Robert Grant
Imagining the Real: Essays on Politics,
Ideology and Literature.
Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pages, $90
The retreat of academic literary criticism from the public realm is one of the sadder phenomena of recent cultural history. In university bookshops the Eng. Lit. shelves are groaning with volumes catchily entitled “The Transgressive Body … ,” “Engendering Discourse … ,” and so on; but who buys them? The practitioners of the genre, certainly; some students (the ones with starry eyes and deep pockets), perhaps; but the general public—which used to rush out to purchase the latest book by Leavis or Empson—hardly at all. Literary biography, now the only form of serious writing about literature to be bought by general readers, is the exception that proves the rule.
If you think that this matters, then you probably also assume that a culture is impoverished when the activity of thinking seriously about literature no longer forms part of it. In which case, you may also suppose (though it doesn’t necessarily follow) that literature enables us to understand more deeply the values by which we live. Many great critics—Arnold and Leavis, to name two—have held such assumptions, and have contributed to a tradition in which literary criticism and moral thinking have been connected, not factitiously (as with the yoking of old texts to new ideological campaigns) but intimately. That tradition, once so central, has weakened to such an extent that anyone who represented it today might seem positively eccentric.
Enter Robert Grant, Professor of the History of Ideas in the English Department at Glasgow University: a critic who for many years has been ploughing a lonely furrow in what used to be this central and fertile field. Imagining the Real is the second in a projected trilogy of collected pieces; the first, The Politics of Sex and Other Essays, appeared four years ago. The new volume, like the previous one, covers a wide range of topics (from honesty to Derrida, from The Tempest to game theory), but with a consistent purpose: to explore the ways in which culture is the bearer and guarantor of human values, and to expose the errors of those who think otherwise.
Of the latter, there are many, and not only among literary or cultural critics. One essay is a courteous but devastating critique of a Swedish Communist who argued, just as the Soviet system was collapsing, that true “conservatism” should require it to be maintained. Grant deftly shows the inadequacy of an approach to life so formalistic that it thinks only in terms of quantifiable goods, power-relations, or degrees of change. He insists that things, people, and ways of life can all be objects of love, and “because love admits of no substitutes, a thing or person loved lies on no conceivable indifference curve, and therefore falls outside the scope of economic or quasi-economic calculation.”
Dealing with “conservative” Swedish Communists may sound like shooting endangered species in a barrel, but there is plenty of other, and larger, quarry here. For example, commenting on the much-trumpeted revival of political philosophy in the 1970s, Grant complains: “the focus of Rawls, Nozick et al. was so narrow as to exclude almost everything previously considered central to political thought: authority, legitimacy, power, history, culture, law and any justice other than the so-called ‘social’ kind.” (Not for nothing is Grant one of the world’s leading authorities on the life and thought of Michael Oakeshott.)
But there are sins of commission that put those sins of omission in the shade. Grant’s main target in several of these essays is deconstructionism, with its abolition of the author and its reduction of literature (and culture in general) to something devoid of both reference and intention. He is, professedly, repelled by the writings of Derrida: “As Dr. Johnson said of Macpherson’s Ossian,” he notes, “any man might write like that, if he would only abandon his mind to it.” Nevertheless, having forced himself to read a large part of the oeuvre, he has produced a marvellously clear—and, all things considered, brief—analysis of both the theoretical weaknesses of Derrida’s position and its psychological appeal. Reading this, one feels rather like a yachtsman who, having been marooned for weeks in the middle of the Sargasso Sea, is unexpectedly given a tow by a passing nuclear ice-breaker.
