Suzy McKee Charnas: The Joys of Elitism

The Joys of Elitism

Every once in a while I come across rude references to the New York Review of Books, as if it's a sort of Bobo current events catalog with no connection to real life. Well, I guess I'm not real, then, because I've just spent a lot longer than I meant to with the Nov. 30, 2000 issue, which sure spoke to my life.

Here on page 4 is a review of a couple of books on the Western literary tradition of Utopias that starts with a mouth-watering description of a new exhibition mounted jointly by the New York Public Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and set up in New York. I have seen nothing else about this exhibition, which apparently includes many art and photo images (of places like Levittown, visions of the Biblical Eden, and the Utopian vision of the designer William Morris at Merton Abbey) as well as documents, objects from Utopian experimental communities, and other items (a replica of the robot woman of Fritz Lang's classic film Metropolis) on the subject.

How does an essay on Utopias connect with me? Through my life in the twentieth century, of course, and various disastrous political attempts to create the Utopia of Communism or Nazism etc. (aspects of the subject included in the exhibition, by the way). But more personally too, through the roots of SF and fantasy in Utopian literature and the continued exploration of Utopias and dystopias in the genre today (my own Motherlines has been considered a feminist Utopia by some readers).

I'm very curious to discover whether the organizers of the exhibition, (which has a world wide web segment that might be considered a natural point of contact with SF) have included any modern Utopian SF in their material. My guess is, not — or at any rate not under that heading, according to the old exclusionary rule, if it's SF it can't be any good, and if it's good it can't be SF. Since I'm unlikely to get to New York before the exhibition ends (Jan. 27, 2001), I plan to check out the website to see what I can see.

My point, however, is that the NYRB has not only alerted me to a spectactular exhibition, it has printed an enthusiastic and detailed review by Anthony Grafton which includes a very good capsule history of Utopian movements in the West, including some not covered in the exhibition. His essay ends with a provocative comment on present-day New York as a Utopia of vital and varied neighborhoods being subverted at this very moment by a dystopia of soulless atomization by the pseudo-culture of polarized wealth and corporate franchises.

Page 12: a thoughtful article on demographic trends and what underlies them by Andrew Hacker, "The Case Against Kids": on weighing the costs and benefits of having families in the modern West, the reasons for America's current birth statistics (more complex than I had imagined), and the tendency to call non-breeders selfish while ignoring the vast numbers of parents who have kids for lousy reasons and then, out of selfishness, treat them badly. It simply had not occurred to me that while there are more divorced women than ever in America, who may have one child but who would probably have had at least one more if still married, there are also much larger numbers now than earlier of bachelors in their forties — many of them openly gay men who in previous times would have included as part of their closet a wife and kids.

Page 18: a fascinating review by Mark Lilla of several books by the French phenomenon Michel Houellebecq, whose cold, dirge-like novels, Lilla says, are so popular among French youth because with all their faults they capture and delineate exactly the current French fear of an atomized, soullessly homogenized life disconnected from all cultural roots and identity. Houellebecq posits a future population shaped psychologically by rampant individualism and physically by soon-to-be-common genetic engineering, not by the standards of any sort of natural human community, and he links this outcome to unrestrained capitalism grown from completely unleashed individualism that began in the sixties.

Lilla's stress is on how modern anxieties about the replacement of family, authority, strict sexual mores, regional identity, by the "homogenous universal state" in which only the rich and physically perfect rule a world of pervasive competition in every aspect of life. I wonder how modern American Goths might respond to Lilla's remark that young people who feel that they will never be able to compete in the open sexual market because they are not pretty enough turn to Gothic excesses of self-mutilation and graveyard make-up as, among other things, an expression of self-disgust at their own inevitable loser-status.

Page 22: a long article on a new book about Sen. Joseph McCarthy, his life, his roots, and his influence, which I skip (as I did an article on a poet I never heard of — I am too impatient for poetry — my loss).

Page 32: a review of Robert Sullivan's book on the recent Makah whaling expedition, pointing out that whaling has again been banned from Neah Bay by court order, and that the one whale killed by Makah hunters may well have been sick and dying anyway. The grays are washing up dead in ever greater numbers on the shores of Puget Sound, possibly dying of illness exacerbated by starvation because they have recovered their depleted numbers so enthusiastically that they may be eating out their food supplies. The irony and pathos, the triumph and the falsity of the whale hunt recounted in Sullivan's book come through very clearly. This book I'll find time to read, somehow.

Page 36: a splendid review of two books about General Sherman and his war, pointing up the strengths and weaknesses of this commander. I noted the fact — which I've never seen in print before — that the famous march through Georgia and North Carolina in l865 was intentionally destructive of wealth and property because Sherman had determined that in a guerrilla war in which the enemy includes an entire enemy population nothing less will serve to effectively weaken the opposition; but the level of personal violence — rapes and murders — was extraordinarily low, much lower than, say, during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, in which apparently civilians died in a ratio of two to one with respect to soldiers.

It's clear that the General remembered as a monster by the defeated South (because his tactic of property destruction worked so well) was in fact an intelligent, thoughtful, tough-minded commander with a remarkably humane approach to the trade he hated, and said so — "War is all hell." Damn, how I hate that self-righteous Southern sentimentalism that villifies good people, and pretends that slavery was never the issue and that war is "gallant," all the moreso when you so deservedly lose.

There's much more, but let me finish by taking note of a review of a new book about Willa Cather purporting to show how this author has been both demeaningly dismissed by traditional scholars (who only see male authors as worthy) essentially hi-jacked out of the unknown and unknowable privacy of her life and turned into a Lesbian icon by radical feminist scholarship. As an author I can't help but be interested in criticism, and this story supports the hatred of both critics and scholars that I've found among my colleagues — writers despise the way their lives are dragged into the public arena and put to the service of whatever ideology is forging ahead at any given time. Authors burn their own files to avoid this kind of "interpretation," and then the vacuum of first-hand information left by the lost documents is used to the same effect in the end.

I particularly like the anecdote of an elaborate interpretation of the word "Berengaria" as it occurs at the end of one of Cather's novels by a scholar who twists herself into knots to make it signify all sorts of symbolical significations, when in fact there was a real ship, really named the Berengaria, on which Cather was herself a passenger, to which the allusion refers. I love stories like this, and one day I want to collect them somehow and publish them — all the stories of scholarly orgies of interpretation and hymns of praise for the inventiveness of fiction-makers over details that turn out to be not invented or symbolic at all, but simple inclusions of bits of reality from the author's life experience.

There's this phenomenon of the exponential growth of fancy meanings for elements that the author put into a story because they were pretty, or seemed piquant to include in just this or that place, or because they are glimpses of the strangeness of reality, not of anybody's fantasy. I'm drawn to this because it illustrates the whimsicality, the serendipity of art, that baffles and befools the analysts and dissectionists who come along later and pry the living work apart in order to deliver their own authoritative exigesis of some intricate meaning that the author would laugh at, incredulously. It's almost a branch of conspiracy theory, and sometimes just as looney.

This enterprise is inescapable, of course, because authors are often dead and helpless before this kind of predatory admiration; and because this is how scholars make their names; and because sometimes, only sometimes, the critical eye sees something that makes the author (if living) sit up with a wild surmise and say, "Hey, you know, I don't remember doing that, but I think it's really in there!"

I've had that happen with my own work, and it's a delightful feeling. But I've also had the other thing — what looks to me like wilfully perverse misinterpretation — and it isn't.

So, back to the NYRB, which isn't always so rich but generally has at least one eye-opener that you can't put down (a recent essay on creepy goings-on in AIDS research in South Africa which may be about misguided cultural pride, a number of articles on the new Balkan wars and what really went on there, and last year, I think, a heart-breaker about the Rwandan massacres all come at once to mind). If this is the reading of the elite, then I guess that's what I am, because it's meat and drink to me.

We should never allow anti-intellectual fearfulness masquerading as egalitarianism to downgrade thought and inquiry and the playfulness of the active mind. But we do.

Well, I won't.

But there's no way in the world that I can get to read all of these books that interest me, either. Hence I review, as it were, a magazine of reviews — what could be more Philistine, more Boboesque! Well, tough. Life is short and art is long and, these days, incredibly rich and dense, and one does what one can. Mostly, though, I have to admit that I don't really read this publication for the books reviewed in its pages. I read it for the reflections and ideas that the writers of the reviews come up with while considering those books. These are thoughtful people with interesting things of their own to say, and in a way they are creating for me what I dreamed of having when I was a kid: a great library of books linked in what we would now call a hypertext manner by scribbled commentaries and cross-references written in the margins by generations of eager, attentive, and knowledgeable readers.

For the time being, this is as close as I can get; and I never thought I could get this close.

--SMC
November 20, 2000