The Devil Gets His Due, page 22
They too, however, turned out to be untrustworthy allies—finally, only another kind of enemy. To begin with, some of them, though dedicated to opening up the canon in terms of gender and race, still smuggled in the old elitist distinctions of High and Low. A recent highly respected history of African-American literature, for instance (its author himself black), not only ignores a street writer like Iceberg Slim, but passes over in silence Frank Yerby, the most widely read author of his race; and does not even mention the immensely talented Samuel Delany—presumably because his books, marketed as science fiction, are, whatever their intrinsic merits, generically extra-canonical.
Even more disconcertingly, such “progressive” revisers of the canon end by excluding as well as including works on ideological grounds; so that their new canon is finally even narrower than the reactionary one they began by deploring. On the one hand, they urge teaching works written by members of previously underesteemed groups in our society, along with those written by anyone which present what are considered at the moment in liberal academic circles correct views on ethnicity, sexuality, age and physical impairment. Yet at the same time, and on the same high moral/political grounds, they urge dropping from our curriculum books which support views on the subjects with which they happen at the moment to disagree, labeling them “racist,” “sexist,” “ageist,” “homophobic,” etc. etc. The more fanatic and finicky among them even consider the use of the customary colloquial derogatory names for embattled minorities sufficient grounds for snatching books from the hands of students. But it is notoriously hard to keep up with such lexical orthodoxy. “Darky” and “coon,” much less “nigger,” have long been deemed dirty words by the “enlightened”; but more recently “negro” has become suspect and even “Afro-American” not quite kosher enough.
Worst of all, though, is the demand of some ardent multiculturalists for the proportional representation in the canon of hitherto excluded minorities. Certainly, the drive to include a percentage of, say, Native and African-American novelists and poets equal to what their people make up in the total population has proved a total disaster in our polyethnic United States; since it has led to exclusion of certain writers who have pleased many and pleased long, simply because they happen to be “DWEMs.” “Dead White European Males,” however, happen to have written most of the books read and loved by such minorities once they have attained literacy. Moreover, these former oppressors have also invented the genres in which the formerly oppressed are presently seeking to render their unique experiences.
Please understand, when I speak of the calamitous resolutes of such misguided book-banning, I am not just thinking of the lunatic political fringe which annually calls for keeping a “racist” Huckleberry Finn out of the classroom. Much less am I referring to the yahoos who picket with equal self-righteousness campus buildings where The Birth of a Nation is being shown and those in which courses in the Great Books of Western Civilization are being taught. Such protestors are the victims of their own ignorance. Not only are they incapable of reading books or films in any way but ideologically; they are also unaware that the so-called “Western Civilization” has always been multicultural.
In its centuries of imperialist expansion the West, even as it has sought to impose some of its own values on alien cultures it has encountered, has simultaneously assimilated theirs. So Longfellow sought to render Native-American legend in the meter of Finnish epic, at the same historical moment that Thoreau and Whitman and Emerson were attempting to make Persian and Hindu myth available to the world of middle-class WASPs. Nor did the process cease in the age of High Modernism, when Ezra Pound dedicated himself to re-imagining contemporary experience in terms of Zen poetry and Confucian philosophy; while at the same time Picasso was learning from African sculpture new ways to see and render the human face.
But this was only to be expected; since from its very beginnings Western culture was rooted in many cultures. It was born, after all, in the eastern Mediterranean, where the Middle East and Europe, Hebraism and Hellenism, the Semitic and the Japhetic merge. But Hamitic elements were present from the start, too. Not only did the Greeks learn much from the Egyptians, but writers whom we think of as belonging to a world dominated by Greece and Rome were in fact Africans: Aesop, for instance, and Apuleius, Terence, and Saint Augustine. Moreover, even after the invention of nationalist Europe, such canonical writers as Dumas and Pushkin were of African descent. To be sure, they made it into the canon—in this respect, quite like Europeanized Jews, from Spinoza and Heine to Proust and Kafka—not because of their alien ethnic origin, but in bland disregard of that fact.
No, it is not the rabid racist “anti-racists” who disturb me finally. It is rather the well-intentioned and knowledgeable young people, misled by (alas, only half-understood) attempts at opening the canon, including my own. I have just learned, for instance, that the most recently hired young instructor at a private secondary school where my wife teaches in his proposed list of readings for an introductory course in American Literature did not include a single book by Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Hemingway or Faulkner. But, of course, women and African-American writers—most of lesser distinction—were dutifully included. He was, of course, only trying to be “politically correct,” as that term is defined by the liberal academic establishment; yet in doing so he was—perhaps unwittingly—collaborating in the creation of what may well be the most totalitarian of all canons. Not merely is it as narrow as the Modernist canon which preceded it; but, unlike the latter, it is immune to criticism in the sense that anyone who objects to it is morally suspect. That is to say, it is based not on aesthetic standards, about which men of goodwill can disagree; it rests rather on ideological and ethical values, which its advocates believe to be not just something to which they happen to subscribe at the moment but one valued for all times and places, right forever.
Confusingly, however, many of those who are opposed to Political Correctness are equally sure that their notions about what the “Western Tradition” is—and therefore what the canon should be—are eternally right. In support of their contention they claim a direct line of descent from Plato and Sophocles; though, in fact, their genteel standards date back no further than Queen Victoria and the Boston Brahmins. Similarly, their opponents would have us believe that their ideological approach is rooted in the teachings of those anti-Victorian Victorians, Marx and Engels; though their rhetoric smacks more of the Fireside chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The current debate about the canon seems, therefore, not a confrontation between eternal verities, but an extension of the journalistic debate between left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans. This is only to be expected, in any case, since an overwhelming majority of the elite academic community tends to support the former, while an equal percentage of extra-academic middle Americans continues stubbornly to vote for the latter.
Consequently, most of the spokesmen for the recent backlash against “multiculturalism” are politicians and bureaucrats elevated to power in the Reagan-Bush administrations, plus a handful of hard-line conservative newspaper columnists, whose highest ambition is to be reprinted in Reader’s Digest. But they include also elitist college professors like Allan Bloom, whose reactionary Closing of the American Mind (with an approving introduction by the Nobel Laureate, Saul Bellow) had already become a best seller even before the current pedagogical debate had been reduced to journalistic platitudes. The readership of that ill-tempered diatribe did not consist mainly of arrant yahoos, but included some who buy books and may even read them: primarily, I assume, college-educated parents of the students we are currently teaching.
Like Bloom himself, they may have been permanently traumatized by the cultural revolution of the sixties; and they are therefore profoundly disturbed to discover their children being taught by survivors of those troubled times, now tenured and aging, but dedicated still to the subversive values they then espoused. But surely, such parents end by thinking, if everything such “progressive” teachers teach is wrong, wrong, wrong, everything in the tradition they deny (and which Bloom supports) must be right, right, right—and should therefore be not merely advocated but enforced.
Such self-righteous yea-sayers agree with their self-lefteous opponents on only one thing: that not to choose between them, not to take sides is the ultimate betrayal of culture. I, alas, find little or nothing to choose; but how to say so and be heard has long been and remains for me still a problem. Initially, I thought it would be sufficient simply to keep on repeating the cryptic phrase of Melville’s which I have made my leitmotif throughout my writing career: “All men who say yes lie . . .” I feared, though, that those I addressed, contemptuous of ambivalence and unprepared to admit that all things—even our most dearly held pieties—change with time, would not listen. And so I ended up repeating in the silence of my troubled head (what I at long last say aloud here) the wish I once heard William Burroughs express: that a toxin might be invented which would destroy all those who think they are right.
It occurs to me, however, as I prepare to conclude, that there is such a toxin, namely, literature itself. To be sure, on the didactic or ideological level, song and story may seem to confirm the values of the social groups by whom and for whom it is written, thus preserving the status quo. But on deeper archetypal levels (and all literature which survives its historical moment is rooted in archetypes), it prepares for change by expressing the otherwise unconfessed dark side of our ambivalence: chiefly our hatred and fear of the Other. That Other is, though customarily defined in terms of race, gender, generation, or class, a projection of all that is unredeemably alien in the depths of our own psyches.
It is for this reason that the books we teach will deliver us (at least so I assure myself) not just from the fashionable methodologies with which we approach them and the currently fashionable canonical distinctions we vainly seek to impose; but finally from the temptation to believe that—unlike our deluded predecessors—we have at long last really got it right.
Ezra Pound: The Poet as Parodist
Everyone knows from childhood on what parody is. Certainly I remember (and I can hardly be unique in this regard) reciting parodies of certain school-anthology poems long before I had encountered the originals. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to begin—though I risk self-parody as a pedant thereby—with a pair of dictionary definitions that distinguish two meanings often blurred in our everyday usage of what is after all an ambiguous term. One kind of parody, which I shall refer to hereafter as intentional, pejorative parody, Webster defines as “a writing in which the language or style of an author is imitated for comic effect . . .”; while the other, which I shall henceforth call inadvertent, honorific (more properly, I suppose, would-be honorific) parody, is described as “imitation that is faithful to a degree but that is weak, ridiculous, or distorted.” I am uncomfortably aware, however, that in the latter sense all writing which emulates or pays homage to an earlier model or aspires to establish its credentials as real canonical literature by evoking a tradition runs the risk of becoming parodic—is, I am tempted to say, willy-nilly, parodic or quasiparodic. Yet it took a long time before critics or writers became aware of this fact. Vergil, for instance, seems to have been blissfully unaware that there was anything funny about attempting to write—on order, and for pay—a Homeric Epic in the age of Augustus; as was Dante when he tried to write a Vergilian one—travestying a travesty, as it were, in the time of scholastic Christianity. Perhaps even Shakespeare did not suspect that his Titus Andronicus burlesques the Senecan horror drama which it seems to emulate, though in the dying twentieth century it has become impossible, for some of us at least, to sit through that play with a straight face. This is because we are the heirs of Modernism, and our sensibilities are sharpened by poets and novelists defensively self-aware, which is to say, prepared to laugh at themselves before their readers laugh at them. The moment at which the founding fathers of Modernism triumphed was, it should be remembered, also the moment of the triumph of Mass Culture. Consequently, they could scarcely have remained unaware that the traditional High Culture of the West, of which they felt themselves to be the last alienated spokesmen (alienated from the great majority of their contemporaries precisely because of their nostalgia for that dying tradition), could be preserved even for the minority audience of their peers only if the great writers of the past who had established it were ironically undercut even as they were piously evoked. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” is the classic phrase with which T. S. Eliot described the mode of honorific (a rather, perhaps, ambivalent, bipolar) parody by allusion and quotation central to his own poetic practice and to that of most other modernist masters as well. In The Waste Land, for instance, he echoes certain elegant anthology pieces, apparently all that is still recoverable of an admired but irrelevant cultural heritage: “So many I had not thought death but had undone so many . . .”; “The Chair she sat on like a burnished throne . . .”; “Sweet Thames run softly till I sing my song . . .”; “When lovely woman stoops to folly . . .” By placing them in inappropriately banal and sordid contexts, he makes their very elegance seem a little absurd; this managing simultaneously to satirize—however tenderly, lovingly—both those texts themselves, and—more brutally, the modern world of anomie and pop culture, in which not even he can any longer take them quite seriously.
At the same time, moreover, he also parodies pop culture itself, particularly the pop songs which most of the world in which he sought to make himself heard preferred not just to his own verse but to that of Dante and Spenser and Goldsmith and Shakespeare. “O O O O that Shakespearian rag. It’s so elegant so intelligent . . .” an anonymous voice sings, parodying his evocation of the Bard. And we recall, as he apparently could not forget, that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” appeared at the same historical moment. But the bipolar parody of The Waste Land cuts deeper than that; since its very structure, what tenuous coherence and form it has, depends on an evocation with similar parodic intent of the archetypal tale of the Quest of the Holy Grail.
That pagan-Christian myth which in times with Europe was still both pagan and Christian, but in any case pious, possessed the deep imagination of both the courtly and folk audience, had, to be sure, not quite died in the secular, skeptical age into which Eliot was born. It persisted, however, chiefly in the nursery and the academy, in illustrated children’s books and footnoted studies written by scholars for scholars. The debt of Eliot was chiefly to the latter, as the parodically pedantic footnotes which he appended to his poetic text make clear: confessing that the source of his inspiration was not the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes or Malory’s Morte D’Arthur—much less Tennyson’s Idylls of the King—but The Golden Bough of James Frazer and, especially, Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance.
So also Eliot’s fellow High Modernist, James Joyce, plays in his mock epic Ulysses the game of bipolar parody by evoking and travestying the archetypal story of the wanderings of Odysseus on his long way home. Not merely does he pathetically translate the magic kingdoms of the Mediterranean into the squalid urban environment of Dublin; but by suggesting that the comic-pathetic, uncircumcised Jew, Leopold Bloom, is all the Odysseus such a world can produce or afford, he also insidiously suggests that perhaps his Homeric prototype may have been nothing more. Thus he calls into question the very notion not just of the Hero but of the Heroic Poem—perhaps even of poetry itself, the Western tradition of which, after all, begins with Homer. Some, indeed (including Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus), have contended that Ulysses as a whole must be read as a travesty, a put-on or send-up not just of the myth of Odysseus but also of the ironic book we hold in our hand and of the notion of High Culture to which that book declares its ironic allegiance.
Not that Joyce (though in fact he consumed its products as avidly as any shopgirl) takes popular culture quite seriously either, mocking it, in fact, throughout Ulysses. He parodies, for instance, in the “Nausicaa” episode the tone and diction of a sentimental Victorian Ladies’ best seller called The Lamplighter, a novel which—to compound the joke even more—almost none of the academic critics of Joyce, who do not in general share his taste for schlock, would be likely to recognize. But all of them do, of course, recognize the English prose styles, ranging from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles to Dickens and beyond, travestied in the “Oxen in the Sun” episode, that tour de force of auto-parodic pedantry, which has become an occasion for further pedantry from those too learned to realize the joke is on them.
In any case, I would argue, travesty, parody and burlesque have been the hallmarks of Modernism from the start. It is, therefore, scarcely surprising to discover that they are omnipresent in the poetry (and prose) of Ezra Pound, who is not merely one of the key figures in, but an apologist for and promoter of, that most self-conscious and self-advertised of all literary movements—its impresario-in-chief, as it were.
Pound as a parodist, however, not merely by virtue of his Modernism; but, even more perhaps, by virtue of his Americanism, for he is hopelessly, unredeemably American—more American by far than T. S. Eliot, as American as Whitman or Longfellow. And this (as I shall try eventually to make clear) not so much despite as because of his long self-exile in Europe, and his shrill, almost hysterically declared allegiance to Old World Culture; in presumed defense of which (as represented by Mussolini!), he risked imprisonment or death as a traitor to his own country. American poets, however, as W. H. Auden once contended, and I do in fact believe, are prone to inadvertent parody of a particular sort. “The danger of the American poet,” Auden wrote, reflecting on the resemblances and even more conspicuous differences of a group of such poets which included William Carlos Williams, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Laura Riding and, of course, Pound, “is not that of writing like everybody else but of crankiness and a parody of his own manner.”
