First published in THE GAMBIER JOURNAL, Volume 4, No. 5, May 1985.

 

It moves sour critics to cries of ‘film classic!’ It makes otherwise mature adults dream, with respect, of the old Hollywood. Four and a half decades after its first showing, it still attracts millions of viewers, none of whom is heard to emit event the politest complaint.

Has no one noticed the elaborate silliness of Gone With the Wind?

The silliness goes beyond the main characters—although, to be sure, they partake of it. It goes beyond Melanie’s idiotic benevolence, somehow confused with Christianity. It goes beyond Ashley’s despairing gentility—despite which, we are expected to believe, he commanded soldiers during four years of war. It goes beyond Rhett Butler’s heart-of-gold cynicism, with which he would seduce his beloved the better to redeem her. It even goes beyond the silliness of Scarlett O’Hara, whose name might be considered a pun on the Biblical Scarlet Whore of Babylon, were we to credit Miss Mitchell with acerb wit she displays nowhere else.

While still in a relatively generous mood, let us credit Miss Mitchell and/or the scriptwriters with giving the title a dual meaning. “Wind” means the war, of course, particularly General Sherman’s incendiary expedition therein. It must mean rhetoric, too; if nothing else, the film exposes the silliness of Confederate orotundities. Judging from the antics at “Tara,” the old South had “gone with the wind” years before the rebels brought their case to Fort Sumter. Regrettably, the film wants us to admire not only admirable courage in a “lost cause” but the sham elegance of a “civilization”—so Miss Mitchell calls it—apparently compounded of little more than chattel slavery and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Worse, this anti-rhetorical film has an rhetorical afflatus of its own.

For Hollywood substituted visual for verbal inflation, offering rather too much of something for everyone. We get, at first, grand photography of trivial persons—the O’Hara’s and the Wilkes’s—minor Dickens characters with Southern accents. We then see these persons impelled into a brutal context, also grandly photographed—which may distract us from their continued triviality. Spectacular improbabilities ensue. Finally, we see them during Reconstruction, repelling trashy whites and uppity blacks with the short sword of Scarlett’s petty Machiavellianism. (“If I have to lie, cheat, steal, or kill, I’ll never go hungry again!” she explains to God, Who has seen far more engaging purposes served by similarly dubious means). The photography remains grand.

We are, I suspect, intended to learn something from this epic melodrama. The film’s makers conceive of illusion as a verbal phenomenon. Each character loves someone who doesn’t return that love, or who cannot return it openly, because words obscure passions, not only for the hearer but for the speaker. Even the self-styled realists, Rhett and Scarlett, manage to confuse each other in the end, with nothing but words.

Done well, this might illuminate something. But Hollywood merely replaced deceptive words with deceptive images. The film is a big truck, a vehicle for carrying ‘scenes’; the ‘scenes’ are receptacles for ‘drama,’ that is, an effort to arouse sentiments. The film-makers load their truck with more and more drama, more and more scenes, and keep the tank filled with theatrical gas. Disasters multiply with each reel, and the last thirty minutes veritably teem with deaths, delusions, and broken hearts.

I once watched the film with a woman of sense who endured it all until the Butler daughter died in a riding accident. “Everything happens to these people,” the lady murmured. One might say the same of Job and his family, but that plot had God, not Miss Mitchell, for its author, which tends to enhance its significance. With Miss Mitchell and the film-makers taking turns at the wheel, the rip only ends when their overloaded rig breaks down—prefigured by the horse that drops dead under Scarlett’s lash and symbolized perfectly by Scarlett herself, microcosm within the macrocosm, collapsed on the stairs, sobbing for the lost Rhett but truly in love only with her real estate. Love of land, of a thing that seems real and lasting, replaces love of unstable humans; love for something photographable overrides love of man, that verbal animal who cannot be captured whole in a picture. It is a Hollywood morality play, that is to say a contradiction in terms insofar as one can say that such a thing has terms.

When Scarlett gets up to declaim, “Tomorrow is another day,” one may take it as a threat to film a sequel. And indeed, as the European philosophical tradition may consist of a series of footnotes to Plato, the Hollywood cinematic tradition may consist of a series of sequels to Gone With the Wind. André Malraux called the techniques of mass ‘culture’ “the arts of satiation”; a photograph, a representation of the surface of things, more nearly satiates us than words do because it shows the appetites what they want instead of trying to tell them about it. Words have a tendency to evoke reason (the Greek word for ‘word,’ logos, also means reason), or faith (“the Word”). Hollywood will not have them. At best, it can only celebrate the earth, beautiful but dumb.

Jeremy Rifkin “in collaboration with Nicanor Perlas”: Algeny. New York: Viking Press, 1983.

 

Consider, if you will, two books. Both are polemics against ‘bioengineering,’ the process whereby scientists combine genetic material from different organisms to produce new genetic structures, and thus new organisms. Both works are intended for what publishers call “the intelligent general reader.”

The author of Book ‘A’ observes that for some centuries we have lived in what he calls a Promethean age; men have transformed their live by “turn[ing] the earth into an extension of themselves” “with the aid of fire” (5). The name Prometheus, he reminds us, means “foresight” (5); men have used fire to conquer nature, to control future events.

A new technology begins to supersede this “pyrotechnology.” “Biotechnology” does not merely reshape nature from the outside, as, for example, dynamos power machines that reshape ore into new machines, or as modern tyrants attempt to reshape men by machinelike institutions. Rather, it reshapes organisms from within eschewing the crude and superficial techniques of industrialism. “Biologists now view living organisms as information systems” (208). Using artificial information systems, computers, engineers will in effect “program” organisms, “mesh[ing] living material and the computer into a single form of production” (21). “[C]ybernetics is the organizing framework for the coming age, the computer is the organizing mechanism, and living tissue is the organizing material” (213).

The author of Book ‘A’ uses the popularization of Darwinism as an example of what is to come. Darwin himself acknowledged his debt to smith and to Malthus; the author contends that Darwin’s doctrine owed much of its popular success to its compatibility with the ethos of capitalism. Attacking Darwin’s theory of evolution as empirically baseless and logically false or tautological, he contends that a civilization’s “ruling metaphor is usually sub-philosophical. As bioengineering metaphors become popular, men should ask themselves if they are not in the thrall of a new myth, replacing Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” with the “survival of the best informed” (221). This myth would reduce nature to a mass of manipulable data.

“Information,” then, replaces “knowledge” as “change itself is honored as the only timeless truth;” “we saturate knowledge with temporality” (240). “The belief that there are no ironclad truths or some objective reality that human beings can discover does not mark the end of the great self-deception that has long plagued humanity, but only the beginning of a new chapter,” animated not by humility but “bravado” (243). “Nature is being made anew, this time by human beings” (244), and our biological tinkerers will surely botch the job.

Book ‘A’ should not be represented as a pathfinding effort or a profound one, but its author states issues clearly and with energy. It is a skillfully-written polemic. As with all polemics, its author reserves the hardest questions for his opponents, not for himself. He fails to ask himself, for example, the question Socrates asks Cleinias: As we would be no better off for having all the gold in the world, effortlessly, if we did not know how to use it, could knowing how to make men immortal benefit us if we do not know how to use immortality, if we do not know how to live? Will men free of genetic disease, served by docile, manufactured slaves, and capable, at least, of that immortality the transmission of one’s exact genetic structure to another organism would bring, really imagine that they had solved any fundamental problem?

Book ‘B’ is far more polemical than Book ‘A’ and much less skillfully written. Its author complains that “we have invaded the long-silent burial grounds of the Carboniferous age” for the fuels that enable us to construct the dwellings, factories, machines, clothes, and roads that “exist as a kind of ghoulish testimonial to our violation of the past” (3). This attempt to make the reader feel guilty over man’s necrophiliac trifling with extinct cycads and equisetums is a mere foreshadowing of absurdities to come.

Theories, he tells us, are “tools, perhaps, but not truths” (31). They merely legitimize a “society’s” economic, political, and other activities while “at the same time” removing “all responsibility for those activities” (35). The theories of St. Thomas Aquinas, that apologist for feudalism, exemplify this dangerous human propensity toward the “legitimacy without responsibility” that “is the ultimate dream of every political elite” (36). “[S]mall snippets of physical reality… have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions” (41). Morality is “humanity’s chief accomplice in the appropriation of nature” (53); “goodness” is only “a mask for our nihilism” (56).

The author of Book ‘B’ cites Darwinism as the most influential nihilism of the hundred years. He calls Darwin’s lifelong interest in collecting biological specimens a characteristically bourgeois obsession. He claims that Darwin based his theory on an analogy between the Galápagos Islands and the British Isles, neither of which offers a sufficient variety of organisms upon which to base a theory of nature; however, the biographer quoted by the author actually refers to Darwin’s study of vampire bat and jaguars—organisms inhabiting that somewhat larger place, South America. The author also claims that “Darwin himself couldn’t believe” that the eye could be the product of evolution (151), although in the passage cited (The Origin of Species, Chapter VI, fourth section) Darwin goes on to explain his reasons for overcoming this doubt.

This tendentiousness combines with sentimentality. With each advance in bioengineering, “cell by cell, tissue by tissue, organ by organ, we give up our bodies as we give up our political power, a piece at a time” (237). This is a locution that might allow us to ignore to whom we are giving up our bodies: ourselves, at least as long as we maintain our political liberty. But the author of Book ‘B’ believes the collaboration of science and commerce so reprehensible, men’s weakness for myth so damaging, and his own condemnation of both so compelling, that in the penultimate chapter he reassures his readers: “Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Charles Darwin… these were not evil men” (242), only misguided ones. One supposes that their shades will be as touched by the magnanimity as they are relived by the mercy of this soft-hearted miniature Nietzsche. In the meantime, he tells us in his concluding sentence, “the cosmos wails” (255).

Book ‘B’ will find its admiring readership among the devotees of what Professor Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. has called “cucumber liberalism”: persons (they would shrink from being called ‘men’) who derive their morality from Erich Fromm, their politics from Charles Reich, their theology from Harvey Cox, their economics from E. F. Schumacher, their military science of Jonathan Schell, and their vision of history from William Irwin Thompson. Readers, in short, more general than intelligent.

The problem, as you have guessed, is that Book ‘A’ and Book ‘B’ coexist between the covers of one book, Jeremy Rifkin’s Algeny. The resulting chimera issues from at least two causes.

First, according to the publicity material accompanying the book, Mr. Rifkin “has authored five books in the past five years on economic, political, cultural, philosophical, and theological themes.” This suggests that Mr. Rifkin partakes of the very industrialism he condemns, but without sufficiently rigorous ‘quality control,’ as assembly-line managers say.

The second cause is more fundamental. Mr. Rifkin is not quite sure how to think about nature, although he does have a fairly clear idea of what he thinks about it. Nature, he writes, consists of interdependent parts; it “asks us to surrender to the oneness of which we are a part” (47) and to be as “participatory” (56) as it is. Life begins “where security is nonexistent, where all things are vulnerable, where there are no hierarchies, no pecking orders, only relationships and mutual dependencies” (249). Life means undifferentiated “comradeship” (253). The human attempt to organize life is unnatural, “not of life but of death” (254).

Presumably, Mr. Rifkin exempts his own book from the latter dictum. But the problem remains: how does one think, much less write, about Mr. Rifkin’s genial chaos? The cosmos does indeed contain many things, more than Darwin or the cyberneticists see, but how does one assess the relative significance of, for example, competition and love? Mr. Rifkin cannot say. In an utterly mediocre man, this would cause random thinking. In Mr. Rifkin, who is not utterly mediocre, it causes patches of sense and nonsense stitched into a motley banner for a band of miscellaneous crusaders.

“[T]he new world we are entering is alien to the vision of all the great theologians, philosophers, and metaphysicians of the past” (218-219). On the contrary, it is an extension of the Machiavellian project as elaborated by Bacon. Understanding this project remains as important as ever, and few contemporary writers have understood it as well as the late Hans Jonas. His last book, Philosophical Essays, contains several pages on bioengineering, an activity he understands better than Rifkin does because he understands thinking better than Rifkin does. To an intelligent general reader who wants to know more about this issue, my advice is: skim Rifkin, read Jonas, study Bacon.

Richard Brautigan: So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. New York: Delacorte Press, 1983.
Richard Sennett: The Frog Who Dared to Croak. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

This review was first published in Chronicles of Culture, Volume 7, Number 10, October 1983. Republished with permission.

In the twentieth century, first-person narrative fiction asserts individualism while undercutting it. Although we quickly learn who this ‘I’ wants us to believe he is, and we rarely fail, in the end, to see who he really is, we do not always clearly see what the author thinks, or believes, about his narrator’s seeming and being. By refusing to judge explicitly, late modern novelists and poets depend on their readers’ ability to find a constellation of meaning beyond the narrative’s landscape—beyond the individual portrayed. Even in an irreligious time we have some idea of Dante’s judgments. But what will readers make of James Joyce six centuries after his death? He himself identified an immediate need for literary archeologists to interpret his books.

This literary problem reflects and reflects upon the familiar political tension between liberty—an assertion of individuality—and authority—the embodiment of meaning. In modern times especially, individuals resent authority but find its destruction a diminishment of themselves. They eventually get the worst of both: individualism for Stalin, tyranny for the Russians; or, alternatively, anarchy for the many and subservience for the few.

The novelist Richard Brautigan, whose earlier book, Trout Fishing in America became an icon of the Sixties ‘counterculture, explores liberty in America. Richard Sennett, a sociologist by day and sometime novelist by night, explores tyranny in Hungary and the Soviet Union. Both use first-person narrators, and both pose the problems individualism causes for ‘we moderns.’

Brautigan’s middle-aged narrator remembers the summer of 1947, when he was twelve years old and “the most interesting thing happening in my life” was watching a husband and wife who fished in a pond while sitting in their living-room furniture, carefully trucked out and unloaded each evening at seven. Imitating their deliberateness, he intersperses his description of one afternoon spent waiting for them to arrive at the pond with memories of other days in his childhood, culminating in the day his “childhood ended” when he accidentally shot and killed a friend.

The reviewer for the New York Times could find no purpose for this procedure, but the narrator explains it simply enough. “I am still searching for some meaning in [the story] and perhaps even a partial answer to my own life, which as I grow closer and closer to death, the answer gets farther and farther away.” Hence the attempt to reverse aging by the means of memory, to recapture childhood, the time when truth seems closer—not only Wordsworth’s famous reason but because an adult can see “unknown vectors” the child did not see.

Brautigan does well. He remembers the boredom of childhood. His cuteness, which has irritated more than one reader of his other novels, here contributes to a story that does not omit childhood’s childishness. Children ponder lying and truth-telling, fantasy and reality, with an intensity most will lose in adulthood; Brautigan knows something of how these intertwine. So, for example, he has his narrator remember the “very ancient and fragile” lock on an old woman’s garage door:
“The lock was only a symbol of privacy and protection, but that meant something in those days. If that lock were around today, a thief would just walk up to it and blow it off with his breath.”
Blowing: the narrator remembers these things “so the wind”—today’s prevailing viciousness, a harsh reality—”won’t blow it all away.” His memories recapture not only childhood but the more humane minds of that time and place—the American Northwest a couple of years after World War II, “before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity.” This isn’t quite as sentimental as it sounds; lonely children who spend their days watching, not participating, often find their way to the eccentric adults (mostly old people, old age itself being a form of eccentricity) who have time for them. The narrator draws these portraits with a bright child’s mixture of sarcasm, curiosity, and fondness.

Brautigan has never offered any but the simplest ideas, and his sentiments—the mixture of satire and sympathy Christianity becomes when secularized—recall Dickens (as do his congruent fascinations with eccentrics and children). He gets his style from Hemingway. But his tone belongs to him, and it is what makes him one of our most elusive writers. His teaching (as it were) is straightforward enough: the narrator remembers his childhood recreation of shooting apples in an abandoned orchard. He bought the bullet that killed his friend because he preferred the “dramatic” sound of “a .22 bullet burning an apple into instant rotten apple sauce” to the satisfaction of eating a hamburger in the restaurant next to the gun shop; he had only enough money for one or the other. He identifies the bullets with “aggressions,” hamburgers with the pleasant eccentricity of the married couple (“Take it nice and easy is my motto,” the husband says while cooking one). Brautigan surely thinks of this homey dichotomy as a choice Americans always have before them, and he leaves no doubt that he now prefers hamburgers.

After the shooting, his narrator developed a sad/comic obsession with hamburgers. (“I was a weird kid,” he concedes; “weird” derives from a word that meant fate, “unknown vectors”).
“Looking back on it now, I guess I used the hamburger as a form of mental therapy to keep from going mad because what happened in that orchard was not the kind of thing that cases a child to have a positive outlook on life. It was the kind of thing that challenged your mettle and I used the hamburger as my first line of defense.”
This satirical counterpointing of guilt with Boy Scoutmaster understatement-by-cliché must leave many readers, including some good ones, strewn like apples shot by a weird kid. The problem of tone reveals the problem of meaning. The whole account sidesteps the fact that the accident could still have been prevented had the boy known not to fire a gun if your friend could be standing in the bullet’s trajectory. The narrator never considers this, his imagination obscuring common sense even after thirty-two years. What of Brautigan?

We can’t know. Whatever Brautigan may think of his narrator, the tone gives us contrary signals, or signals one can interpret variously with equal justification. Like his narrator, Brautigan enjoys individuality, liberty, but not the responsibility they force upon us. That goes for the imagination as well as for action. He detests the mass-imagination of today, preferring the time when “people made their own imagination, like home-cooking.” The result was more palatable, perhaps, because however dotty or injurious it was still on a human scale. But to what extent can an individual really make his own imagination? Brautigan will not or cannot delineate the limits, or the complementary extent to which one must take his bearings from things beyond himself. Responsibility, which must be to something or someone, arises there; Brautigan eludes it. He knows and mocks the old fatherly bromides but his narrator has no father to tell him how to shoot a gun.

Brautigan presents the world of pre-adolescence, omitting sexuality, that complication of love and friendship. In his imaginary memoir of a Hungarian philosophy teacher named Tibor Grau, Richard Sennett devotes only a few pages to childhood, many more to youth and adulthood. Sexuality and politics matter here. But they do so in a way that equally evokes the atmosphere of ‘counterculture’ sentiment.

The notion that sexual liberation really is liberating was the ‘counterculture’s’ central illusion. Despite numberless illustrated instruction manuals and copious experiences, many of us still contrive to overlook the fact that sexual activity involves linking bodies—however variously—and not unrestricted movement. Presented as an act of liberation, ‘sex’ must disappoint. Reportedly, it often does.

Tibor Grau does not share this illusion. Resented by his public school classmates for his superior wealth and intelligence, he wanted “to have them, to conquer them”; his homosexual passion based itself not on the illusion of sexual liberation but on the illusion that one’s enemies are worth “having,” an egalitarian presumption that lies beneath much of what passes for power-hungry elitism. After moving from teenaged schoolboys to young, displaced peasants who frequented Budapest’s Municipal Park, Grau’s “first steps” toward Marxism came “when I began to feel such love for some of the older boys that I wanted to stop paying them, imagining that they would freely return my feelings” if suitably impressed by his mastery of dialectics. They didn’t, of course, and Grau learned early “how sordid life is,” and “how sad and impossible it is to live.”

Evidently, life’s sordidness, sadness, and impossibility result from the rarity of making love, liberty, and sexuality coincide. Liberty in particular causes the young to be “confused and afraid, as they should be.” Personal liberty means you’re on your own. “To avoid the terrifying solitude of liberty,” the young “search to find a realm of life in which they can immediately belong.” Giving up on the male prostitutes in the park, Grau sought love and friendship among the poor, sharing their “anger and hatred against the world.” Even in old age, he imagines “hatred of the world as it is” to be “the noblest emotion an adolescent can feel.”

Resentment and love of love mix easily; they make a poison. We see this when Grau remembers a Deputy Director of “Cultural Propaganda” in Hungary’s short-lived socialist regime of 1919. With the rather heavy irony that tyranny provokes, Sennett shows how this poison caused suspicion, betrayal, and lying, not fraternal struggle for truth against shared enemies. Most insightfully, he has Grau write that he foolishly resisted what turned out to be at routine inquiry not only because he suspected a conspiracy but because he wanted to assert his liberty; he did not want to be forced into writing an apologia. Sennett knows that the problem of liberty would remain even if socialism solved the ‘problem of scarcity,’ economic and emotional, that socialists believe they can solve.

Elsewhere, Grau reflects that socialism asks and promises too much because “no one can give another more than permission to exist, and that permission entails all manner of mistakes, stupidities, and waywardness.” Evil is the denial of this permission, a denial made by too many frustrated socialists, and fraudulent ones. The existence Grau praisses, moderately, is not mere life; “to live is to love something concrete for itself”—a formula that mixes Marxist materialism with Kant’s categorical imperative, in the hope of avoiding the worst aspects of both.

Sennett has Grau survive some fifteen years in Stalinist Russia, including the Second World War. He gives him an elderly, male lover with whom to spend his last years in Hungary; justifiably embarrassed by this bluebird finale, he has Grau write, defensively:

“I know what you will say: Grau, such a self-absorbed, unpleasant man before, now redeemed. You really understand nothing. I simply have something to do. This life formed for me these habit of small pleasures each day which the young would call the prison of old age.”

We are meant to “understand” that the love of something—here someone—specific, for itself, is true liberty. It is surely closer to true liberty than either utopian socialism or Marxist ‘realism.’ But Grau overlooks something. Throughout, he describes himself as a philosopher. The prototypical philosopher, Socrates, insisted that philosophia or love of wisdom differs from loving men—or, for that matter, women. As long as he retains his wits, a philosopher always has “something to do.” Grau doesn’t know this, remaining an intellectual, not a philosopher at all.

Does Sennett know this? He is less elusive than Brautigan; I suspect that he does not.

The modern individualist recognizes no present authority; at most, he might recognize the authority of some imagined future condition of the human race. Yet he often finds the quest to satisfy mere appetites unsatisfying—as indeed he must, with advancing age and infirmity. With no faith in reason or revelation, he can only turn to memory or imagination. Not themselves authoritative, memory and imagination can conjure a dim authority. Remembered authority stands against the rapid changes of democracy or the equally rapid but more brutal changes of ‘totalitarianism’ or modern tyranny. Imagined authority wants to accelerate those changes, to move onward to a future that seems to resolve the unresolvable tensions of the human condition.

Brautigan’s narrator attempts to find authority in childhood, rather like an American Rousseau. Sennett’s narrator “weed[s] his memories… to clarify and refine his understanding,” yielding a materialist Kantianism. The procedures differ, but both men look to the modern substitute for reason and revelation: sentiment. Unfortunately, sentiment’s multifariousness equals or exceeds that of reason, or perhaps even that of revelation. As a substitute for other forms of authority, it is insufficiently authoritative. Modern individualism undercuts itself in its very self-assertion