Ontology

"What is a text?" we asked ourselves in the first graduate seminar I ever attended. We weren't the first to pose the question. Lots of critics and philosophers had wondered about it—not only how you tell a literary text apart from an "ordinary" one, but just exactly what the thing

is, where it exists, what the nature of its being is. The study of being is called ontology, and in the twentieth century there came to be an ontology of artworks, in which the ontology of literary artworks had its own niche. Criticism of the last few decades has grown tired of asking this question explicitly, but it is implicitly posed in the inquiries into language I've mentioned. When language continues to call attention to itself as such, it can't help focusing our attention on the question of what it is. And when what it is is something as indeterminate and untrustworthy as what so many modern critics make it out to be, then it has a way of reducing itself to an opaque substance, the way words do if you repeat them over and over again. The whole New Critical attention to texts and the close scrutiny of them was, in a sense, a way of ontologically isolating them. The following generation continued the trend.

There are other questions of ontology, too. The 1987 best-seller by Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, was a sweeping indictment of higher education in this country, and one of the author's favorite ideas was that the ugly moral wasteland of the contemporary American university has its origin in German thought, starting with Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. The worst culprit in the twentieth century, Bloom thinks, is Heidegger. In one of his less measured statements Bloom asserts that the entire field of comparative literature today has "fallen largely into the hands of a group or professors who are influenced by the post-Sartrean generation of Parisian Heideggerians, in particular Derrida, Foucault and Barthes. The school is called Deconstructionism, and it is the last, predictable, stage in the suppression of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth in the name of philosophy."^[9] I don't think I'd describe Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes as "Parisian Heideggerians," nor do I think the Heideggerian strain in modern criticism is quite the all-determining force that Bloom suggests. Still, there is no doubt that Heidegger's presence in modern criticism is pronounced. Heidegger's chief philosophical purpose was to investigate the nature of being, particularly human being. For him, poetry raised ontological questions with peculiar force since, as he saw it, language is the "house of Being."^[10] Bloom is right to mention the French "deconstructionist" philosopher Jacques Derrida when he speaks of Heidegger's influence on recent French literary theory. Heidegger's legacy in modern criticism is the critique of language that we find not only in Derrida but in Paul de Man, too. For Derrida, the big issue is what he calls the metaphysics of presence, the notion in Western thought that

oral language enjoys a kind of priority over written language because it makes things present. Derrida thinks this is wrong since language never makes anything present but only "defers" meaning endlessly beyond the horizon. De Man has basically the same notion, although he expresses it slightly differently. Both owe their idea to something in Heidegger called the hermeneutic circle, which has to do with the way we can never interpret anything without already having understood it, which implies already having interpreted it, which implies already having understood it, and so on. The question is profoundly ontological in Heidegger because it involves the notion of human existence in a human world. It is ontological in Derrida and his American disciples because it involves the notion of making present. One of the biggest ideas among literary scholars in the 1970s was Derrida's conquest of Western metaphysics, which left everything in a state of indeterminacy and ambiguity. It's the very thing Bloom decried in The Closing of the American Mind, and it, too, was anticipated by our turn-of-the-century poets.

One of Heidegger's best-known commentators, the Anglican theologian and translator of Being and Time John Macquarrie, believes that Heidegger's thought is a form of theology, in which "Being" is virtually synonymous with "God."^[11] There's a lot of truth to this notion, although doctrinaire Heideggerians would disagree. In fact, it is easy to see ontology as yet another quest for mystical essence, for Eden. This time instead of being called God, or a network of relations, or poeticity, the indwelling essence is called Being.

These are the ideas that directed the study of literature in many of our prestigious institutions of higher learning in the late 1960s and the 1970s, especially at the graduate level. And since the graduate students of those years are professors today, these ideas to a considerable extent still direct the teaching of books at the university. This is not to suggest that every professor of literature is some sort of wind-up toy, blindly acting out the patterns that were laid down by demonic, all-controlling professors from his or her graduate-school days. It just means that these ideas are bound to be prevalent. Nor does it mean that professors do not change their views and teaching methods during their teaching careers. They do, and that is how the latest generation of leftist scholars has come to integrate a politically oriented criticism into its teaching even though few of its members were formally schooled in anything like political criticism.

But even where such changes have taken place, certain beliefs seem to subsist among the scholars who teach in the universities, and so our

students continue, in one way or another, to be indoctrinated in these beliefs even when they are at the same time being indoctrinated in an overtly political system of thought. To begin with, our students have been taught that literary criticism and theory is an independent field with its own cast of star characters. They have been taught to focus their attention on language and, in many cases, to abandon their childish trust in its ability to communicate concrete meanings. They have been taught that books and poems can be quantified, measured, diagramed, and reduced to airy structures of pluses and minuses. They have been taught to reflect on issues of being, presence, and absence, in a way that often leads to the same lonely worldview as their reflections on language. But at the same time they have been taught, even by the most cynical and sacrilegious enemies of meaning and morals, to approach their books and poems unquestioningly as objects of value that contain inherent, distinctive essences. They have been taught, often unwittingly, that "you can't do without Eden," that all paths return to it.

Of course, not every single one of these ideas by itself was brand-new either for modern critics or for the poets who preceded them. It's the conjunction that makes this "modern consciousness" what it is. And this modern consciousness was already present in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the poets.