Politics and literature

My comment Sunday on the news that President Obama is reading Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom was not intended to be a political comment, especially not if the word political means “partisan.”

Whether Obama is more or less sophisticated than the “anti-intellectual slob” who preceded him in office is not a question that interests me very much, nor one (I suspect) that any of us is in any position to answer. It is true, I believe, that President Bush cultivated an image of the well-socialized rural Southerner as thoroughly as Obama cultivates an image of the well-read sophisticate who is “the product of three elite schools.” (The hair in the soup is that Bush, despite his reputation, is a heavy reader, something that was kept from the public until the President’s last weeks of office—“awfully late in the day,” as the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen marveled in some perplexity.) For politicians, books and authors are props, which are either carefully staged or sedulously avoided depending upon what the “base,” as the saying goes, demands.

The real question about politics and literature lies elsewhere. In Grand Strategies, Charles Hill suggests that literature can serve as a “tutor” to statecraft. Adam Kirsch scoffs at the suggestion, because (after all) the rational man can no longer approve what the classical poet once glorified: “imperialism and conquest.” For Kirsch, then, the important thing is to determine Hill’s own politics, by which he means Hill’s side in current political squabbles. Thus Hill is “at least a social conservative,” Kirsch warns, since he “dwells often on the sanctity of marriage and family. . . .”

And this is what politics has been narrowed to: as the old Mineworkers’ song used to ask, “Which Side Are You On?”[1] “Will you be a lousy scab,/ Or will you be a man?”—there is no third possibility. Either you deserve a slur or an honorific, and the political problem is to distribute them correctly.

Kirsch can hardly be blamed for not having read Hill’s book with any comprehension, subject as he is to the current commonplace about politics. Hill himself proposes a different understanding. Take his views “on the sanctity of marriage and family,” for example. They do not identify him as a “lousy scab” who irrationally opposes gay marriage (in contradistinction to a rational “man” like Kirsch, who supports it). Rather, Hill argues that marriage, as a legally binding form of contract, is one of the political mechanisms by which primitive uncivilized tribes organize themselves into a modern civilized state.

On Hill’s showing, politics are the extra-personal “strategies” by which people knit themselves together into a polity, and all the members of a polity engage in these “strategies,” even when they take sides to redefine them. (Hence gays’ insistence upon marriage rather than being content with “civil unions.”) The political question in literature is not which side an author is on, but which political “strategies” grab his attention and how he exhibits them in operation in the daily round of life.
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[1] Autobiographical note: both of my grandfathers were coalminers who belonged to the UMW.

Obama and Franzen sittin’ in a tree

When President Obama was “spotted” on Martha’s Vineyard (as if he had not planned to be seen) with Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom, hearts in the republic of letters were set aflutter. The association, after all, was mutually beneficial. Obama benefitted from the prestige of “literary fiction,” while Franzen experienced the once-in-a-lifetime thrill of being brushed with the wings of power. The President does not even have to read the book for the benefits to pile up. And let’s be honest, he probably won’t wade all the way across Franzen’s 500-page novelistic expanse. Obama has admitted that he is has little time for anything more than SportsCenter.

Why Franzen’s Freedom, though? The official story is that a local book­seller “gave” the President an advance copy. What would Obama have done if handed a copy of Sh*t My Dad Says instead? Tony Blair’s memoir would have created too many unflattering comparisons. Jennifer Egan’s Visit from the Goon Squad might have been just as prestigious—and Obama would have been boosting a writer who needs and actually deserves it—but no one has heard of the book, and the President might have seemed “out of the mainstream” if he carried it to the beach so that everyone could see it.

The truth is that Freedom was a perfectly safe choice. Already the second hottest-selling book on Amazon, Franzen’s novel is neither experimental nor a minority taste. And it won’t challenge the President’s political preconceptions. It is the sort of big fat socially relevant novel that was wildly popular in the ’fifties. It belongs to the same company as The Wall or Anatomy of a Murder or Advise and Consent. It is an utterly middle­brow novel whose reputation for “seriousness” is the result of a successful marketing campaign.

Remembering 9/11

Nine years ago today I was driving from Houston to College Station when Islamists hijacked four passenger jets in a coordinated attack upon the United States. I was giving my colleague Itshak Borosh a ride to work that morning; otherwise I would have been listening to the radio.

When I arrived, the worst was over. Having driven an hour and a half in radio silence, I was oblivious to what had occurred. I greeted the department’s computer technician merrily. “How are you today?” I chirped. “How the f——k do you think I am?” he said. Taken aback, I asked what was wrong. “Don’t you know?” he said. But I didn’t. He told me that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and both towers had collapsed. I stared at him uncomprehendingly. His words made no sense. Nothing in my experience had prepared me to make sense of his words.

I lived in New York for six years, working as a business reporter. Even though the Twin Towers were only about a decade old by then, they seemed to a newcomer as if they had always been there, anchoring lower Manhattan, inhumanly huge, immovable, as permanent as a mountain. To imagine their having collapsed was unimaginable.

I rushed to my office and switched on the radio. No one on the air knew what to say. I found video of the Towers’ collapse on the BBC site. I watched it several times, struggling to do more than gasp.

My lecture course in American literature was due to start, but I couldn’t teach. I still had no words for what I had seen and heard. As I left the building, I ran into a colleague, a James scholar. “Can you believe it?” I asked numbly. (Intuitively I grasped that no one would be thinking about anything else.) “Well, this is inevitably what happens when there is such a disparity of power,” he announced. I was so shocked that I could not react. My colleague nodded as if we understood each other, and went on his way. Only after he had entered the building did I begin to shake with anger.

I have written elsewhere about my students’ reaction, which was far more determined and clear-thinking than my own. Later I learned that most of my colleagues had gone on with their classes as if nothing had occurred. Itshak later told me that he had not even mentioned the day’s events to his students.

But I was in no mood to teach. I cancelled my afternoon class and drove as fast as I could back to Houston. I only wanted to be with my wife. We sat beside each other on the couch till late into the night, watching again and again as video showed United 175 striking the south tower and the Towers collapsing. Since then, of course, network television will not air the footage. My twin sons, born eighteen months after the attack, have never seen it, and I don’t know how to begin to tell them about it. I bought them a copy of Mordicai Gerstein’s Man Who Walked Between the Towers, an illustrated account of Philippe Petit’s tight-rope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974. The book ends by observing that the Towers are gone, but does not say why.

A national silence is slowly enveloping the bloodiest attack on American soil in American history.

Rosh Hashanah 5771

This is just to wish all my Jewish readers a shanah tovah and to prod my non-Jewish readers into wishing me a happy new year!

Talk to you on the other side of the world’s birthday.

Against creative writing

I have been charged—by whom is irrelevant—with being “against creative writing.” And it is true that I have been hard on creative writing, both here at A Commonplace Blog and in the afterword to The Elephants Teach. But as I say in that book, the debate over creative writing has been settled. Anyone who would be “against” it these days, in the sense of opposing its very existence, would be wiping at the front of his trousers after he had already wet them.

What is at issue is how creative writing should be taught. What ideas, principles, models, or parallels should be kept in mind when thinking about creative writing as an academic discipline?

My complaint is that not enough thought has been directed at the question. Creative writing is taught in classrooms around the country (indeed, throughout the English-speaking world) pretty much the same way it has been taught for a generation. As I described it in a memoir of Raymond Carver, who taught it like this, “[S]tudent work, mimeographed and handed around in advance, provide[s] the text for study and dis­cus­sion; and in the name of establishing a ‘community of writers’ which offer[s] its members ‘communal criticism,’ students dominate[] the dis­cus­sions.” The photocopier and the .pdf have replaced the mime­ograph machine, but the basic mechanism has remained unchanged.

Francine Prose’s Blue Angel contains an accurate, and telling, portrait of the creative writing classroom. Swenson listens to a student reading her story to the class, and then must “think of something to say, some way to improve this heartbreaking, subliterate piece of shit. . . .” He is not per­mitted to say that, of course; “classroom etiquette” stops him from saying even that a student can do better. He must never say that she—or anyone—should “bag it and start over, as if no real writer would do that, as if he himself hadn’t pulled the plug on dozens of stories and novels.”

Swenson’s first rule in class is this: “We usually start off saying what we liked about the story.” Then and only then is the class unleashed to tear into the story. They criticize it invariably from the standpoint of anecdote and personal experience. The “most sacred covenant of the workshop,” however, is that the author must never defend her own story.

The students offer suggestions for improving the story, primarily by making it more authentic:

     “So what are you saying?” asks [the student author]. “That I’m supposed to do . . . research?”
     “No,” says [another student]. “Close your eyes. Concentrate till you see the street and the girl and her boyfriend. Till you’re sort of . . . dreaming them. Then write down what you see.”Swenson doubts that his students can do it, but so what? They have been “charged with faith in the power of observation to make something come to life on the page, in the power of language to make something walk and talk.” And that, he realizes, is all that a creative writing teacher can hope to give his students.[1]

It is not enough. For two reasons. First, good writing requires more than the “power of observation,” even more than the “power of language.” As Auden says, it is sometimes necessary to write badly in order to write well—in order, that is, to tell truth, to realize an intention, to keep a prom­ise to the reader. And, yes, something like research is needed too. In other words, good writing must be a discipline of knowledge.

But this is the second and more significant reason why teaching a faith in observation and the power of language—the current aim of creative writing—is not enough. As it is now conceived and organized in the university, creative writing is not a discipline of knowledge at all. It is merely a bureaucracy for the public employment of writers and the boost­ing of English course enrollments. It has no larger purpose; or none that has been thought through.

What purpose should it have? I cannot say for certain, but perhaps the question might at least be debated. When it comes to specifics, I am on this question a reactionary: I believe that creative writing ought to return to its original model. Literary criticism and even literary scholarship ought to be integrated into the writing of stories, poems, and memoirs.

But I am not saying that this is the only possible conception of the subject, that the original model of creative writing should be adopted wholesale, replacing a discredited practice with an untried one. In his book Creative Writing and the New Humanities, the Australian poet Paul Dawson argues for a very different model. He says that creative writing should undertake a social purpose, that it should train writers who will “act as a medium between the academy and the public sphere.”[2]

Dawson and I could not be farther apart in our thinking about creative writing. At bottom, though, is a fundamental agreement: creative writing must be reconceived and reorganized as a discipline of humanistic knowledge, with a far more rigorous pedagogy than is now indulged, and with the recognition that writing demands learning. The “power of observation” is something that writers can develop on their own time. Closing your eyes and dreaming may be essential to the creative process, but not in the classroom.

I guess I don’t see how such a stance as this puts me “against creative writing.” Indeed, I am more for it than many of its current practitioners. I think it can be better, and do not subscribe to the etiquette that prevents me from saying so.
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[1] Francine Prose, Blue Angel (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), pp. 51–55. Ellipses in original.

[2] Paul Dawson, Creative Writing and the New Humanities (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 203–04.

Functioning data, obsolete media

A dispute with a company that charges an exorbitant fee to replace data on floppy disks that will no longer be accessible by the latest version of its software program leads me to wonder if the same thing could happen with the Kindle, iPad, Sony Reader, or other electronic reading devices. As far as I can tell, no one has given any thought to what happens in the sequel when electronic reading hardware becomes obsolete.

After all, those of us who paid full purchase price for data on floppy disks did so under the assumption that, as with the purchase of a print-and-binding book, we were obtaining the contents for all time. What would prevent Amazon, however, from dropping Linux in favor of a different operating system, and then charging customers an additional fee to “translate” the books they had already purchased into the new system?

What happens when Amazon ceases to support the version of the Kindle that you own? Unlike the codex, an ebook requires a piece of hardware—a machine—to be accessible. Isn’t it entirely possible that the machines will be replaced and the electronic data will have to be bought all over again, and again? And that some texts will no longer be available in the new format?

Needless to say, this is not a problem with print and binding. Nearly two years ago, I divided books into two categories: “those which are needed for practical activities and those which are collected, treasured, preserved from destruction.” The Kindle, I speculated, would never replace the latter. And perhaps the reason is that the hardware for accessing such texts—the human mind—is in no danger of becoming obsolete, despite the hostility to it in some quarters.

Tenure

My friend and colleague William Bedford Clark has a delightful poem called “Tenure Deliberations” in his new volume Blue Norther (Texas Review Press, $14.95):

Today the dossiers sit at the head
Of the long table where the Chair convenes
Our meeting. What we say must not be said
Outside this room. We adopt this strict means
Against litigation. Bile and rumor
Move among us as silent witnesses,
While we debate journals, imprints, ardor
In the classroom, what a reviewer says.

Six years, up or out! Nothing personal . . .
But the grim stakes are higher still, for we
Are in the dock; each candidate’s record
Serves as rebuke or vindication. All
Here must judge themselves too and secretly
Cower in what peace tenure may afford.Exactly so. The decision whether to award tenure is as much a depart­ment’s judgment on itself as anything else. So much is code for whether a candidate is, like Count Mippipopolous, “quite one of us.” Questions of status and connections crowd out evaluations of merit and originality. What the department is looking for are the right signs, the reassurance that the candidate shares the interests of the tenured faculty, and in the future will vote accordingly.

In Grand Strategies, which I will be reviewing for Commentary, the long­time diplomat Charles Hill says that the line dividing “precivilization” from civilization is crossed when justice replaces status. Status is related to family or clan; justice is one of the foundations of the state:The state focuses on the public good; the clan cares most for its own private cause. The state is committed to administer justice; the clan is sensitive to its honor. The state recognizes and enforces contracts; the clan may deal in something akin to contract, but hierarchy or status counts for more.Many university departments, especially in the humanities, are organized like clans. Their “silent witnesses” are “bile and rumor,” the stock ticker of reputation among members of a clan. Their tenure deliberations are not an exercise of disinterested and impersonal justice, despite the claim that their decisions are nothing personal. They are the formal means of recog­nizing and enforcing a commitment to a department’s private cause, its honor, and its hierarchy.

Last days of the academic ruling class

Higher education in America is an economic bubble that’s about to burst, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has been saying all summer. When Brooklyn College—a college with an undergraduate Jewish enrollment of twenty-seven percent—assigns a book to all incoming freshmen to serve as the basis of their “common experience,” and when that book is by a radical pro-Palestinian who claims that the government “limits the speech of Arab Americans in order to cement United States policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” you begin to suspect Reynolds may just be right.

The problem is not the assignment. In my experience, few if any of the Brooklyn Collge freshmen will even bother to open the book. I can remember the title of the book that was assigned to all incoming freshmen at U.C. Santa Cruz the year I went up there (it was Arthur Koestler’s Act of Creation), but that’s the sum of what I remember about the book. I bought a copy, but never heard it discussed anywhere on campus. Same for the various books that were assigned to incoming freshmen at Texas A&M University over the years. After the English department made a fuss over choosing them, they were never mentioned again.

The problem is the reaction to Brooklyn College’s choice, as reported by Bruce Kesler (h/t: Instapundit). Donna F. Wilson, dean of undergraduate studies, replied to objections from the retired sociologist Werner Cohn by saying:

Each year professors in the English Department and I select a common reading for our entering students. We choose memoirs (a genre familiar to students) set in New York City, often reflecting an immigrant experience, and written by authors who are available to visit campus. Students in freshman composition respond to the common reading by writing about their own experiences, many of them published in [a campus publication]. This year we selected How Does It Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America by one of our own faculty members, Professor Moustafa Bayoumi, because it is a well-written collection of stories by and about young Arab Brooklynites whose experiences may be familiar to our students, their neighbors, or the students with whom they will study and work at Brooklyn College. We appreciate your concerns. Rest assured that Brooklyn College values tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing points of view in all that we do.The invocation of the holy academic trinity of “tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing opinions” is the ceremonial means by which true tolerance, intellectual diversity, and recognition of differing opinions are released into the wilderness. Those who choose books for college study, no matter how politically tendentious and one-sided, are immune to objections from those on the outside.

Yesterday I made the personal acquaintance of such immunity. An English professor at a nearby college dismissed the complaints of the writing majors in a senior seminar, who did not see the point in reading Jacques Derrida.

Rather than an economic “bubble” that is about to “burst,” it is this self-satisfied immunity to public incomprehension and criticism which may at last be fading. There is no way to defend the time and expense of a four-year education which is founded, not upon its economic benefit nor upon the freedom-making greatness of the texts and authors that are assigned, but upon the soi-disant privilege of the book-choosing class.

Note: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Stay awhile, why don’t you? Have a look around. If you are interested in academic questions, this post on why university faculties are dominated by the Left might be to your taste. And here the opposite question is considered: namely, why aren’t there more conservatives in the university?

Damaged in transit

I have been unpacking my library. Because not all of the bookcases have been built, I have just been getting the books out of their boxes in random order. The job has been slowed by the depressing sight of opening each new box. The packers for the van lines did not know what they were doing. My wife says they did not think of books as having any value. Although they wrapped our paintings with extreme care—only because they were framed behind glass, if you ask me—they tossed my books into the boxes any which way. They picked up whole rows and dropped them on their tails with the spines rubbing against the box. Then they piled books on top of them, regardless of any difference in the sizes of the books. The results are dozens of crushed, bent, cocked, and torn books, many with their spines rubbed white from bouncing up and down for twelve hundred miles.

My experience, then, has not been Walter Benjamin’s. Instead of being reminded where I bought a book, and the circumstances under which I read it, I am reduced to asking whether I can afford to replace it. The first edition of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays was a gift from an old flame, who inscribed it. Does it really matter if it now looks like my wife backed over it in a fit of anger? A hip and glossy study of abstract expressionism looks as if I had thrown it across the room repeatedly. As I recall, that’s pretty much what I wanted to do at the time. Has history been added to my library, or only mimicked?

“It is amazing how books can change the way a room looks,” my wife said. She was marvelling at the whole collection. I am distraught at the fate of a few.

A light summer’s reading

I have made no secret that most of my time this summer has been taken up with what is euphemistically called “relocating.” Other than books that I have read on assignment, I’ve had time for only a few others, none of which got beyond disappointing me. Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman’s biographical study of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe who died sixteen years ago amidst fervent shouts that he was the messiah, did little more than recast the official Chabad version of the rebbe’s life. The authors were particularly tone deaf in their reliance upon the biographical fact that Schneerson was academically trained as an engineer. Unable to explain how he switched without apparent warning from a secular career to become the world’s most prominent Hasid, they fall back upon saying only that he “engineered” the switch.

Pearl Abraham’s American Taliban, a reimagining of John Walker Lindh’s story, stumbled badly. Abraham makes her John Jude Parish a surfer who is “committed to the daily minute, to living the present in the present tense, to finding the extraordinary in ordinary time, in the here and now.” The choice was an astute one, if Tim Winton’s Breath is a faithful account of surfing. Of course, Winton’s novel came out two years before Abraham’s.

Jesse Katz’s memoir The Opposite Field is about two of the subjects closest to my heart: fatherhood and baseball (coaching Little League baseball, to be specific). There is much to like in the book, but eventually its earnestness began to wear on me. Perhaps I have developed an allergy late in life to lyrical waxing about baseball.

The best book that I read while struggling to organize and manage the cross-country move was Allegra Goodman’s Cookbook Collector. Not her best novel, but an interesting peek into the IPO’s that inflated many a bank account during the dot-com bubble of the ’nineties. Goodman’s shifting point of view, her interest in several characters at once, her refusal to preen or condescend, keeps the novel fascinating on every page. I’ll have more to say on The Cookbook Collector at greater length a little later. For now, though, I’d have to call it the book of the summer.

Hello, Columbus

My family and I arrived in Columbus several days ago, and are settling in. While the locals complain of a heat wave, we newcomers from south Texas look at them incredulously and enjoy the cool snap. The house is in disarray, and the library, designed by my stepfather in red oak, is still under construction. All of my books remain in boxes. Ordinary life has begun to resume, even though school has yet to start. I am grateful to my loyal readers, who have returned to A Commonplace Blog again and again, impatient for new book talk. It is past time to reignite the conversation. Let’s begin again.

Frank Kermode dies at 90

The literary critic Sir Frank Kermode has died at the age of ninety. His most recent book, Concerning E. M. Forster, completed a return to traditional life-and-works criticism, which he abandoned for a spell to become fashionably dense and theoretical. His return from theory was one of the most encouraging events in the recent history of literary criticism. Although never a distinguished prose stylist, he wrote well enough to attract a general audience. And that in itself was a great accomplishment. His like will not soon be seen again.

Neocon critics

Terry Teachout, ed., Beyond the Boom: New Voices on American Life, Culture, and Politics (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991). 237 pp. $18.95.

Originally published in Commentary (February 1991): 63–64.

According to the conventional understanding, baby boomers were hippies in the 60’s and then, after tuning out, turning off, and dropping back in, they became yuppies in the 80’s. At one extreme they are associated with antiwar protest, down-to-where-I-like-it hair, bell bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts, McGovern for President, Eastern mysticism, the novels of Hermann Hesse, the poetry of Gary Snyder, sex, drugs, and rock-’n’-roll. At the other extreme they are the image of self-absorption and greed: two incomes, no kids, fancy cars, even fancier sailboats, junk bonds, safe sex, an expert knowledge of restaurants, Italian suits, the return of the wet look, and a certainty that their generation, if no longer the most idealistic in history, is still the most conspicuous.

It is the thesis of several of the essayists in Terry Teachout’s new anthology Beyond the Boom, however, that there are actually two boom generations. The hippies, those old enough to have found the Vietnam war personally threatening, can now be described as “older boomers.” They did not become yuppies because they never dropped back in. They drifted from job to job or settled in the university, drawing about them volumes of neo-Marxist theory like an old comforter. “Vietnam seems to have broken them,” Teachout writes in his introduction. “They . . . lost their nerve and were never heard from again.” The younger boomers, by contrast, surprised everyone by voting in heavy numbers for Ronald Reagan. They broke decisively with the politics and culture of their older brothers and sisters, and theirs are the voices you will be hearing “tomorrow,” Teachout promises—“and the day after tomorrow.”

Much support for this view can be found in Beyond the Boom. Although they range in age from thirty to nearly forty, the fifteen contributors are as one in repudiating the ideas embraced by the first wave of the baby-boom generation. Maggie Gallagher and Richard Vigilante convincingly demonstrate, for instance, that the political carryover of 60’s activism included no-growth restrictions which drove up the price of real estate, keeping younger buyers from the market; and a reliance upon government that led willy-nilly to staggering taxes, the deterioration of personal responsibility, and schools distant from or antagonistic to parents’ standards and values. In this light, what may appear as “yuppie greed” is in actuality a reassertion of an ideal much laughed at by 60’s activists—the “bourgeois ideal,” as Vigilante puts it, of “well-ordered prosperity in a law-abiding community.”

Actually, however, the book these authors have collaborated to produce is at best only tangentially concerned with the boomers, early or late. The chapters range from Roger Kimball’s “Requiem for the Critical Temper,” which traces the decline of literary criticism since the 50’s, to David Brooks's happy revival of the seventeenth-century character essay, “Portrait of a Washington Policy Wonk.” Some of the best writing in the book has nothing at all to do with the baby boom. Andrew Ferguson’s “Everything You Know Is Wrong” is a caustic belittlement of revisionist history, the spirit of which is summed up in Ferguson’s title, a line from an album by the Firesign Theater. At the other end of the tonal scale, Lisa Schiffren’s “Whiff of Grapeshot,” the surprise of the volume, is an earnest defense of the martial virtues.

Uncharacteristic of their generation—in as far as that generation is lingeringly identified with the values and deficiencies of the “youth culture” of the 60's—the writers in this volume are also not particularly interested in substituting a clearer image of it. They are not even sure that a generation is an intelligible category. After considering the failure of the boom to bring about a realignment in American politics, Richard Brookhiser concludes: “Maybe no one found a way to use the boom generation or its successors for political purposes because those generations didn't exist in the first place. . . . [T]here are no generations, in a politically coherent sense, at all.” And to judge by this volume, the same could be said of generations in art, literature, religion, business.

Yet if they are not coherent as a generation, the fifteen authors of Beyond the Boom are coherent as a movement—they are neoconservatives. And their book announces a flowering of criticism among a younger set of conservative intellectuals, the legatees of such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Hilton Kramer, Thomas Sowell, Joseph Epstein, Midge Decter, Robert Nisbet, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Edward Shils. Indeed, the authors of Beyond the Boom extend the achievement of neoconservatism as a critical movement. What makes them especially significant is that as Americans who came of age during the 60’s, or in the years immediately following, they acquired their intellectual maturity, their critical surefootedness, almost entirely at the expense of the ideas of the 60’s. This first-hand contention with bad thinking has given them, as writers, an authority and (at times) a hard literary edge that sets them apart from their run-of-the-mill contemporary, the workshop graduate who conceives of writing as the itemization of a sublimely ordinary life. Even when their subject is personal experience, these young critics return continually to ideas.

It is ideas, as Richard Brookhiser says at one point, that the neocon critics see as “the real force for change” in culture and politics. And from this angle, neoconservative criticism becomes the deliberate avoidance of what Bruce Bawer, in an essay on American movies since the 60’s, calls the “fashionable posture of ‘sensitivity’ ”—which usually means an “insensitivity to thoughtful distinctions.” The critics in Beyond the Boom are not too worried about being sensitive. In “Break Glass in Case of Emergency,” George Sim Johnston takes to pieces the “vague religiosity” in which many Americans find refreshment—just as long as it “does not interfere in any way with how they live.” Genuine religious ideas are too “rigid and authoritarian” for most people, and Johnston predicts that only “an unprecedented cataclysm, a new Dark Ages,” will shake them.

Not that these writers are out to shake anyone, at least not in the sense of winning converts. The function of social and cultural criticism, as they engage in it, is not so much to propose answers as to offer clear thinking on questions that are at present badly confused. In his essay “Second Childhood,” for instance, John Podhoretz shows how cultural attitudes toward children in America have oscillated wildly from a pleasant vision of their “spiritual greatness and moral superiority” (as embodied in the movie E.T.) to the current anxiety, needled by exaggerating the problem of child abuse, that children are “possessed of an infinite capacity for victimization.” In lieu of the truth about childhood, what Podhoretz's essay provides is a calm moment in which to reflect that the truth about childhood is not what it is popularly said to be.

This is a gain in knowledge, although it does raise a question about these young critics at this stage of their careers. They do not like The Greening of America, deconstruction, Gary Hart, health foods, the Grateful Dead, feminism, Jay McInerney, nuclear-free zones; they do not like too many new movies, and they are not crazy about the notion of old movies as high art, either. They are rather obscure, however, on the question of what they do like. At one point Walter Olson speaks of “reading Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman by flashlight under [the] bedcovers,” but he really means to contrast his private reading to the “Keynes-and-points-Left economics lectures” he was made to sit through in college. Andrew Ferguson touches upon the normative force of tradition, but he really means to scorn those (unlike him) who consider tradition to be “the vessel of the vulgarest errors.”

Although Beyond the Boom is crammed with derision for cultural quacks and mountebanks, it includes no sustained defense of a single artist or intellectual figure. At this stage, the neocon critics are still absorbed in the task of hauling away the last rusted-out ideas of the 60’s. But it is hard to believe this will satisfy them for long, particularly in view of their great gifts. For the correction of bad thinking is, as Santayana says, a “terrible tax to pay to the errors of others.”

Absence of Mind

Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 158 pp. $24.00.

Marilynne Robinson sets out to restore subjectivity to modern thought in her 2009 Terry Lectures, reprinted earlier this year as Absence of Mind. Any account of reality which leaves out the “testimony of the individual mind” is limited and defective, and yet that is pretty much the only account of reality which moderns will offer or accept. “A central tenet of the modern world view,” she says, “is that we do not know our own minds, our own motives, our own desires.” Modern thought, whether descended from Darwin or Marx or Freud, is eager to unmask those motives and desires, revealing the real forces behind human behavior. (How the modernist can act from superior motives and desires, if everyone else’s are suspicious, is a mystery that he is not curious to solve.) With gentle logic and a zinging prose, Robinson shows that the modern enemies of mind, those who engage in “a hermeneutics of condescension,” claim the authority of science without practicing “the self-discipline or self-criticism for which science is distinguished.” In the end, thought without mind is self-refuting.

Much of what passes for modern thought, Robinson argues, is little more than the bulletins of science without the method of science: “parascientific literature,” she calls it. It sets out to establish its scientific credentials by excluding “the beauty and strangeness of the individual soul, that is, of the world as perceived in the course of a human life”—this is its first principle, its “signature,” its “inflection.” As Robinson convincingly demonstrates, though, the genre of parascientific writing first arose and took form as “a polemic against religion,” and has never really progressed beyond its origins and earliest form.

Robinson’s immediate target is the self-congratulatory New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, which chortles (in the subtitle of a bestseller) How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. For Robinson, however, there is little new about such men and such books. “The motif of a shocking newness that must startle us into painful recognition is very much a signature of ‘the modern,’ ” she points out, and their adoption of the motif is, by this point in literary history, shockingly old. For her, the historic “threshold”—the rupture between tradition and modernity—was crossed some time in the nineteenth century, when the “confidence that science has given us knowledge sufficient to allow us to answer certain essential questions about the nature of reality, if only by dismissing them,” caused intellectuals’ heads to spin. By now, she says, “the parascientific genre feels like a rear-guard action, a nostalgia for the lost certitudes of positivism.”

Robinson is the right one to defend the mind and soul, subjectivity and “novelistic interest,” against those who would eliminate inwardness from reality. She is not only a great novelist—one of the two greatest American novelists of her generation—but she is also intensely religious, an unembarrassed Calvinist whose Death of Adam, a 1998 collection of essays, unembarrassedly entertained “the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them.” Unlike many of her contemporaries in the fiction-writing trade, Robinson understands that a fashionable atheism is far graver a threat to literature than religious intolerance.

Absence of Mind is divided into four chapters. The first, “On Human Nature,” borrows its title from a 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning book in which the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson sets forth a popular version of his view that human behavior is genetically determined. Wilson is not Robinson’s only example of a parascientific thinker; she also examines Dennett, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, and the biblical scholar James L. Kugel. In this chapter, she carefully defines the “assertive popular literature,” the “remarkably reiterative literature,” that she calls parascientific.

“The Strange History of Altruism,” her second chapter (and her best), revisits the problem that bedevils any system that would explain away human subjectivity—namely, the random acts of kindness that human beings occasionally perform, even when (to all appearances) they gain no benefit from them. From its beginnings, the genre of parascientific writing has faced the difficulty of how to redefine altruism as something else entirely. For Robinson, this tendency is sadly typical of the parascientific frame of mind, “defining humankind by the exclusion of the things that in fact distinguish us as a species.”

In the book’s strongest and most memorable passage, she examines how the parascientific writers have handled the case of Phineas Gage (1823–1860), the American railroad worker who became famous for surviving “an explosion that sent a large iron rod through his skull.” The case is a favorite of parascientific writers, who are struck by the fact that, after the accident (in the words of one), Gage became “fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane.” What this supposedly proves is that a brain injury had destroyed his ability to exercise appropriate social control over his speech, demonstrating that appropriateness of speech cannot properly be described as an activity of mind.

Robinson makes short work of such analysis. The explosion might have damaged not merely his skull, leaving Gage disfigured and half-blind, but also his hopes and self-image. If so, irreverence and profanity might not be so surprising, since they are, after all, attitudes that “culture and language have prepared for such occasions.” But parascientific writers never stop to consider how the explosion might have affected Gage’s subjective life, because they rule it out of account from the start—even though, a century and a half after the fact, and entirely dependent upon secondhand accounts in an imprecise and dated idiom, they cannot possibly know anything about Gage’s injury with any degree of certainty. Robinson lowers the boom on them:

I trouble the dust of poor Phineas Gage only to make the point that in these recountings of his afflictions there is no sense at all that he was a human being who thought and felt, a man with a singular and terrible fate. In the absence of an acknowledgment of his subjectivity, his reaction to this disaster is treated as indicating damage to the cerebral machinery, not to his prospects, or his faith, or his self-love. It is as if in telling the tale the writers participate in the absence of compassionate imagination, of benevolence, that they posit for their kind.In the third chapter, Robinson examines “The Freudian Self.” She suggests a different source for the neuroses that Freud identified in his Jewish clientele—by pointing to the ambiguous and increasingly perilous situation of Jews in Vienna. Because he dismissed such immediate worries out of hand, Freud could not even be bothered to refute such an obvious and alternative explanation. That his latter-day followers commit the same error, knowing what became of the Viennese Jews, is inexcusable. Ideas that claim the authority of science are as susceptible as any other to what Robinson calls “cultural contamination,” but the sense that such figures as Freud introduced an “epochal change” in modern thought is only heightened by viewing them “against a background void of detail.” To fill in the background, after all, might require something in addition to science to complete the picture of man.

And that is the theme of her fourth and final chapter. “Thinking Again” reveals that Robinson has been writing a defense of man all along. Perhaps even more significantly, Absence of Mind is a defense of the humanities—history, literature, and especially religion. Without them, human life is incomplete, because the subject of the humanities (“the witness of mind”) is otherwise dismissed as irrelevant. If there is a “modern malaise,” Robinson suggests—if indeed there is “an emptiness peculiar to our age”—the reason is not that the advance of science has caused “an ebbing away of faith,” impoverishing modern experience. To the contrary, men and women still hunger for the “felt life of the mind,” which has been eliminated from their experience only because they have made the mistake of falling under the influence of the parascientific writers thoroughly dismantled in this short but brilliant book.

13 epigrams

These were published many years ago, in an obscure pamphlet issued by Robert L. Barth; then I set them aside and forgot them. The only epigram I have written in the years since, I believe, went unnoticed by readers of this blog. (When I drew his attention to it, Patrick Kurp apologized. “Sorry I screwed up your Martial Plan,” he said.) Earlier today, cleaning out my office in College Station, I came upon these twenty-five-year-old epigrams again, and decided to lend them impermanence in a new form.

1. To J. V. Cunningham

Take these, the work of quiet days,
In place of what I owe you—measured praise.
As you have made my mind your own device
To honor you I epigrammatize.

2. To the Reader

Though you’d prefer a known designer brand,
Accept these rhymes: they’re cheap, but made by hand.

3. To My book

In Herrick’s day men wiped themselves
With quarto leaves. If you ne’er sit
On permanent collection shelves
At least you have got free of shit.

4. To My Bookseller

Behind the thick-backed boys where clerks neglect it
My book will slip and cower if you let it.
Don’t. Make it stand up front where all can get it.

5. Dr. Johnson on the Death of His Mother

                           Idler, 41

If you have tears, whoever you may be,
Enough to drop for mourners filing by,
Then let this train be your last cause for grief:
The last steps of an inoffensive life.

6.

Post-Structuralist, rest in peace,
For whom all substance was caprice,
All meaning vain. At your demise
Yourself were desubstantialized.

7. Martial 3.71

I know, yes. How? I didn’t read your mind.
He’s sore between the legs and you, behind.

8. To Shakespearean Actors

Uncertain kings on th’raisèd stage
Strutting and frothing in a rage
Of unmarked accents, ill-bred shouts,
Easy but in a bawdyhouse,
You act this pre-neurotic drama
To give the audience a trauma.

9.

Men praise here eyes, her lips, her dress, her stockings.
Coy answers naught. And why? To keep them talking.

10.

Once Loose was young, petite, and love was free!
To any man who’ll listen now she tells
Her serial erotic odyssey.
What passion gave away confession sells.

11. Someone’s Epitaph for His Wife

The girl was trouble; I desired no bride
Except in bed, and after she had died.

12. With the Baseball Encyclopedia

These epitaphs, by each man scored
In measures from antiquity,
Keep his life’s record here assured,
Though evened to finality.

13. To My Wife

I never write of love, it’s true.
If love be mutual attraction,
The simultaneous urge to screw,
Let us pass time in mute distractions
Who seek inherence in the act
And have no voices to announce it.
Our marriage is a binding pact
In a dead tongue. We can’t pronounce it.

Singermann

My essay on Myron Brinig’s 1929 novel Singermann is up this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily.

If the novel is ever reprinted, as it should be, it will be because of its transvestism and homosexuality. The best thing about the novel, though, is that it tells a more typical Jewish story—a story that no other Jewish writer ever seemed interested in telling, despite its significance to American Jewry.

Singermann documents the career of a Jewish emigrant from Central Europe who becomes a peddler in the Middle West, and then travels further west to open his own clothing and dry-goods store—the makings of a successful department store. Many if not most of the local department stores in small to mid-sized American cities were established by Jews (the stores have largely been swallowed up by larger chains). The stores, and the Jewish merchants who created and ran them, anchored both the communities in which they were located and the Jews who came there to live and to establish Jewish institutions.

Most of the midwestern Jewish communities in places like Butte, Montana (the novel’s setting), have disappeared. And with them a chapter in American Jewish history. Singermann is one of the few remaining traces.

Hitchens diagnosed with cancer

Christopher Hitchens has released a terse, 37-word statement that he is beginning to receive chemotherapy for cancer of the esophagus. He says nothing about the stage of his cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, five-year survival rates for esophageal cancer are 37% if it has not metastasized, 19% if has metastasized to nearby bones or organs, and only 3% if the metastases have spread to distant parts of the body.

Sadly, though, esophageal cancer is rarely detected until symptoms appear, by which point, again as the American Cancer Society says, the cancer has “reached an advanced stage, when a cure is less likely.”

It is sobering to learn that a writer of such fierce and unshakable integrity must face such a grim prognosis. Coincidentally, I finished eight weeks of radiation earlier today, designed to eradicate the last remaining traces of the metastatic prostate cancer with which I was diagnosed two-and-a-half years ago. At the time, I was given small chance to survive, but I have beaten the odds, and perhaps Hitchens can too. Even though he would sneer, I shall pray for him. I can’t imagine a world in which his voice is silenced.