Perspective: In praise of Roger Shattuck

I write in praise of our esteemed friend, colleague and teacher, Roger Shattuck, who died on December 8, 2005 at the age of 82. He was, for many of us, a beacon of sanity during strange times within the Academy, times when labels like Left and Right, Radical and Conservative, Progressive and Reactionary had became potent substitutes for thought.

He was the consummate scholar and man of letters. A week before his death he was still ordering books through interlibrary loan. He went after each new project with the energy of an excited undergraduate. And he wrote with the care of a prose poet. Here is the way his first book, The Banquet Years (1956), an instant classic about the French avant garde, opens:

“The French call it la belle époque — the good old days. The thirty years of peace, prosperity and internal dissension which lie across 1900 wear a bright, almost blatant color. We feel a greater nostalgia looking back over that short distance than we do looking back twenty centuries to antiquity. And there is reason. Those years are the lively childhood of our era; already we see their gaiety and sadness transfigured.”

The obituaries have generally described Roger Shattuck as a cultural conservative. The London Times online even described him as “archconservative.” He advocated Literature against Theory and held out for enduring values, always numbering among them skepticism and the free use of reason. He did not avoid the obvious questions: how much freedom is too much? Do we need great literature the way biological organisms need their seeds of self-perpetuation? Is it possible that traditional pedagogies are not wrong just because they are time-honored?

Alarmed by the direction literary studies was taking in American colleges and universities after the ’60s, he chose to take a prominent part in “the culture wars.” As a journalist publishing reviews in major American and English outlets, and as co-founder of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, a rival to the M.L.A., he set himself against the prevailing winds blowing towards deconstruction, constructivism and any theory that reduced literary works to textual symptoms of a determining social order.

In other words, he championed the individual creative artist and his or her work.

He knew, however, that defenses of individual creativity and bold experiment needed to be tempered by self-accepted limits. He sat where Goethe sat at the creation of Faust — fascinated and repulsed by the human drive to transgress.

In his book bearing the polemical title The Innocent Eye (1984), Shattuck advanced the preposterous notion that literature might be read intimately, without imposing or being imposed upon. Imitating Martin Luther, he pinned Nineteen Theses to the door of the modern literary academy. The sixteenth read: “More and more scholars and critics write and teach by applying an ideology or a methodology to a cultural ‘text.’ This reliance on appliances tends to eliminate the experience and the love of literature.”

Readers of his work in future times will find labels like “conservative” unconvincing. They will encounter the moralist of Forbidden Knowledge (1996) side-by-side with the experimentalist fascinated by stories of deviance and cognitive transformation, such as The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (1994) and Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life (complete and unabridged edition, 2003).

During World War II, Roger Shattuck was a combat pilot in the Pacific Theater. Throughout his life he took on dangerous missions, including his last, a four-year stint on the local school board in his late 70s. He threw himself into meetings, minutes, curricular guidelines, budgets. He delivered the results during his last public lecture at Boston University, a detailed picture of a public school system infiltrated by trendy educational theories and allergic to common standards and reading lists. He knew he had fought on the losing side this time; he doubted the loss was permanent.

At Boston University, where he taught from 1988 until his retirement in 1997, after holding distinguished teaching positions at the University of Texas (1956-1971) and the University of Virginia (1971-1988), Roger Shattuck devoted himself to undergraduate education. With Dean Brian Jorgensen he helped create our preeminent Great Books program, the Core Curriculum, in which he was a lead lecturer for ten years. The College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program, with its emphasis on great literature across many fields, grammar, imitation and speaking, is further testament to Shattuck’s enduring influence.

The Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures will offer an annual “Roger Shattuck Memorial Lecture,” to be presented each spring by an outstanding scholar of French literature and culture. The first lecture, featuring the distinguished French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, will be given in French on April 24, 2006, with a lecture in English scheduled for the following day at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies.

Michael Prince is an assistant dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at mprince@bu.edu.