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Edward Jayne

My first coherent memories are of having lived with my mother and brothers as well as my two cousins and their parents in the household of my grandparents in Darien, Connecticut. We occupied a weathered brown-shingle mansion on a four-acre estate at Pear Tree Point overlooking Long Island Sound. My grandmother was both energetic and generous to a fault with all her grandchildren. She read to us, played the piano for us, and fixed our favorite foods. She was an amateur sculptress, a local society columnist, and an Olga Frocks sales representative, making it a practice to bring one of her grandchildren with her as she did her circuit from one great mansion to the next. Unfortunately, my grandfather was arch-conservative and obviously irritated by small children. He made reactionary pronouncements at the expense of Jews, liberal dupes, and the "ball-peen hammer boys" dominant in labor unions, especially warning us against give-away politicians such as Roosevelt who betrayed every principle that made America great. Through my childhood I shared my grandfather's patriotic values despite his annoyance just looking at me--at least partly, I suspect, because my very existence had deprived his favorite daughter of her future prospects after her first year of college as a charter freshman at Bennington College.

Then my mother took my two brothers and me on a six-year Odyssey among trailer camps and defense plant housing projects across the Sunbelt stretching from Florida beaches to the Mojave desert and finally rural Iowa. For almost two years we lived with her boyfriend, Bob, a blackjack dealer who wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and rolled his own cigarettes. She was actually employed for a while as a part-time shill at an illegal gambling cassino. Her lifestyle choices got us in trouble wherever we went, and I reacted by turning inward, first reading comics, then Nancy Drew, then Dumas, then almost everything I could get my hands on--Hugo's two major novels, Byron's Don Juan, Shakespeare in his entirety, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, everything by Dostoevsky available in the local library. My taste in music advanced from Tchaikowski to Brahms, Bach and Bartok on a cheap phonograph I bought from a Sears Roebuck catalog with babysitting and pinsetting money. My Webster's second edition (which I still possess) was also obtained from Sears Roebuck, and other purchases by mail included the Walter J. Black set of books, which I read almost in its entirety. From a local bookstore I acquired a signed edition of Ralph Ingersoll's essays.

I became an outspoken atheist but continued to uphold my grandfather's arch-conservative assumptions. And in fact I took these assumptions even further than he himself might have wanted. I remember having shocked my fellow students and ninth grade social studies teacher by filling most of a class period with an oral report that summarized the factual evidence of Hitler's career totally off the top of my head. To help cleanse my mind of the subject, I was sent on successive summers to one uncle and aunt's genteel horse farm (at the time without any horses) and then the Maryland residence of another uncle and aunt, the latter a retired White House correspondent who was willing to explain the merits of democratic socialism practiced in western Europe.

Upon reaching college age, I joined a girl friend (and later my first wife) in Berkeley, California, where I was exposed to entirely new ideas that finally suggested the possibility that my grandfather might have been totally wrong. Friendly Trotskyists, ex-CPers, and anarchists had their impact, but I was also influenced by the relatively progressive standards of a large variety of friends as well as my new father-in-law, a nuclear engineer second in command in Teller's H-bomb project at Livermore. As far as my patron father-in-law was concerned, advanced weapons systems were essential to the defense of democracy salvaged by Roosevelt's excellent policies.

I obtained both a B.A. and an M.A. in English during the thirteen years I spent in Berkeley. The professors with the most influence included Josephine Miles, Albert Cook, Thomas Parkinson, and Ernest Tuveson. Encouraged by Miles and Cook, I assumed a literary approach that might be described as New Critical hyper-analytical. One of my proudest moments was when Professor Caldwell admonished his romanticism lecture course about the uselessness of brilliant but empty scholarship such as my 12-page paper devoted to an exhaustive analysis of the variant use of commas in Keats' last two lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Another high point was when a fellow student stood up in class to apologize to Professor Cook about my incessant arguments, and he replied by apologizing to me for her apology. I also remember having sent a couple of poems to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, and he replied with almost insulting brevity that I might be useful to my generation.

Once in possession of my M.A., I taught at a variety of California junior colleges and state colleges, all of which helped to augment my education as a composition teacher. Two years were spent at Oakland City College, where I became friends with two students in the leadership of the Black Panther Party. Then three years were spent at Humboldt State College, where I also served as faculty advisor for the campus SDS, as the nominal local representative for the CLR and CNP state organizations, as a local Peace and Freedom organizer (our chapter proportionally the largest in California), and as the only 1968 peace candidate north of the Bay Area. Earlier, I wrote a flier at the 1966 CLR-CNP Convention that played a substantial role in convincing the assembled delegates, representing all radical groups of California except the SWP, not to support the reelection campaign of Governor Brown, thus permitting us to organize a third party. This was useful to the anti-war movement at the time but also to Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for governor, since Governor Brown was forced to liberalize his re-election campaign in order to retain the support of voters tempted to join a third party (ultimately the "Peace and Freedom Party"). This diminished his base among moderate Democratic voters and contributed to Reagan's landslide victory that launched his political career. After the convention ended, one of the delegates supportive of Brown (Bettina Aptheker's husband) shouted in my face in front of a large number of gawking delegates, "Let me predict three things: (1) Reagan will be the next president of the United States [and he was, after Nixon, Ford and Carter], (2) you [referring to me] will go back into the woodwork, and (3) my friends and I will all be sent to the electric chair like the Rosenbergs!" It turns out he was right in only two of his three predictions.

In 1968 I switched graduate schools from Berkeley to S.U.N.Y. of Buffalo, since the latter provided the only Ph.D. program in the nation that tolerated, even encouraged, both Marxist and Freudian ideas. It also helped that Albert Cook, one of my favorite professors at Berkeley, had become the chairman of the Buffalo program and was willing to bring me into it, and that it featured Leslie Fiedler, who had been contemptuously described by Professor Tuveson, one of my U.C. professors, as the joke of the profession. Tuveson's extreme agitation when he said this convinced me that Fiedler might possibly have had something to say. Soon enough my critical viewpoint expanded to include the archetypal, psychoanalytic, response-theory, phenomenological, structuralist, and deconstructionist approaches. With Lionel Abel and Fiedler as mentors and dissertation advisors, I also learned to respect the Shachtmanite ex-Trotskyist position that has unfortunately transmogrified into today's neo-conservative ideology. Such professors as Norman Holland, C.L. Barber, Marcus Klein, J.M. Coetzee, and Robert Hass were at least friendly. The "hostiles" included John Barth, Michel Foucault, and the young structuralist Eugenio Donato (according to Abel, structuralism's first "Stalinist" in the sense that he reduced theory to its violent caricature). Foucault actually demanded that I remove myself from his presence in a bedroom at a large party when I tried to argue that Zilboorg's history of insane asylums in England totally disproved his thesis in Madness and Civilization; Donato was aggravated when Abel and I invaded his seminar to challenge his assumptions before his students (in the hall afterwards maybe ten of them surrounded me, and one in particular, his fists up, tried to pick a fight, saying, "Listen Jayne, there are a lot of us around here who don't like you"); and Barth never nodded to me again after listening to my debate with Ralph Ellison at a reception, when I tried to defend Malcolm X's intellectual integrity. The venerable critic Stanley Edgar Hyman was also indignant, declaring, "As much as you know, and as much as you think you know, you don't know for shit." He died just a few weeks afterwards, unfortunately, before he could apologize for his remark. My unpopularity was further intensified by an incident at a department meeting, when graduate students waving black and red flags demanded that almost all of the Ph.D. requirements be suspended. I was the only graduate student who challenged their demands, asking why we didn't just bring a printing press into the department office to run off an endless supply of diplomas free for all who wanted them.

At least once per week through most of my second semester, Abel treated another student and me to beers at a local bar--on our part while he talked--in order to help clarify the New York School's vision of literary value and politics in general the way it should have been clarified--over beers. Abel insisted on being my dissertation advisor, and our compromise choice for my dissertation topic was a dialectic version of response theory. I.A. Richards praised by mail my long first chapter as the best explanation of his ideas he had yet encountered, and Marcus Klein, the department chairman at the time, praised the dissertation as a whole as the best he had seen at Buffalo. At my orals defense, however, Abel pressed his forehead to the table, then slowly raised his face to hiss for everybody to hear that my ideas smelled of Stalinism. I suspect this was because I put too much emphasis on Sartre's theory, Sartre having been his good friend in Paris who had disappointed him by declaring his Marxist assumptions. Everybody calmed Abel down, the dissertation was accepted, and Lionel and I left to celebrate at dinner with the respective women in our lives.

Thereafter my critical emphasis was an eclectic and politically neutral vision of literary experience, but with primary emphasis upon a full reductionist application of relevant theories in the interpretation of literature. "Fathom the basic principles involved, then put them to work relentlessly," became the unspoken mantra that guided my eclectic approach, of course with the understanding that distortions and exaggerations could later be qualified by others in the field toward the more balanced final perspective that might be needed. Radicalism thus shifted from politics to become a methodogical standard for judging both texts and ideas--even those for which the political notion of radicalism was otherwise unsuitable--for example grammar or judicial review or the story of Christ.

My use of psychoanalytic criticism accordingly focussed on the denial displacement, Freud's most lucid concession to dialectics, and from this I could elaborate my interpretation of fiction on a Hegelian basis with an emphasis upon literary deception. I was primarily interested in the author's unconscious manipulation of truths in order to convey more basic lies, for example the sense of adequacy, the happy ending, and simplified distinctions between good and evil. More specifically, I emphasized the denial strategy in the use of narrative closure (which is unavoidable) to obscure or repudiate the metaphoric expressiveness at play as a text advances toward closure.

In my first published article using this approach, "Up against the Mending Wall," inspired by Fiedler (my title suggested by Holland), I proposed that the crux of Frost's poem lay in the dialectic interplay between, on one hand, puns, imagery and metaphor suggestive of homosexuality, and, on the other, an almost blatant homophobic closure which provided the twice-told assurance that good fences make good neighbors (both of them male). Unfortunately, this interpretation offended several of my new colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, a couple of whom had been personal friends of Frost, and in fact one of them never spoke to me again or acknowledged my presence as I passed him in the hall. Lawrance Thompson, Frost's official biographer, was fascinated by my interpretation but warned that the article might destroy my career--as in fact it probably did.

My subsequent articles, "Defense of the Homophobic Imagination" and "The Dialectics of Paranoid Form," didn't help things, though both were strictly theoretical. Nor did my later application of this approach to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," nor my truly metacritical venture in subjecting Roland Barthes's literary criticism to the same kind of analysis, since his specific insights were locally valid while his entire career ended up a magnificent lie. And my effort to employ psychometrics with the MMPI, 15 PF, and a verbal IQ test in order to demonstrate my theory led to very few results before newly imposed constraints about the use of student subjects in classes pretty much quashed the effort and sullied my reputation among liberal friends.

When I finally organized my theory into a larger whole a few years later in Negative Poetics (Iowa, 1992), with many of the chapters revised versions of these articles (but with the homophobic piece excluded), and with psychometrics totally excluded from its text, most of my ideas were simultaneously both outdated and newly distasteful for colleagues familiar with my work, and, as far as I can tell, without anybody having sought to fathom their fullest possibilities. My article, "Metaphoric Hyper-signification, Metonymic Designification," reduced my argument to formalist principles, but again there was no particular response to possibilities by anybody else in the profession.

My judicial review piece that extends my methodology to constitutional history was inspired a few years later by my mother's request that I make some kind of an effort to resuscitate Oliver Ellsworth's memory as a major figure both at the Constitutional Convention and as the second Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. My mother was fascinated with Ellsworth because he was a sixth generation ancestor--much more relevant to our status as Americans than our eighteenth generation great uncle, King Richard III. Unfortunately, Ellsworth's role was inconsequential on the Supreme Court, and his career seems to have been minor compared to those of many of his contemporaries. However, I discovered while researching Ellsworth's life (especially in the Brown biography), that he played a major role in having helped to author the Constitution's first draft within the Committee of Detail, and then, two years later, in having written Section 25 of the 1789 Judiciary Act that secured federal sovereignty by granting the federal Supreme Court the power of judicial review over state supreme court decisions that confirm the constitutional validity of state laws. Fraud was involved in the sense that judicial review was excluded from the Constitution in order to improve the possibility of ratification during the following year, after which judicial review was instituted with the almost impenetrable wording of the Judiciary Act. And it was Ellsworth who played a substantial role both in excluding judicial review from the Constitution and in finally making it law. There would be no immediate change, but, as anticipated, the cumulative impact of Supreme Court decisions in exercising judicial review effectively drew all of the disparate states into a single nation.
Even more useful for my purposes, the U.S. Constitution could be explained on a literary basis with the paradox that its closure, the single 307-word sentence in Section 25 of the Judiciary Act that conferred judicial review as the "enabling feature" of Constitutional sovereignty, was opaque, hence "metaphoric," as opposed to the deceptive lucidity of the Constitution itself. The audience for my Judicial Review piece has been miniscule, but I do take pride in having been told that Kenneth Burke was particularly fascinated with it in the final months of his life.

After being denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts for abrasiveness and overbold speculation as well as an insufficient number of publications, I went on to serve one-year appointments at the University of Minnesota and the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, and then a one-semester appointment at Colby College. Finally, I was able to settle into a permanent position at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where most of my pursuits have been generously tolerated. I have also taught at two additional foreign universities, Freiburg in 1973 and Munich in 1978, both in Germany, the latter while I was on a Fulbright professorship. All three of my assignments abroad even further widened the gap between my mature political opinion and both my grandfather's troglodytic ravings and the constrictive economic reductionism usually associated with the Marxist approach.

I have since brought my "hyper-analysis" to bear upon a large variety of topics, many (not all) of which are amply represented in this web site--for example my theories of grammar and metaphor, my use of a Kondratieff model to explain U.S. literary history, and my extension of the principle of "singularity" now important in cosmology to biology and the individual experience of birth. Eventually my hyperanalysis degenerated into what might be described as hyperskepticism, though I hope and expect with useful applications. At the same time my emphasis on literary deception which culminated with Negative Poetics, shifted to a new emphasis on truth, which has necessitated a better and more comprehensive grasp of the basic principles at the root of skepticism since ancient Greece.

Today, the most important issues for me are the current political crisis in the U.S. (and it is nothing less than one) as well as the history of freethought in general--and atheism in particular--in the context of western civilization from Thales to what is happening in the United States today. Religion strikes me as the single most important source of the populist conservatism now dominant in large portions of our nation, so the primary challenge is to convince the American public of the value of a secular perspective now commonplace in Europe. And, in fact, this perspective has been of crucial importance since the very beginning of our nation, when deism was the faith (or lack thereof) for our first six presidents. If literature and religion are primarily instruments of self-deception, I concluded (and still do, as a matter of act), the full "truth," if such be accessible, is to be sought elsewhere--in the historic achievement of science, skepticism and freethought since ancient Greece. In undertaking this project, I persist, of course, in stretching my ideas to the limit--a freedom I can enjoy to the fullest now that I have been retired from the English profession for five years.

My wife Elaine and I have been married since 1960, 44 years ago. She continues to be employed at Western Michigan University as a reference librarian, the author of the Searchpath college library tutorial program now used across much of the nation. We live in Kalamazoo, Michigan, cramped in our small cape-style house by a 5,000 hardback library that engulfs us like a fatal cancer. Extensive carpentry would be necessary to dismantle our present household and newly construct the next with shelving adequate to our needs. Instead, we make a couple trips per year to visit our four children and nine grandchildren who live in New York City and at both ends of Massachusetts, not more than a couple hours from Pear Tree Point.