Unveiling the “Hoax”: Rebecca Goldstein’s New York Times Book Review essay “Theory, Literature, Hoax”

Unfortunately, I only just now came across Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s essay “Theory, Literature, Hoax” originally published in The New York Times on April 29, 2010, but republished in the most recent Sunday Book Review. As a criticism of literary theory, the position that Goldstein holds – that there are problems with the integrity, pervasiveness, and application of theory in literature departments – is one that has been understood by academics for some time now; and those literature academics who still cling tenaciously to theory are often those who have built their career upon its premises. That being said, and despite the occasional misuse of literary theory as a veiled political tool, her primary issue is that those in literature departments should not infringe upon her field of philosophy: “We looked to these colleagues to explain a poem to us, not to tell us our epistemology.”

A fairly prolific writer and novelist, who is also married to the evolutionary psychologist – famous for his ability to gain media attention, and write popular rather than academic books – Steven Pinker, she decided to protect her overly-wrought position behind the charade of a fictionalized account: “The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose that goes by many names but can be summed up as Theory. The situation seems to call for a story, and one written in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, the grand chronicler of the tragicomic struggle between humans and logic.” Apart from her inability to do Borgesian style justice, she has left herself largely unavailable to criticism in this format – a technique she has long maintained in her promotion of philosophical positions through fiction rather than explication.

Now, while I’m not sure what the desired effect of her essay was, I’m certain that her most pressing goal was to promote her new book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (there she goes again, protecting her intellectual positions behind a fictional facade…). You can view a promotional video of the book in which Goldstein is being “interviewed” by her husband, the much more famous Pinker, in one of the little clips he uses to publicize the work of his friends. If you weren’t aware that they were married, however, you’d be none the wiser after the interview (although you would note that she bears a strong similarity to Ramona Singer – the crazy one on The Real Housewives of New York City).

But what’s more significant than her academic nepotism – which isn’t shocking in any of its manifestations – is her dismissal of literary theory’s support of the position that cultural influences are an imperative factor in our reading and understanding of the world:

“The fantastical vision of a Berkeley or even a Hegel is, however whimsical, a description of some logically possible world. Even this tentative brush with the real was eschewed by Theory, which flipped all our knowledge, no matter the subject, into knowledge of Culture. Culture is the pest always sneaking up from behind, clamping its clammy paws over the eyes and shrieking, ‘Guess who!’ There is no shaking off Culture, blocking the path to any ledge in all the ranges of knowledge — the sciences and the social sciences, the humanities and the arts — from which we can look out and see.”

In light of her (humorous?) reflection, I can’t help but note the fact that Goldstein – a loyal cultural Jew, as is her recently acquired husband Pinker – has published this essay in “The Jewish Question” issue of the Sunday Book Review. Does the surreptitious promotion of her new novel – explained in her video interview as concerning a Jewish man “struggling with the tensions between religion and reason” – in a New York Times Book Review devoted to Jewish culture and religion in any way eschew the importance of culture in our perception of knowledge?

The interview concludes with Pinker interrogating Goldstein with yet another of many rigorous and brutal probes: “You’ve been called a ‘champion of Jewish culture.’ You’ve also been called one of the ‘New New Atheists.’ Is there a tension in the novel between the Jewish themes and the atheist themes?” I’m not sure what their mutual embrace of terms such as “New New Atheism” says about Goldstein’s position on the influence of literary theory, except to say that she doesn’t reject it entirely. But ironically, in light of her declared aversion to the idea of cultural relativism in her butchered Borgesian-style criticism, Goldstein responds that the major point of her book is that religion is about much more than the belief in God: “It’s about loyalties to communities.”

On another note, although there are problems with philosophical relativism – espoused in most literary theory (and, in select circumstances apparently, by Goldstein) – there are also significant difficulties in maintaining universalist positions.  While one of Goldstein’s favorite philosophers (because he is also a Jewish atheist/pantheist?), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), of whom she has written on several occasions including a recent biography, is a valuable contributor to intellectual thought, his philosophy is based on the unreasonable – if we are allowed to examine empirical evidence, at least – position that human nature remains both universal and constant over time.

As the philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) puts it, in his Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, “the unaltering character of basic human nature…could not be so, for man’s creations – language, myth, ritual – tell a different story” (100). He goes on to say, more strongly, that “[t]he rational egoists of Hobbes, Locke or Spinoza are arbitrary and unhistorical; if men had been as they are depicted by these thinkers, their history becomes unintelligible. Each stage of civilisation generates its own art, its own form of sensibility and imagination. Later forms are neither better nor worse than earlier, but simply different, to be judged each as the expression of its own particular culture” (103).

It’s probably safe to assume that Goldstein is not a particular fan of Berlin, but I mean to demonstrate here that her ideas are not necessarily in line with her contemporaries in philosophy departments (not that Berlin is representative either, of course), and so we should approach with caution the professed notion that she has her finger on the pulse of literature academia (she doesn’t). We should not dismiss the contributions of universalist philosophy, by any means, but we shouldn’t remain dogmatic about such positions either since inconsistencies are inevitable. I am going to add – somewhat cruelly, I suppose, but without much concern after her reduction of literature departments to collectives of quack academics – that Goldstein spent a decade as an assistant professor at Barnard College without gaining tenure. She then went on to a series of uncommitted teaching posts, one of which included a several-year stint as a professor of creative writing at Columbia – more than a safe arm’s length away from her former philosopher colleagues.

I should clarify that, on a personal level, I admire Goldstein’s decision to write intellectually rigorous novels rather than allow her works to remain unread in a dusty stack of academic journals. (After all, I’m writing this at the moment.) And I’m sure that her editors appreciate her efforts to promote sales of her newest book by any means possible. But to use her academic background to discredit the encroachment of literature departments into her backyard of philosophy (although, as I have noted, one in which her peers don’t want to play with her) is unconscionable when we consider her eager hypocrisy. After all, rather than explore her philosophical position through the scrutinized logic of academic argument, Goldstein has chosen to bury it in novels throughout her career. If literature academics cannot examine a novel beyond its “techniques for delighting and instructing,” as she desires, then how would we uncover the violations of intellectual consistency that Goldstein so readily provides?