Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (143 page)

Cultural studies is controversial, especially among an older generation brought up to believe that ‘aesthetic’ values are
sui generis,
independent of everything else, helping us to find the ‘eternal truths’ of the human condition. But cultural studies courses at universities are very popular, which must mean that they meet some needs of the young (they have been around too long now to be merely fashionable). The heart of the issue, the most controversial aspect of the new discipline, is the battle for Shakespeare. Keats called Shakespeare the ‘chief poet,’ the ‘begetter of our deep eternal theme.’ The new Shakespeareans, if we may call them that, argue on the other hand that although the bard wrote a remarkable number of remarkable plays, he did not, as Coleridge maintained, speak for all men, in all places, and at all times.

The new scholars say that Shakespeare was a man of his age, and that most, if not all, of his plays had a specific political context. They add too that in the nearly 400 hundred years since his death, successive establishments have
appropriated him for their own essentially right-wing agendas. In other words, far from being an objective fount of fundamental wisdom about our essential nature, Shakespeare has been used by lesser souls as propaganda to promote and sustain a particular point of view. In arguing that Shakespeare was a man of his time, they are also saying that his insights into human nature are no more ‘fundamental’ or ‘profound’ or ‘timeless’ than anyone else’s, and therefore he should forfeit his place as the rock on which English literature is built. For the cultural materialists, as they are called, Shakespeare’s significance is as a battleground for competing views of literature, and its relevance in our lives.

The first concerted attack on the conventional wisdom came in 1985, in a book edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, from the University of Sussex, which was provocatively entitled
Political Shakespeare
,
⁵⁸
It comprised a series of eight essays by British and North American scholars; by comparing the chronology of the plays with contemporary political events, the essays were designed to show that, far from transcending history and politics and human nature, Shakespeare was a child of his times. As a result the conventional meaning of many of the plays was changed radically.
The Tempest,
for example, far from being a play about colonialism and America, becomes a play about England’s problems with Ireland. Published in the middle of the Thatcher/Reagan years,
Political Shakespeare
created an academic storm. Two of the academic referees who read the manuscript argued that the book should ‘on no account be published.’
⁵⁹
After publication, one reviewer wrote, ‘A conservative critic … may conclude in horror that Shakespeare has succumbed to an academic AIDs, his immunology systems tragically disrupted by Marxist, feminist, semiotic, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic criticism.’ Others found the book important, and in the classroom it proved popular and was reprinted three times. In Annabel Patterson’s
Shakespeare and the Popular Voice,
published in 1989, she argued that until the early nineteenth century Shakespeare was regarded as a political playwright and a rebel, and that it was Coleridge, worried by the ripple effects in England of the French Revolution, who sought to overturn the earlier view, for political reasons of his own.
⁶⁰
These books provoked such interest that the
London Review of Books
produced a special supplement on the controversy in late 1991.

The strength of American literature, so evident to Marcus Cunliffe in the 1960s, became even more marked as the postwar decades passed. Its most impressive quality, as new talents continued to emerge, was the staying power of familiar names, and the resilience of their approach to their art.

The playwright David Mamet, for example, continued in the fine American tradition of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, in that his themes were intimate, psychological dramas, where the ‘action,’ such as it was, took place
inside
the characters as revealed in language. Mamet’s two greatest plays,
American Buffalo
(1975) and
Glengarry Glen Ross
(1983), were once described as indictments of a society ‘in which the business ethic is used as a cover for any kind of criminal activity.’
⁶¹
In
Buffalo
a group of lowlifes plot a robbery that they are totally ‘incapable of carrying out.’ Mamet’s characters
are almost defined by their inarticulateness, which is both a source and a symptom of their desperation. His chosen territory is the modern city and the life-diminishing occupations it throws up – in particular, and here he echoes O’Neill and Miller, the salesman. In
Glengarry Glen Ross,
the pathetic optimism of the real-estate salesmen, which overlays their quiet desperation, is painfully moving, as each tries to do the other down in even the smallest of struggles. This distracts them from recognising their own true nature.

Mamet’s significance, as a figure who emerged in the 1970s, was his response to the arrival of the postmodern world, the collapse of the old certainties. Whereas Peter Brook was part of the new temper, a man who enjoyed multiculturalism, and Tom Stoppard, the British playwright, set his face against it, asserting that there
was
objective truth, objective good and evil, that relativism was itself in its way evil, Mamet exercised an old-fashioned, Eliot-type scepticism to the world around him.
⁶²
He embraced and updated the tradition articulated by O’Neill, that America was ‘a colossal failure.’
⁶³
His plays
were
plays because he was suspicious of the mass media. ‘The mass media,’ he wrote in a memoir, ‘… corrupt the human need for culture (an admixture of art, religion, pageant, drama – a celebration of the lives we lead together) and churn it into entertainment, marginalizing that which lacks immediate appeal to the mass as “stinking of culture” or “of limited appeal”…. The information superhighway seems to promise diversity, but its effect will be to eliminate, marginalize, or trivialize anything not instantly appealing to the mass. The visions of Modigliani, Samuel Beckett, Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, survive for the moment as
culture
in a society that never would have accepted them as art…. The mass media – and I include the computer industry – conspire to pervert our need of community…. We are learning to believe that we do not require wisdom, community, provocation, suggestion, chastening, enlightenment – that we require only information, for all the world as if life were a packaged kit and we consumers lacking only the assembly instructions.’
⁶⁴

John Updike has published more than thirty books since
Poorhouse Fair
in 1959, during which time he has attempted to follow both the small and the grand themes in American, white, middle-class life. In
Couples
(1968),
Marry Me
(1976), and
Roger’s Version
(1986) he examined sex, adultery, ‘the twilight of the old morality.’ In
Bech: A Book
(1970) he looked at Communist East Europe through the eyes of a Jewish-American traveller, which enabled him to compare the rival empires of the Cold War. And in
The Witches of Eastwick
(1984) he took a swipe at feminism and American puritanism all at the same time. But it is for his ‘Rabbit’ series that he most deserves consideration. There are four books in the sequence:
Rabbit, Run
(1960),
Rabbit Redux
(1971),
Rabbit Is Rich
(1981) and
Rabbit at Rest
(1990).
⁶⁵
Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom used to play basketball as a professional, used to be young and romantic, and is now caught up in the domestic dreariness of married life. Rabbit is a deliberate echo of ‘Babbitt’ because Updike sees his hero as the natural epigone of Sinclair’s man from Zenith. But the world has moved on, and Rabbit lives on the East Coast, rather than in the Midwest, more at home in New York and Connecticut. His world is that of gadget-packed apartments, of commodities, including art,
of material abundance but also of a spiritual malaise. Rabbit and his circle, with all their everyday needs well provided for, seek to recover the excitement of their youth in affairs, art courses, ever more pompous wines, travel. Despite this, they never escape the feeling that they are living in an age of decline, that theirs is an unheroic, shabby era; and as the books progress, the characters, showing what Updike himself called ‘instinctive realism,’ grow still more desperate in a search for epiphanies that will provide meaning. It is the fate of Updike’s characters, in the Rabbit books, to be entering the postmodern bleakness without knowing it. Updike invites us to think that this is how social evolution takes place.
⁶⁶

Saul Bellow has achieved the enviable distinction, better even than the award of the Nobel Prize in 1976, of writing at least one masterpiece in each of
five
decades:
Dangling Man
(1944);
Henderson the Rain King
(1959);
Herzog
(1964);
Humboldt’s Gift
(1975);
The Dean’s December
(1982), and
More Die of Heartbreak
(1987).
⁶⁷
Born in Canada in 1915, the child of immigrant Jews, Bellow was raised in Chicago, and most of his books are set there or in New York – at any rate, in cities. This is not Updike’s world, however. Most of Bellow’s characters are Jewish, writers or academics rather than business types, more reflective, more apt to be overwhelmed by mass culture, the mass society of vast cities, which they confront with ‘a metaphysical hunger.’
⁶⁸
In
Dangling Man,
much influenced by Kafka, Sartre and Camus, Bellow wrote this about the main character: ‘He asked himself a question I still would like answered, namely, “How should a good man live; what ought he to do?” ‘In
The Adventures of Augie March
(1953), the hero says, ‘It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of our being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve.’ All Bellow’s books are about the ‘social sugars’ in one form or another, the nature of the link between the self and others, community, society. For Bellow, the nature of the social contract is the most fundamental of all questions, the fundamental problem of politics, the deepest contradiction of capitalism, the most important phenomenon that science has not even begun to address, and where religion can no longer speak with authority.
⁶⁹
In
Herzog
we have a character determined not to surrender to the then prevalent nihilism; in
Humboldt’s Gift
we have ‘the Mozart of gab,’ a brilliantly loquacious poet who nonetheless dies penniless while his postmodern protégé, obsessed with commodities, becomes rich. In
The Dean’s December,
the dean, Albert Corde, from a free city – the Chicago of violence, cancer, and postmodern chaos – visits Bucharest, then behind the Iron Curtain, where families, and family life, still exist. He is for ever comparing his own despairing knowledge about city life with the certainties of the astrophysical universe that are the everyday concerns of his Romanian wife. The aphorism behind
More Die of Heartbreak
is ‘more die of heartbreak than of radiation,’ showing, in idiosyncratic yet tragic form, some limits to science. (The book is a comedy.) The progression from the dangling man, to Augie March, to Henderson, to Herzog, to Humboldt, to Dean Albert Corde is a profoundly humane, ebullient set of
tragedies and epiphanies, an intellectual and artistic achievement unrivalled in the last half of the twentieth century.

In the early 1990s literature by native American Indians began to appear.
Keeping Slug Woman Alive: Approaches to American Indian Texts
(1993) and
Grand Avenue
(1994), both by Greg Sarris, were two commercially and critically successful titles.
⁷⁰
Sarris is part American Indian, part Filipino, and part Jewish, an elected chief of the Miwok tribe but also professor of English at UCLA. This conceivably makes him the ultimate postmodern, multicultural figure, the natural next step in America’s evolving history. He, or someone like him, could be the first major literary voice in the twenty-first century. But Bellow has set the standard against which all others will be judged.

In September 1988, at a conference at Chapel Hill, the campus of the University of North Carolina, academics gathered to consider the future of liberal education. Conferences are normally placid affairs, but not this one. Delegates held what a
New York Times
reporter said recalled the ‘Minute of Hatred’ in Orwell’s
1984,
when citizens were required to stand and hurl abuse at pictures of a man known only as Goldstein, the ‘Great Enemy’ of the state. At Chapel Hill, ‘speaker after speaker’ denounced a small group of ‘cultural conservatives’ who, in the words of Stanley Fish, professor of English at Duke University, had mounted ‘dyspeptic attacks on the humanities.’ In the words of the
Times
reporter, these conservatives were ‘derided, scorned, laughed at.’ Though these individuals were not named (possibly for fear of slander), no one was in any doubt over who were the intended targets.
¹
The Great Enemy-in-Chief was Allan Bloom, co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago, where he was also a professor in the Committee on Social Thought.
*
More pertinently, Bloom was the author of a book published the year before, which had really set the cat among the pigeons in the academic world. Entitled
The Closing of the American Mind
, it had broken out of the scholarly ghetto for which it had been intended and had made Bloom a celebrity (and a millionaire).
²
It had been reviewed, and praised, by
Time,
the
Washington Post,
the
Wall Street Journal,
the
Los Angeles Times
and the
New York Times,
and been welcomed or hated by such diverse figures as Conor Cruise O’Brien, Saul Bellow, and Arthur Schlesinger.

Bloom’s thesis in the book was simple but breathtakingly ambitious, though he himself did not see it like that. Using his long experience as a teacher as his guide, he started from the observation that between the late 1950s and the mid- 1980s the character of students entering American universities had changed markedly, and the university had changed with them. He made no secret of the fact that he found almost all these changes for the worse. In the 1950s, he said,
and thanks to the chaotic history of Europe in the first half of the century, American universities had been among the best in the world, with both homegrown talent and that imported by the exiles from totalitarianism. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he found that two decades of prosperity and abundance had created a generation of students who were adventurous yet serious, who had ideals and an intellectual longing ‘which made the university atmosphere electric.’
³
But then, in the late 1960s, he began to notice a decline in reading on the part of students arriving at university, and among them when they were there. From here on, Bloom set about identifying and attacking the chief culprits in what he clearly thought was a serious decline in American civilisation. His venom was initially focused on rock music, which he regarded as barbarous, directed exclusively at children, dwelling on sex, hate, and ‘a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love.’
⁴
There is, he said, nothing noble, sublime, profound, or delicate in rock music: ‘I believe it ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.’ Exactly the same, he said, was true of drugs, but he also castigated feminism, the new psychologies, and the passionate concern of the young for equality in all things, but especially on matters having to do with race.
⁵

Having described the changed nature of the university student (in America, though elements were clearly recognisable elsewhere), in his second section he deliberately examined some of the large questions, the ‘big words that make us afraid,’ as James Joyce said: ‘the self,’ ‘creativity,’ ‘culture,’ ‘values,’ ‘our ignorance.’ His aim was to show that however much students have changed, and however much they think the world has changed around them, the big issues have not changed. He did this by showing that his beloved philosophers of the past – Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Locke in particular – still have the power to inform us, ‘to make us wise,’ and to move us. He showed that many of the ideas discovered, or rediscovered, by the social sciences, were in fact introduced by mainly German thinkers, who included Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, Husserl, and Heidegger.
⁶
His aim was to show that freedom, and reason, two givens that so many take for granted, were fought for, thought for; that true culture – as opposed to the drug culture, or street culture – has a depth, a reasoned,
earned
quality that points toward what is
good.,
that there is a unity to knowledge ‘which goes by the name of wisdom.’ A serious life, he says, means being fully aware of the alternatives that face us in the great divisions we encounter: reason—revelation, freedom—necessity, good—evil, self—other, and so on: ‘That is what tragic literature is about.’ In the third and final part of the book he attacked the universities, for what he thought was their enormous dereliction of duty to be islands of reason and autonomy in an ever more politically correct world. ‘The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favour of individual human reason…. [The university] must be contemptuous of public opinion because it has within it the source of autonomy – the quest for and even discovery of the truth according to nature. It must concentrate on philosophy, theology, the literary classics, and on those scientists like Newton, Descartes and Leibniz who have the most comprehensive
scientific vision and of the relation of what they do to the order of the whole of things. These must help preserve what is most likely to be neglected in a democracy.’
⁷
Bloom also had some harsh things to say about the 1960s (‘barbarians at the gate’), about university colleagues who caved in to student pressure, about the ‘new’ disciplines of social science (‘parts without a whole’), and above all about the M.B.A., the master’s degree in business administration, ‘a great disaster’ because students’ lives were never radically changed by it, as they should be in a proper education.

In saying all this, Bloom naturally managed to annoy or irritate a great number of people. But the people he annoyed most were his colleagues in the humanities. Bloom’s main plea, echoing F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, was that the university should be above all the home of the humanities, by which he meant ‘that the study of high culture, particularly that of Greece, would provide the models for modern achievement.’
⁸
He made it abundantly clear that he considered the ancient philosophers, novelists and poets – generally speaking the authors of the ‘great books’ – as the men from whom we have most to learn. Their survival is no accident; their thoughts are the fittest.

Bloom unleashed a whirlwind. The conference at Chapel Hill articulated the opposing view, the view that Bloom was seeking to counter. The conference’s participants denounced what they said was a ‘narrow, out-dated interpretation of the humanities and of culture itself, one based, they frequently pointed out, on works written by “dead white European males.” … The message of the North Carolina conference was that American society has changed too much for this view to prevail any longer. Blacks, women, Latinos and homosexuals are demanding recognition for their canons.’ Professor Fish added, ‘Projects like those of… Bloom all look back to the recovery of the earlier vision of American culture, as opposed to the conception of a kind of ethnic carnival or festival of cultures or ways of life or customs.’
⁹

We have been here before. Allan Bloom’s book was much longer than T. S. Eliot’s
Notes Towards a Definition of Culture
and was a more passionate and eloquent account, but the overlap in argument was plain. What was different was that the forty years in between had seen a vast change in the world, in the position of minorities, in universities themselves, in politics. But that change also meant that the response to Bloom’s work was very different from the response to Eliot’s, which had been muted, to say the least.

Many people took issue with Allan Bloom, but in 1994 he received powerful support from his near-namesake at another American University, Harold Bloom of Yale. In
The Western Canon,
Harold Bloom was also uncompromising.
¹⁰
Dismissing feminism, Marxism, multiculturalism, neo-conservatism, Afrocentrism and the postmodern cultural materialists, at least as applied to great literature, Bloom asserted the view that ‘things have however fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called “the learned world.” ‘In great style and at even greater length, he argued that there is such a thing as an
aesthetic
value in life, that it was his experience, ‘during a lifetime of reading,’ that the aesthetic
side to life is an autonomous entity ‘irreducible’ to ideology or metaphysics: ‘Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness…. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones.’
¹¹

After making it plain that he considers the current age ‘the worst of all times for literary criticism,’ he set about constructing, and justifying, his own Western canon, consisting of twenty-six authors whom he considers vital for anyone with an interest in reading, but with the following ‘health warning’: ‘Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.’
¹²
For Bloom, the centre of the canon is Shakespeare, ‘the largest writer we ever will know,’ and throughout his book he returns time and again to the influences on Shakespeare and his influences on those who came after him. In particular Bloom dwells on
Hamlet, King Lear, Othello,
and
Macbeth,
the great tragedies, but also on Falstaff, perhaps the greatest character ever invented because, through him, Shakespeare offers us the ‘psychology of mutability,’ ‘the depiction of self-change on the basis of self-overhearing.’
¹³
For Bloom, what merits inclusion in the canon is a quality of weirdness, of strangeness, of monumental originality that ‘we can never altogether assimilate’ and yet at the same time ‘becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.’ After Shakespeare he includes in his list Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Milton, Montaigne and Molière, Goethe, Wordsworth, and Jane Austen. He regards Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as the centre of the American canon, Dickens’s
Bleak House
and Eliot’s
Middlemarch
as the canonical novels, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Joyce, Woolf and Kafka, Borges and Neruda, as worthy of inclusion. But Beckett, Joyce, and Proust are related back to Shakespeare, and in one chapter he argues that Shakespeare, ‘the major psychologist in the world’s history,’ tells us far more about Freud than Freud ever could about the Bard. In fact, in that chapter, Bloom is astute in his reading of several lesser known papers by Freud in which, Bloom shows, Freud (who read Shakespeare in English all his life) acknowledges his heavy debt.’
¹⁴
In acknowledging Freud as a great stylist, Bloom dismisses the psychoanalytic view of the world as a form of shamanism, ‘an ancient, worldwide technique of healing’ and which, he concludes, may well constitute the final fate of psychoanalysis. In dismissing feminism, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism as ways to approach literature, because that assimilation must be
personal
rather than ideological, Bloom does not see himself as being ethnocentric. On the contrary, he specifically says that all great writers are subversive, and he points out that the culture of Dante or Cervantes is far more different from, say, the late-twentieth-century East Coast society than is, for example, twentieth-century Latin American society, or black North American society.

The canon, he says, can never be written in stone, but in the act of achieving
it, or trying to achieve it, a sense of competition exists in which people are
thinking,
judging, weighing one entity against another. People – readers – are ‘enlarging their solitude.’ ‘Without the Canon, we cease to think. You may idealize endlessly about replacing aesthetic standards with ethnocentric and gender considerations, and your social aims may indeed be admirable. Yet only strength can join itself to strength, as Nietzsche perpetually testified.’
¹⁵
Bloom also coined the phrase ‘anxiety of influence,’ by which he meant that all writers are influenced by other great writers and that, therefore, later writers must know what earlier great writers have written. This does not make imaginative literature the same as scientific literature – i.e., cumulative, not in any direct sense anyway. But it does suggest that later works, in a rough way, develop out of earlier works. This is not evolution in a classically biological sense, but taken in conjunction with the struggle to construct the canon, it does imply that the development of imaginative literature is not entirely random either.

The Blooms evoked a counter-attack. This took several forms, but responses mostly had one thing in common: whereas the Blooms had written very personal polemics, in a combative, ironic, and even elegiac style, the replies were more prosaic, written ‘more in sorrow than in anger,’ and used detailed scholarship to refute the charges.