Railing at Greatness: Why Critics, Educators, and Readers are so Touchy These Days
‘Railing at Greatness’: Why Critics, Educators, and Readers Have Been So Touchy Lately
A “classic,” as Mark Twain famously remarked, “is a book that everybody praises but nobody reads.” Over the past couple of decades, his observation is no longer true: not only has there been less reading, alas, but even less praise – at least for those artists and works who most deserve it. To make matters even more distressing, critics and their devotees haven't merely stopped reading and praising the classics: where they haven't successfully banned them altogether, they want to change them, update them, “dumb them down,” – doing everything necessary to make them palatable for 21st century readers, except letting them be what they are.
Very recently there has been a mini-controversy involving an well-meaning English professor whose good intentions led him down the consequently hellish path of exorcizing a word from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and substituting with another word, apparently one less-offensive, albeit less acutely descriptive and with fewer nuances, thus undermining the author’s use of the original word. Here on the LitNet blogs a lively discussionhas sprung up concerning alleged racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a charge first raised in a 1977, subsequently revised as an essay ten years later and since updated by the esteemed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. (It might come as a surprise to many of us that both issues have already been covered–perhaps even settled -- fourteen years ago this month, more of which be explained in the second and third parts of this essay.)
In the past two or three decades we have seen highly respected professionals accepting or rejecting a work according to how much or how little it reflects the social and political temper of the time--not so much the time in which it was first created, but in the time in which it is interpreted. This subjective--rather than objective-- type of assessment is a relatively new development in the world of literary criticism. For much of the twentieth century, literary thought was dominated by the New Critics (such as Brooks, Leavis, Tate, and Robert Penn Warren et al) who urged close structural analysis of the individual work without very much emphasis on whatever outside forces may have influenced its construction. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot, who is often included among the ranks of this literary movement, maintained that the quality of a specific work must also be assessed against the whole canon of literary works which preceded it. Most importantly, Eliot argued for minimizing an poet's personal background, in order to shift the focus away from the author toward the poem itself. (That is an crucially important point which will return in a later part of this essay.)
In 1957, the Canadian scholar, Northrop Frye, published The Anatomy of Criticism, which many consider the greatest volume of literary criticism of the twentieth century. Frye helped send criticism down a bold new path in that he viewed the role of the critic not as an ancillary sidekick or adversary to creative works but as a creative endeavor requiring just as much of the imagination as producing the work of art itself. Still, the methods which Frye recommended seemed closer to science than to art. He called the process "inductive" -- looking at the work itself and then systematically analyzing it according to certain sets of criteria, including and especially mythological "archetypes." Despite the fact that primary focus began with the original work, by admitting an external framework into the mix, Northrop Frye unwittingly became a bridge between the New Critics and the more recent crop of literary critics: which more and more seem to resemble a precinct full of book cops as well as cultural watchdogs, ideological spokespersons, and word warriors in the cause of social justice.
The popular trend on university campuses of Derrida-style “deconstruction” notwithstanding, today's literary critics seem less interested in taking a difficult, comprehensive approach. Our fast-paced civilization has lost its appetite for the painstakingly-written, in-depth review, marginalized with the label “think piece.” The in-depth analysis has been evicted by the capsule review, a more superficial one designed to cater to “the consumer,” providing him with the option of accepting or dismissing a work in a matter of seconds with two-sentence book reviews or downsized movie blurbs. For all the sophisticated complexity of our technological gadgets, it is a misnomer to call ours “The Information Age,” when the basic morpheme is called a “bite.”
Somewhere along the line we stopped trying to discover what literature is; instead we somehow feel compelled to ask what literature is for: for self-improvement, for contribution to our culture, for airing grievances, and for righting wrongs, as if fiction and poetry were super heroes, dressed in colorful tights and capes-- though, in a way,
some of them do wear a kind of "mask."
One reason for this is that although literature once was autonomous, aloof, and isolated from the assault of transient trends and cultural vagaries, it has since been yanked down from its loft and forced to work for a living. Rather than considering art and literature for their own respective sakes, educators on every tier of the system, from elementary through post-secondary schools, have conscripted them as possible “educational tools,” and thus are fully prepared to reject them for failure to embody prescribed criteria. If a specific work of literature makes the grade, it may be subjected to specious interpretations in order to make it “relevant” or “interesting” to an audience held captive by ennui. A blatant example of this tendency was described in John Kilgore's essay deploring the way poetry is introduced to high school students, such as reading Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” as an exhortation to avoid peer pressure.
Elementary and secondary curricula are developed by experts who assiduously monitor texts for material that may be inappropriate; they are specifically on the lookout for ethnic and religious bias either in the work as a whole or isolated passage. Given the youth of the students, the process is, at least in theory, the correct one on the elementary and high school level. There is, however, a danger that quality material commandeered for the benefit of students may be rejected for questionable reasons, for example a word with multiple meanings, one of which may be offensive. This is the reason The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appears on so many lists of “banned books” despite the fact that no non-minority author in American literature ever made a stronger attack on slavery and racism. The well-intentioned monitoring of offensive material continues on the college and university level, where it is both refined and intensified. One of Philip Roth's novels sends up the zeal of the self-appointed protectors of oppressed groups. In The Human Stain some undergraduates, with their antennae up and their sensitivity meters ramped up to eleven, misinterpret a highly-respected professor’s off-hand remark in the classroom as a racial slur. Rather than defend a distinguished member of their faculty, administrative officials cower under the students’ charges, and Coleman Silk’s life is forever changed. The integral irony is that Silk himself straddles the racial divide in American society, and through this dilemma Roth examines cultural issues of race, class, education, and ultimately, on the broader scale, the human condition.
Additionally, this habit of seeking and inevitably finding offensive aspects in the classics may have another cause: factions of both academia and the literati seem beset with a condition of partial amnesia in which current readers and critics use present-day cultural, social, and political standards, historically hard-won by heroic sacrifice, to judge works created in an earlier, admittedly less socially conscious age. Unquestionably, denouncing bigotry in all of its forms is certainly the correct moral stance to maintain; still, insisting that artists who once inhabited a bygone era and a world which had not yet evolved into a position akin to modern enlightenment should be likewise righteous is not only preposterous but patently unfair.
There is yet another reason for making literature fit into a Procrustes bed (which in modern times would be undoubtedly be a therapeutically designed futon) is the contemporary tendency toward literalism, straight-forward candor earnestly delivered with a straight face. Tangentially, readers occasionally succumb to an unconscious tendency to equate the opinions and behavior of characters with that of their author, with the intractable assumption that everything he produces is “autobiographical,” or the notion that the “I”of the poem or its speaker is always the poet himself.
Despite the resurgence of what is called “satire” (but is more likely parody) in popular entertainment, and a general wave of healthy skepticism toward both governments and corporations, in many ways the children of the millennium are allergic to irony. One has only to recall their parents’ generation, in which television viewers were savvy enough to recognize the particular ax a situation comedy like All in the Family was attempting to grind. This wasn't the 1950s and early sixties typical sitcom in which the main comic foil -–usually the bumbling father-figure in the family --evoked empathetic laughter at his foibles, with the confusion predictably cleared up before the last commercial break. In Norman Lear’s “ground-breaking” series, however, the central character was meant to be laughed at, not “with.” Racism, sexism, homophobia and especially invincible ignorance were the direct targets of ridicule, through the loud blustering of a character who personified bigotry and wrong-headedness, the deflation and destruction of which was written right into his name, Archie Bunker.
In the four decades since that show’s premiere, we've had the rise of cable television accompanied by looser standards of programming regarding uncensored expression of language and themes. It could be argued that but for all of the apparent sophistication of these times, one can only imagine the impassioned outrage a network show such as All in the Family might evoke today. Somehow readers and audiences do not have the ability – or at least the inclination–to dig more deeply than what appears on the surface. The current collective unconscious somehow has lost that particular type of critical thinking, and in the process seems to have developed a wafer-thin skin.
Ostensibly, the barriers of “censorship” seem to have crumbled, yet there is an apparent paradox in the fact that clouds of a form of prior restraint are rolling into the creative atmosphere. Some writers and artists have of late may be thinking that they are pushed into a position of near skittishness, in that they must –to use a phrase by a former White House Press Secretary– “watch what they say,” else they inadvertently enrage certain factions of their audience who will take a passage or a phrase out of context and proclaim it as an affront to civilization.
Part of this hypersensitivity can be attributed to the to the subjective character of our self-absorbed era, a predilection for solipsism stemming from an artificially inflated sense of self-esteem. Despite --or more likely because of -- its appearing on so many local lists of “banned books,” The Catcher in the Rye has attracted legions of devoted young readers from its initial publication in 1949 through the present day. That its author provides such a resonant voice for its adolescent protagonist/narrator attests to Salinger’s skill, but at the same time opens up a window in which his audience, flattered if not thrilled to the core, recognizes itself in Holden. The window, perhaps, is open a bit too wide, for such strong reader identification brings the unfortunate side effect of diminishing the art of this novel. While teen readers cheer at Holden’s railings against “phoniness” and worship his insistence on seemingly noble integrity, they take every single word out of Holden’s mouth as gospel and thus tend to miss some of Salinger’s comic observations and sly satire, i.e. “I don't know what I mean but I mean it.” Young readers may not have as yet reached the level of sophistication to recognize that the authenticity which they admire so much has been craftily calculated to appear genuine. It never crosses their minds that other narrators might be unreliable or that modern authors–including Salinger!– did not and do not live in an unambiguous, literal universe.
Another byproduct of such intense reader identification is that young people expect the same instant recognition and flattery everywhere else. They want the similar experience no matter what they read; no matter the character, these readers want to “feel” the same way Holden Caulfield does as when cares about the ducks in Central Park. Taking everything personally could be part of the answer as to why so many contemporary readers are quick to bristle and find offense even where it doesn't necessarily exist. Adolescents and hypersensitive adult readers as well–might benefit of a reminder that -- even though the themes of all good books concerns themselves with the human condition, with all of the virtues and flaws we hold in common as well as the onslaught of slings and arrows that accompany the whole of mankind--not everything you read is about you.
The experience of literature is not limited to validation and praise; more likely it tends to challenge and chastise. This is not to say that reading literature of high-quality is not enjoyable, yet reading, as Mortimer Adler so eloquently told us, is not a passive activity. It’s hard work, but like everything of any value in life, “you get what you pay for” in terms of time and effort.
This might be the reason young readers shun vigorous modern American authors such as Bellow or Roth. Their narrators are nothing like Holden: instead of aspiring to “save” the innocent, to catch children from falling over the cliff of worldly knowledge (and thus maturity), the anti-heroes in the novels of Bellow and company are non-apologetically cynical, unsentimental thinkers. Characters such as Charlie Citrine and his mentor Humboldt (whose model was the real poet, Delmore Schwartz), as well as the academic administrator Albert Corde are not conventional saints but insatiable scholars of both book-learning and human nature. Their observations and musings are embedded with multiple layers of meaning descending more deeply than an off-shore oil rig. Every bit as introspective as Holden, but less romantically so, they are primarily men of thought rather than exclusively men of feeling. Their sense of moral outrage is as intense as that of Salinger’s noble youth, but with the mature recognition of life as it really is rather than what a less-seasoned, would-be hero such as Holden Caulfield would prefer it to be. If the reader is looking for a straight answer, a comprehensive explanation of life in terms of black and white, he'll seldom if ever find it in contemporary literature --or in all of modern art, for that matter,–because human existence seems to be at the mercy of relentless chance, a fundamental absurdity for which the only response-- if there can be any–-is ambiguity. The world observed through filters devoid of rose-tinted lenses cannot be completely explained in simple declarative sentences, and seldom offers a scenic view that is conventional, straightforward, or socially acceptable. This world is not “nice,” and neither are its artists.
What these contemporary protagonists and their creators are, most of all, is articulate, indeed exquisitely so, almost to the point of intimidation. So-called “serious” literature --or, as it is pigeon-holed into its artificially-imposed genre, the redundant term “literary novel” -may have, among its loftier goals, an attempt to stretch language to its outer limits and/or reduce it to its irreducible core. Whereas this kind of work is a novel in its conventional sense of its being “about” plot, character, setting, and theme, it is “about” itself as well, with as much, if not more, emphasis placed on the “how” as on the “what.” Thus, the contemporary or “post-modern” novel often features references, allusions, even parodies of –to use the favorite word of insurance corporations --“pre-existing” material, transformed into “black humor,” “gallows humor,” “tragicomedy,” “dramedy,” but always offering “jokes”–highly sophisticated bits that go over some readers’ heads, like an stand-up comic whose dry material is “too hip for the room.” That the reader is unfamiliar with the references or is unable to “get” the joke does not mean the work is flawed; an artist can never be held responsible for the gaps in a reader’s education.
Added to this challenging mix, as complex as a multi-step recipe full of obscure gourmet ingredients, is the possibility that the narrator and/or his author may be unreliable, either or both may be deliberately lying, intentionally throwing the unsuspecting reader off the scent, with an artistic approach which Stravinsky praised as being “sincerely insincere.” Again, many contemporary readers, especially the Americans, may lack the irony gene.
It is not easy to read and understand ultimately literature that pushes us out of the safe comfort of the “quick read,” a book that flatters us by catering to our tastes and is as easily “digestible” as an bowl of false alarm chili. When literature demands time-consuming mental effort and reflection, it may evoke a sense of frustration in readers accustomed to less demanding fare. When readers mistake challenges as confrontational condescension, they shift the source of irritation away from themselves to that of the author. This is the theory examined by the critic Vince Passaro who published “A Flapping of Scolds,” a literary review published in Harper’s Magazine way back in January 1997. We'll take a look at Passaro’s views on how such reader resentment takes shape in the second part of this essay which follows below.
Please stay tuned for Part II, which continues below in reply #2----
Railing at Greatness -- Part II
II.
Several years ago a New York City tabloid unleashed what is commonly called a “media frenzy” over what can only be described as a contrived rumor. The subject of the slew of “articles” (to use the term loosely) was some idle speculation over the sexual preference of one of the Big Apple’s Major League ballplayers. Boldface headlines screamed with questions – who is he? Does his manager and the team’s owners “know?” Was the assumed “cover up” deliberate? Is he about to come out of the “closet”? Naturally, the name of the hypothetical gay ballplayer was never disclosed–if he ever existed at all. (He could have been entirely fabricated, like “Sidd Finch,” George Plimpton’s mythological pitching phenom capable of hurling 100+ mph fastballs in rapid succession.) Meanwhile, the gossip about the closeted pro ballplayer must have caused a spike in newsstand sales. Eventually, a fresher sensational rumor and/or scandal hit the streets, and the hysteria over the anonymous player withered away. But at its height the speculation did not cause massive legions of fans –homophobic or otherwise–to boycott either of New York’s two baseball venues or to stop watching televised games. Nor did any of the prurient pandering inspire anyone to question how sexual preference would affect any ballplayer’s ability to play the game.
That inane anecdote from the outskirts of the sports world might illustrate as an analogy: just as sports fans have no difficulty separating what a player may or may not do “off the field” with his performance in the game, so should we be willing to distinguish the facts we know about an author’s personal history from his works. When it comes to art, perhaps we could evoke the oft-cited Christian dictum that we should “hate the sin but love the sinner” and apply a kind of converse: abhor the artist but admire the work.
In his 1919 critical essay, “Tradition and The Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot outlined his idea of the role of a poet as well as urging readers and critics to shift the focus away from the poet to that of his work, further suggesting that the emotions of art differ from the emotions of life. Ironically enough, critics made no such distinction when they began serious studies of Eliot’s own poetry. Though the Nobel Prize Committee found Eliot’s work worthy of the literature prize in 1948, critics gradually attempted to diminish his stature, becoming more dismissive as the decades progressed, mainly on the charges of Eliot’s anti-Semitism.
The critics were still at it as late as 1995 with the publication of T.S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form by Anthony Julius (who incidentally is an attorney who served as the divorce lawyer for Princess Diana.) Vince Passaro offers an examination of Julius’s thesis in “A Flapping of Scolds,” a literary review which, in addition to Julius’s book, scrutinizes a collection of literary essays by David Denby, a new edition of Heart of Darkness, and a posthumous publication of previously unpublished early poems by Eliot himself. While Passaro does not dispute the allegation that Eliot was anti-Semitic, he strongly disagrees with Julius that such religious bigotry “was central to Eliot’s work,” adding that Julius bases his charges on “very slim pickings,” namely one complete poem, excerpts from five other poems, and a ”few scattered remarks.” Although negative reviews of Julius’s work from the NY Times and NY Review of Books eventually appeared, Julius and his scathing indictment were initially lionized. Passaro notes that when news of Julius’s book broke in America, the cocktail party crowd heaped praise on the lawyer/critic; they “congratulated him, with a jaunty approval usually bestowed on strong wrestlers or winning ponies,” followed by “the sighs of pleasure that fill the air during the public flogging of the sinner.”
The applause for the “flogging,” Passaro believes, stemmed from anger and disgust that is the natural reaction to anti-Semitism itself, upon which was grafted “the conviction that literature had no right to cause that pain, using such unpleasantly effective images and words.” While Passaro seems truly sympathetic to such discomfort, he does not want muzzles forced on literature in order to spare the feelings of readers. He wants to hold on to the belief that there is a “proud willingness” among the ranks of the American literary culture “ to extend to serious art the privilege of causing pain, of exorcizing demons, of flirting with annihilation, of attempting to say the unsayable or give voice to what for prudence’s and politeness’s sake should be left unspoken. Obviously, no such privilege exists, not because of a prudish public but because of an academic and procedure-ridden literary world which chooses not to ‘authorize’ work that offends or threatens us in any way.”
Characterizing such indignance as “the new prudery,” Passaro likens it to a “reactionary, nineteenth century impulse, a deeply conservative desire to bring all cultural expression into harmony with the moral conventions of our day,” in which literature is valued on the basis of its impact upon its audience, reducing it to mere function,” and consequently judging on the extent in which it fills that bill. Passaro believes that these latter-day Bowdlers and Comstocks prefer to regard literature as a way “to affirm the predominant cultural values of our time, and the agreement that this is its proper role seems as unshakable as the ancient prohibitions aimed at the protection of virginity, or the contemporary ban on smoking in public places.”
Readers of Passaro’s essay must be gratified to read that he is quick to make a distinction between this “new moralism” and the oversimplified “political correctness” cliché:
“The new moralism is not. . .merely a matter of political correctness vs. traditional canons; it is a projection of a long-standing and deeply middle-class fear and resentment of art, one that . . .can be found in equal measure among leftist cultural critics and conservative opponents of whatever is politically or sexually offensive. The Western literary intellectual in the late twentieth century has been. . .severely undereducated and raised in an atmosphere full of irrational babble, grave pieties, and adamant distinctions. We seem to have bred generations of literary critics who speak only in the tones of those who deplore, who regret, who feel compelled to express their outrage at one or another form of doctrinal deprivation. Standing against them are almost no advocates of a literature that dares to speak unpleasantly or even plainly about the darker corners of the heart.” {Emphasis mine.} Clearly, members of the literary establishment have a habit of taking themselves much too seriously, for, as Passaro suggests, they are “rarely lucid” and “even more rarely funny.”
In our times literature has endured another assault in that it is expected to prove its worth through pragmatic results. (Sorry, William James.) Passaro states that the arts and the humanities have to earn their keep, so to speak, “when ‘art’ for its economic survival must be peddled as a public good akin to universal health care, with a body of administrators paid to make sure every population is represented and gets its weekly dose.” The “patrons of art” of past centuries are long gone; instead we have “figures with access to government and corporate-purchase orders” whose “political survival” depends on their reassurance that “we are all being personally and socially improved by art. What we are not being, they are quick to assure us in moments of wrenching doubt, is challenged or disturbed.” {Passaro’s emphasis.}
Part One of this thread brings up the issue of irony in the sense that some readers are incapable of recognizing irony when they see it--unlike potentially offensive passages which supposedly jump off the page into the eyes of those who make a practice of looking for them. Passaro’s takes irony to an exponential level; he believes that irony is “what we despise about literature, and what exhausts us about modern literature in particular,” and “ its acknowledgment that in. . .the beautiful process of creation is tinged with something slightly immoral, something exploitative of intimacies and experience, rude, vain, self-justifying, disloyal, brutal, unrestrained. . .Modern art insists on making something significant and even beautiful out of ugliness, dissonance, fever, hatred, anger, failure, and pain.” Passaro admits that readers and audiences who follow their own “intuitions” are more receptive to such a sensibility, but “marketeers and critics” are not, for:
“The tragic impulse in literature is what such impresarios of art wish to demolish most of all, especially complicated or ambiguous tragedy. If one must portray tragedy, it should be simple and psychologically direct, something akin to Death of a Salesman or Steinbeck’s The Red Pony.” (Though Passaro doesn’t mention cinema directly, the preference for palatable simplicity and the persistent looking at “the bright side of life“-- a sentiment hilariously spoofed in a Monty Python song – may help explain Hollywood’s stubborn habit of making movies with “happy” endings.)
From that point Passaro segues to a critique of a 1996 publication of Heart of Darkness, edited by D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, who includes other texts about the Congo and other regions of Central Africa as they existed in the 1890s. Passaro states that this edition puts the novel in the historical context which “Conrad had observed (or ignored)” when he was there. Passaro sees the value of this “evenhanded” presentation, for “it connects Conrad palpably to the European colonialization of the continent that he barely, in Heart of Darkness, refers to by name, and it hardens the connection between Conrad and colonial racism made most famous by Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe. . .”
Passaro disagrees with Edward Said, author of
Orientalism, Culture, and Imperialism,in that Said takes “Conrad’s vague references to the superiority of the British to the Belgian forms of African colonialism a little too far “ because Said– and presumably Conrad’s other detractors– either misses or minimizes the dry observations of Conrad’s narrator, Marlow. Passaro regards Marlow’s view of “essentially every conquering nation past and present in his ironic dismissals,” and illustrates it with one of Marlow’s remarks near the beginning of Heart of Darkness: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into too much.”
That may hint at the “problem” of both Conrad and Eliot: their literary assailants may indeed be “looking into it so much” for hidden landmines of bigotry that they fail to detect their ironic tone. Passaro elaborates: “What particularly disturbs us about writers like Eliot and Conrad is that they employ such dangerous forms of irony with utter self-confidence and abandon.” What makes “readers uncomfortable,” Passaro writes, “are the insinuating suggestions of ugly, painful, destructive redemptions.” Achebe’s well-known diatribe stems at least in part with the demented Kurtz , aggravated by Marlow’s description of him as “a remarkable man,” which enrages Achebe so much that he cries: “ Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?”
Achebe’s question is, to my way of thinking, reasonable, and I can see how one who has firsthand evidence of his countrymen, having suffered under the long-standing oppressive system of colonialism, may feel moved to ask it. Still, I can also see the equally-compelling argument in Passaro’s point in his attempt to answer it:
“Yet it is exactly within the economy of modern literature to reduce an entire continent to a metaphor in the development of a single consciousness. This ‘arrogance’ is exactly the arrogance of the writer, the writer’s prerogative, and I suspect that in the long run Achebe
has hit upon the core of our hostility to writers of Conrad’s stature and authority. . .[T]he brush of racism is wide enough to paint over the accomplishments of most artists and intellectuals at work before 1950 who are guilty of having lived in less enlightened times.”
At this point Passaro briefly weighs in on the long-running furor over the alleged “racism” in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although his paragraph on Twain is short relative to others in his lengthy review, it is nonetheless the most shocking in its summary of a critique of Twain from a writer whose stellar reputation suggests she might have known better than to espouse such an astonishingly bizarre opinion:
“[A]n essay by Jane Smiley (author of the ‘comic’ novel Moo and a social work version of King Learcalled A Thousand Acres) . . .unfavorably compared Mark Twain with. . .Harriet Beecher Stowe, a deranged and hyper-Protestant nineteenth-century Martha Stewart who wrote an unreadably didactic novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Smiley declared Twain a racist on the grounds that Huck, although he likes Jim, doesn’t overtly declare Jim his own equal and bow down before him in shame begging for mercy. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, says Smiley, is a superior novel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of the former’s ennobling vision of African Americans. Smiley’s essay demonstrates vividly the necessity of ignoring the literary quality of a work in order to show it to be morally wanting.”
Passaro says writing the passage about made him “cringe;” seeing Smiley’s strange words 14 years later makes this reader cringe just as much.
Part III continues below in Reply #3
Part VI (Conclusion) to Railing at Greatness
IV.
The public assaults upon the works of illustrious authors such as T.S. Eliot, Conrad, and Mark Twain from Anthony Julius, Chinua Achebe, Jane Smiley and others who share their incensed sensibilities seem to be relatively recent, but the cultural history of the last two centuries teems with incidents of similar outrage. Not every artist deliberately sets out to piss off the middle class by shaking it out of its complacency, but it’s funny (in both meanings of the word) how seldom the so-called bourgeoisie fail to show boisterous signs of that very reaction. Cases in point are the riot that broke out on opening night of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the fact that it literally took a federal case to allow Ulysses to be published in the United States in 1933, and the (weather-permitting) picket lines organized by various demographic groups in front of theaters for having the audacity to show some allegedly offensive movie or boycotts (actual or threatened) over an insensitive theme or shocking portion of some transitory television show, an action which more often than not raises the financial risk for the targeted network when commercial sponsors cave in to the pressure.
If a reader objects to material in a book, the simple solution is to stop reading it. Unfortunately, what complicates matters is that the perceived affront seems so intense that he feels compelled to prevent others from reading the nasty material as well, calling to mind H. L. Mencken’s famous description of a Puritan “living in constant fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” The more public the protest, the better the publicity, and so the Morally Indignant go to extraordinary lengths to make their anger known, mounting passionate campaigns not against living, breathing bad guys or unpleasant abstractions such as injustice but against an inanimate object: a piece of printed matter. To the militant busybodies themselves the mission is a sacred one, while a casual observer may shake her head at an enterprise that seems quixotic, if not naive, with these peacetime soldiers wielding atomic flyswatters and –to borrow one of Vonnegut’s analogies-- “putting on a full set of armor to attack a hot fudge sundae.”
What is baffling, maybe irritating, about those loud voices and pointing fingers is their preternatural presumption that they have the unadulterated right to speak for someone else. Chinua Achebe at the very least was a citizen of the country which was allegedly wounded by Conrad’s words. Much farther removed from reality are the critics who take it upon themselves to fight another’s battles, in most cases without being asked to do so by the group supposedly wronged. It's like the nursery rhyme, "This is the House that Jack Built": say, a critic for a New York literary journal fuming about the depiction of a native population in an African region by an author born in Poland in a novel published a century ago in England. Despite the earnestness and conscientious – and perhaps genuine– sympathy for the cause, speaking in behalf of others is a dangerous undertaking:
“Beware behalfies! The New Behalfism demands uplift, accentuates the positive, offers stirring moral instruction. It abhors the tragic sense of life. Seeing literature as inescapably political, it replaces literary values with political ones. It is the murderer of thought. Beware!”
The writer who said those words knows without a shred of doubt what he is talking about. His own written words were literally a matter of life and death; for several years he was the target of a worldwide death threat against him by “behalfies” convinced that their religious belief had been attacked by one of his novels. That writer and the source of the quotation was, of course, Salman Rushdie.
Artists, especially the ones who take their work-- but not their selves!–seriously usually have the fortitude to slough off controversy. Up until recently, literary furor has been intermittent and short-lived, except in the cases of T.S. Eliot., Conrad-- and, mystifyingly so, given his prolific writings against slavery, racism, and colonialism, Mark Twain. Aside from the general theory that art belongs to “everyone,” if anyone can claim ownership of a work of art, it is the person who created it, and not the audience with whom it is shared. Yet, perhaps because it is the audience who may pay for a book or a movie ticket or provide financial support through taxes or contributions to non-profit arts organizations, the audience claims a kind of ownership of the works that are offered to them and thus somehow claim the “right” to object to it, or censor it, or fiddle with it and clean it up to make it presentable for polite company.
Vince Passaro’s lengthy treatise that the New Prudery is a reaction to excellence is, I believe, a correct one, and it has taken more than a fortnight of anguished thought for me to reach that conclusion. When a work proclaims its own excellence, it may have a tendency to intimidate people, but the reason great literature is excellent is that it is effectual. By that I mean, the work of art shows emotions so well that the audience’s aesthetic experience is intense; the work makes them “feel” exactly the same way as they feel in life. One wonders then if this isn't why works of art move them to anger so much, because they mistake the emotions of art with the emotions of life. That is also why when they think they see racist or anti-Semitic elements in art, they may react just as strongly as if happened to put the book down and looked out the window to see a terrifying band of white-hooded, cross-burning thugs stomping through their neighborhood.
Let’s be clear – there is absolutely no question that anti-Semitism, racism, colonialism, and every other odious “-ism” that has vexed and tortured mankind for millennia must always be denounced in whatever hideous form it takes in the real world. It is also an unarguable fact that a human being, regardless of his or her religious belief or lack of it, has the moral imperative not to inflict harm or to aggravate any pain that has already been inflicted upon our fellow members of the human race. Moreover, it is our sacred responsibility to alleviate suffering wherever, whenever, to whomever we can. This–more
than any other action we may choose to take in our lives–is the highest purpose of human life–of life, but not art.
There is a difference: life is life and art is its expression. Life plants itself in the terra firma, and keeps itself busy with the predictable, the actual, the temporal, the tangible, and the real. Art either tiptoes or barges into a party to which it hasn't been invited and insinuates itself into the unpredictable, the hypothetical, the timeless, the ineffable, and the imagined. In all of its forms, art brings into existence something that has never existed before.
In its written forms, art attempts to make, in Eliot’s phrase, “a raid on the inarticulate.” The articulated result can be wildly comic or deadly serious or both at once, according to the dictates of the artist’s unique vision. A writer has the absolute freedom to express his or her vision as directly or obliquely as he or she chooses. Precisely how the specific subject matter presents itself – coarsely or sublimely – is the prerogative of the writer alone. That the proverbial little old lady in Dubuque blushes at a sensual scene or a base expletive or that some anxious faculty member striving for tenure at a Massachusetts college campus writes a damning article about the book’s ideological bent or that a disaffected high school student balks at reading the work because understanding it is just “too hard,”-- none of it is the writer’s “problem.”
Those of us who have dedicated a large portion of our limited lives to the appreciation of the finest literature a civilization can produce is forced into a battle which, like most human conflicts, should never have reared its ugly head to begin with. Despite our efforts to the contrary, certain groups– well-intentioned or not -- will sporadically take action to defend their specific idea of society against writers who depict the same society with a different, perhaps dissenting, vision. The gleaming integrity of an extraordinary piece of literature stands immune from the chastisement of self-appointed social arbiters for whom protecting their own interest means preserving the status quo, from the scolding and name-calling of lesser lights secretly cowering in the presence of greatness, and from the irrelevant judgement of the undereducated young reader who assesses the depth of a work’s value on the shallow basis of whether he “liked” it or not.
