Byzantine icons hugely influenced European culture: their arrival in medieval Italy revived Italian art and, through their reinterpretation by Duccio di Buoninsegna and his student Simone Martini in Siena, began the evolution toward the Renaissance. I recommend three Byzantine icons in particular that might intrigue students: the tenth-century mosaic panel of St. John Chrysostom (“Golden Mouth”) of Antioch in the north tympanum of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul; a twelfth-century tempera-on-wood icon of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (“Wonder Worker”) in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg; and a thirteenth-century tempera-on-wood icon of St. Nicholas of Myra in Bari, where the saint’s relics are preserved (this is the St. Nick later identified with Santa Claus). In each case, a fiery-eyed figure, ornately robed, is standing against a gold background inscribed with floating Greek letters. Each saint is holding a book, a Bible studded with jewels. He catches it in the crook of his arm and steadies it with a shrouded hand, as if it were too sacred or numinous to touch. A book, in other words, is represented as the burning source of spiritual power.
Finally, I would invoke one of my favorite works of art, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (Tate Gallery), which clearly demonstrates the childhood influence on Warhol of his family’s Eastern rite church. It is a modern iconostasis: fifty images of Marilyn Monroe are lined up in registers on two large screens. On one, the orange-yellow riot of Marilyn’s silk-screened images illustrates her cartoon-like stardom. On the other, her photos have faded to smudged black and white, like newsprint washed by rain or tears. Marilyn Diptych suggests that in a media age, words melt away, and nothing is left but images.
* * *
My final exemplary image is that of the skull in pre-Columbian art (Fig. 3). This is another area of tremendous controversy: life-size crystal skulls continue to be touted on New Age Web sites as Aztec, Mayan, or Incan artifacts that allegedly function as archaic magnets or radio receivers to capture cosmic energy and confer prophetic power (Fig. 4). These weird objects, I submit, would be highly useful for warning students of the still-unreliable state of Web resources. My commitment to the Web as a new frontier is unshaken. (I have been a columnist for Salon.com, with long breaks, from its inaugural issue in 1995.) Nevertheless, I still believe that only through prolonged, comparative study of books can one learn how to assess ambiguous or contradictory evidence and sort through the competing claims of putative authorities.
(Fig. 3) Turquoise- and shell-encrusted mask of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec Feathered Serpent. The British Museum, London.
(Fig. 4) Rock crystal carving, claimed to be Aztec or Mixtec, Mexico (ca. 14th–15th centuries). Possibly European (late 19th century). The Museum of Mankind, London.
Though most major studies of Meso-American culture acknowledge the enormity of human sacrifice that occurred, particularly in the two centuries before the Spanish conquest, the issue has been de-emphasized over the past thirty years in the ideological campaign to convict Christopher Columbus of genocide. Otherwise well-produced picture books of Chichén Itzá, for example, the mammoth Mayan complex in the Yucatán, document the great step pyramid, the ball court, the domed observatory, and the temple of a thousand pillars crowned by a raffish Chac Mool statue holding a belly plate on which freshly extracted, still-quivering human hearts were laid. But it is difficult to find photographs, much less comprehensive ones, of Chichén Itzá’s centrally situated Platform of the Skulls, where the severed heads of sacrificed prisoners, ritual victims, and even losing ballplayers were displayed on wooden racks to bake in the sun. Around that imposing stone platform, which I have personally inspected, runs a complex frieze of stone skulls still bearing remnants of bright red paint. The widespread view of the Maya as peaceable, compared to the bloodthirsty Aztecs, certainly needs adjustment.
Such platforms, called tzompantli, date from the prior Toltec era in Central Mexico and northern Yucatán. Among several eye-witness accounts by Spanish soldiers and priests in Cortés’ expedition, one extravagantly estimated that 136,000 skulls were displayed on the tzompantli in the main Aztec temple complex of Tenochtitlán on the site of present-day Mexico City. A codex ink sketch by Friar Diego Duran shows tiers of skulls tightly strung like an abacus with rods piercing the cranium from ear to ear. In their orderly symmetries, these vanished skull racks resemble Byzantine icon screens as well as the tall magazine shelves of modern libraries. The grinning, pre-Columbian skull also appears in isolation on stone altars and on the heads, crowns, or trophy belts of ferocious earth goddesses like Coatlicue (“She of the Serpent Skirt”), who represents the cycle of fertility and death. Even more striking are unearthly masks worn by Aztec priests: an example in the British Museum, which may have belonged to king Montezuma himself, consists of the front half of a real human skull surfaced with mosaic and tied around the face; it was worn with an elaborate feather headdress. The finest of these mosaic masks are faceted with brilliant turquoise jade, with detail work in red or white seashells and obsidian, a black volcanic glass.
These authentic Aztec masks, which have circulated in Europe since Cortés’ first shipment of booty, undoubtedly inspired today’s notorious crystal skulls. At least fourteen crystal skulls, some transparent and others varying in hue from smoky brown to rose and amethyst, are currently heralded by New Age spiritualists. Several were once in major museum collections and loaned out for scholarly exhibitions. In 1996, however, a BBC TV crew, in the course of making a documentary, subjected a series of crystal skulls to scientific testing and revealed that microscopic evidence of machine polishing showed they were probably made in Germany some time since the nineteenth century. Dismayed officials at the British Museum and Smithsonian Institution immediately withdrew their crystal skulls from public display.
There is a Canadian connection here. The world’s most celebrated crystal skull—the so-called Skull of Doom—is owned by Anna Mitchell-Hedges, who lived as a child in Port Colborne, Ontario. Her stepfather, a British-born adventurer, claimed she had discovered the skull at a Mayan ruin in Belize on her seventeenth birthday in 1924. From 1967 on, the skull, which weighs eleven and a half pounds, was kept in a felt-lined case in her house in Kitchener, to which pilgrims came from all over the world. A Toronto medium did work with the Skull of Doom and reported on its prophecies in a 1985 book, The Skull Speaks. The BBC producers traveled to Toronto to interview Mrs. Mitchell-Hedges, but she did not allow the skull to be tested. Its present whereabouts are unknown.
Crystal skulls, fabricated or not, are splendid symbols of human brainpower and vision. A skull, stripped of gender and identity, reduces the face to eyes and jaw—to seeing and speaking. Yet it has neither lips to shape syllables nor throat to generate breath. Images like the Aztec skull can help students bridge the vast distance between the archaeological past and futuristic cyberspace. But it is only language that can make sense of the radical extremes in human history, from the ecstatic spirituality of Byzantine icons to the gruesome barbarism of Aztec ritual slaughter. It is language that fleshes out our skeletal outline of images and ideas. In a media age where books are no longer the primary medium for information storage and exchange, language must be reclaimed from the hucksters and the pedants and imaginatively reinforced. To save literature, educators must take command of the pre-rational world of images. The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.
* [An expanded version of a lecture at a conference, “Living Literacies: What Does It Mean to Read and Write Now?,” at York University, Toronto, November 15, 2002. Published in Arion, Winter 2004.]
EDUCATION
48
FREE SPEECH AND THE MODERN CAMPUS*
Our current controversies over free speech on campus actually represent the second set of battles in a culture war that erupted in the U.S. during the late 1980s and that subsided by the mid-1990s—its cessation probably due to the emergence of the World Wide Web as a vast, new forum for dissenting ideas. The openness o
f the Web scattered and partly dissipated the hostile energies that had been building and raging in the mainstream media about political correctness for nearly a decade. However, those problems have stubbornly returned, because they were never fully or honestly addressed by university administrations or faculty the first time around. Now a new generation of college students, born in the 1990s and never exposed to open public debate over free speech, has brought its own assumptions and expectations to the conflict.
As a veteran of more than four decades of college teaching, almost entirely at art schools, my primary disappointment is with American faculty, the overwhelming majority of whom failed from the start to acknowledge the seriousness of political correctness as an academic issue and who passively permitted a swollen campus bureaucracy, empowered by intrusive federal regulation, to usurp the faculty’s historic responsibility and prerogative to shape the educational mission and to protect the free flow of ideas. The end result, I believe, is a violation of the free speech rights of students as well as faculty.
What is political correctness? As I see it, it is a predictable feature of the life cycle of modern revolutions, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789, which was inspired by the American Revolution of the prior decade but turned far more violent. A first generation of daring rebels overthrows a fossilized establishment and leaves the landscape littered with ruins. In the post-revolutionary era, the rebels begin to fight among themselves, which may lead to persecutions and assassinations. The victorious survivor then rules like the tyrants who were toppled in the first place. This is the phase of political correctness—when the vitality of the founding revolution is gone and when revolutionary principles have become merely slogans, verbal formulas enforced by apparatchiks, that is, party functionaries or administrators who kill great ideas by institutionalizing them.
What I have just sketched is the political psychobiography of the past 45 years of American university life. My premises, based on my own college experience at the dawn of the counterculture, are those of the radical Free Speech Movement that erupted at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1964, my first semester at the State University of New York at Binghamton. The Berkeley protests were led by a New York–born Italian-American, Mario Savio, who had worked the prior summer in a voter-registration drive for disenfranchised African-Americans in Mississippi, where he and two colleagues were physically attacked for their activities. When Savio tried to raise money at Berkeley for a prominent unit of the civil rights movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he was stopped by the university because of its official ban on political activity on campus.
The uprising at Berkeley climaxed in Savio’s fiery speech from the steps of Sproul Hall, where he denounced the university administration. Of the 4,000 protestors in Sproul Plaza, 800 were arrested. That demonstration embodied the essence of 1960s activism: it challenged, rebuked, and curtailed authority in the pursuit of freedom and equality; it did not demand, as happens too often today, that authority be expanded to create special protections for groups reductively defined as weak or vulnerable or to create buffers to spare sensitive young feelings from offense. The progressive 1960s, predicated on assertive individualism and the liberation of natural energy from social controls, wanted less surveillance and paternalism, not more.
The entire political and cultural trajectory of the decades following World War Two in the U.S. was a movement away from the repressions of the Cold War stand-off with the Soviet Union, when the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives searched for signs of Communist subversion in every area of American life. A conspicuous target was the Hollywood film industry, where many liberals had indeed been drawn to the Communist Party in the 1930s, before the atrocities of the Stalinist regime were known. To fend off further federal investigation, the major studios blacklisted many actors, screenwriters, and directors, some of whom, like a favorite director of mine, Joseph Losey, fled the country to find work in Europe. Pete Seeger, the leader of the politicized folk music movement whose roots were in the social activism of Appalachian coal-miners in the 1930s, was banned from performing on network TV in the U.S. in the 1950s and ’60s.
There were sporadic landmark victories for free speech in the literary realm. In 1957, local police raided the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco and arrested the manager and owner, Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for selling an obscene book, Allen Ginsberg’s epic protest poem, Howl. After a long, highly publicized trial, Howl was declared not obscene, and the charges were dropped. The Grove Press publishing house, owned by Barney Rosset, played a heroic role in the battle against censorship in the U.S. In 1953, Grove Press began publishing affordable, accessible paperbacks of the voluminous banned works of the Marquis de Sade, a major thinker about sex and society at the close of the Enlightenment. In 1959, the Grove Press edition of D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, then banned in the U.S., was confiscated as obscene by the U.S. Postal Service. Rosset sued and won the case on federal appeal. In 1961, the publication by Grove Press of another banned book, Henry Miller’s 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer, led to 60 obscenity trials in the U.S. until in 1964 it was declared not obscene and its publication permitted.
One of the supreme symbols of newly militant free speech was Lenny Bruce, who with Mort Sahl transformed stand-up comedy from its innocuous vaudevillian roots into a medium of biting social and political commentary. Bruce’s flaunting of profanity and scatology in his improvisational onstage act led to his arrest for obscenity in San Francisco in 1961, in Chicago in 1962, and in New York in 1964, where he and Howard Solomon, owner of the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, were found guilty of obscenity and sentenced to jail. Two years later, while his conviction was still under appeal, Bruce died of a drug overdose at age 40.
This steady liberalizing trend was given huge impetus by the sexual revolution, which was launched in 1960 by the marketing of the first birth control pill. In Hollywood, the puritanical studio production code, which had been adopted in the early 1930s under pressure from conservative groups like the Legion of Decency and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, was gradually breaking down and was finally abandoned by the late 1960s. The new standard of sexual expression was defined by European art films, with their sophisticated scripts and frank nudity. Pop music pushed against community norms: in 1956, Elvis Presley’s hip-swiveling gyrations were cut off by the TV camera as too sexual for The Ed Sullivan Show, which was then a national institution. As late as 1967, The Ed Sullivan Show was trying to censor the song lyrics of major bands like the Doors and the Rolling Stones, who were imitating the sexual explicitness of rural and urban African-American blues. (The Stones capitulated to Sullivan, but the Doors fought back—and were never invited on his show again.) Middle-class college students in the 1960s, including women, began freely using four-letter words that had rarely been heard in polite company, except briefly during the flapper fad of the 1920s. In the early 1970s, women for the first time boldly entered theaters showing pornography and helped make huge hits out of X-rated films like Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and The Devil in Miss Jones.
In short, free speech and free expression, no matter how offensive or shocking, were at the heart of the 1960s cultural revolution. Free speech was a primary weapon of the Left against the moralism and conformism of the Right. How then, we must ask, has campus leftism in the U.S. been so transformed that it now encourages, endorses, and celebrates the suppression of ideas, including those that question its own current agenda and orthodoxy?
My conclusions are based on my personal observation as a career academic. Despite the longstanding claim by conservatives that “tenured radicals” invaded the universities in the 1970s, I maintain that no authentic 1960s radicals, except for Todd Gitlin, the president of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), entered the profession and attained success. If they entered graduate
school, most of them dropped out. To enter grad school at all was in fact viewed as a sell-out. For example, during my last semester in college in 1968, I was confronted near the fountain on the quad by the leader of the campus radicals, who denounced me for my plan to attend the Yale Graduate School. “Grad school isn’t where it’s happening!” he contemptuously informed me. “And if you go anywhere, you go to Buffalo!” As it happens, I had indeed applied to and been accepted at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I would have happily worked with the psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland and the notorious leftist critic, Leslie Fiedler, whose controversial 1960 masterwork, Love and Death in the American Novel, had had a huge influence on me. Indeed, Fiedler had just become a folk hero of the counterculture the year before, when police raided his Buffalo house and arrested him for drug possession, a disastrous incident that he would chronicle in his 1969 book, Being Busted. At any rate, I had chosen Yale because of its great library, which I sorely needed for my research, but my fellow student’s warning stung and shook me.
Provocations Page 39