting it. Terry Eagleton offers a subversive critical re-reading. Shylock is not the victim, Eagleton declares, but the victor: he “is triumphantly vindicated even though he loses the case: he has forced the Ch...