Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  As a critic, an Indian, and a woman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has become one of the more prominent postcolonial writers, perhaps most influential as one of the editors of the celebrated journal Subaltern Studies. This word, subaltern, neatly ironical, refers to that low rank of the army, especially the Imperial Army of Britain, which was subordinate to the officer class – so low, in fact, that if a subaltern wanted to speak, he (always a he) had to ask permission. Subaltern studies is a variety of historiography that is frankly revisionist, seeking to provide an alternative history of India, a new voice somewhat analogous to the British Marxist historians, retelling the story ‘from the bottom up.’ Gayatri Spivak, who like Rushdie, Desai, and so many other Indian intellectuals, divides her time between India and the West, combines an essentially feminist view of the world with neo-Marxist flavouring derived from Derrida and Foucault.49 The chief achievement of this group has been, first, gaining access to the raw material of the Raj, without which no revision would have been possible, and second, confronting what many have regarded as the failure of Indian culture to hitherto produce a rival system to the British one.50 In historiography, for example, subaltern scholars have revisited a number of so-called mutinies against the British when, according to the imperial accounts, ‘bands’ of ‘fanatics’ rose up and were defeated.51 These are now explained in terms of contemporaneous religious beliefs, marriage/sexual practices, and the economic needs of empire. Five volumes of Subaltern Studies were published in the 1980s, to great acclaim among scholars, providing an alternative historiography to what is now called colonialist knowledge.52

  Underlying much of the postcolonial movement, not to mention the postmodern sensibility, was a phrase that the American critic Fredric Jameson gave to one of his books in 1981, The Political Unconscious.53 Postcolonial and postmodern criticism derived much of its strength from Raymond Williams’s earlier arguments that ‘serious’ literature should not be read in any way different from popular literature, and that the same is true of all art. This position was set out most fully in two celebrated articles published in New Left Review, one in 1984 by Jameson, entitled ‘Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ and the other, in 1985, by Terry Eagleton, professor of English at Oxford, entitled ‘Against the Grain.’ Jameson’s argument was that all ideologies are ‘strategies of containment,’ which enable a society ‘to provide an explanation of itself which suppresses its underlying contradictions.’54 The certainties of the nineteenth-century novel, for example, were designed to reassure the middle classes that their orderly class system would endure. Hemingway’s novels, on the other hand, with their spare, short sentences, obsessed with machismo, had to be set in exotic foreign countries because he couldn’t fit into America’s self-image as a complex, technologically sophisticated society. Jameson’s second major argument was that the postmodern sensibility was by the mid-1990s not merely one way of looking at the world but the dominant one, and that this was because it was the logical outcome of late capitalism.55 In this late stage, he said, society has finally abolished the distinction between high culture and mass culture – we have instead a culture that many decry as ‘degraded’ but younger people espouse enthusiastically: kitsch, schlock, pulp fiction and TV, Reader’s Digest. The first to appreciate this was Andy Warhol. The point, Jameson says, is that late capitalism recognises that art is, above all, a commodity, something to be bought and sold.

  Eagleton was more aggressively Marxist. The distinction between high art and popular/mass art was one of the oldest certainties, he said, and the fact that it has been undermined is an aid to the socialist, because it helps ‘expose the rhetorical structures by which non-socialist works produce politically undesirable effects.’56 In late capitalism, Eagleton writes, commodities have become fetishes, and he includes artistic commodities with the others. This is a new aesthetic category with no precursors.

  Critics like Jameson and Stanley Fish, his colleague, then at Duke University in North Carolina and now at the University of Illinois in Chicago, paid as much attention in their work to other media besides books – that went without saying. Films, television, comic books, advertising … all these were systems of signs.57 The early work of Raymond Williams, postcolonialism, and postmodern literary theory, together with the theories of such French authors as Barthes, Lyotard, Lacan, Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard, plus the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, therefore came together to create a new discipline, cultural studies. This is not the same as media studies, but they both stem from the same impulse. The fundamental idea behind both is, as was mentioned above, and to return to Jameson’s phrase, the political unconscious – that works of the imagination are not ‘privileged’ in any way, to use the favoured term, that they are just as much a product of their context and environment as anything else, are subject to market forces, and therefore cannot avoid having an ideological or political angle. It is the aim of cultural studies to render this hidden agenda visible, peeling away one of the final layers of self-consciousness.

  Cultural studies is controversial, especially among an older generation brought up to believe that ‘aesthetic’ values are sui generis, independent of everything else, helping us to find the ‘eternal truths’ of the human condition. But cultural studies courses at universities are very popular, which must mean that they meet some needs of the young (they have been around too long now to be merely fashionable). The heart of the issue, the most controversial aspect of the new discipline, is the battle for Shakespeare. Keats called Shakespeare the ‘chief poet,’ the ‘begetter of our deep eternal theme.’ The new Shakespeareans, if we may call them that, argue on the other hand that although the bard wrote a remarkable number of remarkable plays, he did not, as Coleridge maintained, speak for all men, in all places, and at all times.

  The new scholars say that Shakespeare was a man of his age, and that most, if not all, of his plays had a specific political context. They add too that in the nearly 400 hundred years since his death, successive establishments have appropriated him for their own essentially right-wing agendas. In other words, far from being an objective fount of fundamental wisdom about our essential nature, Shakespeare has been used by lesser souls as propaganda to promote and sustain a particular point of view. In arguing that Shakespeare was a man of his time, they are also saying that his insights into human nature are no more ‘fundamental’ or ‘profound’ or ‘timeless’ than anyone else’s, and therefore he should forfeit his place as the rock on which English literature is built. For the cultural materialists, as they are called, Shakespeare’s significance is as a battleground for competing views of literature, and its relevance in our lives.

  The first concerted attack on the conventional wisdom came in 1985, in a book edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, from the University of Sussex, which was provocatively entitled Political Shakespeare,58 It comprised a series of eight essays by British and North American scholars; by comparing the chronology of the plays with contemporary political events, the essays were designed to show that, far from transcending history and politics and human nature, Shakespeare was a child of his times. As a result the conventional meaning of many of the plays was changed radically. The Tempest, for example, far from being a play about colonialism and America, becomes a play about England’s problems with Ireland. Published in the middle of the Thatcher/Reagan years, Political Shakespeare created an academic storm. Two of the academic referees who read the manuscript argued that the book should ‘on no account be published.’59 After publication, one reviewer wrote, ‘A conservative critic … may conclude in horror that Shakespeare has succumbed to an academic AIDs, his immunology systems tragically disrupted by Marxist, feminist, semiotic, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic criticism.’ Others found the book important, and in the classroom it proved popular and was reprinted three times. In Annabel Patterson’s Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, published in 1989, she argued that until the early nineteenth century Shakespeare was regarded a
s a political playwright and a rebel, and that it was Coleridge, worried by the ripple effects in England of the French Revolution, who sought to overturn the earlier view, for political reasons of his own.60 These books provoked such interest that the London Review of Books produced a special supplement on the controversy in late 1991.

  The strength of American literature, so evident to Marcus Cunliffe in the 1960s, became even more marked as the postwar decades passed. Its most impressive quality, as new talents continued to emerge, was the staying power of familiar names, and the resilience of their approach to their art.

  The playwright David Mamet, for example, continued in the fine American tradition of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, in that his themes were intimate, psychological dramas, where the ‘action,’ such as it was, took place inside the characters as revealed in language. Mamet’s two greatest plays, American Buffalo (1975) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), were once described as indictments of a society ‘in which the business ethic is used as a cover for any kind of criminal activity.’61 In Buffalo a group of lowlifes plot a robbery that they are totally ‘incapable of carrying out.’ Mamet’s characters are almost defined by their inarticulateness, which is both a source and a symptom of their desperation. His chosen territory is the modern city and the life-diminishing occupations it throws up – in particular, and here he echoes O’Neill and Miller, the salesman. In Glengarry Glen Ross, the pathetic optimism of the real-estate salesmen, which overlays their quiet desperation, is painfully moving, as each tries to do the other down in even the smallest of struggles. This distracts them from recognising their own true nature.

  Mamet’s significance, as a figure who emerged in the 1970s, was his response to the arrival of the postmodern world, the collapse of the old certainties. Whereas Peter Brook was part of the new temper, a man who enjoyed multiculturalism, and Tom Stoppard, the British playwright, set his face against it, asserting that there was objective truth, objective good and evil, that relativism was itself in its way evil, Mamet exercised an old-fashioned, Eliot-type scepticism to the world around him.62 He embraced and updated the tradition articulated by O’Neill, that America was ‘a colossal failure.’63 His plays were plays because he was suspicious of the mass media. ‘The mass media,’ he wrote in a memoir, ‘… corrupt the human need for culture (an admixture of art, religion, pageant, drama – a celebration of the lives we lead together) and churn it into entertainment, marginalizing that which lacks immediate appeal to the mass as “stinking of culture” or “of limited appeal”…. The information superhighway seems to promise diversity, but its effect will be to eliminate, marginalize, or trivialize anything not instantly appealing to the mass. The visions of Modigliani, Samuel Beckett, Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, survive for the moment as culture in a society that never would have accepted them as art…. The mass media – and I include the computer industry – conspire to pervert our need of community…. We are learning to believe that we do not require wisdom, community, provocation, suggestion, chastening, enlightenment – that we require only information, for all the world as if life were a packaged kit and we consumers lacking only the assembly instructions.’64

  John Updike has published more than thirty books since Poorhouse Fair in 1959, during which time he has attempted to follow both the small and the grand themes in American, white, middle-class life. In Couples (1968), Marry Me (1976), and Roger’s Version (1986) he examined sex, adultery, ‘the twilight of the old morality.’ In Bech: A Book (1970) he looked at Communist East Europe through the eyes of a Jewish-American traveller, which enabled him to compare the rival empires of the Cold War. And in The Witches of Eastwick (1984) he took a swipe at feminism and American puritanism all at the same time. But it is for his ‘Rabbit’ series that he most deserves consideration. There are four books in the sequence: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990).65 Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom used to play basketball as a professional, used to be young and romantic, and is now caught up in the domestic dreariness of married life. Rabbit is a deliberate echo of ‘Babbitt’ because Updike sees his hero as the natural epigone of Sinclair’s man from Zenith. But the world has moved on, and Rabbit lives on the East Coast, rather than in the Midwest, more at home in New York and Connecticut. His world is that of gadget-packed apartments, of commodities, including art, of material abundance but also of a spiritual malaise. Rabbit and his circle, with all their everyday needs well provided for, seek to recover the excitement of their youth in affairs, art courses, ever more pompous wines, travel. Despite this, they never escape the feeling that they are living in an age of decline, that theirs is an unheroic, shabby era; and as the books progress, the characters, showing what Updike himself called ‘instinctive realism,’ grow still more desperate in a search for epiphanies that will provide meaning. It is the fate of Updike’s characters, in the Rabbit books, to be entering the postmodern bleakness without knowing it. Updike invites us to think that this is how social evolution takes place.66

  Saul Bellow has achieved the enviable distinction, better even than the award of the Nobel Prize in 1976, of writing at least one masterpiece in each of five decades: Dangling Man (1944); Henderson the Rain King (1959); Herzog (1964); Humboldt’s Gift (1975); The Dean’s December (1982), and More Die of Heartbreak (1987).67 Born in Canada in 1915, the child of immigrant Jews, Bellow was raised in Chicago, and most of his books are set there or in New York – at any rate, in cities. This is not Updike’s world, however. Most of Bellow’s characters are Jewish, writers or academics rather than business types, more reflective, more apt to be overwhelmed by mass culture, the mass society of vast cities, which they confront with ‘a metaphysical hunger.’68 In Dangling Man, much influenced by Kafka, Sartre and Camus, Bellow wrote this about the main character: ‘He asked himself a question I still would like answered, namely, “How should a good man live; what ought he to do?” ‘In The Adventures of Augie March (1953), the hero says, ‘It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of our being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve.’ All Bellow’s books are about the ‘social sugars’ in one form or another, the nature of the link between the self and others, community, society. For Bellow, the nature of the social contract is the most fundamental of all questions, the fundamental problem of politics, the deepest contradiction of capitalism, the most important phenomenon that science has not even begun to address, and where religion can no longer speak with authority.69 In Herzog we have a character determined not to surrender to the then prevalent nihilism; in Humboldt’s Gift we have ‘the Mozart of gab,’ a brilliantly loquacious poet who nonetheless dies penniless while his postmodern protégé, obsessed with commodities, becomes rich. In The Dean’s December, the dean, Albert Corde, from a free city – the Chicago of violence, cancer, and postmodern chaos – visits Bucharest, then behind the Iron Curtain, where families, and family life, still exist. He is for ever comparing his own despairing knowledge about city life with the certainties of the astrophysical universe that are the everyday concerns of his Romanian wife. The aphorism behind More Die of Heartbreak is ‘more die of heartbreak than of radiation,’ showing, in idiosyncratic yet tragic form, some limits to science. (The book is a comedy.) The progression from the dangling man, to Augie March, to Henderson, to Herzog, to Humboldt, to Dean Albert Corde is a profoundly humane, ebullient set of tragedies and epiphanies, an intellectual and artistic achievement unrivalled in the last half of the twentieth century.

  In the early 1990s literature by native American Indians began to appear. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: Approaches to American Indian Texts (1993) and Grand Avenue (1994), both by Greg Sarris, were two commercially and critically successful titles.70 Sarris is part American Indian, part Filipino, and part Jewish, an elected chief of the Miwok tribe but also professor of English at UCLA. This conceivably makes him the ultimate postmodern, multi
cultural figure, the natural next step in America’s evolving history. He, or someone like him, could be the first major literary voice in the twenty-first century. But Bellow has set the standard against which all others will be judged.