the Greater Nomadic Council

Literary Criticism as Politics

Or, perhaps more accurately, politics as literary criticism. What am I talking about? Not Marxist, feminist, queer, or other readings prevalent in contemporary literary criticism (all of which I find interesting, useful, and as incomplete as any other reading; they must all be taken together), but a recent War Room post:

"Outside these walls, the cries of those powerless souls who are injured, disenfranchised, or otherwise aggrieved may, indeed, be faint. But those same pleas for help echo powerfully within the Department of Justice. Every day, like a steady drum beat, we are asked to provide an answer to a problem, to secure a remedy, to be a champion. And every day, this department responds, as it has done so time and time again throughout the history of our beloved America."

The remarkable thing isn't that Gonzales would invoke the "powerless souls who are injured, disenfranchised, or otherwise aggrieved" when neither he nor his boss has been all that helpful to any of the above. (Think tortured detainees, think voters in Ohio and Florida, think victims of medical malpractice or asbestos poisoning.) What we're struck by is the grammatical disconnect -- the embedded admission of a gulf -- between the "cries" of those "powerless souls" and the actions of the Bush Justice Department.

That last sentence sets up what can only be considered a close reading of Gonzales's remarks that would make any professor of literature proud. It's precisely the sort of thing I love to do when writing about poems (see my earlier post on Lycidas for instance). Perhaps if the general populace were trained to pay such close attention to language and the nuance of meaning, politicians would find it more difficult to obscure their meanings. Such training is unlikely to become widespread, but, as Milton wrote, "For so to interpose a little ease, / Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise."