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Middle Earth various issues, 1967-1968
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THE DESERTER: The Contemporary Defeat of Fiction by Carl Oglesby A personal confession: I don't read novels or poems or plays now with any of the excitement that I remember feeling ten years ago. That was a time, in fact, in which I not only read but wrote the things - two novels, one finished twice but not the third time, three plays, each of them performed, for better or worse, in a number of places, and now and then a poem, usually for a lady who was flashing for a meteoric moment in my life. (I'd always understood that writing poems is most elementally a lecherous act.) It was a very serious matter for me int hose days, this literature. If one didn't know it, onw was ignorante. It was where it was happening; it was what made a difference. That I no longer feel this was about it, and that I have stopped - or at least for a long time postponed - the writing of it, means, to be sure, most simply that I have changed, too. It has become very wild, very confusing, and seems everywhere to bespeak most clearly out individual impotence and unimportance. And fiction, it seems to me, has responded to this change at least in the respect that it, too, has become very wild, even grotesque, and very confused. I've called this paper 'The Contemporary Defeat of Fiction.' But I don't intend to argue that this defeat was unavoidable or that ir is suffered everywhere or that there is some cultural force which absolutely obstructs its reversal. Any minute, somebody might bowl me over. What I mean to talk about, rather, is my sense that the kind of strategic thought one encouters in certain important novels is a strategy of defeat and desertion - aprropriate yesterday, perhaps, when the world was different, but not appropriate now. I have the perhaps mistaken idea that I could argue this view in the context of a number of important writers, the line of argument of course being different with each: Genet, Beckett, or Robbe-Grillet; or Leroi Jones or Baldwin; or the Bellow of Herzog or perhaps the Ken Kesey of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest For a variety of reasons, I've decided to talk about Camus and Heller's Catch-22: first, because each is important, relevant, and exciting to engage with; and second, because Camus seems to me paradigmatic of a type of failure which I suspect pervades contemporary American fiction, and because Heller's good novel is a convenient and interesting instance of this failure. That is, I claim to find in Catch 22 a resume of an immense historical, cultural problem of ours, an embodiment of a dilemma which the informed artist is virtually compelled to pose, and which, once posed, [insert] ThE ShoP OF THE UNUSUAL EARRINGS NECKLACES PINS - GIFTS NOVELTIES CATHERINE'S forces the artist to confront a responsibility that may transcend the efficaties of fiction itself. Most coldle, the question I want to get at is this: When the house is burning down around the poet's head, on grounds of what if any dispensation can the poet continue the poem? Since I want to put all my cards on the table, I should at least describe my view of fiction. After a rather long episode with the New Criticism, I at last came to my senses and decided that literature is most essentially a form of history, something which makes propositions about the human experience of a time and a place. Whether or not these propositions are also elegant, they ought to be in the first place significant and in the second place true. It follows that I hold the writer responsible for his time - trying to know what's in it, what it's about; and to the extent that a large part of our experience is a witness of injustice, if not direct complicity in it, it follows that the writer has no exemption from the political meanings of choices which he can in no case avoid making. In our time and place, one simply is a partisan - of something, of some cause; even silence is no escape. The business of the critic is to grasp and elucidate the fullness of all these circulating partisanships and - like the writer he scrutinizes - to take a stand. It should go without saying that the stand will be complex always and often ambivalent. No American novel published in 1963, for example, can be excused for the almost racist stereotyping and the dilute elixir of facism which one finds in Ken Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest; yet that novel is resonant with a nostalgia, an aspiration, and a man-centered commitment which I not only share, but in fact find enlarged and re-energized by my experience of that book. More complex and ambivalent yet is my attitude toward Catch-22 as will be clear momentarily. Good enough: one works it out. Neither a novel nor its critique is something one can go shouting out in the streets. The point is to know that novels imply worlds, make assertation about the nature of social reality, embody summations, prophecies, and demans which are manifest in the very process of selection of material and assumption of stance. It is the politics of na artwork which we have to elucidate, explore, and - finally - judge. I suppose this view of art is neither fashionable nor very glamorous, although the current delcine throughout the humanitites of the spirit of positivism no doubt makes it easier at least to re-examine the idea that a work of literature amounts to so many mimetic and value-charged statements about man's experience of himself in the world, and the companion idea that the values and methods appropriate to criticism ought to be integral with the values and methods appropriate to living in a time in which social conflict is ubiquitous and sharp. That men are in trouble, that the trouble may be grave, is neither a foolish nor an especially electrifying notion. It seems by now to be simply a routine commonplace. The interesting questions are the subordinate ones: How is this trouble to be explained and described? What should men do about it? A drama is all but composed when its cast of characters has been assembled: what sort of hero is being pitted against what sort of villain? For Camus, the central figures are Man, who stands on one side of the line of battle armed with his solitude and passion, and over on the other side, in the opposite corner, the Absurd Cosmos, armed with its silence, its indifference, and its mystery— all of which, however, turn out to be not exactly what they seem. For if, with Camus’s acuity, you listen a moment more to this silence, it becomes a curse flung in the face; the indifference becomes contempt; the mystery becomes arrogance and spite. For Camus, even the stars seem sometimes to amount only to so much sinister celestial graffiti. Hence, for example, the air of melodramatic showdown with which The Myth of Sisyphus opens: ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,’ he writes, ‘and that is suicide.’ Camus never seems to have surpassed the most prosaic meaning of a much younger Sartre’s dictum, ‘Man is a useless passion.’ Samuel Beckett has somewhere noted the essential ignobility of such a stance: ‘The microcosm,’ he says, ‘cannot forgive the relative immorality of the macrocosm.’ Perhaps a good deal of Casmus’s melancholy bravura boils down, then, to a hyped-up and vastly more sophisticated ‘Invictus.’ A common jealousy, mingling with fright and pride, yearns to be transfigured, to demonstrate its perfect bravery, by taking on the cosmos, nothing less. Camus’s moral philosophy seems in this case to be an extensive elaboration of a single rather uninteresting lesson, namely, that the enemy of life is death, and that life appears frequently to lose. At the scene of that defeat, confronting his absurd destiny face to facelessness, Camus’s Rebel undergoes that apotheosis which alters nothing— that is, becomes totally lucid, almost like Wallace Stevens’ man of glass, as to the divine and poignant uselessness of lucidity. But there’s much more to Camus’s moral strategy than this strangely byronic pursuit of disappearing ultimates. It satisfies also the political function of destroying the challenge of historical risk. It relegates history, the mundane affairs of men, to an inferior plateau of moral experience. To be in history, to spend one’s time with it, becomes a sadly unavoidable violation of one’s higher possibilities. ‘For years now,’ Camus wrote to a German friend who had become a Nazi soldier, ‘you have tried to make me enter History.’ History: in a familiar gesture, he capitalizes the initial and turns it thus into something abstract and remote, a category among other categories. He had wanted to live outside this History apparently, not quite in the wilderness, but at least in a distant suburb, fixing his attention upon the absurdity of his oncoming death with a despair sometimes jubillant and always graceful. When he finally does enter History in 1941, it is not in order to Cont. p. 5 WISCONSIN, Head Bust It is late Monday afternoon, the Monday after the Wednesday violence in Madison. I am there in the library Mall, listening to rally speakers who go on about an infinity of connections that the students should be making between the Cops and Dow, and Human Rights and so on. I have just spent two hours listening to the broadcast of a closed faculty meeting where 2000 professors hemmed and hawed and finally decided something like: violence is regrettable and set up the inevitable study committee. There doesn’t really seem to be much difference between what the faculty has done and what the speakers at the rally are doing; they all make eloquent speeches, in radical terms, in liberal terms, all linking up everything in need intellectual packages the way they sum up literary movements for their core lit. courses. I am a little disillusioned and a lot bored. And then I feel a tap on my shoulder and there is this girl. Her hair is blond and short except in front where it covers her eyebrows. She is probably a little taller than me, but she seems to be looking up when she speaks, maybe it’s the hair. ‘What do you think of all this?’ There is no hostility in her voice, but it is pretty clear that if I say something, it sure as hell better be relevant. I say I just got here two hours ago, and I don’t know what does she think? ‘I think it’s all for shit,’ she says. There is no anger in her voice; it is like she is admitting the total defeat of something incredibly important. We stand around for a few minutes more, and she introduces me to some people. Then the rally is dismissed for a teach-in someplace, and Monica and her friends and I go over to the union for coffee. Nobody says much, and we get our coffee and sit down, and Monica takes her jacket off. Her right arm is in a sling, and on the sling and green magic marker, ‘the cops were here,’ and it gets pretty obvious pretty quick what very important thing has been defeated in the piles of eloquent oratory. She tells one about standing there, in the protest, and all of a sudden there were the police with clubs. She tells me about the people on the floor trying to crawl away as the police clubbed them, and how she hasn’t been able to eat anything since Wednesday because the cop who knocked her down with the club kicked her in the stomach. She understands the war, and Dow’s involvement, and how things link up, but this is no longer her level of involvement; her level of involvement is very personal now, and it has to do with police brutality. But the people in charge don’t see it that way. The faculty is bogged down with parliamentary procedure. Perhaps this is to be expected of faculty. Forget the faculty -- the real crime is that the student leaders are bogged too, in something far more gummy than parliamentary procedure, sophisticated political ideology. They say that police brutality is not a big enough issue, and they will not be bothered with something so trivial. They are determined to use the brutality as a means of explaining to every man woman and child on the face of the cont. p. 8
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THE DESERTER: The Contemporary Defeat of Fiction by Carl Oglesby A personal confession: I don't read novels or poems or plays now with any of the excitement that I remember feeling ten years ago. That was a time, in fact, in which I not only read but wrote the things - two novels, one finished twice but not the third time, three plays, each of them performed, for better or worse, in a number of places, and now and then a poem, usually for a lady who was flashing for a meteoric moment in my life. (I'd always understood that writing poems is most elementally a lecherous act.) It was a very serious matter for me int hose days, this literature. If one didn't know it, onw was ignorante. It was where it was happening; it was what made a difference. That I no longer feel this was about it, and that I have stopped - or at least for a long time postponed - the writing of it, means, to be sure, most simply that I have changed, too. It has become very wild, very confusing, and seems everywhere to bespeak most clearly out individual impotence and unimportance. And fiction, it seems to me, has responded to this change at least in the respect that it, too, has become very wild, even grotesque, and very confused. I've called this paper 'The Contemporary Defeat of Fiction.' But I don't intend to argue that this defeat was unavoidable or that ir is suffered everywhere or that there is some cultural force which absolutely obstructs its reversal. Any minute, somebody might bowl me over. What I mean to talk about, rather, is my sense that the kind of strategic thought one encouters in certain important novels is a strategy of defeat and desertion - aprropriate yesterday, perhaps, when the world was different, but not appropriate now. I have the perhaps mistaken idea that I could argue this view in the context of a number of important writers, the line of argument of course being different with each: Genet, Beckett, or Robbe-Grillet; or Leroi Jones or Baldwin; or the Bellow of Herzog or perhaps the Ken Kesey of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest For a variety of reasons, I've decided to talk about Camus and Heller's Catch-22: first, because each is important, relevant, and exciting to engage with; and second, because Camus seems to me paradigmatic of a type of failure which I suspect pervades contemporary American fiction, and because Heller's good novel is a convenient and interesting instance of this failure. That is, I claim to find in Catch 22 a resume of an immense historical, cultural problem of ours, an embodiment of a dilemma which the informed artist is virtually compelled to pose, and which, once posed, [insert] ThE ShoP OF THE UNUSUAL EARRINGS NECKLACES PINS - GIFTS NOVELTIES CATHERINE'S forces the artist to confront a responsibility that may transcend the efficaties of fiction itself. Most coldle, the question I want to get at is this: When the house is burning down around the poet's head, on grounds of what if any dispensation can the poet continue the poem? Since I want to put all my cards on the table, I should at least describe my view of fiction. After a rather long episode with the New Criticism, I at last came to my senses and decided that literature is most essentially a form of history, something which makes propositions about the human experience of a time and a place. Whether or not these propositions are also elegant, they ought to be in the first place significant and in the second place true. It follows that I hold the writer responsible for his time - trying to know what's in it, what it's about; and to the extent that a large part of our experience is a witness of injustice, if not direct complicity in it, it follows that the writer has no exemption from the political meanings of choices which he can in no case avoid making. In our time and place, one simply is a partisan - of something, of some cause; even silence is no escape. The business of the critic is to grasp and elucidate the fullness of all these circulating partisanships and - like the writer he scrutinizes - to take a stand. It should go without saying that the stand will be complex always and often ambivalent. No American novel published in 1963, for example, can be excused for the almost racist stereotyping and the dilute elixir of facism which one finds in Ken Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest; yet that novel is resonant with a nostalgia, an aspiration, and a man-centered commitment which I not only share, but in fact find enlarged and re-energized by my experience of that book. More complex and ambivalent yet is my attitude toward Catch-22 as will be clear momentarily. Good enough: one works it out. Neither a novel nor its critique is something one can go shouting out in the streets. The point is to know that novels imply worlds, make assertation about the nature of social reality, embody summations, prophecies, and demans which are manifest in the very process of selection of material and assumption of stance. It is the politics of na artwork which we have to elucidate, explore, and - finally - judge. I suppose this view of art is neither fashionable nor very glamorous, although the current delcine throughout the humanitites of the spirit of positivism no doubt makes it easier at least to re-examine the idea that a work of literature amounts to so many mimetic and value-charged statements about man's experience of himself in the world, and the companion idea that the values and methods appropriate to criticism ought to be integral with the values and methods appropriate to living in a time in which social conflict is ubiquitous and sharp. That men are in trouble, that the trouble may be grave, is neither a foolish nor an especially electrifying notion. It seems by now to be simply a routine commonplace. The interesting questions are the subordinate ones: How is this trouble to be explained and described? What should men do about it? A drama is all but composed when its cast of characters has been assembled: what sort of hero is being pitted against what sort of villain? For Camus, the central figures are Man, who stands on one side of the line of battle armed with his solitude and passion, and over on the other side, in the opposite corner, the Absurd Cosmos, armed with its silence, its indifference, and its mystery— all of which, however, turn out to be not exactly what they seem. For if, with Camus’s acuity, you listen a moment more to this silence, it becomes a curse flung in the face; the indifference becomes contempt; the mystery becomes arrogance and spite. For Camus, even the stars seem sometimes to amount only to so much sinister celestial graffiti. Hence, for example, the air of melodramatic showdown with which The Myth of Sisyphus opens: ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,’ he writes, ‘and that is suicide.’ Camus never seems to have surpassed the most prosaic meaning of a much younger Sartre’s dictum, ‘Man is a useless passion.’ Samuel Beckett has somewhere noted the essential ignobility of such a stance: ‘The microcosm,’ he says, ‘cannot forgive the relative immorality of the macrocosm.’ Perhaps a good deal of Casmus’s melancholy bravura boils down, then, to a hyped-up and vastly more sophisticated ‘Invictus.’ A common jealousy, mingling with fright and pride, yearns to be transfigured, to demonstrate its perfect bravery, by taking on the cosmos, nothing less. Camus’s moral philosophy seems in this case to be an extensive elaboration of a single rather uninteresting lesson, namely, that the enemy of life is death, and that life appears frequently to lose. At the scene of that defeat, confronting his absurd destiny face to facelessness, Camus’s Rebel undergoes that apotheosis which alters nothing— that is, becomes totally lucid, almost like Wallace Stevens’ man of glass, as to the divine and poignant uselessness of lucidity. But there’s much more to Camus’s moral strategy than this strangely byronic pursuit of disappearing ultimates. It satisfies also the political function of destroying the challenge of historical risk. It relegates history, the mundane affairs of men, to an inferior plateau of moral experience. To be in history, to spend one’s time with it, becomes a sadly unavoidable violation of one’s higher possibilities. ‘For years now,’ Camus wrote to a German friend who had become a Nazi soldier, ‘you have tried to make me enter History.’ History: in a familiar gesture, he capitalizes the initial and turns it thus into something abstract and remote, a category among other categories. He had wanted to live outside this History apparently, not quite in the wilderness, but at least in a distant suburb, fixing his attention upon the absurdity of his oncoming death with a despair sometimes jubillant and always graceful. When he finally does enter History in 1941, it is not in order to Cont. p. 5 WISCONSIN, Head Bust It is late Monday afternoon, the Monday after the Wednesday violence in Madison. I am there in the library Mall, listening to rally speakers who go on about an infinity of connections that the students should be making between the Cops and Dow, and Human Rights and so on. I have just spent two hours listening to the broadcast of a closed faculty meeting where 2000 professors hemmed and hawed and finally decided something like: violence is regrettable and set up the inevitable study committee. There doesn’t really seem to be much difference between what the faculty has done and what the speakers at the rally are doing; they all make eloquent speeches, in radical terms, in liberal terms, all linking up everything in need intellectual packages the way they sum up literary movements for their core lit. courses. I am a little disillusioned and a lot bored. And then I feel a tap on my shoulder and there is this girl. Her hair is blond and short except in front where it covers her eyebrows. She is probably a little taller than me, but she seems to be looking up when she speaks, maybe it’s the hair. ‘What do you think of all this?’ There is no hostility in her voice, but it is pretty clear that if I say something, it sure as hell better be relevant. I say I just got here two hours ago, and I don’t know what does she think? ‘I think it’s all for shit,’ she says. There is no anger in her voice; it is like she is admitting the total defeat of something incredibly important. We stand around for a few minutes more, and she introduces me to some people. Then the rally is dismissed for a teach-in someplace, and Monica and her friends and I go over to the union for coffee. Nobody says much, and we get our coffee and sit down, and Monica takes her jacket off. Her right arm is in a sling, and on the sling and green magic marker, ‘the cops were here,’ and it gets pretty obvious pretty quick what very important thing has been defeated in the piles of eloquent oratory. She tells one about standing there, in the protest, and all of a sudden there were the police with clubs. She tells me about the people on the floor trying to crawl away as the police clubbed them, and how she hasn’t been able to eat anything since Wednesday because the cop who knocked her down with the club kicked her in the stomach. She understands the war, and Dow’s involvement, and how things link up, but this is no longer her level of involvement; her level of involvement is very personal now, and it has to do with police brutality. But the people in charge don’t see it that way. The faculty is bogged down with parliamentary procedure. Perhaps this is to be expected of faculty. Forget the faculty -- the real crime is that the student leaders are bogged too, in something far more gummy than parliamentary procedure, sophisticated political ideology. They say that police brutality is not a big enough issue, and they will not be bothered with something so trivial. They are determined to use the brutality as a means of explaining to every man woman and child on the face of the cont. p. 8
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