In The Theory Toolbox, on page 177 there is a prompt asking about whether or not “political correctness” has so deeply penetrated literary criticism to the point of being its ultimate goal. To demonstrate a possible answer to this question, the text cites a critic named Frank Lentricchia who decided to opt out of the title of literary critic because he thought that the sole concern of criticism had become for progressives to establish their moral superiority on questions of race, gender, and sexual orientation over canonical authors. In this sense, he says that criticism is now fundamentally “self-righteous.”
While, again, I find myself thinking that the authors of TT have caricatured the opposing side of the debate rather than engaging with it fairly, choosing a quote from Lentricchia that is filled with much more vitriol than argumentation, I still think that this is an interesting question they are toying with. It seems to me that the tendency in criticism, especially when performed by undergraduates, is to morally attack classic works. It is fairly regular in class to hear students and professors pointing out the injustice depicted or implicit in certain texts, and sometimes it can seem as though the concern is less with the text itself and more with the injustice. While it obviously is right to condemn injustice in all forms, whether literary or otherwise, it also seems as though this approach to literature can sometimes come at the expense of treating it in a way that is more formal or genre-minded.
However, even such approaches as these, it could be argued, encode a certain implicit morality. All interpretations, whether intentionally or not, assume a system of values that they apply to the interpreted object. Thus while we may, like Lentricchia, object to the “self-righteous[ness]” and moralizing of certain modes of criticism, this does not entail that there is another mode that is itself amoral. And without an amoral means of interpretation, it follows that all criticism is, to a lesser or greater extent, subject to this same objection. Realizing this, it seems to me, leaves us with the question of if interpretation ever could be amoral, and if not, how could we justify complaining of smug progressiveness while admiring other forms of criticism.
I like your question of whether or not interpretation can be amoral. Something else that caught my eye was you pointing out that it’s pretty common to hear the injustices in certain texts being pointed out by professors and students. I find that to be pretty common, too. In one of my classes last semester, my professor pointed out something interesting about Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. She noted that while the main character does a great job of explaining what the African slaves went through, one of the problems that some people have with the novella was that we never hear from the slaves themselves. We never exactly know how they feel about things, from their own point of view. I just thought that was interesting.
I think the key is to go beyond pointing out injustice, and instead asking oneself how injustice functions in the text as a product of its historical context, its author’s own background, and as a product of constraints presented by genre and form. Thus, Conrad appears to join a broadly shared caricature of African life at a certain point in history even as his ideas can seem very progressive as they interrogate what drives the imperial self. One cannot simply point to things; one must use the kind of “contextual creativity” our authors describe to reveal how certain progressive and regressive things happen all at once. So the test is really that contextual creativity–one’s ability not to limit contexts (“Conrad is racist”) but to expand them (where is Conrad’s racism most evident? Where does it emerge from? Where is it contracted and by what / whom?). I think the authors of TT would caution against any approach that is hyper-moral to the point of being smug and those who discard attention to injustice for as they flee to the “aesthetic” itself (as though, as you note, that wasn’t already an embodiment of a certain ideology).