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Issue # 126
| Fraser
Bell
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| Defargeism
and its Pitfalls |
"And what are you reading, Miss...?"
"Oh! it is only a novel!...or, in short,
only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature,
the happiest dilineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions
of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language."
"Northanger Abbey,"
Jane Austen
The English professor was dressed all in black and she was surrounded
by students also in black. She had one of those metallic, penetrating
voices which you can hear even if you aren't listening. The circle of
students drew in closer; their eyes seemed to be shining, their thin bodies
were arched forward. The professor spoke in a manner which told you that
she'd said these things many times before but that in saying them again
she was merely reaffirming a self-evident truth.
"Robinson Crusoe," she said, jutting her chin forward, and
allowing a tight little smile to play over her lips, "Robinson Crusoe
is a metaphor for Imperialism...an emblem of white racial supremacy, while
Man Friday is of course the eternal Uncle Tom, the stereotype..."
She went on in this manner for some time, and finally I drifted over
to the bar to get some more wine, but mostly to get away from the woman
I'll call Madame Defarge, after the demonic character in Dickens' Tale
of Two Cities. This was at a Canadian writers' conference. The whole
caboodle of the literati and their hangers-on seemed to fill every corner
of the convention centre. When I finally moved outside to the patio for
a smoke I closed the door behind me, but that voice - importuning and
pitiless - seemed to follow me here too.
It was as if I was hearing a steady drum roll; a kind of vocalized Rogues's
March as this author or that author, one after the other, was led to the
guillotine, forced to his knees, his neck bared for the descending blade
- and then black oblivion. Drum de rum dum. Snap, wheech, thud and away
you go. Another head tumbles into the basket while Mme Defarge, with her
acolytes all around, stitches yet another list of the "guilty"
into her knitting. There goes Defoe as proto-imperialist; there goes Henry
Miller as pornographer; Kinglsey Amis as mysoginist; ditto Hemingway;
T.S. Eliot as anti-Semite and reactionary; ditto H.L. Mencken; ditto Dickens;
Brecht as Stalinist; Byron as pedophile, mysogonist, "and" womanizer,
and so on. Drum de rum dum. Snap, wheech, thud...
I didn't realise it at the time - this was about ten years ago - but
what I was witnessing was one of those cultural sea-changes which seems
to descend on the academy every generation or so. I had heard in passing
the expression "identity politics" and I was vaguely aware of
all the theories which were going the rounds: post modernism, meta fiction,
deconstructionism, etc. But since I'm not an academic, I hadn't yet grasped
the fact that writers, invented characters, literature as a whole, had
to go through a sort of political security check; that their worth had
to be weighed and tested and then filtered through this or that theory
before they were accepted or rejected. Then there were the literary wars
which broke out over the Western Canon with, as far as I could make out,
the Young Turks against and the Old Guard for. Up until then I had thought
that the Canon was pretty well intact, and that if, say a book like the
"Iliad" can last about 2,800 years, and as many translations,
then it must be worth reading. It dawned on me slowly that defending such
and such a novelist or poet defined you ideologically. Apparently if you
agree with Allan Bloom's The Western Canon you are a fellow-traveller
of the right-wing intelligentsia - a kind of highbrow Simon Legree. I
used to think that Defargeism was just silly-clever academic chatter;
harmless enough so long as no one took it too seriously. I didn't realise
it was to become one of "the" intellectual orthodoxies of our
times.
Probably my difficulties with literary systems goes back a few years
when I was living in Glasgow. The sort of readers you meet at random in
Glasgow pubs - the types who could quote all of Burns' Tam O'Shanter
after the fifth pint - had too much respect for the written word to judge
literature by this or that grand theorem. They were bare-knuckled empiricists
who didn't suffer the kind of ignoramuses who expressed opinions on art
and life without having at least a passing acquaintance with Joyce's Dubliners
or Palgrave's Golden Treasury. Omar the telephone engineer or Andy
the parks foreman or Wullie, the ex-merchant seaman, were Virginia Woolf's
"common readers" - independent minded, catholic in their tastes,
intelligently disputatious, the sort who would agree with G.K. Chesterton's
remark that solemnity was the great obscurer of truth.
Maybe that's why I'm dismayed at the Defargeist school of letters. I've
always believed that you can enjoy Hemingway's writing even if you don't
like the idea of cracking someone on the jaw or stabbing a bull to death,
or that you can read Ezra Pound's poetry without embracing fascism. As
you don't have to be a pacifist or a Christian anarchist to read Tolstoy,
neither do you have to be a Union Jack-waving skinhead super-jingo just
because you experience that old familiar pang of pleasure (like eating
"cheap sweets," Orwell commented) whenever you re-read the likes
of Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads or Plain Tales From the Hills.
Reading books might be as grim a business as Mme. Defarge made out; perhaps
after all her students will come out at the end with a humane world-view;
perhaps they will be sensitive, anti-imperialist, tolerant, and otherwise
ready to make a better civilization because of their understanding of
literature. What a shame though that they'll be denied the only important
aspects of reading which count in the long run, namely, of opening yourself
up to those "effusions of wit and humour" Jane Austen mentions;
of entering an invented world on its terms; not yours; of experiencing
the joy of language; of sympathetic engagement with the unexpected twists,
turns and moral conundrums contained in the old human story. If you read
with an eye to finding out the political agenda of the writer, or confuse
the social views of the writer with his characters, or think anachronistically
that Nineteenth Century and Modernist writers should have the same ideas
about race, class, and gender as writers of our own time, then you are
bound to miss by a mile the beauty of the details, the shadings, the gestures,
the dips and curves of manners and speech, the contours and coloration
of an invented world. You are bound, in other words, to become Defargeized.
Many books are of course motivated by the politics of the day or by a
particular social cause: Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at Noon, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. No doubt
it does help your understanding if you know that Swift's satire has to
do with 18th Century Hanoverian politics; that Koestler's novel is about
the Stalinist Show Trials of the 1930's, or that Steinbeck's story is
concerned with the plight of a family of Oklahoma farmers during the Depression.
Even at that, you can't judge books like these solely for the political-pamphlet
appeal. Aside from the fact that topical events rapidly recede into history,
or simply become yesterday's half-forgotten news, a true work of art can't
survive if it is balanced on only the one idea, cause, or political manifesto.
Besides, history in the narrow pedagogical sense, is not the business
of fiction writers. While imaginative truth and empirical truth intersect
at certain points and complement one another (Stephen Crane's Red Badge
of Courage or Doctorow's Ragtime come to mind), they ought
not to be confused. A fiction writer, unlike an historian, is not obliged
to stick to the known facts. Insofar as the novelist deals with history,
his concern is with the details and fragments of the past which enhance
the story. The historian's central job is to deal with the "why's"
with the broader picture of man in society; with causes as well as effects.
For example, the fact that the Battle of Waterloo started at around 11
a.m., June 18, 1815, needn't concern the novelist, but it is the sort
of fact that the historian simply must know if he is to make sense of
everything else which went on before and after the battle. If he gets
that one wrong then he is judged to be a fool, an incompetent, no matter
how brilliant his analysis might be.
But literary judgment is a different matter entirely. What counts in
books like Thackeray's Vanity Fair or Hugho's Les Miserables,
both of which portray scenes from Waterloo, is how well the writer has
re-invented and fictionalized the event for the purposes of his story.
A novel's integrity in the long run has nothing to do with the whereabouts
of a battalion or an Emperor's proclamation, or grand strategy. A novel's
truthfulness cannot be gauged by how faithfully it reproduces external
reality, but to what degree it sticks to its own internal laws. When the
critic strays across the frontier which separates the imagined from the
actual; the official from the unofficial story, then we find ourselves
wandering in the territory mapped out by the Defargeists - that shadowless
landscape without ambiguity or shades of grey, where one thing is muddled
with another.
In the Artist As Critic, Oscar Wilde remarks, "A little sincerity
is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. The
true critic will...seek for beauty in every age and in each school, and
will never suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought..."
Whether or not you read for aesthetic reasons or for self-improvement,
or simply as a way of escape, there's no question that the very worst
approach to literature is always the ideological one. I mean ideological
in the broadest modern sense; not just the old left-right divide, but
gay, feminist, pacifist, Christian, Moslem, environmentalist, theorists
of all stripes, animal rights groups, vegetarians, alternative medicine
practioners and so on. There are never any lack of 'ism-advocates who
would like to prevent literature one way or the other. If you look at
my list you'll get a pretty good idea of who would take exception to novels
about killing whales, or stories about shooting elephants, or fiction
in which the main character is (a) a matador (b) a drunken priest (c)
a British intelligence agent (d) a detective who smokes and calls women
"doll face" (e) a communist union organizer (f) an Edinburgh
schoolmistress who admires Mussolini.
Orthodoxies though, in life as well as in art, are ultimately doomed
if for no other reason than that "fatal" sincerity of the believers.
Their ideas inevitably become dogma which in turn transforms into cant,
until the whole structure collapses under its own weight of contradictions,
and slithers down into the shallows of reductio ad absurdum. For there
is no whole truth in literature any more than there is in history; only
bits of truth. But it's the bits which endure, outside of time and place
- the incidental, the particular, the scraps and daubs: lines like "Barkis
is willin," or Elizabeth Bennett's quick knife-thrust, "One
cannot be always laughing at a man without stumbling on something witty."
And those minatory scenes which haunt your memory long after you have
read them: the pale face of a beautiful woman shadowed in a carriage window;
a has-been boxer in a rooming house yearning for a piece of steak; a man
running for his life through the Paris sewers; a shipwrecked seaman standing
on a white beach, utterly alone, reflecting on his drowned mates, "...as
for them, I never saw them afterwards...except three of their hats, one
cap, and two shoes that were not fellows."
That's what it's about.
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