WHATCHA READIN?: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO MODERNISM? (2010)

Grey Matters in New Haven is a fairly new addition to the city that has changed its character a little. Book Trader, the former primary used bookstore, stocked mostly trade books—novels of all kinds, biographies, books on a range of subjects, yes, but not many purely intellectual works. Grey Matters is more like visiting “the old curiosity shop” and at least some Yale students I’ve met view it as the means to serendipitous finds, browsing their way into the byways of texts not on the syllabus.

I say that, but I don’t know for certain. Maybe there are still theory classes like there were in the ‘90s, but I doubt it. In fact, the shelves of Grey Matters let me glimpse again what it was like to elbow one’s way around Micawber Books on Nassau Street in Princeton or Labyrinth Books on York in New Haven back there at the end of the previous century and the beginning of this one; even the university bookstores attached to Yale and Princeton were once full of books! Strange but true. And so you could go in at any time and expect to find bound copies of the entire works of a considerable range of authors, or at least the best-known or most oft assigned. And there were shelves packed with the products of university presses, each proclaiming that new research and new terminology and new career-making inquiries or late career-capping retrospectives were as important and timely as whatever latest celebrity memoir or business, money, love or family How To.

At Grey Matters, which used to be a clothes store, it’s like you’re in the attic where all those used student copies from the ‘80s and ‘90s went to remote storage. Sometimes you’re even faced with a collection curated from the library of a deceased professorial eminence, a memento mori of texts, books that may bear an inscription from the author, letting your mind wander for a moment over conversations and conference meetings and correspondence that may have gone into a lengthy acquaintance over the course of time needed to bring an idea to birth as a book. The writer’s life, so very rewarding! And yet it all seems filmed over with the dust that has long since settled on print culture, blown in from the long years that have intruded themselves between my earliest thirties and my dawning mid-sixties.

The students, at play in grandpa’s library of long gone intellectual heroes, may take what value they find. Me, I’m on the lookout—as sometimes in used record shops—for this or that find that reminds me there’s room for one more. Something I passed over before but which now will have its day, suiting my mood or a quest for a new wrinkle in an old suit of clothes. I’m not that various, sticking usually with What I Know, but the landscape of that terrain has altered in sometimes unrecognizable ways by this point. And with books, unlike music, I don’t feel the same friction of identity. A book can be picked up out of idle curiosity. Music, less so. Music will need to be inhabited and the object itself has to have a certain allure or aura. A book—usually I have “heard of” the author at least—can just be a momentary indulgence.

So it was when I stepped away from a conference celebrating the career of Peter Brooks (one of those important professors of literature in my grad school days who is stlll with us, as emeritus, and still producing books) to browse a bit and let my mind wander: I came upon a Gabriel Josipovici hardback in clean wrappers—with a Klee on the cover—from Yale University Press: What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010). Now, it wasn’t simply that perhaps elegiac or perhaps jeering or perhaps ironic rhetorical question/title that got my interest, but also the date of publication. Having recently begun a new fiction ms. set in 2010, I found the coincidence providential. I’d already found—from what little I’d written—that an author born in 1937 and so in his early seventies is holding forth on his views on literature. So why not a quick acquaintance with what GJ (born in 1940) has to say about that literary and artistic movement or tendency or aesthetic doctrine that fascinated me so in my early twenties and became significant to my education and professionalization (such as it was) from the mid-Eighties to . . . well, yes, about the time of GJ’s book! For 2010 is just after the Birth of the Smart Phone, and just after the Big Buy Out, and just two years before my last five week course devoted to Ulysses. Whatever happened, indeed?

The book, it turns out, derives from lectures given in 2007—so not quite the coincidental chime I’d imagined, but no matter. It’s not as if my fictional novelist is not drawing on a lifetime of reflection on his art, much as GJ—a novelist and playwright as well as critic—is doing. In fact, the GJ book that I seemed to dimly recall as I flipped through this later work was Lessons of Modernism (1977; 1987), a book that I at least glanced at somewhere there in my undergrad and/or grad days—1985-94—and so he seemed an old mentor or former teacher showing up again. Why not? I left with the book.

Actually, reflecting on it while carrying groceries home today, I recalled an advisor in grad school mentioning GJ with approval and can only assume Lessons of Modernism was the text in question; it may be that she was pointing to his work as insights from a practitioner of fiction and not simply a critic or scholar. That there was something more at stake for him that had to do with a dissatisfaction with contemporary fiction, which is certainly something I was always going on about back then. The period between the wars had seemed to promise so much for what novels and poems and paintings could be; GJ is fed up by having the likes of Martin Amis and Iris Murdoch and Ian McEwan trotted out as worthwhile novelists. Part of the problem is that GJ is situated in the UK and it’s well known that Modernism didn’t have much purchase there—especially if you clear out the Americans like Pound and Eliot or the Irish like Joyce and Beckett. You’ve basically got Woolf, Forster (if you think so) and Ford Maddox Ford. Lawrence? Well, there you have it. Lawrence is certainly a modernist in his interests but his methods are pretty much cut in the good old yarn-spinner’s mode. But I guess there is a syllabus where Lawrence can sit with “American modernists” like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, sure. The point is that Modernism—which, because of the last named, throws a long shadow of influence in the U.S.—doesn’t inspire the next generation much in the UK. And so GJ imports almost all his examples from Europe and even from other eras.

And that’s where I found him on familiar ground—because arguments about the modernity of Don Quixote and Pantagruel and Tristram Shandy had all fed into background arguments I’d found useful for what made Ulysses the unique work it is. Not that GJ is all that keen to deal with Joyce. He’s much more likely to find figures for his supreme modernist in Kafka, Beckett, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Borges. He’s also apt to pull in Robbe-Grillet and Simon and all those French figures who kept the radical stress on form alive and active in the 1950s and into the 1960s. It’s not that I’m out to fault GJ for his references; I merely read his book to see how well what he says jells with my own discontentment with fiction as generally practiced, looking for maybe the odd apercu that would bounce around in my brain while at work on what my Jonathan Hawthorn is hawking.

Following the idea that serendipity has its own logic, or at least that what gets taken up randomly may provide random yet providential input, the passages in What Ever Happened that appealed most to me came from Kierkegaard (who I’ve mainly read in quotations, though he seems to be for GJ the kind of “modernizing thought influencer” that I found in Nietzsche, way back there in my schooldays), and, which I'll get to first, some quotations from visual artists that struck me as apropos to my own endeavors in that realm. The first from—so unlikely a source as to be memorable—Marcel Duchamp, he of the objets trouvé and source of all that “is it art?” “what makes it art?” rigamarole that keeps the critics and scholars busy and Duchamp, no doubt, laughing in his grave:

“Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.”

For Duchamp: what object to choose and what to do with it?  In “normal painting” (which is I guess what I do), “what size,” “what orientation,” “what surface,” “what colors,” “what brushes,” “what ‘object’ or ‘subject’ or ‘image’” . . . notice how the second we move away from tangibles—the materials that are used to make the art object I’m making (called “a painting”) we get bogged down. Is the object I’m making a depiction of some other object (the “object” of my attention—in my case, often a photograph or photographs I’ve chosen), or is it a depiction of a “subject”—as in a topic or theme? Or both? And is the ”choice” of an image to depict—based on photograph or image of a painting or some other kind of visual source—the start of the object I’m making or is it not really “an image” until I’ve done something with it? The good news is that—in order to paint—I don’t have to care at all! I’ve only got to make my choices and get busy, which is what I like about Duchamp’s statement. I don’t even have to choose how I want to talk about the painting really. (I’m still put-off by the fact that what I’m doing while I’m at work on the ”piece” is called “painting” and that when I’ve stopped work on it, it is now called “A painting.” The point seems to me to be that “painting” is what you do (as in: applying paint to a surface), and the thing you achieve is a painted surface and we should have some term for the thing other than that which designates the act itself. But we don’t. To even call it “a work of art” is a distortion, since not all will admit that every painting is a work of art, because “art” has a limited range of applicability, whereas “painting” is a generic term (it’s a painting, not a drawing, etc.). But then so many works of art aren’t paintings and the whole problem of “work”—again an activity that gets imported into the static object at the end of the process—is its own headache.)

What this all gets at, to me, is the fact that “the painting” is never really finished, so “painting” it is because it could go on, but also it points to the fact that the painting is not a static object at all—though a photograph of it is. The painting keeps changing—first as the pigments set, then as they age, and, always, depending on the light and temperature in which they are situated, they look different to different eyes, which also age and change. So, if you are at all an aware viewer, you know that you yourself—in terms of your attention and focus and awareness—are never exactly the same when you look at the thing. You keep seeing it differently, if you bother to look carefully.

So, I’ll go with “choice is the main thing” when we’re talking about making the thing—or appropriating a thing for artistic use. But “choice” is not the main thing about the “finished thing.” Except to the extent we become critics and, like GJ, choose our quotations and our examples. So let’s turn to another quotation I wrote down, this time from Francis Bacon, the powerful twentieth-century British painter (I’ve seen two retrospectives, one at Yale British Art Gallery, the other at MoMA), who said, in an interview: “I believe art is recording; I think it’s reporting.”

Now, the context for Bacon’s statement is he’s explaining why he doesn’t care much for abstract, non-representational painting, but also why his style of painting—which is truly unique and a significant achievement for twentieth-century painting—isn’t simply “illustration.” In other words, even as great a painter as Bacon has to worry about what the hell he’s doing. It’s not enough to just be a great painter and get on with it. No, you’ve got to carve out some space between those who believe all representational imagery is “illustration” (clearly, an “applied arts” and not “fine arts” region) and those for whom “abstraction” is built into the very nature of painting since the point of the procedure is not to make an exact copy of some already existing thing but to alter it according to a method, style or manner. Bacon has a definite style, manner, and method and it should be enough to have those things and so be discussed for what those things, in his case, bring to the table. But Bacon, in trying not to just dump on shaping colors on canvas for the sake of visual effect as an end in itself, has to take on a dimension that matters to him (and to me): “recording . . . reporting.” As in: his paintings have “subject matter.”

At the outset though I want to say that I believe that any kind of painting is recording and reporting. An artist of abstract painting is recording and reporting too. It’s just that what they record and report doesn’t take the form of a representational image, and so the “report” is something you have to work to intuit. But the point is that, even with a representational image you recognize at once—Christ’s nativity, say, or a Rembrandt self-portrait—you have to work to intuit the “report.” Because the report is how the painting is a painting. It’s always a report on what was made. Now, with a more abstract canvas the record is really just the record of what got painted, and that’s what makes abstract painting so satisfying as an object: there’s nothing but the painting as painting to be concerned with. But the kind of “recording" Bacon means has to do with the artist as a person who exists in time and so wants to leave a record of that—which may take the shape of a series of non-representational paintings, or which may take the shape of a series of faces or places or animals or what-you-choose.

And so, for my projects of “renderings,” I felt implicated. Since I have one series, called “Philly Days,” in which I choose scans of photos taken in the period when I lived in Philadelphia (1979-83) and make them the basis of paintings: “for the record,” so to speak. That was. Now I’m reliving it (not just recording but reliving because the whole time I’m painting I’m in some space not wholly contained by the here and now). 

Then there’s a series called “21st Century Studies” from photos taken in the 21st century, which, because the pictures chosen are at most 23 years old, feel more immediate and so a “report” on life in the 21st century, so far. In both series, I’ve so far drawn only from my own “circles”—of friends and families, but the “reporting” on the 21st century could go on into other areas. 

I’ve also commenced two series that allow me to “record” images that “stand for” certain influences in my early life: one I call “Pop Figures,” which so far consists of a rendering of James Joyce and his book Ulysses, painted for its centenary; a rendering of the photo of The Beatles on the cover of The Beatles For Sale (1964); a rendering of a composite of stills of Boris Karloff as ‘the Creature” in the original film of Frankenstein (1931). 

The other, related, series is called “Masters Revisited” in which I take an image of a painting by a master painter and submit it to my style of rendering; so far I’ve done a study of the mother and children in Michelangelo’s Flood sequence on the Sistine Chapel; a study of a Madonna and child by Raphael; a reconfiguring of the “muse of history” model in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, complete with images of places of personal relevance on the map behind her; and a painting done from a lithograph by Delacroix—illustrations for Goethe’s Faust—depicting Faust and Mephistopheles on horseback.

So, the final point: because I’m nothing like so great a painter as Bacon I don’t mind at all that what I do be considered “illustration.” In fact, I think that, if Bacon pushed a bit harder on his language, he’d see that “recording and reporting” simply means—in one sense, at least—illustrating one’s point. One puts up images when words fail or when—perish the thought!—they are utterly irrelevant to the act of looking. Even better than the act of looking is the act of painting.

Then there’s the act of writing (as opposed to reading) but more on that next time . . . 

 

 

 

 

WHATCHA READIN'? (2)

Elizabeth Hardwick’s Herman Melville (2000)  Another book picked up by chance at Gray Matters, to complement earlier readings this month of Jean Giono’s Melville and Hardwick’s own Sleepless Nights.

Here, Hardwick as usual writes well, conveying some of the excitement of reading Moby-Dick, but ultimately I’m not impressed, as she has no particular sense of Melville. It’s a belletristic performance in the bad sense. I’d say EH has no insight into Melville because she can’t fathom how completely bizarre he is. How sui generis. (Which is odd, given that she was intimate with the rather bizarre and sui generis Robert Lowell.) But EH, one of the founders of the New York Review of Books, commits the sin of the lit. journal: to describe others by your sense of judgment . . . and let’s be clear: that’s what book reviewing is. Publications such as NYRB promote work within the terms of their sense of judgment, and the implied idea is that everyone writes “in order to be judged” by them. It’s the grand conceit of lit crit: that its judgment trumps the object. Whatever the artist creates, what she or he achieves is determined by critical judgment. So all art asks/waits to be judged. Critics love to quote bad judgments so they can find an opening for their own judgment—but the self-congratulatory rhetoric is that such-and-such has “waited until now” to have its true or real judgment. No such thing. The judgment machine rolls on and other horrible workers will come (to paraphrase Rimbaud).

As something like the NYRB judgment on Melville, EH’s take is rather lacking in depth, though not a bad read. She likes to visit those “homoerotic moments” in Melville’s writing as if the fact that men can be attracted to men and be rather sanguine about that feeling is new or surprising (just how sheltered are intellectuals?), but has so little to say about Pierre (I’ve begun it, taking it slowly) which is rife with stunning oddity, a fantasy of psychosexual proportions that EH is not interested in at all. I suspect that Pierre will make me a Melvillean much as FW made me a Joycean—thought not as whole hog, perhaps, but convinced, again, of the writer’s unmannerly pursuit of “necessity.” EH can only shake her head, wondering why someone who flopped with Moby-Dick would next write Pierre. And there you have that judgment by market forces and by “critical judgment.” No one grasped what he was doing, the readership avoided it, so he should try to rectify that and write what the public want. Rather than what he wants to write. But Melville has that at least, the courage to write what he wants to write, and because there’s no “excuse” for it, otherwise, that makes him worth reading, to me. His manner is engaging, his ideas odd.

Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology. A Critical Investigation (1983) Also part of the Gray Matters’ haul, this was a very gratifying find, a book I probably skimmed back there in Princeton but was surprised to learn was published in 1983 (I took it for a late ‘80s or early ‘90s book). My sense, reading it now, is that McGann’s sense of the English Romantics is clear, both in what they are and what they aren’t, and what he’s particularly good at is sifting the criticism of Romanticism, an area that, if more entrenched even than modernist criticism, can also boast better readers. The notion of “ideology” which he brings to the discussion, after Marx’s The German Ideology, helps to open the question of what—if anything—one tries to “teach” via literature. It’s a question I’ve never been satisfied about and was quite disillusioned with the forms it had taken by the time I tried to sign on (forms that, I note, McGann was already criticizing in 1983—when I was blithely indifferent to academia and following my own fantasy). He sees the too-easy assumptions of an over-arching period consciousness in which students learn the checklist of Romantic attributes and then look to see them evenly applied throughout the works of the period, while the so-called early and late Romantics are quite temperamentally distinct. Even critics and scholars who should know better take up positions that are aimed to explode ideas that no one who seriously reads the Romantics (rather than the synthesizers of the critics) would ever have.

What I miss in McGann is any very developed sense of romantic irony (he prefers the “romantic agony” approach—even with or especially with his man Byron); McGann, tinged by the claims made for artforms by the likes of Althusser and his epigones, has to do battle with the notions of “escape” and “transcend.” What McGann can’t seem to grasp (seems deaf to, as a kind of tone-deafness) is the ironic emphasis of most Romantic utterance. The romantic poet, to use Dylan Thomas’ phrase, “sings in his chains like the sea.” The irony is that is the best one can do. Romantic poetry is a soliloquy in a drama that one cannot “escape” in a world one can barely alter and never master. And yet one sings. And, while that situation might inspire “agony,” to me it was one of a more notable irony—as found in Shakespeare’s tragic heroes who, for all the tragic dimensions of their situations, can speak with a sense of irony that “the wheel has come full circle, I am here.” It is a question of tone, at last.

McGann is very good at stressing how poems are created in their own particular times with those kind of temporal assumptions that Bakhtin theorized as “the chronotope.” So much so that it might behoove me to consider, not only the extent to which “the Romantic ideology” has played its part in my formation but also “the Romantic chronotope”—both, I feel, are important to the scene or space of utterance in “Mobil Limbo” (which has gotten some significant tweaks this summer). Its flights of imagination always land, we could say, back into that space/time. The “chains” are very real but the way they can be imagined, the way one can imagine breaking them or shedding them—there’s that “escape” and “transcend” again—is what keeps the game in play. Byron: “And mine’s a bubble not blown up for praise / But just to play with, as an infant plays.” As for all that, McGann did send me back to the poems of Coleridge headed “Limbo,” and I expect I will revisit “Childe Harold” and “Manfred” and would like to finally get through “Don Juan” (I’ve just acquired McGann’s texts of Byron in the Oxford edition, to that end). He also tipped me to Galvano Della Volpe’s Critique of Taste which I managed to acquire in a Verso summer sale (just arrived today—I’d already forgotten I ordered it). More anon.

WHATCHA READIN'?

Stanislaus Joyce’s My Brother’s Keeper. James Joyce’s Early Years (1957) Picked up a nice used copy by chance in Gray Matters mid-August. I don’t believe I’ve read it cover to cover, more like skimmed it in a library. It was a big revelation for Joyceans in the late '50s/early '60s, but by the time I got into JJ studies, mid-80s, it had been thoroughly picked clean in other studies, notably Ellmann’s biography which I first read in 1981 or 82. And anyway, MBK mainly seemed of use for the old “spot the reference to JJ’s own experience” approach, which I was frankly dismissive of, as a scholarly bent. Stanislaus is all about their shared experiences. In a represented discussion with JJ, Stanislaus dismisses the ending of a juvenile play JJ wrote because the ending has no basis in Joyce’s own experience (i.e., JJ had no lady love in his life at the time) so SJ is criticizing his brother for inventing a woman wholesale. It’s pretty feeble as criticism but, as no one but SJ and William Archer read the play, maybe it was a feeble scene (though Archer, a publisher, found that scene to be best). It’s not to besmirch SJ that I note this but mainly to say that his rendering of JJ is steeped in “what I know about him”—which is always going to miss the big picture. But here is what SJ says much to the point: “He [JJ] maintained that art had no purpose; that all fixed purposes falsify it, but that it had a cause, namely, necessity, the imperative inward necessity for the imagination to recreate from life its own ordered synthesis. He spoke of the importance of the artist in the community, and insisted on his right to develop his personality freely in accordance with his own artistic conscience, and without being drawn into movements or making himself the mouthpiece of others. The artist inherits difficulties enough to struggle with in his own soul” (p. 129).

Reading this, I can say that that attitude is one I had in youth, that was much like my driving ideal. Since I knew little of Joyce until the end of high school, the common ground for that view might well have been Ibsen. I had an Ibsen phase around 15—though nothing like JJ’s infatuation with Ibsen as a living artist he actually corresponded with! Probably the main source is Nietzsche which SJ doesn’t speak of much except to note the part he played in creating, in Duffy of “A Painful Case,” a character somewhat based on SJ. In any case, that sense of the artist as his own criteria was clear to me and was my “test” in evaluating artworks: was the creator his own person, working from that sense of “necessity”? It’s what I embraced in Dylan whenever he turned away from what was expected of him in search of whatever he felt most compelled to do. It’s what, eventually, made me a defender/explicator of Finnegans Wake. For I believed fully in JJ’s reasons for writing it, though I never insisted that a “general reader” had any reason to read it. And that’s my view of art anyway: when it comes to “community” I don’t recognize one. Though I suppose that it is how one gets from the inward imaginative necessity to a commodity for sale in a marketplace. It must pass through “a community,” the “win friends and influence his uncle” phase. I still see writing the way I see art works: unique. Certainly, as with prints and other mechanically arrived at works you can make as many copies as you like but the notion of “supplying a market” only makes sense if there is a market—and is a market ever “a community”?  This is shown in JJ’s own career. I always loved the story of how Ulysses was published: it was done by a community; only when it went forth into the international marketplace did it have to deal with being suppressed and pirated and all that mess. Certainly I’m glad there were commercial versions of it available by my lifetime, as I am that Dylan got a contract with a major label, after winning over the “folk city community” of NYC, but how those things came about is always murky to me. In other words, how the artist gets the interest of the money-men, out to make money off his “inner necessity” by means of consumers rather than a community.

I have to say it’s a shame Stanislaus didn’t get to the Trieste years. His pointing out sources for the Dubliners stories (often from something SJ witnessed) makes me want to read them again (it’s been ages).

RETRO READING: CAMUS

Re-read Camus’ The Fall, probably the first time since the 1980s. I read it first around 1974, I think, and it was part of the background I draw on when I recall my high school reading. The formative stuff. My recollection of it—the bar, the quays, the bridge—played a part in the initial “Axis and the Fallen Angel” composition of around ’76 or so. Reading The Fall now, I see in it the seeds of my conviction, fully ignited by reading Nietzsche in those days, that the purpose of life was a kind of mental clarity about one’s state—I suppose I would’ve accepted “spiritual state” as a good enough phrase for what I had in mind. Key to that intention was a need to do away with the teachings of the Catholic church in the name of something else.

In The Fall, the speaker’s insistence on judgment—to give it and to escape it—plays into that need. One could accept that one would be judged “sinful” by the arbiters of that law one was raised with, but the effort was to free oneself of that view, to find another way. The greatest risk was that one had wasted one’s time, one had squandered one’s gifts—and life, with whatever talents and intelligence one possessed, was the chief gift. One was indebted, from the start, but how to repay that debt? For the artist, the way was clear, in a sense: use one’s talents to the best of one’s ability. But there one encounters a question: how do we determine “best use,” how do we understand—or even perceive or conceive—what “talent” compels? It becomes “a blessing and a curse,” as the song says; it becomes a test of one’s mettle all along the way. One reason I want to go back to the scene of starting out is because I want to see again where I went wrong—but, even more so, I want to reshape the past for the sake of the present and possibly for a different future.

Returning to The Fall interests me because I know that the speaker’s insistence that “we need slavery” is something I grasped at some basic level back then—in two senses. One was with Rimbaud’s “we are slaves, let us not curse life.” A complex statement that says our slavery is built into the system we serve. We have our assigned tasks and we let them determine our identities, to a large extent. We are given money for this and so we cease to call it slavery—we are “free,” we say, to choose. But if we are honest, we know how little choice we have. Somewhere in that notion, as I received it, was Nietzsche’s “What, a great man? I see rather the play-actor of his own ideal.” That line, to me, undermined even the unique life of the artist or leader. Such figures were still slaves to an ideal, an intention, that governed them. We might wade through the biographies of everyone whom talent or wealth or wisdom supposedly freed until we come at the moment when they are ruled by something—call it love, call it God, call it need, call it—maybe even—justice. It doesn’t matter. It’s an ideal that shapes that person’s acts, making them, at best, an actor—pretending they “have it,” the ideal—at worst, a puppet, an automaton compelled by the ideal to—and here’s where Camus comes in—make excuses. For we all fail our ideal. And so must own up to it, or take it out on others. “No excuses ever, for anyone; that’s my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing . . . .  In philosophy as in politics, I am for any theory that refuses to grant man innocence and for any practice that treats him as guilty. You see, in me, très cher, an enlightened advocate of slavery.”

So we come to the other sense of slavery—as the state of those who require masters, or a master. In other words, the Hegelian master/slave dichotomy. To me, coming from Catholicism, God was the ultimate master and we his slaves because he owned us—having created us for his own reasons. The Christian sense of this debt was simply that we should love Him, worship Him, do His bidding to the extent we could perceive it. But if that master is removed, then mastery itself becomes the task: to master oneself, to make of oneself a master to be loved. To the master who achieves this, perhaps, the mass of mankind would willingly be a slave. But the master? What kind of freedom is his? It’s the kind of freedom (from masters) that Camus’ Clamence calls “a chore . . . a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.” The master enslaved to his mastery.

This is not only the artist enslaved to his own ideal of mastery—of, perhaps, preaching a message to the masses via art—but also the task which Camus will imagine as the rock of Sisyphus. Pushing the rock up the slope, Sisyphus masters gravity; letting it roll to the bottom and pursuing it, he masters himself. But he is eternally enslaved to that struggle. There’s no freedom through tasks. Freedom from all tasks—that, I suppose, was the tact I took. The freedom simply to Be. To be, not only as “finale of Seem,” but Be as the only acceptable slavery. For one must exist. Camus also argues for the acte gratuit of suicide, as a gesture of mastery of the moment, and over life itself—which some find, no doubt, in the taking of other lives. But it should be clear that in the philosopher’s oubliette—or what Camus’ speaker calls “the little-ease” (a medieval torture confinement)—we are only concerned with the life we were given. (If one lets oneself become an executioner of the life of others one is indeed defined by the task, by the fact of lives one can end until someone or something ends one’s own life. Needless to say, all such acts are distractions—as is sex and appetite—from the existential emptiness at the heart of the endeavor, any endeavor.)

Granted, art or war—or maybe the art of war—are alike in their valuing a skill set that must prove itself again and again. At some level, the exercise of these skills may be an end in itself, but don’t we—the spectators of the world historical cases these exercises establish—want something more? Some like to speak of edification, but that’s a mighty abstract idea. Don’t we want, really, a rooting interest? A sense that there are stakes and that our hero-warrior or hero-artist or hero-ruler may fail mightily or succeed greatly? But in what lies that success or failure? Renown? The eyes of the multitude upon the acts, and the judgment—always the judgment of someone from somewhere—that it was “worth the time,” “worth the candle,” worth—if it must come to it—the whole world. And into that “world” we place the crying babies of need, and the misused and abused women and men, and all those who have shackled their fortunes to the side that lost, and all those who danced in the streets with the side that won, and all those who never knew comfort and all those who squandered riches untold, and all those who struggled to improve their lot or the lot of others, and those who broke every rule and yet thrived, or who reviled their betters or abased themselves for preference, or who lived pious, quiet lives, exulting in God, or who threw all caution to the wind and gave themselves over to every sensual pleasure and pain. “All” are subsumed in this Battle Royale of one against the very principles of existence.

Thus existentialism chez Camus.

READING RAYMOND WILLIAMS

“And so a mood is created in which all decisions seem inevitable and in which people speaking of different solutions seem remote and impractical. It is a mood of submission, under the pressures of an effectively occupying power.”

Thus Raymond Williams, writing in 1960 in “Advertising: the Magic System.” The “occupying power” is advertising, particularly the role that advertising’s appeal has begun to play in TV land and, by extension, in politics. It’s 1960, the year that historians often point to as the moment that television affected the outcome of a presidential election, with the televised debates between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. Williams doesn’t refer to that, but the timeliness of what he’s saying gains force through the confluence of moments. Williams sees that, in time, all will submit to advertising, and he sees that submission as giving up a certain kind of liberalism. Mainly, the liberalism of public policy, of public control of important institutions of social life. The almighty buck is having its way and that bodes ill for democracy, to say nothing of any political agency formed of those with nothing—neither money nor status nor influence. Corporate interests determine what we see and what gets said.

Williams writes of the “social failure to find means of public information and decision over a wide range of everyday economic life,” a failure that results from “allowing control of the means of production and distribution to remain in minority hands.” In our terms, it’s about privatization, and its effects are already clear to him: “political parties considering how to sell themselves to the electorate, to create a favourable brand image; education being primarily organized in terms of a graded supply of labour; culture being organized and even evaluated in terms of commercial profit.” 

This is the world I was born into—in 1960—and it’s worth traveling back in time with Williams to see, in the Trumped times we live in, how the tendency was already more than apparent. He points to the “evident fact, in the years we are living through” of the “emergence and elaboration of a social and cultural form—advertising—which responds to the gap between expectation and control by a kind of organized fantasy.” Those years are the years depicted in the popular TV show Mad Men, when the logic of advertising, as Williams sees, begins to dominate other cultural forms, like art, and to supplant them.

And, reading Williams now, it’s not really possible to overlook the extent to which government has become “organized fantasy” predicated on the control of information in a way that advertising pioneered. Advertising, like just about everything Trump (and many other politicians) says, is lies. But we live with the lies of advertising as simply the price of letting those vested corporate interests, with their incessant ads, bring us the mindless entertainment we seek. And there’s not much disjunction between the false claims of ads for detergent and the false claims of ads for campaigners. This was evident in the Sixties and became more and more so, till, in the Eighties, the Reagan presidency was nothing if not a scripted show, as far as the networks were concerned.

I found myself reading Williams not simply to remind myself of why it was nearly impossible to have any sense of art in the times of my childhood—TV, movies, comic books, pop music, yes, art, no—and why I have long abhorred commercial TV, but to find some sense of an alternative to consumerism and commodity culture. Certainly, he glances at the ubiquity of the latter: “Since consumption is within its limits a satisfactory activity, it can be plausibly offered as a commanding social purpose. At the same time, its ambiguity is such that it ratifies the subjection of society to the operations of the existing economic system.” And all effort is aimed at maintaining the existing economic system by those whom it benefits. Our participation is to consume and to mimic the satisfaction that hired actors display in using “the only available choices.”

Which brings me to what I’m trying to get a handle on, for my own purposes. And that’s the question of how one makes use of those social elements Williams calls “formations” and “structures of feeling” to arrive elsewhere, intellectually, creatively—politically? Perhaps we can’t go so far. One has not dropped out, however much one might feel oppositional. Though the trajectory I want to delineate, based on certain objects of “consumption” (if one must so term it), promotes a kind of self-formation that, as Williams stresses again and again, is social—deriving from the subject’s economic status, education, location, period, race, gender, and inherent biases—it is also “aesthetic,” as in: based in perceptions derived from exposure to certain fields of creative endeavor that open up possibilities not generally acknowledged by the utilitarian and egalitarian aspects of the culture at the time. In fact, certain social and professional satisfactions are definitely foreclosed, but not imaginative satisfactions. And that becomes the point of poetry, of writing that has no aim other than to be a record of a process, or rather let’s say of “a music.”

“Practical consciousness is almost always different from official consciousness, and this is not only a matter of relative freedom or control. For practical consciousness is what is actually being lived, and not only what it is thought is being lived. Yet the actual alternative to the received and produced fixed forms is not silence: not the absence, the unconscious, which bourgeois culture has mythicized. It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange. Its relations with the already articulate and defined are then exceptionally complex.”

He goes on to say that “no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors.” The point being, for my purposes, that “writing” and “reading”—which means sometimes (often) “not writing” as well—is “a matter of relative freedom or control,” and that it is “alternative” to what is “received and produced” (and sold for consumption), and, while I don’t necessarily endorse “embryonic” as any kind of useful metaphor in this case, is, at least in theory, on its way to “fully articulate and defined exchange.” What is always wanting, however, is the social and material occasions for that exchange. For the notion that there is still an intelligentsia—such as I would recognize its merits—is largely defeated by the Eighties, when I come of age. Williams is looking askance at what the Seventies will be (the afterword of the advertising essay dates from 1969), but lord-a-mercy in the Eighties.

And yet, as I’m trying to see now, the occasions for those complex relations from the Sixties to the Eighties—the period of “formations”—may well be worth articulating. To say nothing of the ensuing periods in which—well beyond anything that could be called “embryonic”—I still find myself at variance with the social and material habitus that would make my “useless and pointless knowledge” an economic asset. So reading Williams—Culture and Materialism (1980) and Marxism and Literature (1977)—not only illuminates the moment of my starting out through the views of a canny critic of the capitalist status quo, but adds ammunition to a deep dissatisfaction with “literary studies” as having any kind of purpose, other than antiquated, and with “the literary” in general, as a failure of the schoolmen. In other words, Williams takes me back to the ways in which those terms—as cultural markers—were already beside the point. And that helps me to see how the assumptions of commodity culture were there from the start, even if only as the primary antagonist. That agon, I’m afraid, is the defining one, after all.

I heard the Sermon on the Mount

And I knew it was too complex

It didn’t amount to anything more

Than what a bit of broken glass reflects

When you bite off more than you can chew

You got to pay the penalty

Somebody’s got to tell the tale

I guess it must be up to me.

--Bob Dylan, “Up to Me” (1974)