Are humanists to blame for the kind of analysis found in the infamous torture memo?
I’ve long been invested in the notion that teaching to read literature carefully, seriously, reflectively can be an ethical act. So I was shaken when I recently began the latest book of an author I admire very much, J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (labeled a novel, but much of it a diatribe against America’s role in the world), and I came upon a passage on the prosecution of four young American Muslims accused of planning an attack on Disneyland. They were indicted, in part, on the basis of a home video so amateur and irrelevant that the prosecutor argued those very characteristics proved their link to Al Qaeda, where “nothing is as it seems to be.”
“Where did the prosecutors learn to think in such a way?” Coetzee’s fictional persona asks. “The answer: in literature classes in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, where they were taught that in criticism suspiciousness is the chief virtue, that the critic must accept nothing whatsoever at face value.” The denunciation continues, criticizing “not-very-bright graduates of the academy of the humanities in its postmodernist phase,” who, the book says, acquired “a set of analytical instruments which they obscurely sensed could be useful outside the classroom, and an intuition that the ability to argue that nothing is as it seems to be might get you places.”
Is that right?
The question Coetzee raises relates to an issue obsessing me for five years now: the interpretations produced by the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice to defend the use of torture (by any other name). The infamous August 1, 2002, memorandum from Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee to Presidential Counsel Alberto Gonzales (written, it is said, by John Yoo, now at the law school at the University of California at Berkeley) uses at least five different dictionaries, of varying dates, to select definitions of words it can then bend to its point, which is essentially that nothing is “torture” short of death-inducing pain. And even that can be excused by a good-faith belief it was not intended as torture.
In just one among many examples, the authors of the memo note that: “The key statutory phrase in the definition of torture is the statement that acts amount to torture if they cause ‘severe physical or mental pain or suffering.’” But because the statute doesn’t define “severe,” they go on, “we construe a statutory term in accordance with its ordinary or natural meaning.” To find that ordinary and natural meaning, the memo turns first to Webster’s New International Dictionary (in the 1935 edition, for some reason) and then to the American Heritage Dictionary (1992) and the Oxford English Dictionary (1978) to discover that “severe” “conveys that the pain or suffering must be of such a high level or intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.” But that definition, however ordinary and natural, doesn’t meet their purposes. So they search in the U.S. Code and discover: “Significantly, the phrase ‘severe pain’ appears in statutes defining an emergency medical condition for the purpose of providing health benefits.”
We need to ask whether the use of “severe pain” in the medical context (for insurance purposes, for instance) is in fact more “significant” than any other uses of “severe,” in statutes and in ordinary usage. But it serves the purpose: The slide into medical usage then allows the authors to assert that the pain that defines torture must involve damage that rises “to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function.” We’re now well into the emergency room.
Next comes the definition of “severe mental pain or suffering” in the torture statute, which includes inflicting “prolonged mental harm” intentionally. To prolong, Webster’s (1988 edition this time) tells our authors, is to “lengthen in time,” and that permits them to segue into the following: “Put another way, the acts giving rise to the harm must cause some lasting, though not necessarily permanent, damage.” After several more paragraphs of such circular reasoning, we get to “intent.” If someone is accused of inflicting torture, or even contemplating it, the defendant’s good-faith belief that the acts were not forbidden by the statute would constitute a “complete defense to such a charge.” We may uneasily sense that we are witnessing a tricksy free play of the signifier of the sort that literary critics and philosophers are sometimes accused of sponsoring.
The readings in the memo get yet more detailed and weird as it proceeds. It resonates at moments as a kind of parody of literary interpretive deconstruction at its worst.
It must be admitted that the lessons of deconstruction in the wrong hands — less adept than its original practitioners — led to facile untetherings of meaning. Nonetheless, the best, most responsible “close readings,” whether by New Critics or structuralists or poststructuralists, were essentially ethical in their wish to understand how texts mean and how language works. The critic Paul de Man, often identified with deconstruction, made the point eloquently in an essay, “The Return to Philology.” In it he evokes a course in “close reading” (itself derived in large part from I.A. Richards’s early experiments in “practical criticism”) taught by Reuben Brower, an independent sort of New Critic at Harvard University in the 1950s and 1960s.
Like de Man, I was a teaching assistant in the course, and I can attest to the intense energy it created — moral as well as intellectual — in trying to get your readings right. The course (and similar ones in many universities) made classroom debate of what a Shakespeare sonnet or an Austen novel meant, and how you could create an argument for its meanings, and then defend it (as well as entertain dissenting views), a serious and exciting business. Students who participated fully came away with an understanding that there is an ethics of reading — that it’s not a matter of “anything goes,” but of proof that is as rigorous as that of science.
Brower himself once cited Coleridge’s claim, which he learned from the Rev. James Bowyer, “that poetry, even that of the loftiest and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes.” Bowyer would say that “there is a reason assignable not only for every word, but for the position of every word.”
Must we who work in the interpretive humanities accept Coetzee’s bitter condemnation of our role in the world? The “torture memos” suggest the pernicious effect of unscrupulous reading, whatever its origin. Can we affirm — as I hope we can — that our practice and pedagogy of reading leads our students to a reflective engagement with those “reasons assignable": with the tough and supple work of language in representing the world and clarifying its moral dilemmas? We need to ponder the ethics of our readings, urgently.
Peter Brooks is a professor of comparative literature at Yale University. His most recent book is Henry James Goes to Paris (Princeton University Press, 2007).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 22, Page B5