Review of Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind"

Unless you were attending a university when this book was published, or have a special interest in the general ongoing dialogue we call the culture wars, "The Closing of the American Mind" may not be on your radar. When it first came out in 1987, it caused quite a fracas and became, I'm sure to everyone's (including Allan Bloom’s) surprise, a bestseller. It's difficult for me to imagine a book by an unprepossessing University of Chicago professor on the debilitating effects of Heidegger and Nietzsche on higher education becoming a bestseller today. This may only serve to bolster Bloom's case that the "liberal" attitude of openness has gone a few steps too far.

Or it might be the direct effect of Bloom's "voice" - which is, despite what any of his intellectual confreres say, by turns elitist, rankly unegalitarian, and possibly anti-democratic in content; in tone, he often comes off as the curmudgeonly old grandfather shaking his newspaper at you and telling you to get off of his lawn. I personally have no problem with the elitism or anti-democratic attitudes when it comes to teaching. There are, quite simply, some books that are better than others, and some ideas that are better than others, and having to pretend otherwise is simply to play the ostrich's game of sticking our heads in the sand. The better books should be taught for the moral education of the student body while inferior books should be set aside (surely to be picked up by many people who, after graduating from university and having been introduced to the greats, choose to eschew them and read pulp instead.) I, like Bloom, regret that recent American culture has lost the sense of education as a kind of moral training. Bloom's critics, however, also do him the grave disservice of hitching his tone onto the wagon that is the content of his intellectual argument. Who's going to take this cranky old man seriously - who sees an uncontrollable sexual release in a young teenage boy unashamedly gyrating his hips to rock 'n' roll, who unabashedly and unashamedly blames affirmative action as one of the contributing factors in the decadence of the contemporary American university, and whose explanation of the breakdown of the American family (if there indeed has been such a thing) is, quite charitably, described as "old-fashioned."

Bloom's argument is large and multifaceted; no review of a few hundred words could deal with it in all its complexity. What it claims at its base, though, is that certain attitudes popular in the sixties and seventies - universal acceptance, universal tolerance, the slow erosion of critical faculties - which eventually came to shape the minds of university students and even how university are administered. He claims, after Nietzsche, that we live in a time "beyond good and evil" - that is, where we have ceased not only looking for the differences in good versus bad (he archly points out that we describe nothing as "evil" anymore), but that we don't even know how to discern those differences. For Bloom, the moral education must consist of "a vision of the moral universe, reward for good, punishment for evil, and the drama of moral choices." That is, at the very least, an education in critical moral discernment. He argues that this is all but gone.

He claims - dubiously, I think - that he noticed a steep drop in the number of students who were interested in the "Great Books" from the time when he first started teaching in the United States in the early sixties to the time of writing this book. At many stages in his argument, Bloom seems to have counterfactually reimagined a world in which students walked into the university already well-versed in Plato, Homer, Stendahl, and Hegel, Aristotle, eager to be filled to the brim with The Wisdom Of The Masters. I think everyone was exposed to Homer in high school, but how many of us took it "seriously" - what Bloom would call seriously? Were they familiar with the importance of “xenia” and the “oikos” in Homer? (And no, you don’t get translations of those words.) I can speak from personal experience that many of teachers themselves didn't have the intellectual background to teach Homer this rigorously. 

Richard Heffner, one of Bloom’s interlocutors following the popular press cavalcade after the release of the book, suggested during his interview with the professor that being an elitist might mean “thinking some questions are better answered by Hegel than by Joyce Brothers.” By that measure, I would imagine the vast majority of intelligent people are in fact elitists. Knowledge properly used and appropriately fostered quite simply makes you a better person. I think even the most obnoxious paladins of popular culture would admit that there is intellectual territory that Oprah’s Book Club hasn’t yet broached.

You may vehemently disagree with much of what Bloom has to say, or at least how he says it (it would put you in good company), but this comes highly suggested for anyone who thinks that answers to life’s “higher and deeper” questions deserve our most serious consideration. It serves as an honest refutation against the idea a few easy shibboleths of our times: that all answers are equally good, all educations are equally fulfilling and worthy, and all truths are equally valid.

Review of John Williams' "Stoner"

Until recently, I usually begin a book with the same amount of enthusiasm with which I end it. Good books have inviting beginnings, which sustain me through to the end; to be overly simplistic about matters, bad ones can be bad in many different ways (see the first sentence of “Anna Karenina”) but I usually still trudge through due to my half-hearted attempt at self-discipline and genuine belief that To Quit A Book Is A Serious Thing, Indeed. Lately, I’ve been beginning books with one opinion and finishing them with another. “Stoner” was one of those.

It begins as a tight, crisp story, without lingering over any of the main character Stoner’s biographical details too much. Stoner comes from a poor family of farmers and after a few semesters of thinking he is going to get a degree in agriculture, soon finds that his true calling is literature. He pursues an M.A. and a Ph.D. which draws him further away from his family, gets married to a cold, distant debutante named Edith, and has an adorable daughter named – and this is important - Grace. 

As the book and the marriage wear on, Edith becomes more and more inexplicably heartless, tormenting, and cruel, you feel like you’re reading “The Good Soldier” – something Dreiserian in its ability to induce pathos. One of the biggest unsolved mysteries of the novels – and it’s really one that should have been explained more carefully – is why a mild-mannered milquetoast like Stoner would have married a total bitch like Edith. Divorce wasn’t completely unheard of a century ago; they certainly didn’t run in social circles where they had to keep up appearances. So, what gives? 

The one thing the story has going for it is Williams’ refusal to romanticize Stoner, his occupation in academia, or any other aspect of his life. This certainly isn’t an Ivory Tower university (not that those are always so cozy either) where he gets paid to spend hours idling over dusty books in the Rare Books Room; he has several undergraduate classes, teaches a graduate seminar about the influence of Latin literature in late antiquity, and is responsible for a spate of graduate students’ dissertations. In addition to this, he also researches and writes to be published (how little things change over the decades). Well, two things: that and Stoner’s implacable dedication to the profession of teaching. 

Williams was once asked in an interview about Stoner’s life, and if he thought it was “sad.” He responded with an affirmative “no,” that Stoner had an absolutely wonderful life. This good life, full of wonder, can only be adjudged to be such against Stoner’s own standards of what it means to be a teacher and how closely he hewed to them. He was a passionate teacher, even though we’re told in the opening lines that “Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the other ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.” 

Let’s be brutally honest here: when all is said and done, the will be said for 99.9% of us. That old Greek wish of being remembered generations and generations hence, which came to easily to Odysseus, just will not come to fruition for most of us. Does that make our lives any less full of wonder, or regret, or even the sublime? Stoner’s life, I think, serves as an answer: “no.” For it is in how we pursue what is most meaningful to us that marks the truest measure of ourselves. As someone more eloquent than myself said in her Goodreads review, “it is about how the inner life redeems the outer.” How simply, and how beautifully said.

Review of W. Somerset Maughm's "The Moon and Sixpence"

When this was published almost a century ago, I’m sure the story of a man abandoning upper middle-class English life (along with his wife and two children) to pursue the life of a libertine artist in Paris would have packed more of a punch. It’s difficult to write about how and why people do such things beyond just saying, “They must or else, according to the flights of their fanciful imagination, they will wither away and fail to fulfill their truest being.” But alas, that’s not even enough to fill out a short story. Sometimes a short, studied approach like this one works for huge, ponderous questions like the one this novel raises, and sometimes it falls incredibly short. 

Maugham’s writing is best suited to short stories or novels like this one, which has such a “short story feel” to it that it could easily be read in a quick sitting. The only other piece by Maugham I’ve read was “Razor’s Edge” which, though written a whole generation later, I remember having much the same literary style. The writing, especially in the first half, is so artful and balanced, and at the same time epigrammatically clever and playful, as to be unbelievable. Some of the quotations jump off the page and straight into your lap, begging to be included in the next edition of Bartlett’s. While this falls off a bit toward the end, this is one of the few pieces of fiction I have read lately where the simple elegance – and sheer, unrepentant wit - of the style can’t help but strike you. 

Despite the incredibly controlled writing, judged strictly as whether it was able to shed any light onto the artistic process, or why someone would choose to repeatedly endure the gauntlets of the self-critical artist, I learned little here. Charles didn’t strike me as the heartless cad that I’m sure he probably appears to be to other readers; he’s just pursuing what he thinks he needs to be fully happy. Maybe that’s what Maugham is trying to insinuate through the title: that we should appreciate what we have (the moon – most people seem to be perfectly happy with a spouse and two children without fulfilling their need to run away from everything and start all over again), instead of thinking that we can be well-adjusted people and wanting to absolutely have it all. 

Should we hold it against Charles that he makes such a drastic decision? It’s unclear whether Maugham takes delight in punishing Charles, but he certainly weathers a lot of punishment – living in near squalor, dying a slow, painful death. Of course none of this is to say that he couldn’t have mitigated this punishment by being a decent person to Dirk’s wife, who then would have gladly taken him in when he needed her most. Did Charles suffer the fate of being almost wholly unrecognized during his lifetime and the scourge of disease directly because he so eagerly embraced the reckless decision to leave his family? Is Maugham trying to make a moral point? If so, it’s a very subtle one; none of the language in the book comes across as sermonizing in tone.

As with any good story, there are more questions than answers. Charles is certainly supposed to strike us, I would think – to make a forceful point. That point, however, eludes me still. That it might just as easily elude others may have convinced him that he’s nothing but a heartless beast. I’m convinced that he is not one of those. But what is he? That, I don’t know.

Review of Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior"

“The Woman Warrior” is haunted with ghosts: Mexican ghosts, Negro ghosts, white ghosts, janitor ghosts, teacher ghosts, and so on. I don’t mean this to be a paranormal or spiritual observation. Kingston uses the term so casually, we know what she is talking about – a ghost is almost anything or anyone outside of her Chinese-born family – but that still left me wanting a fuller explanation. We don’t get one. So, what is a ghost? It is something that, despite its seeming absence, leaves a trace of itself, a residue that can’t be erased. It’s a metaphor that runs throughout the entire book, and is extraordinarily apropos for a book that is, at its core, about the archetypical clash of two cultures.

I enjoyed the novel as a total reading experience – and I suppose there’s not a lot more you can ask from a book – but I felt because I wasn’t a Chinese woman, that I was missing something vitally important. I figured that most of the people who have probably enjoyed it haven’t been either of these things, so I tried to ignore how awkwardly self-conscious the book made me feel about my own identity, and trudged merrily on. 

The book is about a lot of things – growing up in the United States with parents who were born in their native China; the difficulties one has living with parents who have yet to become properly acculturated even though you as a daughter are already intimately familiar with that culture; even what it means to be Chinese, and how the weight of Chinese history and civil mythology can weigh heavily on someone who hasn’t even set foot in that country. The book is composed of five vignettes or chapters, which don’t flow in a chronological way, but revolve around the same characters: Maxine, her mother, her female Chinese relatives she’s never met. 

I can see how this would have been a punch to the literary establishment’s gut when it was published nearly forty years ago, on the coattails of “Fear of Flying” and a myriad of other works important to the feminist tradition. Not only does Kingston’s story recognize her womanhood and coming to terms with that in a particular time and place in the United States, she complicates matters by recognizing her Chinese heritage, which has very different ideas of what it means to be a good daughter, a feminine woman, and so on.

This has been sitting on my bookshelf staring at me for several years now, and I’m glad that I finally chose to read it. Is it something that I’m likely to ever read again? Probably not. It’s exactly the kind of book that college students across the humanistic disciplines – sociology, anthropology, cultural studies – should be exposed to: horizon-expanding and full of ideas to widen the minds of parochial university freshmen, i.e., kids that need the aforementioned culture clash. Once out of school, many people would never again admit to reading for self-edification. I’m not one of those, and self-edification was part of the reason I read this book. It’s just that every time I stop to think about it, I can’t help but think all over again of how self-conscious it made me of being a privileged white male. I know, I know. #FirstWorldProblems