Sporting A Code Of Many Colors

You’d never know it from the dearth of ink they’ve received of late, but the gnomes of academe have been up to business as usual: hi-jinks, as we comic strip devotees call it. The rest of the world may have its gaze fixed on Monica, Saddam Hussein and other eminent mischief-makers of the day, but the priests and priestesses - priestpersons? - of the campus depart not a moment from their appointed rounds.

As evidence of this, word came the other day from one of the campuses about a quite remarkable document. It was passed along by a wholly trustworthy mole in the English department at a major public university, but it is anything except a secret. It is a memorandum to English departments around the country from the editor of a hugely successful literary anthology, and it tells us all we need to know about the state of just about everything in the humanities departments these days.

If you are an undergraduate at an American institution of higher education in this, the shank end of the 20th century, the odds border on overwhelming that sooner or later you will have to take a survey course in American literature and pony up close to $100 for either the Heath Anthology of American Literature or the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Each takes its name from the company that publishes it. Among the English department illuminati and the students who labor under their gaze, the two are known simply as “Heath” and “Norton.”

As my informant reports: “They are both in two volumes and both big-time moneymakers. To maximize investment, editors need to get contents changed around every few years or the used book market will eat up the publishers’ profits. We are deluged with free copies. Everybody is advantaged by continually shifting the texts - everybody, that is, except the students - whoops, sorry, - ‘clients.’ These books are very expensive … and, since most of Volume 1 is free of copyright, very lucrative. Hence, another reason for churning contents.”

Churning is just what the good folks at Heath are up to these days. A new edition of the Heath is on the market, so you will not be surprised to learn that it is in the interests of Heath, as well as its allies in the English departments, to make the new Heath seem far more attractive to potential users than the new Norton.

It used to be that texts for a survey course were chosen by the English department and used by all instructors (mostly graduate students) who taught the course sections. But now, in my mole’s words, that is regarded as “too confining, dictatorial, hegemonic,” so the choice is often made by each instructor: “It’s a crap shoot.”

The stakes are huge: big-time entrepreneurial capitalism at work, bleeding the masses. But in this instance it bleeds them for their own good. Last month’s memorandum to the English departments came from Paul Lauter, editor of the Heath anthology, who was busily engaged in putting what he called “something of a commercial spin” on the new Heath’s virtues. They are, as the memorandum makes abundantly - if not appallingly - clear, the virtues of political correctness and diversity gone berserk.

Did you think that there’s still a “canon” of works by “dead white males” to which poor impressionable collegians are subjected against their will? Forget it. The new Heath anthology is proudly presented to its prospective clients as the very model of modern multiculturalism. Whereas pitiable old Norton insists on torturing the young with “a certain tendency toward conventional selections,” Heath turns up its nose at the likes of Cheever and Roth and Vidal - even Vonnegut! - to give its clients “an historically rich, more accurate and complete account of American writing and American cultures.”

That sounds just about as lofty as the preamble to the Constitution, but what it really says is that the Heath’s contents have been chosen on the quota system. Norton, Heath’s editor charges, has “a significant weakness … with respect to coverage of minority and white ethnic writers”; it includes “only one writer of Puerto Rican origins” and omits “many of the key Chicano/a writers”; its “selection of white ethnic writers (Italian and Jewish American particularly) is equally weak”; and its “coverage of writers of the 1930s is practically nonexistent.”

Heath, by glittering contrast, includes many writers Norton utterly overlooks: Tillie Olsen “(a major influence on feminist writing and thinking)”; Rolando Hinojosa “(who, among other things, is among the best-known ‘American’ writers in Latin America)”; and Carolyn Forche “(more and more seen as the most significant American poet of working-class origins and subjects).” Where Norton “begins with Columbus,” Heath “begins with a variety of Native American texts.” Heath has a “new selection of the work of 19th-century women poets,” a “‘sheaf’ of political poetry from the modernist period” and “19th-century writers … important from American studies and women’s studies perspectives.”

Et cetera. Could one imagine more compelling evidence that the teaching of literature in the American academy now has nothing to do with literature and everything to do with ideology?

The Heath table of contents as thus so proudly described isn’t a guide to literature, it’s a snapshot of the Rainbow Coalition. Writers are included not because of the quality of their work but because of who they are and what special interests they represent.

At the end of his interminable missive, Lauter signs off with his name and a quotation from Bob Dylan: “You don’t need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows.” No, all you need is a copy of the new Heath Anthology of American Literature. It’s an ill wind and it blows no good.

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