Allow Me to Intervene for a Moment

(As regular readers will know, the term of art "intervention" in academic Critical-Theory writing is one of my pet peeves.)

A friend the other day pointed to this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about the controversy over a sculpture currently being shown in a former Domino Sugar refining plant in Brooklyn.  "A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby" is

a 35-foot-tall, 75-foot-long sphinxlike figure with "the head of a woman who has very African, black features," as the artist told an interviewer. "She sits somewhere in between the kind of mammy figure of old and something a little bit more recognizable—recognizably human. … [She has] very full lips; high cheekbones; eyes that have no eyes, [that] seem to be either looking out or closed; and a kerchief on her head. She’s positioned with her arms flat out across the ground and large breasts that are staring at you." 

The subject of the article is the discussions, even debates, over the meaning and value of the sculpture in social media, especially Facebook, compared to "mainstream" media.  Some good points are made:

That black women differ from one another, or that they are talking about art, stereotypes, or the relationship of gender to economic exploitation, or even that art might mean different things to various viewers, is not nearly as notable as is the fact that outside of Facebook, it is increasingly difficult to hear the voices of black women participating in such robust and nuanced conversations. Indeed, I’m starting to wonder if Facebook matters most because it is one of the few places where black women can publicly speak to and for themselves and with one another ...

Women from the boomer generation are more likely to see the sugar sculpture as an unnerving but powerful intervention to stimulate dialogue about art, culture, history, and representation. However, some millennial women ask if Walker’s sphinx isn’t just a tired trope. They wonder whether we haven’t moved beyond stereotypes of black women, given television shows like Scandal, which stars Kerry Washington as an upper-middle-class professional. And, of course there is the first lady, Michelle Obama. Few spaces other than social media offer black women the opportunity for that type of engagement.

But I wonder how really diverse "mainstream" mass media can ever be.  By their nature mass media are a bottleneck, selecting a relatively small amount of information to disperse to a wide audience.  The professionalism and good intentions of the people who run such media will always be at odds with the limitations of space and time.  Combine that problem with the corporate ownership of most mass media, and the increasing concentration of ownership in the corporate media, and it seems extremely naive (to me, at any rate) to expect much range or depth from them.  It's precisely the rise of the Internet, in fact, which includes not only social media but the comments sections in many corporate media, that have made possible a much broader spectrum of debate and discussion that is accessible (in principle, at least) to larger audiences than ever before.  True, a lot of the discussion in such places is pretty poor stuff, but so is the discussion in the respectable corporate media.  The point is that a range of opinions and voices is there, if you want to look for it.

Looking for more information, I found this article at The Huffington Post.  Besides providing some useful background on the sculpture, the writer reveals some assumptions about what Art is and how it should be used.

The installation is, essentially, layer after layer of historical references, pleading visitors to peel back those layers, lest they mistake the wildly popular art attraction (the opening alone saw 4,000 people) for this season's "Rain Room." While Walker has imagined a sensually appealing construction -- it's a visual feast to say the least, and even the air tastes like sugar -- it's on the viewers' shoulders to educate themselves on what the sphinx's finger gesture means or what the basket-toting children signify. It's not enough to traipse around the ruin relic mouth agape, Walker's sculptures need you to dig deeper.

I take this sympathetically -- I cut my literary teeth, after all, on 20th-century modernists like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, who notoriously expected readers to educate themselves in order to fully appreciate the richness they thought they'd folded into their work.  In the case of those two dead white European males, this would have meant replicating their own idiosyncratic educations, which included supposedly monumental works of scholarship on Myth that have turned out to be ephemeral, and Joyce's magpie-like collection of linguistic lore.  In both cases, such study is arguably not necessary to enjoy their work.  Some critics eventually pointed out that such ideas about art are themselves an historically specific accident, the result of schooling in classic works that needed footnotes and the filling of historical and cultural background for works that originally could be enjoyed without study aids.  The groundlings who watched the original productions of Shakespeare's plays didn't need his slang decoded, because it was their slang too.  Few of them, probably, could compare his versions of certain stories with the source material in Plutarch, Boccaccio, Greek mythology and British history, but even fewer would have cared.  Were they missing something?  Maybe, but since every experience of a work of art will be partial -- both in the sense of biased and in the sense of incomplete -- you could say the same about their more-schooled class superiors.  Only once Shakespeare's work began to be taught did schoolmasters try to fill in the gaps that time opened in the plays like a leaky roof.

I'm wary of artists who are explicitly and primarily didactic.  The qualifiers are there because a lot of art can be understood didactically, regardless of the artist's intent.  But since the artist can't (thankfully) be present every time someone encounters the work, looking over our shoulder and nagging us to see what they did there, it's futile to hope that the work's audience will see it as the artist wants them to.  "A Subtlety" is being displayed with a crew of volunteer "docents" to do just that, but sooner or later they'll go home and the sculpture will have to face its public without their help.  Wise artists know they can't control what even their contemporaries, let alone future audiences, will get from their work, partly because meaning doesn't inhere in the work, it's created by the audience as they experience it.  When I was writing poetry I showed it to different people, curious to see what they'd get from it.  I have the same attitude to my current Comrade Kim Jong Un Affirms You project; I wasn't even entirely sure what I thought my satirical memes meant, let alone how other people would take them.  Satire is especially tricky that way, but so is just about everything people say, write, or make.

Dis-Illusioned

A blogger at The American Conservative pointed me to this post at The New Yorker today, on "the death of the novel."

(Incidentally, I'm a bit bemused by the fact that I'm finding a lot of intelligent writing at The American Conservative.  But I find that somewhat reassuring.  RWA1 and other right-wingers have lamented the stereotype of conservatives as, well, not too bright.  RWA1 himself complained about this on Facebook a few weeks ago: What, he wailed, about the great minds of the Right, like "Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Harvey Mansfield"?  Why don't you libs talk about them?... I'd be happy to, but alas, RWA1 never links to them.  Instead he routinely serves up such second- and third-raters as Thomas Sowell, Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., George Will, Jay Nordlinger, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Peggy Noonan, Joe Rehyansky, and the Op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal.  Oh, and these persons.  ["A different kind of feminist," he called them, but he doesn't know shit about feminism.]  And he evidently believes that the late Andrew Breitbart was anything but a crooked hustler ... But I digress.  The point, and I do have one, is that there are people on the Right today who can think.  I don't agree with them on most things, probably -- Daniel Larison, for example, is evidently opposed to same-sex marriage, but that's not what he writes about -- but I'll read them, link to them and quote them when they say something useful.)

Anyway, that post at The New Yorker.  It's a reply to Tim Parks, a novelist and writer who posts at the New York Review of Books blog.  The New Yorker writer says:

The essay is diaristic, and this is part of what makes it interesting: there is something forlornly personal in its lament. Parks’s repeated distrust of novelistic wisdom seems telling. Latent in the life devoted to literature is the promise—although we don’t perhaps know where this promise comes from—that books will, in time, arm us with experience and maturity. But what if the solace of wisdom fails to arrive? Parks relates meeting with a former mentor who, retired and confined to a wheelchair, confessed that once-beloved novels by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, and others had come to appear like “empty performances.” There may seem to be a lie inherent in works of realism that, in the final reckoning, fail to prepare you for what reality actually brings. And how futile it must feel, as a writer, to inexorably repeat that lie in each forthcoming book.

It's a common mistake to confuse one's own life-cycle changes with what everybody else thinks.  I'd been wondering recently if I'd lost interest in contemporary movies for just that reason.  After you've watched enough movies over many years, you may lose the ability to be surprised by them. Movies from the 50s and 60s I loved as a kid, for example, are often painful to watch now, with their wooden dialogue and stereotyped acting.  An acquaintance I met at the library today pointed to the Sean Connery James Bond DVDs on display nearby, for example, and asked what I thought of them.  I'd watched some recently, and couldn't get through them, with their mindless sexism, racism, and Cold War politics, but also their dated music and sensibility, the Playboy mentality that assumed the exemplary coolness of rich white guys with sports cars, hi-fi stereo systems, and Jazz music lps.  I've also watched movies with some unsophisticated friends who laugh delightedly at slapstick violence and other devices that didn't work for me, and I found myself wondering whether they weren't better off than I, since they could still enjoy them.  But I still wouldn't give up the experience of having watched and enjoyed a far wider range of films than they can, or of having read a similarly wide range of books, or listened to a wide range of music.

On the other hand, this past week I watched two recent movies, This Is the End and Europa Report, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed them.  Europa Report is a small-budget science fiction flick about the first "manned" expedition to the Jovian moon Europa to see if there's life there; This Is the End is about the End of the World, featuring various bro-movie stars (Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, James Franco, et al.) playing versions of themselves as Los Angeles collapses and is invaded by demons.  Both had their flaws, but I didn't worry too much about them, just enjoyed the expert playfulness at work in them, their joy in telling stories and creating illusions.

Which brings me to something else that occurred to me as I read Sam Sacks's response to Parks, though it's not something he said explicitly in the piece: Sacks did talk about Parks's "disillusionment" --

What about brilliance, beauty, truth? Parks doesn’t deny that these qualities exist in today’s literature; he merely contends that they have ceased to carry meaning. That in itself should point up the severe limitations of world-weariness as a guiding philosophy. If brilliance and beauty are traps, then consciousness itself is a trap, and the world, as Hamlet famously opined, is a prison; but even Hamlet understood that he was, to some extent, full of it.

 -- and it occurred to me that all art and entertainment involves the making of illusions and require suspension of disbelief.  Sometimes we lose the ability to suspend disbelief, it's true, but that's to do with us, not necessarily the works we're taking in.  When I first saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for instance, I fell in love with the visuals as well as the story and characters.  Watching Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh run and leap across rooftops took my breath away.  I knew it was fake, but the actors were able to create a sense of conviction about the fantasy.  (The much younger friend I saw it with griped about the wirework, despite director Lee's cutting-edge use of the technology; but you should see the movies he could take seriously.  I recall many geekboys who reacted to Crouching Tiger by celebrating movies like Ong Bak that didn't use wires (or so they thought; they were often mistaken), just "natural," "realistic" fighting (clearly they were unaware of the intricate planning, choreography, rehearsal, and multiple takes required to get that "realism" -- even Roger Ebert, who should have known better, thought that the sound effects of men falling from a tree at the beginning of Ong Bak were simple realism, no doubt from live mikes during the shoot).  Similarly I've had some interesting exchanges with people who insisted that nothing is needed in fiction but simple, direct, natural begin-at-the-beginning storytelling -- but there's no such thing.  (Starting a story in the middle or near the end of the plot, for example, is ancient; see The Odyssey or Oedipus Rex.)

Art is never natural; it's always art, in the old sense of the word which means objects (material or immaterial) constructed by human effort and skill.  And it always involves illusion, whether it's sculpture, drawing, poetry, fiction, drama, film, photography -- what you think you're seeing isn't really there, but to enjoy it and be affected by it you have to pretend for a while that it's there after all.  Where is the "meaning" in a poem?  In the words?  Between them?  Between the lines, in the white space?

But beyond this, the contempt for illusion and the ephemeral has bothered me for a long time: the belief that nothing has any value unless it's eternal and immortal.  It requires the fantasy that something is eternal and unchanging, but leave that aside.  Language itself is an illusion, the illusion that the noises we make are charged with immaterial "meaning," whatever that is, and strung together they make bigger, more serious meanings, so that you can talk about the meaning of a poem or story that is in the words, on the page.  Those meanings are in our minds, just like the meanings we construct from music or films.  I can sympathize with Tim Parks's loss of the ability to lose himself in fiction, whether as writer or reader, but it's his failure, not the failure of the works.

You're Stupid, Therefore I'm Smart Q.E.D.

Roy Edroso decided to make fun of the right-wing legacy blogger Jonah Goldberg yesterday.  He couldn't decide whether "the key line" of the Goldberg post he was mocking was its celebration of the TV show Breaking Bad as true conservative entertainment, or "And that is why great novels are, by nature, conservative."

This, of course, set off a wave of parodies from Edroso's commenters, rewriting the opening lines of various famous works of literature.  Not all of them were novels, and I suspect that a similar blurring of form and genre by right-wing writers or commenters wouldn't get a pass from this lot.  Anyway, because Edroso's fans, like all liberals, are bold independent thinkers, they followed his lead predictably.  Most of the parodies were constructed by putting in references to Goldberg's mother (because Goldberg probably got his start in right-wing punditry thanks to his connection with her), flatulence (Edroso's standard punchline for his mockery of Goldberg), and Cheetos (another standby in Edroso's comic arsenal).  Because, as we all know, the most devastating reality-based criticism you can make of your political opponents is to call them fat.  It's the vital common ground between American liberals and conservatives.

For a long time I used to go to through a 32 oz bag of Cheetos quickly. Sometimes, when I had put my hand in the bag, its contents would vanish so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’ve eaten another goddamn bag of Cheetos!”

But none of them, not Edroso and not his commenters, thought to notice that Goldberg had an arguable point in that claim about the conservatism of novels.  Better minds than either Goldberg or Edroso have claimed as much, and it's not exactly surprising.  The literary canon is conservative in the strict sense of the word, because it's designed to expose students to the normative works of the past, and despite right-wing hysteria about liberal professors, the canon was generally chosen by political as well as artistic conservatives, and they've traditionally been taught to minimize whatever thoughtcrime they contain.  (George Orwell, for example, remained a socialist all his life, but 1984 and Animal Farm are usually taught as pro-capitalist because they're anti-Communist.  And so they are, but they are vehemently anti-capitalist too.)  There might very well be great works of literature that could be labeled liberal or even radical, but they were usually not taught to children or even college students.  Schooling was primarily intended to mold the young to obedience, not to critical thought.  Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, for another example, doesn't need to be rewritten with the Cheeto in the place of the madeleine to make it a conservative work.  Jonah Goldberg was probably just cribbing someone else's cliché, and he doesn't seem capable of developing an argument to defend his beliefs anyway, but he might not be totally wrong in that sentence.

Even if I grant Goldberg that much, though, neither he nor Edroso and his merry band notice that "conservative" in the sense I've been using it here has nothing to do with what's known as American political conservatism.  Richard Hofstadter pointed out fifty years ago that American right-wingers like William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan who styled themselves "conservatives" were really radical reactionary statists who wanted to overturn the American system of government: real conservatism, in the sense of wanting to conserve the good things in one's society, would in the 1950s have meant New Deal "liberalism."  Older American conservatives were generally put off by the vulgarity and belligerence of the New Right, which is not really a point against the latter; it's a matter of class and style, not of content or policy.  Pointing out that today's conservatives aren't really conservatives is as much a cliché as Goldberg's truism about "great novels."  But that's why I'm mostly referring to people like Goldberg as right-wingers here, not conservatives.

As I've noticed before, Edroso's take on art is pretty "conservative" in the sense of hanging on to the New-Critical stance which denies or ignores the political content of art and entertainment in favor of close readings of the texts -- usually short forms like lyric poetry, which can be covered in a single class period or journal-length article.  (Even the New Critics, if I remember correctly, admitted that their approach didn't work well with long poems or novels, but they thought that just counted against the value of those longer works.)   He loves to mock his right-wing counterparts' obsession with finding right-wing content everywhere they possibly can, but he (and even more, his fans) clearly wants to believe that good art is liberal if it's anything.  This, you may recall, was the lot who were comfortable with claims like "Political philosophy is almost entirely a liberal project" (which is false no matter how you define "liberal" and "conservative"), and had to be reminded that "Marx, Alinsky, Debs, Chomsky, Ilich, Mills, Zinn, Sinclair, Gorz and the like" were not a liberal canon but a left-wing one.  Just as the Right wants to claim various dead heroes as real if unbaptized conservatives had they only known it, liberals love to claim those heroes for liberalism, even when they were explicitly hostile to liberalism.

One commenter today wrote:

Wait a second, isn't this the guy who just wrote a piece on how liberals try to bring politics into everything? Geez, Jonah, you couldn't have let a week lapse in between those observations?

And another lamented, "They just can't let us have anything to ourselves, can they?"  (Reminiscent of heterosexuals who see gay readings of works they like as "appropriative."  If gay men love Bette Davis, normal people can't love her.)  Resistance to "political" criticism of art or entertainment is a bipartisan bugbear, of course.  That's partly because it's not easy to do it well, partly because many people persist in understanding literary "criticism" as purely destructive rather than analytical, and partly because it often uncovers aspects of popular and beloved works that their fans don't want to think about.  Laura Miller's book on fantasy, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008), falls into this trap, even though Miller recognizes the value of criticism generally.  Yet she also writes:

The traditional, reverential study of canonical literature that prevailed in Lewis’s day, and the revolution-mongering of the 1960s and 1970s that supplanted it, gave way to poststructuralist and postmodern theory. Books that past generations regarded as eternal monuments of genius were dragged into the courts of theory and indicted for their ideological inadequacies. Their authors’ personal lives and political beliefs served as evidence against them. Racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia lurked everywhere, often in disguises that required expert decoding. If you wanted to know why the world proved so resistant to the utopian designs of a fading radicalism – and that’s exactly what many academics, having seen such dreams die, wanted to do – you could point to the poisonous bias embodied in even the most celebrated pillars of our culture [170].

Compare this to Joan Acocella's fervid defenses (which is how she saw them) of Willa Cather against "theory" which leveled the "accusation" of lesbianism against Cather.  Both Miller and Acocella are probably liberals, but they both treat any discussion of authors' "personal lives and political beliefs" as scandal-mongering -- even though they both root around in the knickers of their chief subjects themselves, Cather in Acocella's case and C. S. Lewis's in Miller's.  I suppose there must have been writers who fit Miller's caricature of postmodernist theorists, but I can't remember ever having read any myself, and I've read a fair amount of postmodernist theory.  Probably the chief work of this kind is pre-postmodernist, a classic of feminist scholarship: Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, published in 1970.  Millett focused on three iconic male modernist writers: D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, with an envoi on Jean Genet, but she included a historical overview that, among other things, introduced me to (and induced me to read) Charlotte Bronte's Villette.  Millett was attacked for demonizing Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer, though in my opinion her analysis was nuanced and didn't demonize the great men; I'd say she drew fire simply for criticizing them at all.  Ironically, Miller too was attacked by Lewis fans who thought she didn't cut the great man enough slack, though I think she cut him plenty, and wrote about him with affection and compassion.  To the true devotee, of course, no acknowledgment of the hero's clay feet is acceptable.

But all this pretty much misses the point of political (or "political") criticism.  In the first place, the "traditional, reverential study of canonical literature" was fully compatible with destructive criticism of non-canonical work, to justify its exclusion.  Read male critics' denigration of female writers, and you'll see what I mean; Joanna Russ collected and analyzed critical misogyny in her How to Suppress Women's Writing (Texas, 1983); and as Robert K. Martin argued in The Male Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Texas, 1979), mainstream critics generally agreed that a great artist must be a Truly Good Person, so they had to decide whether Walt Whitman (for example) couldn't be homosexual because he was a Great Poet, or he couldn't be a great poet because he was a homosexual.  Biographical criticism of this kind is traditional; perhaps what changed in the 1970s was some critics' insistence on confronting the question, and it infuriated the traditionalists.

But biographical criticism of this kind is not really political criticism.  As Miller argued,

Of course, it’s absurd to speak of the “politics” of Narnia. These are children’s fantasies, not designed to address such adult concerns as class systems, nationalism, and economics. They take place in a dream world where talking beavers bake marmalade rolls despite having no surplus goods to trade for oranges and sugar, commodities that can only have been imported from a warmer land. Who raises and slaughters the pigs to make the bacon and sausages gobbled up at almost every Narnian meal? Who grows the wheat and grinds the flour for bread, and who imports the tea and coffee? Even Tolkien, who labored for countless hours to make Middle-earth a consistent, coherent alternative world, never made it entirely plausible economically, and he thought Narnia a disgracefully slapdash creation [158].

I disagree that it's absurd to speak of the politics of Narnia, and Miller shows right here why it isn't.  It's just not all that relevant, since as Miller goes on to say, Narnia isn't a real world but a fantasy creation where political economy isn't involved, any more than it is in a dream.  But notice that J. R. R. Tolkien, hardly a poststructuralist critic, objected to the Narnia books because they weren't realistic in this sense, the sense he tried to realize in The Lord of the Rings.  That would indicate that it's not improper to point out flaws in Tolkien's execution of his aim to make Middle-earth "a consistent, alternative world," though doing so is probably as much beside the point as it is for Narnia.

What political criticism does properly do is analyze the assumptions that underlie art and entertainment.  As Joanna Russ argued, "it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value." (Quoted at greater length, with sourcing, here.) Myself, I don't really draw a distinction between art and entertainment, but I'm thinking here of people who get their pants in a bunch over academic criticism of commercial entertainment and culture.  They hardly consider Madonna or Barbie or I Love Lucy to be Great Art, so they don't see the point of analyzing it (though they don't really approve of analyzing Great Art either, as I've already mentioned).  I think that commercial entertainment is just as full of assumptions about "what human nature is", etc., as Shakespeare, and it's interesting and worthwhile to figure out what those assumptions are and to see how they work in practice. 

As for sexism and racism and other bigotry in canonical art, I've argued before that conservative critics don't want to confront them because they consider bigotry acceptable, a cultural norm.  "Liberals" tend to defend their favored works and and artists by declaring that in the old days it hadn't yet been discovered that people of color, or homosexuals, or women, were people, though they're unclear as to when this great discovery was made.  (Notice that Orson Scott Card has tried to use this argument to oppose a boycott of the upcoming movie of Ender's Game: "Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984."  Gay issues hadn't been discovered yet in 1984, and won't exist in the future!) Of course, it's not easy to evaluate the significance of bigotry in works from the past, which is why academics are still hotly debating whether The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic, for example.  But I don't see why it's unfair to raise the question.

I realize that going off in this direction takes Jonah Goldberg more seriously than he deserves; and probably Roy Edroso, too.  But I think that both of these boys are playing with serious (if not necessarily important) matters that deserve better, more thoughtful treatment than either can give to them, or cares to.