Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” Stephen Greenblatt Though I am not an Americanist and have never been guilty of formulating a theory of The Scarlet Letter, I read Winfried Fluck’s brilliant and still timely essay with a certain rueful amusement and a sense that it is my own ox that is being gored. I recognize that I am personally implicated in much of what Fluck undertakes to take apart, an implication signaled in his use of terms like selffashioning, subversion, and containment, and, still more, in the whole enterprise that he characterizes here as cultural radicalism in response to the liberalism of literary studies in the mid-twentieth century. I am a quintessential product of those studies, having been educated in a classic 1950s suburban public high school, one with a rigid academic hierarchy that situated automotive mechanics and wood-working shops in the basement and then rose floor by floor to the Advanced Placement classes at the top floor where we learned Latin, studied the Constitution, and discussed King Lear. Enrolled at Yale for both my B.A. and Ph.D. degrees, I majored in English and was taught by such giants of New Criticism as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Louis Martz, and Maynard Mack. But sandwiched in between my undergraduate and graduate years in New Haven I had two years at Cambridge University in England, where I first encountered Lukács, Benjamin, and Althusser. I was particularly influenced by the lectures of Raymond Williams who agreed to serve for a semester as my tutor. When I returned to Yale to write my thesis, I had first thought to study with Geoffrey Hartman, but I found the structuralism to which Hartman at that time adhered to be only a more abstract, French-inflected version of the formalism in which I had been trained, a formalism with which I felt impatient. For his part, he found my political concerns and my interest in history distasteful distractions from a proper engagement with underlying literary codes. In the turbulent late 1960s, I longed for something more engaged with questions of class, politics, economic exploitation, and the exercise of authority. I decided to write about Sir Walter Raleigh, whose plangent, deliberately fragmented poetry fulfilled a New Critic’s taste for complexity, ambiguity, and self-referentiality, and yet whose income depended wholly upon monopolies on wine licenses and broadcloth, control of the tin mines in Cornwall, and the rents from some 40,000 acres of ruthlessly expropriated land in Ireland. I wanted to understand what Raleigh was doing, writing exquisite poems that to my ears sounded eerily like T. S. Eliot, and what the relation was between that aesthetic side of his life and the side that massacred the soldiers who surrendered unconditionally to him at Smerwick. At Berkeley in the 1970s and 80s I became increasingly fascinated with the extent to which the writers in the period I principally studied - Elizabethan and Jacobean England - were bound up with structures of power, helping to shore up those structures, or so I thought, even when they were calling them into question. Hence the strain of argument to which Fluck calls attention, one that shifted the search for political meaning, as he puts it, “from the representation of politics to the politics of representation” (“Literature, Liberalism,” in this volume 48). Fluck observes cannily that this shift felt like a form of empowerment: if political reality was textual, then radical literary criticism could seem like a crucially important intervention, a kind of action. I remember this feeling of excitement with deep nostalgia. The burden of Fluck’s critique is that the sense of empowerment was an illusion, a distraction from actual engagement in radical action. “Social justice,” he writes, “can thus be reimagined on the model of textual dehierarchization, and political commitment can be expressed without actually having to enter the field of politics” (56). The observation hits home, though it slips over the fact that at the time that I and others were trying to analyze the politics of representation, we were also marching through the streets and breathing our share of tear gas in Sproul Plaza. Fluck implies that there is always a stark choice - criticism or politics - but in my experience of those years it was possible to choose both, and also to fall in love, plant a garden, sample the California wines, and take long walks on the Pt. Reyes Peninsula. Still, it is the case that as the marches diminished in size and number and as we settled down to our tenured lives, we kept up the enterprise of radical critique and felt that we were doing something not only to understand literature but also to reshape political discourse. We set the stage for the process that eventuated in our students convincing themselves that changing the curriculum or making a few new academic hires was going to revolutionize the whole social order. Or as my late, lamented friend Todd Gitlin wryly quipped, “While the Right has 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0004 68 Stephen Greenblatt been busy taking the White House, the Left has been marching on the English department” (qtd. in Côté and Allahar 21). According to Fluck, we set the stage too for a kind of revulsion against literature itself, that is, for what he calls the “radical critique that can only treat literature as a political allegory of cooptation, coercion, and containment” (“Literature, Liberalism,” 63). Over the years since Fluck’s essay was written, this revulsion has morphed from an attack on the canon into a decline of interest in reading literature altogether, and especially in reading the literature of the past. For what is the point of engaging with The Scarlet Letter or The Faerie Queene or The Canterbury Tales, if they are only monuments to ideological incarceration? Here I am less inclined to plead guilty, and for two reasons. First, for me at least, the crucial word “containment” always meant two things at once: enclosure within literary form, in order to keep a subversive force from spinning out of control, and incorporation within literary form, in order to keep a subversive force from extinction. Literary containment does not bring the possibility of radical change to an end. It is a mode of keeping it alive and transmitting it forward. Second, and again for me at least, the skeptical analysis of literature in an attempt to understand its implication in the dominant structures of authority was always built around and meant to intensify love for that literature. Without that love - without the deep pleasure at its heart - what is the point of the whole enterprise? Works Cited Côté, James E., and Anton L. Allahar. Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0004 Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” 69