During the eighties and nineties, technology and the regime of the electronically visual world have altered perception of the public and our experience of one another. (The current Age of the Spectacle promised intimacy and universalization in a global village setting. But it has delivered frightful confusion about private and public existence.) Following the demise of the much maligned sixties and seventies, during which there was an actual, contested, fought over, fought for, and fought against public (and publicly expressed) life, it seems unlikely that there will ever be a decade like that: where issues of conscience, morality, law, and ethics were liberationist rather than oppressive. And it is interesting to note that it is a decade that, unlike any previous one, is embarrassed by itself. That kind of public life (the Civil Rights movement, etc.) is not experienced as media phenomena made possible by “the enormous weight of advertising and media fantasy [which suppresses] the realities of division and exploitation; [disguises] the disconnexion of private and public existence.” The consequence may be apathy, disgust, resignation, or a kind of inner vacuum (numbness), “a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience,” where, as F. Jameson observed, “never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.” That was 1971 when those comments were made and they are inapplicable to some degree now, when product ethics and media ethics have greater force than social ethics or justice.
We live in the Age of Spectacle. Spectacle promises to engage us, to mediate between us and objective reality in nonjudgmental ways. Very like the promise of nuclear energy: to be safe, clean, and cheap, but turned out to be dangerous, dirty (contaminated), and expensive. The promise made by the spectacle has been forfeited. Not only are we not engaged, we are profoundly distanced—unable to discriminate, edit, or measure shock or empathy. The “regime of visual authority [is a] coercive organization of images according to a stopwatch” and passes its organization off to us as a simulacrum of the real.
The news promises to inform us. Yet “the promiscuity of the nightly news—the jostling together of tornadoes in Pennsylvania, gunmen in Bosnia, striking teachers in Manchester … infant heart surgery in California—is dictated by the time constraints of the medium.” But the jumble of events is presented to the viewer as if it were a representation of the promiscuity of the external world, which we find, as a result, incoherent.
“Millions of people look to the screen for signs of their collective identity as a national society and as citizens of the world. The media now play the decisive role in constituting the ‘imagined community’ of nation and globe.” In this fashion “the news is validated as a system of authority, as a national institution with a privileged role as purveyor of the nation’s identity and taker of its pulse.”
Recent events, however, suggest something has gone wrong. The formula, the authority, the paradigm, the goals of the spectacle may not be working. The erstwhile “church of modern authority,” television once routinely presented news as sacred spectacle: the funeral of John F. Kennedy, the wedding of Prince Charles, presidential inaugurations, the death of Diana—all implying that what was on view was of grave national and international significance. But in the merging of news (which is not news unless pictorial) with spectacle at the service of profit-making entertainment, certain electronic narratives originally constructed as official or national stories revealed not the promised national identity but the fault lines within. War becomes a timed and shaped “story” where the electronic question becomes the political one: When will we get out? When will the troops come home? When will the despot be dead? In other national narratives—the Clarence Thomas hearing, the O.J. trial, the Whitewater investigation, the impeachment hearings—time and narrative shape as well as plot are all subject to televised programming needs. It is fascinating to recall that virtually all of these recent stories are highly inflected by race and/or sex and the power wielded or withheld by either one.
These national spectacles did not hide divisions as they wished, but exacerbated them. We cannot count on the spectacle to heal and distract completely. It is more likely to damage, alter, or distort time, language, the moral imagination, concepts of liberty, access to knowledge, as our consciousnesses are being reduced to self-commodification. We become “ads” for ourselves under the pressure of the spectacle that flattens our experience of the public/private dichotomy. The question becomes how and where can we experience the public in time, in language, as affect, and in context in order to participate fully in our own personal, singular, even invented life in relation to the life of the various communities to which we claim or wish to belong.
What is the source of this flattened perception of private and public? Part of the confusion may simply be the reckless use of the terms: there is private life and there is the privatization of prisons, health care, and so-called public schools. The first use emanates from constitutional guarantees as well as a personal claim. The second is a corporate investment publicly traded.
The first (personal claim to privacy) can be abandoned (on a talk show, for instance) or lost in the courts (by celebrities and “public” figures), but in any case such connotations of privacy are under surveillance at all times. The second (the privatization of formally public institutions) can be thwarted in the courts also, but are presented to us and represented to us as for the “public” good (encouraging competition and so forth, which ought to lower prices and increase quality for consumers). Public interest is often redefined as “special” interests.
The slippage in these definitions so erases the boundaries between an individual and his imagined community, we are not surprised or agitated by the fact that public life is now rendered as visual phenomena of a chosen narrative that exploits and sensationalizes sex, race, and family threats for the national resonance and marketability they provide. This chaotic collapse of private and public—the constantly surveyed private life—and the public sphere over which we have no control encourages retreat into the narcissism of difference, a surrender to the shallow delights of entertainment. Or participation in a wholly illusory community shaped by fear and unquenchable desire.
It seems to me that given these already realized subversions and the possibility of more, literature offers a special kind of amelioration. The history of claims for the study of literature circles around three major benefits: (1) literature’s character-building, moral-strengthening capacities, (2) its suitability for high-minded, politics-free leisure activity, (3) its role in “cultivating powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship.” While being educated to citizenship is superior to being educated to consumership, citizenship as a goal has troublesome nationalistic associations. “The problem with nationalism is not the desire for self-determination … but the particular epistemological illusion that you can be at home, you can be understood, only among people like yourself. What is wrong with nationalism is not the desire to be master in your own house, but the conviction that only people like yourself deserve to be in the house.” Whether the character-building properties of literature, its rigorous politics-free intellectualism, or its utility in producing good and caring citizens—whether any of those claims still resonate among readers (and I am not sure that the case for literature has changed much since Emerson’s “American Scholar” or F. R. Leavis’s pronouncements), there is nevertheless a level of urgency in the study and production of literature hitherto unimaginable that has manifested itself: fictional literature may be (and I believe it is) the last and only route to remembrance, the only staunch in the wasteful draining away of conscience and memory. Fictional literature can be an alternative language that can contradict and elude or analyze the regime, the authority of the electronically visual, the seduction of “virtual.” The study of fiction may also be the mechanism of repair in the disconnect between public and private.
Literature has features that make it possible t
o experience the public without coercion and without submission. Literature refuses and disrupts passive or controlled consumption of the spectacle designed to nationalize identity in order to sell us products. Literature allows us—no, demands of us—the experience of ourselves as multidimensional persons. And in so doing is far more necessary than it has ever been. As art it deals with the human consequences of the other disciplines: history, law, science, economics, labor studies, medicine. As narrative its form is the principal method by which knowledge is appropriated and translated. As a simultaneous apprehension of human character in time, in context, in space, in metaphorical and expressive language, it organizes the disorienting influence of an excess of realities: heightened, virtual, mega, hyper, cyber, contingent, porous, and nostalgic. Finally, it can project an alleviated future.
These theoretical moves (about the novel’s peculiar affinity for experiencing a receding public life) become explicit moves in the last three books I have written. Beloved, Jazz, Paradise—each has a structural anomaly in common. A postnarrative, extratext, outside-the-book coda that comments not on the plot or story, but on the experience of the plot; not on the meaning of the story, but on the experience of gathering meaning from the story. These coda play an advocacy role, insisting on the consequences of having read the book, intervening in the established intimacy between reader and page, and forcing, if successful, a meditation, debate, argument that needs others for its fullest exploration. In short, social acts complete the reading experience.
Beloved ends narratively with Sethe’s question about her individuality. The extranarrative activity is the reestablishment of the haunting—larger now than what it was assumed to be and what it was limited to in the beginning: a frustrated child, a justifiably malevolent creature of will. Much larger than its own problem of annihilation, it, the figure of Beloved summoned in the book’s “afterlife,” is now the responsibility of those who have shared, participated in, witnessed the story. A private responsibility disguising public or community obligations: “This is not a story to pass on.” “They can touch it if they like.” “They forgot her.” “Loneliness that can be rocked [individual]” “Loneliness that roams [public].”
In Jazz the beyond-the-book gestures are stronger: the characters themselves escape the prognosis of the book, are different from and more complicated than the book ever imagined. Thus the final paragraphs constitute not merely a plea for the compassionate understanding of a misleading, self-involved narrative, but for an exquisite, shared, highly eroticized private relationship between reader and page. These paragraphs also activate the complicity by calling attention strenuously, aggressively to the act of reading as having public consequences and even public responsibility. From “Look, look. Look where your hands are. Now,” one can infer something is to be done, something is to be reimagined, altered, and that something is literally in the reader’s hands.
In Paradise, again the novel ends (or closes) with activity almost irrelevant to the narrative. “Almost” because it does allow some speculation as to what in fact happened to the women in the Convent. But mostly to complete the play on gospel with the “visitations” and “sightings” of the New Testament and finally to refigure paradise’s imaginary. And paradise is everything but a solitary existence—is, in every projection, a community with a shared public life.
The novel, I believe, allows, encourages ways to experience the public—in time, with affect, in a communal space, with other people (characters), and in language that insists on individual participation. It also tries to illuminate and recover the relationship between literature and public life.
The Nobel Lecture in Literature
“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise.” Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.
“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.”
In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.
One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.”
She does not answer, and the question is repeated. “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?”
Still she doesn’t answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender, or homeland. She only knows their motive.
The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.
Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”
Her answer can be taken to mean: If it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.
For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.
Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird in the hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now, thinking as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency—as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her, “Is it living or dead?” is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure, certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However, moribund, it is not without effect, for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheried to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor, polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.
She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, and absence of esteem, indifference or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the void of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling
language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence, it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge, it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law without ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek—it must be rejected, altered, and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language—all are typical of the policing languages of mastery and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary or insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue, no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms, and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like pâté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.
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