Sunday Night Journal — December 5, 2010
(I started this piece last Sunday, and had to stop
writing to deal with a software emergency at work. But I had already seen that
I was probably not going to be able to handle the subject in a blog post. I
took it up again today, and once again had to stop and address a problem at
work. But it had become clear that I wasn’t going to be able to fit the topic
into a blog post of a thousand words or so. The more I wrote, the more the
topic demanded that I write. And so I’m calling this part 1. It stops rather
abruptly, and will resume next Sunday. It really should be an essay, and
perhaps will find its way into my book. Thanks to Toby Danna for posting on
Facebook the link to the Commentary piece which set me to thinking about
this.)
How many people know that the United States has a poet
laureate? Of those, how many can name him, or at least would recognize the name
if they saw it? (It is “him” right now, so that eliminates half, at least, of
our poets.) Of those, how many have read any of his work? My first thought in
formulating those questions was that they would describe a progressively
smaller group of people. But having written them out now, I think most people
who would be able to answer “yes” to the first question would also be able to answer
“W. S. Merwin” to the second question, and “yes” to the third.
In any case that group is quite small. Within the United States, one person in a thousand? With a population of three hundred million, that
would give a number of roughly 300,000, which seems perhaps a little high to
me, although I have no way of knowing whether it is. Surely not more than a
million, anyway.
Perhaps more significantly, I would guess that the group of
people who know those facts overlaps very heavily with the group of those who
are writing or have made some attempt at writing serious literary poetry. In short:
poetry in our time is of interest mainly to poets, and perhaps their friends
and family.
In contrast, Joseph Epstein tells us in this recent Commentary
piece that in 1956 T .S. Eliot lectured to an audience of 15,000 at the University of Minnesota. Even if we assume that some large percentage of those did not
really know or care very much about Eliot’s work, they did at least know that
he was a famous poet and critic, and they felt at least the they ought to care
about such things, or, at very least, wanted to appear to care. Eliot
was a celebrity. And he was not an entertainer, playing to the tastes of the
crowd: he stood for the highest standards, and his poetry and criticism were
austere. Everyone with a little education knew his name, even if they weren’t
quite sure who he was and had never read a word he wrote. Bob Dylan wrote him,
along with Ezra Pound, into a song (“Desolation Row”) in 1965, when it was
still possible to assume that a mass audience would recognize the names.
There is no comparable figure today. There is no one of his
intellectual and artistic stature, and if there were he would not be as widely
known as Eliot was in 1956. There are many reasons for the near-extinction of
poetry as an art for anyone other than a few specialists, and for the fact that
poetry has suffered a greater decline than fiction. But the things for which
Eliot was famous—poetry and criticism—are extreme indicators of a trend which
has been clear for some time in literature in general. As Epstein says:
Understatedly spectacular is the way Eliot’s career
strikes one today, at a time when, it is fair to say, poetry, even to bookish
people, is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to
pursue academic tenure. Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known,
seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down.
I believe this is true. Literary culture is not dead, but it
is either dying or becoming something different, which amounts to much the same
thing. There are many reasons for this, and Epstein names the obvious ones:
…the distractions of the Internet, poor rudimentary
education, the vanquishing of seriousness in university literature departments
owing to the intellectually shallow enticements of modish subjects, and the
allure of the pervasive entertainments of popular culture.
But there is a more fundamental problem:
Although none of these things help, literary
culture is, I believe, shutting down chiefly because literature itself has
become unimportant: what is being created in contemporary novels, poems, and
plays no longer speaks to the heart or mind.
And here is his diagnosis:
For Eliot, literature was a moral enterprise, but moral
in a way that purely secular moralists—the moralists of economics, of social
science, of contemporary politics—cannot hope to grasp. He wasn’t accusing
modern writers of immorality, or even amorality, but of ignorance “of our most
fundamental and important beliefs; and that in consequence [contemporary
literature’s] tendency is to encourage its readers to get what they can out of
life while it lasts, to miss no ‘experience’ that presents itself, and to
sacrifice themselves, if they make any sacrifice at all, only for the sake of
tangible benefits to others in this world either now or in the future.” Not,
any of this, good enough.
I think this is exactly right, and would carry it further:
the current intellectual climate is extremely moralistic, but in a way that is
antagonistic to what Eliot still felt justified in calling “our most
fundamental and important beliefs.” The gap between the contemporary literary
community and that of Eliot’s time is in part the product of something more
active than mere neglect, mere failure to preserve: it involves a conscious act
of destruction.
The moralism of contemporary intellectual culture, the
culture which is the ungrateful inheritor of the Western literary and
philosophical tradition, produces and is produced by an attitude of hostility
and skepticism toward that very tradition. It is a broad movement, much larger
than literary culture specifically. It is amorphous, and has no agreed-upon
name. I’ve sometimes called it the cultural left, meaning that it is a cultural
movement which is primarily concerned with reforming or destroying cultural
institutions, as the political left is concerned with reforming or destroying
political institutions. (In both cases destruction is supposed to be followed
by new construction, but those plans are usually somewhat vague.) And I’ve
sometimes called it the anti-culture, because its defining characteristic is
opposition to the culture in which it is embedded. I think I’ll stick with this
second term here.
I don’t mean that all intellectuals are part of this
anti-culture, but that it is dominant enough to set the characteristic tone of
intellectual life. It is strong in the academy, but that doesn’t mean that all
academics are part of it. Only a minority, I suspect embrace its more explicit
anti-Westernism, but most are affected by it and have made its
pieties—“diversity,” multiculturalism, feminism, etc—their own. And those who
oppose it will be conscious of swimming upstream.
The anti-culture is rooted in social-political progressivism,
by which I mean the view that history is a record of progress toward a goal of
pure freedom and equality (a contradictory dream, but that’s another story), in
which effort we are the latest and greatest workers. It sees that the history
of the West is full of violence and injustice, which is true enough, but it
sees little else. It sees history as a power struggle, and is very much a
partisan on one side of that struggle, and therefore it is narrow. It allows little
or no room for balance and perspective, or any real sympathy with the past. It
is sympathetic to the oppressed, or those counted as oppressed; that
qualification is necessary because some of those who were in fact mistreated do
not merit much sympathy or attention—persecuted Christians, for
instance—because they were allied with non-progressive forces. But it has
little interest in the broad humane approach which seeks to comprehend the past
in its living complexity, its tangle of good and evil. In its eyes Western
culture is either a criminal to be prosecuted, or a fool to be scorned or
pitied.
When it reads the literature of the past thousand years or
so, it sits in judgment on what it encounters. It looks for and praises what
seems to anticipate its own views. It looks for and condemns what offends those
views. It makes compliments of the words “subversive” and “transgressive”
because it admires whatever undermines the existing order, even if it is in
itself repulsive, as in the case of de Sade. (It is not of course at all
tolerant of subversion or transgression directed against itself).
The thing to which it is most hostile is exactly the
transcendent moral dimension which Epstein describes. Let’s be plain: its chief enemy is the Christian faith, and in particular the Catholic Church,
the oldest and largest and most intransigent of the institutions which embody that
faith or which sprang from it.
(to be continued)