What News?

The very sad news of the death of the journalist Gwen Ifill, one of the anchors of the PBS News Hour, is in our house a kind of “objective correlative” of a more pervasive distressed mood following the general election.  I had no personal acquaintance of Ms. Ifill, but I was a great fan.  She was a luminous presence of intelligence, amiability, and spiritual generosity, a person of refinement and moral weight.  She understood the distinction—strangely unobserved by many of her professional peers—between reporting the news and trying to make the news. 

Journalism has played a huge role in recent political events, either through an actual or a perceived “media bias”.  We say that seeing is believing, but it as often works the other way around.  We seek confirmation of what we already believe, often with great success.  That is perhaps the essence of living or writing in a “bubble”.  My fear going into the election was that, whatever the outcome, about half the country would be left feeling aggrieved.  I was right about that, though wrong in identifying which half.  From one point of view this election barely had a winner.  Trump was behind in the gross popular vote, and he won only because of the vote in the Electoral College—the way the Cubs won only because of the rules of baseball.  According to most of the sources I read Donald Trump won because large swaths of the American electorate cannot accept America’s increasing “diversity”.  I think that is exactly backwards.  Mr. Trump won because America is already “diverse” in ways apparently unfathomable to the nation’s elite journals.  Looked at from the broad perspective that includes the “down-ballot” and state elections the vote was a stupendous Republican victory, an electoral blizzard.

Years ago, while I was researching my book The Anti-Communist Manifestos, I came upon a man named Sender Garlin, an American Communist journalist and one-time staffer on the Daily Worker.  Among other things, Garlin had played a role in the conversion to Communism of the young Whittaker Chambers.  Though his politics were grim, he was a fellow of good humor as is suggested by the following anecdote he reported.  In 1927 Garlin was working for the Bronx Home News, and was assigned to write the story about Lindbergh’s solo flight to Paris in May of that year.  His editor, ever mindful of his journal’s parochial mission, put the following headline on the story: “Lindbergh Flies over the Bronx on Way to Paris”.  I was reminded that cosmopolitan self-absorption is still vibrant in the Borough of Manhattan as well, when on the second day following the election the New York Times ran a two-banner headline proclaiming that “Democrats, Students and Foreign Allies Face the Reality of a Trump Presidency.”

            Hard upon that, I was sedately tooling about in my second-hand Mazda, with my radio tuned, as always, to NPR.  NPR has suspended its regular programming in order to focus full time on their “International Festival of Sore Losers,” an enterprise possibly accordant with my own mood.  The “New Yorker Hour” came on, featuring the famous magazine’s editor (David Remnick) and two of its staff writers (George Packer and Amy Davidson) in conversation about the election and its meaning.  These are three extraordinary intellectuals.  I actually remember Remnick as a brilliant Princeton literature major nearly forty years ago.  And you don’t get to be a New Yorker staff writer by just showing up.  But this conversation, I mean…Tell me not in mournful numbers.  Concerning the rubes who elected Trump there’s been an intellectual development among the Sore Losers.  They (the rubes) are more to be pitied than censured.  True enough that they may mostly be academically uncredentialed and unpigmented persons of xenophobic, homophobic, and racist character, but one has to make allowances for their upbringing, which has been among grain silos, cow pastures, revival meetings, and meth labs.  The conversation partners joined in the heavy, heroic effort to understand their compatriots in Bartlesville and Altoona, though they had to stoop ever so low to do it.  Being deplorable in elite eyes might be painful; but being pitiable must be crushing.  I hope it will not come to suggesting “Hug a Hillbilly” lapel buttons.

            I think that we can conclude that American journalism—as opposed to certain inspiring American journalists—failed us rather badly during the late political campaign.  Fortunately as we face the anxious days ahead we do have other and more promising institutions, and in particular our Constitution with its reasonably clear delineation of powers and the limitations on those powers.  For stamp our little feet as we may, wave “Not My President” signs as we wish, he will indeed be our president.  According to Mr. Trump Americans have become so used to losing that we don’t know what winning is.  That is one of several of his positions for which I find scant empirical backing.  It seems to me that a large cohort of Americans—including some who wield the overwhelming power of the press—are so used to winning that they have forgotten how to lose in the spirit of the democratic compact.

           

Jean-François Champollion

statue of Champollion, courtyard of the Collège de France

This morning we have learned the results of the American general election.  Concerning the dreadful campaign I have absolutely nothing novel, interesting, or cheerful to say, beyond citing the refrain of one of our oldest English poets: þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg.  The poem is “Deor” in the Exeter Book, a catalogue of disasters that befell various legendary Germanic worthies, concerning each of which the gloomy poet concludes  “That one passed away—this one may too”.   Lincoln had had a yet more ancient philosopher in mind when he wrote thus: "It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words `And this, too, shall pass away’.”  Thus ends my desperate search for a segue to the day’s actual theme, which is philological.

Figeac: Place Champollion

               Some years ago my wife Joan and her friend Susan set out on their epic pilgrimage to Compostela, starting at one of the ancient bivouac points, Le-Puy-en-Velay in the Haute-Loire.  It was agreed that their husbands, both named John, would meet up with them after a week or so a couple of hundred kilometers to the west at a place known to all of us only as a name on a map:  Figeac.  Figeac turned out to be a fine old country town, but with so little happening of an evening that the only open eatery we could find was a pizzeria that might have been borrowed from a Jersey shopping mall, teen-agers and pinball machines included.  It appeared that the last big event in Figeac may have occurred in December, 1790, with the birth of Jean-François Champollion.  This I concluded from observing that most things in town, possibly including the pizzeria, were Champollion-this or Champollion-that.  That set me reading, as so many things do.

Champollion, of course, was “the father of Egyptology,” the “man who solved the riddle of the hieroglyphs”.  I once heard him described, less felicitously, as “the man who cracked the Rosetta stone.”  (Actually, it was already broken like that long before his time.)  What a great man!  Anyone with a passing familiarity with France, whether it be the France of the fourteenth or the twenty-first century, is likely to develop a somewhat ironical view of the place.  But say what you will, what other nation—in addition to producing at least 450 kinds of cheese—venerates a philologist as a great national hero?   Champollion exemplifies the bountiful harvest of the Enlightenment and the brighter side of the French Revolution—both of which certainly do exist. A boy genius from a modest household in the sticks, Jean-François fell in love with language.  No passion is more intense.  I know, because I have a son pretty much like him.  While still in the single digits he was mastering the canonical classical tongues—and some others.  He was already infused with a generous and questing republican spirit, and his merit was recognized by others so inspired. 

In 1798 Napoleon invaded Egypt.  There was method in this madness, though it cannot concern us now.  The campaign was a military disaster but a cultural bonanza.  It ignited yet another European spasm of Egyptomania—they seem to occur every few centuries—including a kind of learned international phoneme race.    The ability to read the formal ancient written language of the Egyptians, the hieroglyphs, had vanished from the earth in time immemorial.  Everybody knew that serious progress in understanding the amazing culture exposed to view in the excavated temples and looted artifacts depended upon the decipherment of the hieroglyphs.  Concerning the hieroglyphs many crackpots had had many crackpot theories over the centuries.   Now whole battalions of crackpots rushed onto the field. But so also did the most brilliant linguists in Europe, including the imposing  English polymath Thomas Young, and set themselves to the task in earnest.  It was Jean-François Champollion, a nobody from Figeac, who got it right.  He did so by calling upon his unparalleled erudition and by thinking outside the box.

In this instance the box was the general belief that the hieroglyphs were a repertory of pictorial symbols: bowl, wave, hawk, owl, kissy mouth, etc.  Well, the hieroglyphs manifestly are that.  But Champollion reckoned that if they were the elements of an actual language they could not be just that.  They had to signify in such a fashion that they could be read aloud in significant phonetic combinations.  That is, they were the letters of an alphabet.   The line of Old English poetry in my first paragraph twice uses the obsolete English letter þ.  That letter in ancient times was called a thorn (sharp-pointed woody projection), of which it was a “picture” of sorts.  But when you see on the page a þ you do not think “rosebush,” and you do not say “thorn”.  You recognize it as the graphic representation of a sound that in our English is represented by th.  This was the great “secret” of the hieroglyphs.  They may be cool pictures, but they are in the first place the letters of the ancient Egyptian alphabet.  Like certain other brilliant intellectual breakthroughs, this one seemed so simple once some genius had made it.  Champollion died far too young in 1832, but not before providing the human sciences with a tool of extraordinary power.

 The Rosetta Stone

 The Rosetta Stone

Biography and Brevity

I have just finished reading Philip Short’s biography of Mao Zedong.  Even as I write that sentence I blush at its exaggeration.  The author is short, not his book.  It’s a volume of about 750 pretty big pages with a huge dramatis personae whose names my aging and occidental brain finds it difficult to keep straight.  But it was the book that several knowledgeable  friends told me I should read if I hoped to begin to understand Mao, who by any way of looking at things was among the most consequential actors upon the historical stage of my own times. I did a good deal of skimming and hopping about as directed by Short’s comprehensive index.   I did read major sections in their entirety, including that on the Cultural Revolution; so I will exercise a license to which I may well not be eligible and say that that “I read the book.”

            What did I learn about Mao?  I well remember idealistic young Americans marching in the streets chanting his praises.  On my own campus there were those who affected his dismal haberdashery.  In France in 1968 I saw a huge sign fashioned by the student revolutionaries for one of their rallies that read “Our cause is invincible, for we have a weapon forged in Sinkiang.”  I didn’t know what it meant exactly, but it sounded persuasive.  Philip Short is an engaging journalistic historian, not a moralist or a political polemicist; but the gist of his book, in my admittedly episodic reading, is that Mao was one of the very greatest monsters in recorded history, perhaps even Numero Uno.  The man achieved hecatombs that surpassed the joint production of Hitler and Stalin. He inspired the admiration and emulation of other murderous despots limited in their ambitions only by the comparatively more modest size of the populations under their subjection.

            You should not have to read seven hundred pages to find out that a man was a monster.  My complaint about biography as a contemporary literary genre is that biographies seem destined to get longer and longer.  Having just spent the better part of a week working under the direction of my son Luke in trying to clean up my study I have seen for myself how easily and how quickly junk mail can become sacralized as an “archive”.   Technological developments in communication make it easy to create “documents” and way too easy to keep them.  On Anthony Weiner’s seized laptop the FBI has found 650,000 emails of conceivable pertinence to Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, fifteen-year-old girls in North Carolina and—who knows?—maybe even Carlos Danger himself.  Most people seem to be concentrating on the “pertinence” issue, but I can’t get there, my intellectual energies having been drained by the preliminary effort to imagine six hundred and fifty-thousand emails.  Someday some biographer of somebody is going to find it necessary to read them and tell me all about them.

John Aubrey

            Classical models teach us the wisdom of biographical brevity.  Think of Plutarch, think of Seutonius.  There are about twelve thousand words in the Gospel of Mark.  Is there anything more biographically felicitous than Aubrey’s wonderful and wonderfully titled Brief Lives from the seventeenth century?  Samuel Johnson published the Lives of the Poets—fifty-two of them, like a deck of cards—in a single collection.  A century later the cultural critic Matthew Arnold would nominate six of the best of them as established, permanent “points which stand as so many natural centres, and by returning to which we can always find our way again."  That’s pretty high praise.  John Reed, a founder of the prelapsarian American Community Party, crammed more into his thirty-two years than the television lounge of your average pensioners’ home could pool together.  When he was twenty-nine he wrote a little autobiographical gem, Almost Thirty, that practically electrified me when I first stumbled upon it.

            Only after reading Philip Short did it occur to me to pull down from its shelf my favorite contemporary collection of short biographies: Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts.   This book, incidentally, is one I hope could be in my Desert Island Library should I ever be forced to put one together.   Clive James was combating political correctness before it had even settled into its name.  In this book he deploys his ideas through the medium of about a hundred biographical essays.  For anyone inclined to respect learning, to honor history and try to be honest about it, and to value the Western cultural tradition and its distinctive achievements, one of the greatest obstacles is the slovenly but fashionable forgetfulness that he calls “cultural amnesia”.  I suffer as well from forgetfulness of the more conventional kind.   I could not remember for sure whether he had an essay on Mao, but of course he does.  It is five pages long, and that includes an encomiastic review of Short’s biography and other relevant bibliographical information.  His opening sentence: “The full evil of Mao Zedong (1893-1976) is continually being rediscovered, because it is continually being forgotten.”  So Short had to go long.

 Clive James

Bill Bowen

 Bill Bowen (1933-2016)

William G. Bowen, the former president of Princeton University, died last week.  Bill was already a professor in the Economics Department when I arrived on the faculty in 1965.  Two years later he became provost—technically the second person to hold that new office, though effectually its creator—before being elevated to the presidency in 1972.  He was the seventeenth president of our venerable institution, and served until 1987.  This meant that I was an observer of his entire administrative career here.  I was never a member of the Administration, but I served on various consequential committees and chaired an important academic department during that time, so that I have a reasonably informed basis for my high opinion of the man and his work.

Large and noble educational institutions respectful of long tradition and governed by the fiduciary principle generally move like battleships in port—which is to say, slowly and carefully. But move they do.  There is no standing still.  They are getting either better or worse.  And they move in large part animated by a vaguely defined “leadership”.  My father was of the cynical opinion that the divine protection of the Church was proved by the mere fact of its continuing existence through centuries of malfeasant leadership.  But if you happen to be a part of some large earthly enterprise whose mission you applaud, even but a small cog in the machine of human betterment and fulfillment, it is inspiring, encouraging, and beneficially challenging to know that the people at the top, including particularly the person at the very top, are of outstanding character and capacity.

I believe that a large part of our persistent national malaise, an acute phase of which has flared up during the current election campaign, arises from the want of access to such credible belief.  So I have a nearly sacred obligation to acknowledge the great good fortune of having spent a professional career under the leadership of four presidents very different in their accidental qualities but very alike in their essential excellence.

The death of a man of Bowen’s eminence and achievements naturally attracts obituary attention commensurate with its subject.  I have seen several impressive notices already, and more will appear.  This brief appreciation is not of that sort.  I am not a theoretician of American higher education, and I do not feel qualified to comment on a career that many knowledgeable people would say became more rather than less important after Bill left Princeton and went to the Mellon Foundation.  But I have never seen anyone put more into a job than Bowen put into his.  The man was an indefatigable worker to judge by my accidental observation.   As an early-morning swimmer I habitually passed by the back side of Nassau Hall on the way to the pool in the pre-dawn dark.  I always knew when the President was out of town: the lights were not blazing in his offices.  On several occasions I travelled with the President and others to alumni conclaves hither and yon.  I noted that he spent practically every minute of the return flights writing longhand against a clip-board: hand-written notes thanking hosts or otherwise following up on particular matters from the meeting or event.

I once drew him up short by telling him that he had an “abbatial” style—that is, the style of a Benedictine abbot.  Religion was not a big thing with Bill, and I doubt that he had much pondered the medieval monk as his role model.  But the analogy remains in my opinion just.  He prided himself on knowing the name of every faculty member—no mean feat.   And though his first and apparently ruthless concern was always with “quality” and “absolute distinction” in his faculty, I came to hear over the years of several instances in which he made discreet, helpful interventions in relief of drastic faculty health or family emergencies—and that was only in the small plot of the institution in which I myself toiled.  He was expert, too, at letting other people have his own way.  As Lyndon Johnson was to the U.S. Senate, Bill Bowen was to the Board of Trustees.

He was not an easy man to get one past, but I did it one time, when he was still Provost.  To understand and forgive the anecdote you must realize that even I was once young and even Princeton had its mildly wild side around the cultural revolution of the late Sixties.  My very dear friend Jim Magnuson was then a playwright in residence as Hodder Fellow.  Jim had among his trove of stage properties a tent-size crimson gown fashioned in a light corduroy material that had been prepared for a production of The Duchess of Malfi—doubtless for the duchess herself.  It was decided that human felicity would be increased if I were to march in the Commencement procession wearing this garment.  I did so.  The truth of the matter concerning academic ceremonies is that you can do almost anything so long as you do it with pomp and apparent authority.  Beside, one fake Renaissance garment is pretty much like another.  A moment of inadvertent but felicitous eavesdropping at the end of the ceremony picked up the following.

Bob Goheen: What was that robe John Fleming was wearing?

Bill Bowen: Oh, Bob, that’s an old Oxford gown—said with apparent authority.

Writing: Invention or Exclusion?

 Georges Perec

Is it possible for you to write some complete, coherent sentences without using the first letter of our writing system?  The response to the question is “yes”, though the sentences might end up looking very odd, contorted, or contrived.  For the shunned letter is indeed the second most frequently used in English writing—only its fellow-vowel E being more often employed.  Hence, few extended prolusions of prose could omit it.

The gimmick in the paragraph above is that it contains not a single A.  That feature makes it a lipogram—from the Greek λείπω, leave out—a literary bagatelle in which a writer voluntarily submits to some more or less absurd compositional constraint, such as avoiding the letter A, in order to demonstrate…exactly what? 

There is a very long history to this sort of thing.  A deservedly obscure Greek poet named Tryphiodorus is supposed to have written his own versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, each in twenty-four books corresponding to the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet.  In serial fashion each book scrupulously avoided its appropriate letter: no alphas in book one, no omegas in book twenty-four, and so forth in between.  The great Lope de Vega, who could write a play in the time most people require for a shopping list, wrote five novels in order to omit from each one of the principal vowels (a, e, i, o, u); he did not consider y a worthy challenge, despite the fact it is the Spanish word for “and”.  It is alleged that in 1816 a strange drama entitled “Pièce sans A” had a very brief run upon the Paris stage.  The opening (and only) night of the “Play without an A” got off to a bad start when the lead flubbed its initial line.  The curtain rose to discover a man greeting another on stage.  “Ah, monsieur!” cried the first.  “Vous voilà.”  The audience howled with laughter, but with the help of the prompter the actor recovered and started again: “Eh, monsieur, vous voici.”

These and numerous other examples are provided by the estimable William S. Walsh in his inestimable Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1893).  Mr. Walsh had no high opinion of lipograms, which he regarded as forms of “literary trifling” and “useless tours de force.”  He thought that Tryphiodorus belonged to “those early centuries of our era during which the world, or the greater part of it, seems to have been in a state of blue mould for want of work.”

In fact the lipogram thrives on post-modernity, and I believe its mouldiest days are still ahead.  Perhaps the greatest of modern lipogrammatologists was Georges Perec (1936-1982), the tragically short-lived author of the indisputably brilliant Life: A User’s Manual, a book from which not much was left out.  But as a prominent member of an avant-garde literary conspiracy (in rough translation the “Atelier of Potential Literature”), Perec was all about pushing envelopes, shattering parchment ceilings, jumping the barracuda, and leaping the lipogram.  His masterpiece in this field was the full-length novel La Disparition (The Disappearance [1969]), a book in which the letter E never appears except insofar as its manifest absence invisibly ministers to major themes of lack, loss, and mysterious disappearance and is an important plot-theme.  In 1994 Gilbert Adair (1944-2011), a brilliant Brit, published his English translation of this book, eless, as A Void. I became aware of it from reading an eless review by my old friend and one-time Princeton colleague, the late Paul Gray, then the book editor at Time magazine.

Intelligible language may be the distinctive feature of the human species and its principal advantage among all other animals.  It is difficult to imagine effective human community without effective speech.  What of written language?  For most of recorded history a large majority of humanity was illiterate, and large swaths still are today.  Now most advanced countries enjoy high literacy rates—one of the features that make them “advanced”.  With negligible exception the educational systems of the world silently subscribe to this view.  Human civilization in its entirely depends upon archived thought and information.  How is it then that although the vast majority of humanity does a fair amount of talking each day, only a small minority ever does even a little writing?

            It is the view of many that the hardest thing about writing is thinking up something to write about.  I used to think that too.  The old word for this was “invention,” which in Latin had really meant “finding” or “discovering” as in the “Invention of the Cross”.  The famous orator Cicero thought that “invention”, the discovery of convincing arguments, was the first job of rhetoric.  My own thinking about this has evolved.

            Thinking up things to write about is a piece of cake.  The trick is in figuring out what to leave out in writing about them.  Say that Shakespeare wants to write about his terrific girlfriend, a subject for which the potential material is infinite.  How does he discipline the presentation?  Well he limits himself to fourteen lines of iambic pentameter distributed in three quatrains with a concluding couplet, with a rhyme scheme of abab, cdcd, efef, gg.  That makes him leave an awful lot out, to be sure, but also forces him to make what he puts in really counts.  If literary trifling and useless tours de force can add some variety to a writer’s workout, I’m all for them.

Groping: A Brief Literary History

"Adam catched Eve by the Furbelow"
traditional English folk catch

Can a medievalist possibly have a special take on the latest from Donald Trump?  After all, the locker room must be a comparatively recent architectural development.  The Greek palestra was something altogether different, and “palestra talk” was probably mainly devoted to speculation concerning the ordering of the cardinal virtues or the metempsychosis of material individuality and stuff like that.  Nevertheless since there is a literary history of almost everything, there must be a literary history of sexual groping.  It’s a hard assignment, but somebody has to undertake it.

            One might be tempted to suggest that Mr. Trump is a Rabelaisian figure. But though he achieves the requisite grossness, he lacks the cordiality of Grandgousier, the savoir-faire of Pantagruel, and the erudition of Gargantua.  As painful as it is for me to admit it, he is much more a Chaucerian character:

                        A Donald was there in that compagnyë

                        Whose speech was aldermost of harlotryë.

                        He wolde restore the greatness of the lande,

                        With bluster, insult, and a gropynge hande.

That’s not really Chaucer, of course, but the following is.  In the transcendentally brilliant “Miller’s Tale” there are two characters who have perfected Trumpian techniques.  The first is the Oxford student “hende” (clever) Nicholas who seizes the opportunity of his aged landlord’s temporary absence to make the following move on Alisoun, his winsome young landlady:

                        As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte;

                        And prively he caught hire by the queynte,

                        And seyde, “Ywis, but if ich have my wille,

                        For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille.”

The repeated word queynte is obviously a quibble.  In the first line it is an adjective meaning something like “inventive”.  In the second it is a vulgar noun, still in common use in a slightly different form, for the female private part—thus justifying a pun on “prively”—that throughout history has also been denoted by the linguistically challenged with a select menagerie of small, furry animals, including rabbits, squirrels, beavers, and pussy-cats.  It is important to realize that Chaucer is being satirical, and that the object of his satire is hende Nicholas, whose actual subtlety approximates that of a battering ram or of the Black Death.  Chaucer also knows that nobody in history has ever actually died (spilled) from sexual continence, frustrating though it may be, and that Nicholas’s hyperbolic concerns on that score could be resolved with a small hair-shirt or perhaps even just a cold bath.

            Quite apart from the hapless old husband, Nicholas has a competitor.  A second character is chasing the same young wife, and that is the dandy Absalon—like the biblical character from whom he takes his name, a pretty boy with long blond hair.  His ambitions to “score” are somewhat more modest than are those of Nicholas:

                        To Alison now wol I tellen al

                        My love-longing, for yet I shal nat mysse

                        That at the leeste wey I shal hir kisse.

                        Som maner confort shal I have, parfay.

                        My mouth hath icched al this longe day;

                        That is a signe of kissing atte leeste.

Now one of the more remarkable passages on the recently published “Trump tape” involves oral hygiene.  Mr. Trump is just about to get off a bus to be greeted by a young woman he has never before in his life met but who has already been sufficiently ogled from the bus window by Trump’s pandering sidekick, Mr. Bush, to have been declared officially “hot as shit!”  Now you or I might find some ambiguity or even restraint in enthusiasm in the phrase “hot as shit!” but it only sends Mr. Trump to his travelling medicine chest.   “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her,” he tells Bush.  “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss.”

Returning to the fourteenth century we find the fop Absolom preparing for his hot date in a manner somewhat similar.

…hym arraieth gay, at point-devys.  [all dolled up]

But first he cheweth greyn and lycorys,

To smellen sweete, er he hadde kembed his heer.

Under his tongue a trewe-love he beer,

For therby wende he to ben gracious. 

Gracious (pronounced grahs-i-OUS) preparing to rhyme in the next line with the word house (pronounced as it still is in Tidewater Virginia) is a marvelously ambivalent adjective that can refer either to a deep moral virtue or a flimsy and superficial affectation of “class”.  The “greyn” mentioned is cardamom seed, or “organic” Tic-Tacs. 

Should there still be anyone in the world who has not read the “Miller’s Tale,” it is too delightful by far to have me ruin it with a plot summary.  It is a beautifully plotted gem in which the high comedy begins where the dirty jokes end, yet so transparently moralistic as to be called “Chaucer’s Measure for Measure.”  Suffice it to say that the bad guys get exactly what they deserve--and in a way that may have vindicated Billy Bush's odd index of female pulchritude.  Oh that life might imitate art!

Cultural Appropriation

            So-called “political correctness” on our college campuses—the shaping or censorship of thought, expression and deportment to conform to certain cultural dogmas of a mandarin intellectual caste—is rapidly moving from being merely annoying if occasionally amusing to seriously threatening and dangerous.  You have all heard or read about various absurd instances (the prosecution of festive sombrero-wearers at Bowdoin, the banishing of the noun “American” at the University of New Hampshire, etc.)  More serious is the growing list of invited speakers who have been disinvited or shouted down when they stood at the lectern.

            A teacher of medieval literature might be secretly jealous of those whose message is important enough to protest and to censor.  I have certainly put a few people to sleep, but in forty years of lecturing on many subjects I experienced only one indignant public protest, when in a tangential sentence I expressed my opinion that there was literary evidence of probable editorial intervention in the narrative of the gospels as they have come down to us.  A man leapt up, noisily, and huffed out of the lecture hall.  I almost felt I had finally made it.

            The most obviously politically incorrect people tend to be on the one hand business executives, politicians, and officials (governmental or non-governmental) deemed reactionary, and on the other social scientists and public intellectuals deemed conservative.  But artists and imaginative writers are more and more frequently being called to task.

            The idea that all serious cultural analysis is necessarily based in the three circumstances of race, gender, and class is what has authorized the politically correct strait-jacket.  That is, race, gender, and class are the only things really worth talking about.  When applied to works of art this triad often leads the commentator away from imagination and empathy, precious qualities of much great art, to dull sociology and dubious economic theory.

            The thought crime du jour for the politically correct is “cultural appropriation”.  I think I understand what this phrase means—beyond the admonition that Bowdoin boys better not wear sombreros unless they also carry Mexican passports.  When applied to writers, the phrase “cultural appropriation” means the spiritual and artistic effort to imagine and depict with conviction characters and situations very different from oneself and one’s own.  There are genuine problems involved.  I first became aware of them acutely in the late 1960s with the controversy over William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner—a fiction deployed in the imagined voice of the leader of a Virginia slave rebellion of the 1830s.  There were those who took the view that no white writer had the ethical right to do that.  That seemed to me nonsense then, and seems nonsense now.

            In the current moment of rampant identity politics and maximal racialization of almost everything, it is hardly surprising that the issue has again become current.  It has been much in the news this past week because of a controversial keynote address delivered by the American novelist Lionel Shriver at the Brisbane Writers' Conference.  Its title was “I Hope the Concept of Cultural Appropriation Is a Passing Fad.”   She followed this in the Times with an account (“Will the Left Survive the Millennials?”) of the experience of delivering the talk, which featured a high profile walk-out by an ethnically indignant fellow writer.  I have not read Ms. Shriver’s fiction, but if it is as good as her polemical essays I had better get to it quick.

            Writers are well advised actually to know something about what they write about; and they should be judged by whether they do so well or badly.  But if everyone claims an artistic monopoly on large swaths of cultural experience, the result will be a literature of solipsism.  Great books are not paeans to parochialism but claims upon universal aspects of the human spirit.  Humanists used to quote with approval a maxim of the Roman playwright Terrence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.  “I am a man, and I regard nothing of humanity as alien to me.”  Maybe men can say something about women, and vice versa; maybe blacks can say something about whites.  It is even possible that a spinster like Jane Austen might write a small shelf of immortal books all about marriage.

            There is a good deal of historical evidence concerning the dismal effects of political correctness on literary creation.  Many intellectuals of a hundred years ago truly believed that the Russian Revolution would usher in an era of literary liberation and creativity such as the world had never seen.  The aristocratic epic of Tolstoy, the puerile mysticism of Dostoyevsky—all this would shrivel into oblivion before the humane powers of Socialist Realism.  By 1934 Max Eastman, an early American Communist, an expert in Russian literature, and one-time editor of The Masses, published a book, Artists in Uniform: a Study of Literature and Bureaucratism, in which he examined the state of letters in Stalin’s Russia.  That state was dismal, but also terrifying as it presented an image of a literary culture toward which the tendencies of many left-wing intellectuals in the West at that time seemed to be drawn.  It may be time for an Eastman revival.

            As for the term “cultural appropriation”, it seems to me a largely meaningless redundancy like “power politics” or “food nutrition”.  Culture is largely appropriation, and the process of appropriation has become ever more rapid and robust with the dramatic developments in transportation and communication characteristic of modernity.  Cultural appropriation is one of the chief indices of American dynamism in our cuisine, our dress, our religious and secular rituals, and in the fashionable ideas that dominate the humanities departments of our colleges and universities.  And I challenge any writer of English to try to write a few intelligible paragraphs free of what the historians of language call "loan" words.