1979: E Pluribus Unum

Abstract

Northrop Frye about earlier conventions set me to thinking about my own first MLA meeting in 1950. Though I do not recollect the particular meeting, what I do remember from that period is a feeling of collegiality, the sense of belonging that characterized our whole profession thirty years ago. Of course we were a much smaller organization then, with about six thousand members, as opposed to the nearly thirty thousand we have today. To a certain extent, of course, I subscribe to the bigger is better thesis, and there is no question in my mind that the MLA of the late seventies is a much stronger, more active, and certainly a more representative organization than that of the fifties. Our size and the diversity of our interests give our meetings a rich and stimulating atmosphere that I do not remember from the earlier times. But these qualities have also created problems that may prove divisive enough to jeopardize our ability to face the future. We talk about the need for solidarity, but we tend to separate into factions that too often end up quarreling among themselves. This tendency is not a new one; literary critics have been contentious ever since they first came into being. Indeed, our profession may depend on such debate, since each new way of analyzing language and literature has to use criticism of other methods to gain a right to its own place in the constantly evolving intellectual world. To dramatize this argumentative inclination I shall set up some parallels with quarrels that occurred over the ages in French cultural history, though I fully realize the rashness of such a project. While we may not learn directly from history, we may learn from historians, or at least I hope we can in this particular exercise, in which the historical examples should be taken as no more than stylized forms of exempla. One of the most unfortunate splits that plague us is the regional one. Too many members think that the MLA, which should represent the profession as a whole, is dominated by the Northeastern establishment, aided and abetted by the California clique. Looking backward over French history, I come up with a terrible parallel, a negative exemplum of the most frightening type. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Midi, the south of France, produced a flourishing and highly sophisticated literature that remains an inspiration to many writers today. Where Provencal used lyric modes and courtly themes in a closely controlled cultural context, northern France at that time had developed the chanson de geste, a narrative and didactic genre with very different principles. Rather than rivalry between the two, there seemed to be complementarity, and once the northern poets were exposed to the Provengal lyric, they paid it the ultimate compliment of adopting it, adapting both its themes and its forms to the distinctive