Ihab Hassan

Postmodernism, Etc.:*
an Interview with Ihab Hassan

by Frank L. Cioffi
Princeton University

I first met Ihab Hassan in 1982, when I participated in his NEH Summer Seminar,
“Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Question of the Text.” It was there that
I discovered Hassan was more than just a writer and critic; he was a teacher of
extraordinary ability and power. In the intervening years we have kept in touch, and
I find I have been influenced as much by Hassan’s pedagogy and stance as by his
writings.

The following interview was assembled from November, 1998, through January,
1999, and done by telephone, e-mail, and postal mail.

Your major works of criticism that engage the idea of the postmodern--
The Dismemberment of Orpheus, Paracriticisms, The Right Promethean
Fire, The Postmodern Turn, and many essays--have had an enormous
impact on literary culture and theory. Can you briefly characterize and
account for this impact?

HASSAN: Did they have an “enormous impact”? My impression is that

their impact is enormously spotty. Some like Charles Jencks or Linda
Hutcheon or Hans Bertens will mention the work. Others--especially neo-
Marxists--will have a very different attitude toward it, a magical or
apotropaic attitude, as if to ward off a bad spell; or else they ignore it in
audible silence. There are exceptions, of course, like Bernard Smith, whose
roots are in historical materialism, and whose recent essay, “The Last Days
of the Post Mode,” shows remarkable poise and maturity of judgment. But
all this is quite familiar to writers throughout history.
Well, you coined the term “postmodern” in reference to a certain kind
of literature; indeed, you helped define a literary movement--or do you
not want credit for this?

HASSAN: No, I didn’t coin the term. Some claim that a British painter
called John Watkins Chapman used the term casually in the 1870s. Since
then, Federico de Onis, Bernard Smith, Dudley Fitts, Arnold Toynbee,
Charles Olson, Irving Howe, and Harry Levin have all used the term
variously--with diverse meanings and degrees of insistence--before I did.
But I guess I did stick with the term, and I did try to clarify for myself an
emergent movement.

What do you think of as the relationship among Romanticism,

Modernism, and Postmodernism? At a public lecture at Princeton,
I recently asked Robert Storr (of the Museum of Modern Art) to define
“Postmodernism,” and he said he was always confused by the meaning
of the term. Do you think many people are likewise confused?

HASSAN: Ah, as it happens, this is the topic of something I’ve been

working on, a lecture to be given at some universities in Germany and
Austria this spring. I call the lecture “Romanticism, Modernism,
Postmodernism: Three Isms in Search of a Concept.”

Let’s start with Romanticism: it has become as contested a category as

Postmodernism. Modernism is perhaps less contested because the sheer
density of writing about it has given it a certain gravity, a certain weight and
stability--note two recent, magisterial tomes, Bernard Smith’s Modernism’s
History (about painting) and Peter Conrad’s Modern Times (about culture),
both preceded by Christopher Butler’s Early Modernism and William R.
Everdell’s The First Moderns, and that’s just the crême de la crême.

Now, as you know, for some critics like Harold Bloom, Romanticism
has never ended--we are all just “belated” Romantics, like himself. What is
clearer to me, however, is that we have projected the ironies and insecurities
and indeterminacies of Postmodernism back onto Romanticism; we have
reinvented the Romantics into our own image (which, incidentally, is the
other side of the “anxiety of influence”--I mean absorption, assimilation).

Certain topics or problems or figures, however, do run from

Romanticism, through Modernism, to Postmodernism, mutating all the
while. For instance, Romantic Imagination becomes Modernist
Consciousness becomes Postmodernist Language--from Imagination to
Language, as master tropes. And the Romantic Self becomes the Modernist
Ego becomes the Postmodernist empty Subject, itself a Discourse. But these
are largely French conceits: try to tell the Self or the Ego or the Subject or
your child, for that matter, that its imperious needs are a form of absence,
dissemination, or deferral.

But are you also confused, as Robert Storr says he is, by

Postmodernism?

HASSAN: Well, yes and no. I accept the instability of the term in the
age of hype and media. I accept its labile, shifting, conflictual character, in a
time of ideological wars. And, increasingly, I ignore it because my own
interests have drifted away from it toward the possibilities of a spirituality
that addresses all the issues of the postmodern turn.

This said, I still remind myself that when Charles Jencks talks about
postmodern architecture or Fredric Jameson about the “cultural logic of late
capitalism,” something real, not just hyperreal, is being discussed.

Once, I coined the term Indetermanence (indeterminacy cum

immanence) to describe the ethos or impulse or style of Postmodernism.
This was an insufficient description because, in the geopolitical context,
Postmodernism does not only involve Indetermanences in Western cultures
but also new relations between centers and margins, margins and margins,
centers and centers, nowheres and nowheres (utopias?) of every kind. That’s
the emergent and tortuous syntax of localization/globalization.

But what about Modernism itself in all this?

HASSAN: Well, once I also tried to characterize Postmodernism by

contrasting it with Modernism, since the human brain is compulsively
contrastive. This was in an essay called “Toward a Concept of
Postmodernism,” reprinted as the “Postface” of the second (1982) edition of
The Dismemberment of Orpheus. This essay has often been reprinted,
especially a few pages listing some contrasts between Modernism and
Postmodernism in two vertical columns.

Now, this table proved very popular, especially with those who wished
to criticize it. Invariably, they all ignored my explicit caveat: that “the
dichotomies this table represents remain insecure, equivocal. For differences
shift, defer, even collapse; concepts in any one vertical column are not all
equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and
postmodernism, abound.” They also ignored earlier statements, going back
to 1971, that Modernism does not suddenly cease so that Postmodernism
may begin: they now coexist--in effect, I was saying that Postmodernism
lies deeply within the body of Modernism (in “POSTmodernISM: A
Paracritical Bibliography”).

An English critic adopted an attitude of specious merriment toward the

table. But Linda Hutcheon, more scrupulous, made a valid point in her A
Poetics of Postmodernism: namely, that Postmodernism includes features
from both columns, that its logic is less one of opposition (either/or) than of
incorporation (both/and). Fair enough. But so is the logic of Modernism, of
Romanticism, of so much else.

My point here really addresses Linda Hutcheon much less than a

mindless poststructuralist legacy: that, somehow, both/and is deeper or more
subtle than either/or. If we say both/and--we can say this about almost
anything--it behooves us to show exactly in what way oppositions or
differences apply and in what ways they are sublated or overcome. To say
both/and to everything is jejune.

“ Postmodernism” has of course taken on a newer or additional

meaning. I recently read what I think is a concise characterization of
“Postmodern relativism.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review,
Jim Holt gives this definition: “The notion that physical reality is
nothing but a social construct and that science, despite its pretensions to
truth, is just another ‘narrative’ that encodes the dominant ideology of
the culture that produced it.” We seem to hear it (or versions of it) all
the time, espoused by relatively serious people, enough so that it is
singled out for censure by the Pope. How could any sane person truly
believe in this “postmodern relativism”? What do you think is behind
it?

HASSAN: Sane persons, as well as the not-so-sane, have desires; the

“will to believe,” as William James called it, is every bit as powerful as the
“will to power”--in fact, they are akin, if not the same. Out of suffering,
deprivation, urgent need, profound resentment, comes the will to restitution.
Now, if Truth is dead, then everything is permitted--theoretically. And if
everything is arbitrary, contingent, and relative, nothing is binding: reality is
what I choose to make it. That’s quite “liberating”-- till I wake up with
cancer one day or lie on my deathbed or lose my spouse or discover that I’ll
never run as fast or jump as high as ... in short, till I cease being a child, an
American child.

Tell the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that science is just

another “narrative.” A man (Einstein, presumably) writes on a blackboard: e
= mc2, and two cities go up in flames. Narrative?

Yes, relativism offers the illusion of both innocence and freedom. And
have you noticed that relativism is usually invoked by someone about to
lose an argument?

How do you think, though, that “relativism” became yoked with “post-
modern”? Do you think there is some logical connective between the
kind of art you identified as postmodern and a radically relativist
position?

HASSAN: Play, parody, pastiche, pluralism--the staples of a

Postmodern style or sensibility--tend to relativism, as does openness or
indeterminacy. Non-foundational or pragmatic philosophies also tend to
relativism. And hybrid, heterogeneous, conflictual societies further tend to
relativism. All three are part of the “postmodern condition.” But please note
that I say “tend to”: I doubt that a “radical relativism” can be sustained in
practice.

How would you characterize literary criticism and theory of the last
fifty years or so?

HASSAN: Well, that’s a topic for a book, indeed for a library of books,
written and burned. Let me read you, however, a mildly satirical, but I think
relevant, passage in an article I have recently published, “Queries for
Postcolonial Studies,” a topic I usually shun:

Deep in the unconscious of the academic humanities there is a story, and it

goes something like this. “Once upon a time, a long, dark time ago, there
was a tribe of writers in the American South, terribly misnamed the New
Critics. They paid inordinate attention to the forms of literary works, and to
special devices like irony and paradox. For an unconscionable time, they
dominated the reading scene. But when the sixties finally arrived, thank
God, the New Critics were exposed for their literary exclusiveness and
political conservatism. The air was cleared, and adventurous young critics
began to turn to Continental Europe for inspiration: to existentialism and
phenomenology, to the philosophy of consciousness and reception theory, to
critical philosophy, to structuralism. These critics gestured in the right
direction, but they had to wait for the advent of poststructuralism to
discover the full possibilities of their deconstructive art. Deconstruction,
alas, soon became tedious, hollow, disengaged. Feminist, ethnic,
postcolonial, and cultural studies came to the rescue, saving deconstruction
from its innate sterility, and enriching their own socio-political ‘agenda’--
yes, that’s the word--with all kinds of subtle demystifications and
demythifications. It may be safely said that with the current prevalence of
cultural studies, in their varied forms, criticism has reached its apogee. It
only remains for us to stand our ground against sundry humanists,
reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and proto-fascists still skulking in the
corridors of academe.”

Parody, you cry, caricature! Caricatures have a disconcerting habit of

coming to life in academe, especially in American academe. But let that
pass: the point is that a self-congratulatory myth of progress informs
criticism in the era of cultural wars. Progress? Culture is a wrinkled
palimpsest, and the arrow of history moves like a swallow, if not a
boomerang. As Thomas Kuhn has argued, the sciences and the humanities
develop with disparate logics. There are no Ptolemaists or Nostradamists in
reputable science departments; there are, however, Platonists, Aristotelians,
Thomists, Kantians, Hegelians, Marxists, Nietzscheans, Freudians,
Heideggerians, Lacanians, Foucauldians in reputable departments of the
humanities. This is not to say that the paradigms of science are “better”; it is
only to say that they respond to different criteria of confirmation and
disconfirmation. The paradigms of the humanities--Kuhn would say
“schools”--respond to fashion, true, but also to genuine needs for social
change. This last is admirable, though it signals no epistemological
progress. The opinions of certain influential critics receive no sanction from
a logic of inexorable ascent in our ideas about human reality.

(qtd. from Philosophy and Literature 22 [1998]: 329-30)

Recent literary criticism, it seems to me, has become increasingly

difficult for the layperson, the nonspecialist--or even the specialist--to
understand. The vocabulary, the jargon, the syntax, and even the
organization all seem rebarbative, almost designed to repel
understanding, to exclude a large segment of its potential audience.
Many critics contend that complex, difficult ideas require complex,
difficult prose. Yet your writing seems against the grain in that it is
complex yet lucid; accessible, pragmatic, grounded in a real world, it
seems directed at the educated reader with whom you really want to
make a connection. What are your thoughts on academic writing in
general, such as what appears in the pages of this journal, for example,
and elsewhere? Do you feel that the “essay” is perhaps more suitable
than the academic article for conveying ideas? And whom do you
consider the most important critics writing today (within the last
quarter century or so)?

HASSAN: As you know, I am dead set against jargon, jargon

masquerading as intricate thought. I am dead set against bad prose. This is
not simply an aesthetic judgment; it is ethical and social as well. Indeed, it is
a spiritual judgment because--with certain exceptions like Kierkegaard’s
prose, if it is prose--good writing, for me, combines gaiety, renunciation,
and spiritual clarity.

Much has been already said about the Common Reader, Public
Criticism, the Obscure (and Unpatriotic) Academy. Let me just say that
I consider certain prose styles in American academe to be dead ends. This is
not an isolated perception, and I am heartened by the good, working prose
I find, for instance, in the MLA’s Profession 1998, also in periodicals as
various as Philosophy and Literature, Salmagundi, the Georgia Review.
I am heartened by the Bad Writing Contest, sponsored by Denis Dutton and
Patrick Henry, editors of Philosophy and Literature, which award prizes to
the most hideously hilarious academic prose every year. But I am not
cheered when some graduate student tells me that bad prose is “actually
politically correct.”

I enjoy most the critical prose of poets as different as Seamus Heaney

and Annie Dillard, and even in translation I enjoy the prose of Zbigniew
Herbert, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, many others. Among living critics,
I like, pell mell, the prose of Denis Donoghue, Susan Sontag, Frank
Kermode, Roger Shattuck, Robert Hughes, Helen Vendler, William Gass,
the early George Steiner--I’m pluralist, eclectic, you see. But that may be
because I like the intellectual persona--that’s more than ideology, you
know--of these critics. For Harold Bloom, a true original, I have great
esteem, and I value his values. But his prose strikes me sometimes as
elliptic, narcissistically impacted. But that’s only in certain works, in certain
pages, more’s the pity.
What, then, should literary criticism be doing? Why are the humanities,
to your mind, in such disarray? Is there anything we can do to save
them?

HASSAN: I agree with T. S. Eliot: the only qualification for a critic is to

be very intelligent. Well, I partially agree, because the great critics, from
Aristotle, through Dr. Johnson, to Eliot himself and into our time, have been
more than “very intelligent”: they have also been wise. Perhaps that’s what
Eliot meant, perhaps not. For me, wisdom, not intelligence or ideology, is
all.

Why are the humanities in disarray? Are they really in disarray? Or are
they simply conflicted and impoverished? And why should we “save them,”
and how, and for whom?

It’s like Emerson’s mousetrap the world will beat a path to your
doorstep if you possess something it truly needs. What do the humanities
offer nowadays, beyond cant and piety, that our compatriots--start with
them--really need? Well, as I’ve said, the humanities now strive for social
change, by clarifying it. But that’s not quite enough; there are other, perhaps
deeper, needs.

I have no television, but I can’t live without a certain kind of book. Am

I, then, a freak? That’s a flattering thought. But no, it’s an authentic and
shared need. If we can testify to that need with wit, feeling, truth,
generosity, if we can testify out of joy, not resentment, out of joy and also
vulnerability, then the power of sympathy may prevail. This, I think, is our
“bottom line,” to testify in fullest measure to the signal representations, let’s
just say achievements, of humanity.

Have you evaded this question, or am I missing something? How do we

“be wise” or even “very intelligent”? Are we trying to explicate literary
texts? Are we uncovering social mechanisms? Are we--

HASSAN: --“We” is not a singular pronoun: there are many kinds of

humanists, some intelligent and others less so, some wise and others given
to folly. There are also many valid tasks that academic humanists perform,
from teaching composition to deaning, from explicating works to promoting
ideas, from writing biographies, editing texts, formulating theories,
researching cultures, to ... you name it.
 What I was invoking a moment ago was an ideal--no doubt, one of
many ideals--of a critic or scholar or teacher or humanist or simply writer
who testifies to something very central, very compelling, but also veiled,
mysterious, in the human condition. Something without which many readers
cannot live. It’s not definable, yet for many of us, it energizes the
humanities.

Is there an area in which you would like to revise what you have
already said in print? If so, what? You have written that your first
book, Radical Innocence, was the most “accepted” of your books. Do
you wish that your works had been more “accepted”? Or do you prefer
the stance that you seem to have taken? And what do you consider your
greatest academic achievement and why?

HASSAN: Too many difficult questions here, difficult because they

appeal to vanity masked as regret or repentance, at best as self-criticism, the
illusion that we know better when we age. The funny thing is, I do believe
we know better some things, that we “wither into the truth” in Yeats’s
terrifying phrase--we empty ourselves out of self-concern.

Or perhaps it’s more like what Kafka suggests in “In the Penal
Colony”--you know, just before we die we finally understand the nature
of our mistakes?

HASSAN: I’m not so sure that’s how I would interpret Kafka as a

whole. The realization that we finally understand the nature of our mistakes
may be itself an illusion. I think, and I think Kafka thinks, that our true
home is a cloud of unknowing.

But let’s see how I can respond to the rest of your questions. I think that
I have marginalized myself, geographically and professionally--
constitutionally, I am a loner. My independent stand (let’s call it that) has
been, paradoxically, more acceptable in Europe than in America. Why
paradoxically? Because America, that old “willingness of the heart” as Scott
Fitzgerald put it, has been most generous, most welcoming in every other
way. I feel this strongly as a person, as an immigrant: I do not consider
myself a hyphenated American.

But the profession, since Radical Innocence, has been more

circumspect. First, there has been my advocacy of postmodernism, when it
was still young, still unknown. Then came my paracriticism, with its
dislocations of critical prose. Then my resistance to GRIM (the Great
Rumbling Ideological Machine), as I call it, a juggernaut of intellectual
conformities. And all along, there has been what some people perceived as a
louche streak of mysticism, though I am not now, nor have ever been, a
mystic--only, like all the rest of us, a wanderer in the cosmos, and so a
wondering a-gnostic. Of course, I’ve also been intellectually reckless
sometimes, impatient, provocative, and provocations in a fractious age, you
know, can spring up from the earth like dragon teeth, fully armed. But I am
not a creature of regret: I accept what is the case.

My “greatest academic achievement”? Some might say the criticism of

postwar American fiction; some might say the early work on
postmodernism; still others like the work on the literature of travel; and
others, again, prefer the autobiographical work, say Out of Egypt or
Between the Eagle and the Sun. I won’t answer the question about “my
achievement” myself, lest the answer strike you as a bit nihilistic.

By the way, there’s a positive, almost holy or kenotic kind of nihilism

that has increasingly engaged me--perhaps we can talk about that later.

Many of today’s academics were 1960s radicals (after a fashion), and

have embraced Marxist or neo-Marxist theories. Yet you resisted this
overall political trend. What do you think is the attraction of Marxist
theory, except that it helps provide “the obligatory rhetoric of packaged
rectitude” (to use a phrase of your own)? Is it too ideological (what you
call the “GRIM”)? Do you think a leftist stance helps academics feel
that they are still “activist”?

HASSAN: First, let’s distinguish between Marxism and the Left. (Isaiah
Berlin, among many others, has written convincingly about this.) Next, let’s
recognize the changing character of Western Marxism over the last eighty
years. Then, let’s admit that theoretical Marxism--and it has never been
anything but theoretical--has succeeded in becoming a floating Signifier of
Resistance, a moorless Sign of Change, a flapping Banner of Discontent--
like Islam now in certain parts of the world, without gulags. In fact, a
Moroccan intellectual once said to me in Casablanca: “I’ve turned to Islam
because the other [meaning Marxism] has failed.”

Myself, I find Marxism, viscerally as well as intellectually, distasteful--

on ethical, aesthetic, political, psychological, and simple pragmatic grounds.
I have always found it so--perhaps it’s the loner in me again--as I have
always found all forms of fascism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and
fundamentalism repugnant. Increasingly, too, I have come to distrust
abstractions, especially bloodied abstractions (to misquote Wallace
Stevens); that is, abstractions that demand human blood to maintain them
for a higher end. No!

A limber Left, however, fully cognizant of the ethical, aesthetic, and

spiritual needs of human beings, can indeed revitalize not only the academy
but also society. But in what sense would it be “Left”? In the sense of
progressive? If so, it will require a constant adjustment in direction, since no
party has a monopoly on progress, as history has amply shown.

What would you recommend to a student who wants to go into the

humanities? Do you feel that the university system is something that
has a lot to offer people seeking careers?

HASSAN: I ask prospective doctoral candidates to test the limits of

their commitment to the academic profession. Beyond that, I cannot go. If
they do enter the profession with strong commitments, they will do more to
shape it than I can.

What worries me, though, is the tendency--especially in America, from

Charlie Wilson to Bill Gates--to treat all human institutions as simply
variants on the business model. A hospital, a church, an army, a family, a
research lab, and, yes, a university--all these are not simply businesses,
though all may respond to the “invisible hand.”

Do you feel that teaching has an ethical urgency? You have written that
teaching has engendered and informed your work.

HASSAN: Teaching is, has always been, unavoidably ethical, all the
way back to Socrates. But it is also aesthetic, political, erotic, spiritual.... As
a central human activity, it calls upon our full capacity, students and
teachers alike, to be fully human. Partial teaching, in both senses of
“partial,” shrinks everyone concerned. But good teaching must be a little
perverse.

In what sense “perverse”?

HASSAN: I mean unexpected, unpremeditated, uninstitutionalized. To

be by one’s students and by oneself surprised. To have a touch of
“Dadacticism,” as I once called it.

Do you think that we should teach a “great books” type of curriculum?

Do you feel that feminist objections to the canon are valid ones?

HASSAN: Yes, indeed, we should, we do, we will teach great books (no
quotation marks there necessary). Yes, the objections of many feminists to
the canon have been sometimes valid. No, the canon, a responsive canon--
and Frank Kermode has shown it to be ever so--should not be abolished,
cannot be abolished, since the “abolitionists” most often cry for the
institution of their canon, whether they call it that or not.

Do you feel that we are outmoded because we teach relatively

underread books? Or do you feel that their perdurance over time
signals some importance? You don’t usually teach “popular culture”--
or write about it very much; most of your work is in what might be
termed “high culture.” Do you have a particular preference for “high
culture”? Can we draw a firm line between fine and popular art, as
Norman Mailer and John Updike recently did in reviews of Tom
Wolfe’s A Man in Full?

HASSAN: I have a particular preference for what moves me, what

compels me, what surprises me, what instructs and disturbs me, what
expands my horizons of awareness as of sympathy. But you are right: I have
not taught or written much about popular culture, except where it affects the
literature that affects me. This has included certain works of popularized
science and of science fiction.

As to Mailer and Updike on Wolfe, certainly I agree with them,

particularly Mailer whose review seems to me genial, generous, devoid of
animus. But if our sensibilities have become so flattened, dulled, even
brutalized, that we cannot feel the distinctions--however tentative, however
arguable, however particular, they remain distinctions still--as real, then we
have lost part of our minds, part of our spirit. It is not a “firm line” that
Mailer and Updike and the rest of us want to draw; it is simply a vital line.
Is it “outmoded” to feel the difference in the bone between what is facile
and what is difficult, what is sham and what is real, what sedates and what
calls us to a fuller existence? I say all this and still would give Tom Wolfe
his rich due, as Mailer himself does in that review, for A Man in Full is a
borderline, a vexed case.
Maybe I am asking what you make of the changes that a digital, hybrid,
hyperreal, consumer, media-driven society has effected.

HASSAN: That’s too big a question to tackle here--and the returns are
not yet in. Let me say this, though: I am surprised that there’s no greater
discrepancy between the values of my students and my own values today
than there was forty years ago. Do you realize that ours may be one of the
most “change-full” periods of history? Do I contradict myself (about
accelerated change)? I think not: willy-nilly, we are all changing together,
some more, others less; for some the gap may widen, for some it may
remain constant or even narrow.

You see, I don’t believe we are “culturally constructed” except in a

superficial, indeed tautological, sense--but then, the life of strict ideologues
is itself tautology.

But surely culture has deposited some of the same residue, as it were, in
each of us? Or do you feel that “selective exposure” to that culture, as
well as individual differences such as those stemming from genetics and
upbringing make each individual consciousness so different, so unique,
that “cultural construction” (or even my more modest suggestion of a
“cultural residue”) is a metaphor that just levels too many distinctions?

HASSAN: In a word, yes. “Cultural residue” is fine, but I am impressed

by the infinite differences within a class, a race, a gender, a family even. We
are “constructed” to an indefinite degree, but we also construct back.
Chance and biology, self-creation and social influences, all play a part.
Strict “constructionists,” who tend to be determinists, can accuse others and
exonerate themselves in the same cry. Obviously, this has great appeal,
therapeutic and theological appeal.

Indulge me in a Gedankenexperiment: suppose, if you will, that we lived

in a culture where any literary-critical act, spoken or written, were
taboo--the equivalent to, say, publicly discussing in detail one’s sexual
preferences or experiences. What would such a culture be like? Would a
kind of underground criticism emerge? Would the culture be
diminished by the absence of public voices of criticism?

HASSAN: A Gedankenexperiment deserves another. We would get

what I call Angelic Criticism, angelic reading of texts: total identification
with texts, in silence. Or, if you wish, [Pierre] Menardian Criticism:
rewriting the text in identical words. It would be better, wouldn’t it, than the
class that begins every “discussion” with, “Now, what’s wrong with this
book?”

Have you read anything good lately? Anything that pulls you up short,
surprises you? Can you recommend any novelists, poets, or playwrights
writing today--in any language--who speak to our condition with
eloquence and concinnity?

HASSAN: I have been reading Australians, lately. Patrick White’s Voss,

of course, overpowers, an astonishing achievement. But wonderful, too, are
the works of David Malouf--I hope he wins the Nobel soon--and Thomas
Keneally. And Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, recently published, is breathtaking
in its indirection.

Returning to American fiction, the big books like Pynchon’s Mason &
Dixon and DeLillo’s Underworld impress me, especially the latter, but do
not always move me. I might say the same of Paul Auster’s work, obsessive
and intriguing, on a smaller scale. Still, I would give my vote--had I one--to
Don DeLillo as the American successor of Toni Morrison for The Prize.

Whom to recommend for our time? How about a hedgehog and a fox:
Nietzsche and Shakespeare? Or Beckett and Montaigne? Or Kafka and Zen?

Funny that you should mention DeLillo, I am working right now on a

long piece about his work. What about his fiction do you find
compelling?

HASSAN: In brief, intelligence, imagination, integrity, social insight, a

metaphysical surliness, and withal language, language, language....

You have moved in a spiritual direction (yet not a religious one). Could
you briefly discuss the relationship of aesthetics and spirituality? How
does this spirituality connect with American culture and American life?

HASSAN: Hold it, if I can answer one of your large questions, answer it
half decently, both of us will sleep well tonight.

Human beings--it’s that troublesome big brain--are multifaceted

creatures. They cannot be reduced to material or political terms, as the
Standard Model in Cultural Studies now strongly implies. They cannot be
reduced to Spirit or Beauty or Truth or Language or.... They cannot be
reduced, period--though once dead, they reduce to dust quickly enough.

Now, no culture, ever, has developed without some sense of the

spiritual. Nor has ours. But this does not mean we can define the spiritual,
or the sacred, or the numinous, as we can define circle or square. The
spiritual extends over a broad band of noetic experiences, from common
intuitions to mystical revelations, from aesthetic appreciation to the
sentiment of the sublime, from inspiration in science and art to intimations
of immortality, and so forth. Spirit, Emerson thought, has the “terrible
power of self-change, self-accommodation to whatever we do.” William
James knew this, as did many others, from Plato to Heidegger, from
Longinus to George Steiner (in Real Presences).

I am interested in discovering, or rather, rediscovering, the relations

between the spiritual impulse of human beings and our daily lives in a
culture of irony, kitsch, disbelief. I am particularly interested in discerning
the nexus between spirit, nihilism, and language. I mean nihilism as a
penultimate form of sincerity or lucidity, as we might encounter it in
Nietzsche or Cage or Beckett--I mean the examples to be outrageously
discordant.

We are nihilistic thoughts that come into God’s head, Kafka said. Put
another way, human consciousness introduces radical doubt everywhere in
creation. Then what? That’s the point of departure of my recent essay, called
“The Expense of Spirit in Postmodern Times: Between Nihilism and
Belief.” Does the “sickness of severe suspicion” (that’s Nietzsche) hint
rebirth?

And yes, of course, this spiritual impulse is very much in the American
grain, whether Native American or Puritan Pilgrim, whether in the Hudson
School of painters or the Transcendentalist Movement, whether in
Fundamentalist religions or New Age gush. The impulse variously quickens
some of our best living writers: Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, John Updike,
Toni Morrison, John Ashbery ... the list is long. How, then, can I ignore it?

In that Georgia Review essay you also suggest that even if people were
physically safe and comfortable there would still be a lot of problems.
“[C]an the world’s evil diminish by material means alone? Will the
collective miseries of humanity dissolve, or even distinctly reduce, by
attending only to the corporeal needs of the individual?” What are the
“miseries” you had in mind, and do you really think they would be as
bad as physical deprivation?

HASSAN: I had in mind the miseries of Cain and Job, Oedipus and
Agamemnon, Antigone and Medea, Cassandra and the Wandering Jew, Iago
and Edmund, Hamlet and Lear, yes, and Caliban, among others. The
miseries of Milton’s Satan who cries, “I myself am Hell!” The miseries of
the most vivid and varied characters of the novel, from Don Quixote to
Captain Ahab, from Anna Karenina to Emma Bovary, from Ivan Karamazov
to Dr. Zhivago, from Bloom to Molloy--you get the point, I’m sure: they all
suffer. The miseries of gods and immortals, too.

I have no calculus of human suffering, and I don’t know which is

greater, the pain of a homeless, hungry man or that of a spiritually stricken
woman. But I know that they are both intolerable, and that alleviating the
one does not necessarily alleviate the other.

This perception should not lead to Original Sin, or Quietism, or

Fatalism, or even Stoicism, admirable as that is. If it leads to anything at all,
it is to an unillusioned recognition of reality, what is the case, whether we
wish it so or no--together with an undiminished resolve to act without
eudaemonic fictions. It’s all there in the Bhagavat Gita.

Our second innocence may be indifference, a particular kind of

indifference, which is self-indifference.

What kind of writing are you at present doing?

HASSAN: Well, I’m trying to write a short book about everything,

without footnotes. Call it a quasi-poetic, personal meditation on life, death,
spirit in our time--that sort of thing. The key phrase here is “trying to write.”
Because banality is the constant companion, almost the natural self, in this
unnatural enterprise.
Works Cited

Bail, Murray. Eucalyptus. New York: Farrar, 1998.

Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in

Europe. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
Conrad, Peter. Modern Times, Modern Places. New York: Knopf, 1999.

DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribners, 1997.

Everdell, William R. The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth

Century Thought. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

Hassan, Ihab. Between the Eagle and the Sun: Traces of Japan. Tuscaloosa: U
of Alabama P, 1996.

____. “Criticism in Our Clime: Parables of American Academe.” New

Literary History 25 (1994): 621-36.

____. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature.

New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982.

____. “The Expense of Spirit in Postmodern Times: Between Nihilism and

Belief.” Georgia Review 51(1997): 9-26.

____. Letter. “Forum on Intellectuals.” PMLA 112 (1997): 1139-40.

____. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York:
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____. “Negative Capability Reclaimed: Literature and Philosophy contra

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____. Out of Egypt: Fragments of an Autobiography. Carbondale: Southern

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____. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture.

Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987.

____. “POSTmodernISM: A Paracritical Bibliography.” New Literary History

3 (1971-1972): 5-30.

____. “Postmodernism Revisited: A Personal Account.”

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____. “Queries for Postcolonial Studies.” Philosophy and Literature 22

(1998): 328-42.
____. Radical innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel.
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____. The Right Promethean Fire: Imagination, Science, and Cultural

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____. Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama

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____. Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters.

Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.

Holt, Jim. “Is Paris Kidding?” Rev. of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern

Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, By Jean Bricmont and Alan V. Sokal. New
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*Used with permission from Style 33, 1 (Fall 1999)

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