106. "Stereotype"

"This year, 569 Asian-Americans qualified [for admission to Stuyvesant High School], along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics and 12 blacks. Results like that feed the stereotype that Asians are smart, hard-working, repressed and conformist" (David Brooks, NYT 12-19-11).

That sounds bad, feeding a stereotype. I thought we were supposed to starve those things. A stereotype is "a set of inaccurate, simplistic generalizations about a group that allows others to categorize them and treat them accordingly." You don't want anything like that to grow.

Like take this stereotype of Americans, that they don't know foreign languages. Oh how that lets Europeans categorize them and treat them as people beneath them in culture. They've got this joke:

"What are you when you know three languages?"

"Trilingual"

"What are you when you know two languages?"

"Bilingual."

"What are you when you know one language?"

"American."

The word for that joke is "offensive."

But suppose Asians really are smart and Americans really are culturally deficient? What are you feeding then with your statistics and your jokes? Something simplistic, maybe, but certainly not inaccurate. You're saying it's generally true of people in their category."

As for the treatment you give them, what's appropriate for people who are, say, culturally deficient? Education, obviously. But just heavy education? Can you include some razzing, some jokes? I think an embarrassed American who goes home from a party determined to learn another language is an improved American.

But you've improved him at the cost of hurting his feelings. I'll admit that light-hearted teaching, the kind that goes on at parties — and on television and in magazines — is a very effective, sometimes the most effective, way to teach, but it's too dangerous. Politically it can be disastrous.

Even if what you say is the truth about that group?

Hah, the truth. Who knows what it is about any group? And if somebody does know it who's going to trust his announcement of it? Anybody who stands up to do so will belong to the group. Is there a group we trust enough to credit what a member announces?

Yes, the group of scientists. We trust them because they try so hard to eliminate from their work and their announcements the group and personal interest we're worried about. They are, of all groups, the most disinterested.

Are you sure of that, or is it just a stereotype?

105. A Fantasy Starter

Christopher Hitchens finds himself in Heaven.

104. The Stuff about the Stuff about the Stuff

 

Did your English teacher ever tell you what hermeneutics was? Mine did. "Hermeneutics," he said, "is the stuff about the stuff about the stuff." The stuff was the literature we studied every day. The stuff about the stuff was the criticism we studied once in a while. The stuff about the stuff about the stuff was the theory of criticism (dictionary: "the science and methodology of interpretation") we never got around to studying. Poems and stories took up too much time.

I see the move from poems to the theory of the criticism of poems as a move from this world, the world I lived in, to the academic world, a world then beyond me. My professor took us to it reluctantly, I now believe, because he was also a novelist, and probably wanted us to be good readers of the kind of thing he put a great deal of effort into — though he did write criticism, and put a lot of effort into that too. I see him working, professionally, in the academic world but living, imaginatively, in this world. The stuff he dealt with as a novelist, the Ur-Stuff, was life.

And that's what I had to deal with too when I read his novels. I understood them by filling his words with the meaning my experience with life had given me. When a character didn't want his neighbors to think he was "getting uppity," and so concealed the fact that he was "going to the toilet in the house," I well understood because I had lived in a town where you couldn't "get uppity." When I failed to understand his words the reason was usually lack of experience. When a character said, "Goodbye, Lois, and I forgive you for everything I did to you," I had to wait until I had known some men who mistreated women, and even then fell short.

In any case I was close to life, a lot closer than I was when I started doing graduate work, and discovered, in the abstract distance, all that the word "hermeneutics" referred to.  Reference was not a problem for those I had left behind, the ones close to life in the novelist's class.  There the word referred simply to the higher stuffiness.

Then came the really high hermeneutics in Literary Theory. "That stuff you're so interested in, that stuff all this other stuff is about? There isn't any. There are only representations of stuff, interpretations of stuff."  That's what it told us.

Talk about a kick in the kidneys. "There is nothing outside the text." Zero, zilch. "Words appeal not to facts but to other words." Two boots from Jacques Derrida. Half the people in the English department were doubled over with pain.

Ah, but nobody in a Physics Department was. Over there they ignored Derrida or made fun of him. Like making him the pilot of an airplane approaching an airport. "I've got some stuff in front of me," he tells the tower. "That stuff is a thunderstorm," says the controller. "Steer left." Does Derrida believe there is something outside the controller's text, something "fact" is the right word for? If he doesn't he's not long for this world.

     

Well that's not the world he and his followers live in, according to Harold Bloom. They live in the academic world, where they have to get ahead. Literary Theory, as seen in Cultural Studies at least, is just "a vehicle of careerism."

Sure, when you get serious you'll find that there's a lot more to it than that. But you can't do that, you can't go into this problem, without venturing into an even higher hermeneutics. Who has any energy left?

103. Removed

102. How Should We Speak the Word "Democracy"?

"You don't really believe in democracy, you English-speakers, you believe in it only when the right guys are going to win." Try to answer that and you're hit with the names of the democratically elected wrong guys our guys moved out of office, Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Salvadore Allende in Chile. Or, worse, a quote from Dwight Eisenhower backing Ngo Dinh Diem's cancellation of elections in Viet Nam: "80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh." Hold on, Vietnamese, you're not going to get any support from us for democracy.

So, if we state, "America is a democracy" proudly we're going to get a lot of noise. Can we quiet it down by making the statement doggedly? "We know, we know, but everybody has to compromise their ideals sometimes. In those times that you mention national self-interest trumped the democratic ideal, sure. But we had a good reason for that: serving our interest served the interest of democracy. The nation keeping democracy alive around the world has to keep itself alive, doesn't it? The Soviets used the same argument about communism and their country."

Say that, and then point out that we still have an election every four years, don't we? Peaceful transfer of power, that's our big claim. Democracy gives "power to the people most likely to be troublesome if deprived of it, the majority" (Post 39). We've got the essentials.

Clearly doggedness in that line can buy us some peace and quiet. But will it ever last? Aren't there always going to be some bad guys we want to keep out of power? And aren't there always going to be people of our own, maybe a majority, crying, "Bad! Bad! Keep them out! Keep them out!" Right now we've got Islamists threatening to win elections all over the Middle East. In Egypt there are some generals ready to keep them out. If we say, "Go ahead, generals, deprive them of power," how dogged can we be about those essentials? That's just what the generals will be violating. "Oh no," they'll hear us saying, "those people aren't going to be troublesome. They're just the majority." Yes, and we're the voice of democracy.

We don't know whether we'll talk like that yet but we know that if we do the word "democracy" is going to stick in our throats. And dogged repetition isn't going to help.

So, how will we speak the word? Should we maybe not use it? Find some other word for what we represent? No, we are still doing many things that only the word "democracy" identifies. And some of these are the ones that get us into the deepest trouble. Why do our leaders listen to those voices crying simply, "Bad! Bad!" — over communists in Viet Nam, or tyrants in Mesopotamia, or Islamists in Egypt? They know that the situations in those places are, or were, very complicated, and simple good-bad calls are very dangerous. They must know that. Educated people know that. Ah, but these educated people must, to stay in power, have the votes of the majority, which has never, in any country yet, had time (or inclination) to educate itself. So there you are. Democracy. There's no other word for it.

All right, we just have to find a becoming way of saying the word "democracy." It's tough. Luckily, though, we have some pretty good guides. Winston Churchill, after admitting that democracy was a terrible form of government, once added that it was "just better than all the others." There's our cue. Say it resignedly, or wryly. "Ah me, America is a democracy." In a store full of trash you've got to make the best of a bad bargain.

101. "Hokum" and its Hazards

Wasn't it fun calling lines by W. H. Auden "hokum" (Post #100, below)? There he was in all the anthologies, the whole educated world was cheering, but we weren't fooled, no, we hung in there and nailed him. And best of all, we got his blessing for it! He knew he was off base.

Auden strayed into lofty words, a view of history from too far up. When you asked for details — the support, the goods, the beef — he, unlike the historian, could only wave. Can we say that, in principle, loftiness in poetry is a bad thing?

If we do we've got poets like Yeats to deal with. Here's Yeats in "Two Songs from a Play":

Odor of blood when Christ was slain

Made all Platonic tolerance vain

And vain all Doric discipline.

How's that for lofty? And later he says,

The Roman Empire stood appalled:

It dropped the reins of peace and war

When that fierce virgin and her Star

Out of the fabulous darkness called.

You can't get any loftier than that. And you with the Midwest accent, are you ready to make your speech to the cheering world? "Got to have some facts naow. Pretentious nonsense. Pretentious nonsense."

Who wants to say anything like that about Yeats's words? I don't. I get a tingle just typing them out. So, should we academics shun these these blunt terms? We've got so many of them — claptrap, bunk, eyewash, bullshit, hogwash, humbuggery, malarkey, moonshine, poppycock, tommyrot — and so few fit a subject this complicated. They may be all right for the street, but literary criticism? Please.

I think the test will come when we're facing a poem for which all our other words seem inadequate. Like Ossian's Fionnghall, the poem the intelligentsia of Europe (including Napoleon and Goethe) called the great primitive epic, and we call...well, let's wait. It's not an epic at all, it's just full of epicky details, exactly the ones the primitivists of the time would lap up — the battles, the speeches, the lifestyle (oh the lifestyle, the noble, savage lifestyle) of the ancient Highland chiefs. We don't have to wait to find out it's all a fake ("Ossian" was a smart contemporary Scotsman named Macpherson) to start calling it names. It's not poetry, it's a lifestyle pitch. Pure, pure...ah yes, hokum! That Macpherson, could he ever sell snake oil.

I would also, with qualifications, nominate Alan Ginsberg's "Howl," the defining poem of the Beat Generation with the famous beginning:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...

Who says those are the best minds of Ginsberg's generation? Ginsberg does. Trust him. Did we trust Auden when he told us the thirties were low and dishonest? If we did we shouldn't have, and in the end he was embarrassed for wanting us to. We, and apparently he, saw hokum in the loftiness.

Ginsberg is lofty (on war and capitalism and the military industrial complex) but memories of Yeats have undermined our easy use of "hokum" for loftiness so we hold back. Then we finish "Howl" and realize that the whole thing is lifestyle. Nothing but one picture after another of the way Ginsberg and his friends lived — sitting up "smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,...investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets," and so on. Cool, but still only lifestyle. And with a pitch. Ginsberg is selling it. Is there any word better than "hokum" for this?

100. The Higher Hokum

Hokum: "something apparently impressive or legitimate but actually untrue or insincere; pretentious nonsense." The word originated, apparently, as a combination of hocus-pocus (magic) and bunkum (nonsense). We see snake-oil salesmen. Just the word you'd invent in the American heartland. Low class.

Watch commercials and listen to political speeches now, though, and you really understand the word. We're swimming in hokum, morning and night. And the more screens technology provides us with the deeper we sink. Oh for some purer air, some higher culture, before we drown.

Higher culture, that's what I came out of the heartland gasping for in 1944, and I thought I had found it in the high poetry my teachers, college teachers, introduced me to — T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden. How great to rise above vulgarity.

But it occurs to me now that to understand "hokum" fully I ought to consider more carefully the kind of reaction I had reading one of those high poems, the famous "September 1, 1939." Auden is sitting "in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street"

Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade.

And I am with him, oh am I with him. A terrible thing is happening, the start of World War II, and terrible forces, which I do not understand, have been at work producing it. Auden understands so much, the general sweep, "the whole offence/ From Luther until now/ That has driven a culture mad," and the crucial details, "what occurred at Linz," and "What mad Nijinsky wrote/ About Diaghilev" — which is still " true of the normal heart."

I can't tell you how thrilling it was to read this in the middle of the war. I know that every poet says, "Look at me," but he also says, "Have a seat beside me," and for me to be sitting alongside Auden as the world crumbled was just, well, English-major heaven. I understood the war, maybe all wars. This was pure truth, and I sucked it in like a surfacing porpoise.

What I failed to see was how much Auden resembled the salesman who put me alongside him in the Buick commercial. Both were appealing to a passion, one to a passion to feel rich, the other to a passion to feel wise. And both appeals were illegitimate. I could never really be rich and nothing Auden told me would make me wise.

To be really wise on his subject I'd have to know just what was dishonest about that thirties decade, and what, exactly, was clever about its hopes. Auden doesn't say, and he doesn't, in a poem, have space to say. He can only signal the power to say. So trust him, and enjoy the view. Or, buy the snake oil.

Now you may say, "That's poets for you, they can only signal power," and you may say, "That's poetry-readers, they have to trust signals," but, in college, you can't ignore for long the presence of people whose words you don't have to trust, scientists. They're there for you to test, there with the goods, willing to take the time, receptive to your questions, without limit on the length of their answers. In my case I could have gone to a historian, that kind of scientist, and gotten the alternative to Auden's hokum about the thirties: painstaking analysis. I'd see the difference between being wise and having the feeling of being wise.

Obviously, hokum-detection is essential and I know that beyond scientists are philosophers, like Plato, who can equip me, through the example of Socrates, to detect hokum in nearly everything a poet produces, but I'm not willing to go into that at this point. Maybe I'm too intuitively stuck on high poetry to want to bad-mouth it any more. And I must say that the Auden case taught me something about the meaning of "high," as in "high culture."

Here's how it did that. Equipped by Plato I went back to Auden's poetry with a more sensitive hokum detector than any I'd ever had. I came to "September 1, 1939." The detector was clicking like mad: "Pretentious nonsense, pretentious nonsense." Then I discovered, on Wikipedia, that Auden was way ahead of me. He had detected so much hokum in that poem that he couldn't stand it. He called it "trash." He "loathed" it. And he refused to let it be reprinted in his 1966 collection. All while the reading public was eating it up!

Well, there's the meaning of "high" for you. One who writes "high poetry" will have a high sensitivity to hokum. His detector (for Hemingway a "shit-detector") won't keep all the hokum out but it will keep out the really bad stuff, the cheap appeals to the passions, the sentimental pull. But not just that. It will, at the highest levels, keep out the intellectually subtle appeals, the kind that make very intelligent people think they know something when they really don't.

99. "The Defenestration of Prague"

You tell me that what started the great war between Protestants and Catholics in central Europe was "the defenestration of Prague." Somebody removed somebody's windows. Thirty years of slaughter over that?

No, no, no, nobody removed anybody's windows. They threw them through a window. Catholics came to a meeting-room in a Prague castle and Protestants tossed them out.

For that I think the word would be transfenestration, and that's what your historian would have used if it had happened as you say. I think the Catholics must have come up there and taken their windows off. De — remove; fenestra — window . There go the windows and you've got a lot of angry Protestants.

Wait, wait. I'm afraid you've got the prefix de wrong. It doesn't have to mean removal. De can mean away or off or down.

So the Catholics were thrown away from the windows, or off the windows, or down the windows?

Well, they were thrown away from the room, off the third floor, and down to the ground. Would you like to know where they landed?

Yes, but later. Right now I want to get straight what the parts of this unfamiliar word tell me about its meaning. I understand the prefix de by its use in many, many words I am familiar with — defrost, defrock, deflower, debone, decompress, de-emphasize, and many, many others, all indicating removal. I know there are other de- words (derail, degrade) that fit your meaning, but they are much fewer and you often have to twist the meaning to make them fit. Aren't you doing that here, having your Catholic flying away from and off of the window? It's the window that the word tells you you're doing something to, not the poor Catholic.

I don't see how I can deny that. I guess I was straining at a meaning. Yours is more natural — to speakers of English.

Why that qualification?

Because other languages are generally closer to Latin, where my meanings appear more naturally, as they do to English academics familiar with Latin. Ordinary speakers of English see so many words like de-ice and de-claw that their first thought is nearly always of a removal.

What good storyteller wants that here? You're going to lose your English reader if you emphasize the window. His eyes need to be on the body flying through it.

Well, all I can say is that it's too late. You're never going to see a chapter titled, "Transfenestration in Prague." English speakers will just have to live with what's been given them.

And the storyteller, will he be able to live with listeners whose eyes aren't following the body? I think I've heard that the Catholic landed in a pile of manure, safely. With a denouement like that it's a crime to have readers, even for an instant, thinking of windows coming out. Even if they land in manure.