Books : Abstract Insights From a Secret History

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus (Harvard University Press: $29.95; 496 pages)

On Page 18 of “Lipstick Traces,” Greil Marcus announces the theme of the book. He calls it “serpentine.” That is, it is long and twisty, it keeps doubling back upon itself and, though he doesn’t say so, it tends to swallow its own tail.

It is a book--this gnarled, passionate, semiconfessional search for the spark of anarchic revolt through the history of our culture--at war with itself. The title, for example, fights the subtitle.

“Lipstick Traces” suggests the gaudy, graffiti-like gestures of defiance of such movements. “A Secret History of the 20th Century” suggests a ponderous, all-encompassing machinery of arcane connections. The book is a little of both; brilliant flashes flickering in a turgid tide.

Back to Page 18. Here are the various, seemingly discontinuous scaly humps that show above the sea while the single serpent that owns them is hidden below.

Cultural Protest

In 1975, the Sex Pistols, led by Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, launched punk rock. Its wild, funky attack on social and musical verities--including those of commercial rock ‘n’ roll--”distill,” as Marcus phrases it, the style of combat used by a small group of Paris intellectuals known in the early 1950s as the Lettrists and later on as the Situationists. The Paris upheaval of May, 1968, which came close to toppling the government, used a number of Situationist slogans and methods of cultural protest.

These methods have an earlier ancestry among the Dadaists and Surrealists of the 1920s. And Marcus traces them back through history in selected bits from the young Karl Marx (“Our kind will be the first to blaze a trail into a new life”), the French Revolutionary intellectual, St. Just (“Happiness is a new idea in Europe”), various orgiastic heresies of the Middle Ages, and the knights of the Round Table.

Marcus tells us vividly of listening to a Johnny Rotten song now, a dozen or so years after it was made. It was “a voice that denied all social facts and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible.” Punk, for a few years--in its crudity of technique and the violent accessibility of its images--wrecked hierarchies and allowed slum kids to feel empowered.

Felt Like Revolution

Safety pins through the lips, purple spiked hair, outrageousness--”Belsen Is a Gas” was one of the songs--felt like revolution, Marcus writes. So did the vehemence of the Anabaptists and the 17-Century Ranters, the Surrealists’ dead horse on a piano, the German Dadaist who stood up in Berlin Cathedral in 1920 and shouted “God is a sausage,” and Michel Mourre who donned a Dominican habit in 1950 and shouted “God is dead” on the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral.

So, for a few days, did the eruption of Paris youth in 1968 with such slogans--some of them taken from the Situationists of the 1950s--as “Never work” and “It is forbidden to forbid.”

The fugitive, go-for-broke eclat of these gestures entrances Marcus. He puts them together as a history of moments, a secret history whose links he provides. Rotten did not know about the Dadaist Tristan Tzara nor, of course, vice versa; but Marcus does. Perhaps he is the serpent who connects the humps.

Perhaps they are better as unlinked moments. The Levellers of all ages--and all these are in some sense Levellers--salute the rubble that replaces the boring building. The trouble is that, after a while, rubble is even more boring, as well as providing less shelter.

Momentary Heroes

Marcus recognizes the effervescence of these momentary heroes of his history. Listening to a Sex Pistols record, he writes: “You can listen and feel: This is actually happening, but you can’t look back and say this actually happened.” A secret history, in a sense, is no history. Marcus’ formidable 500-page apparatus of reference and cross-reference is almost a travesty of the fugitive passion it so pedantically tries to commemorate.

Marcus is a rock historian and critic and, more broadly, a critic of culture. His book is a curious mixture of graphic and visceral responses with the theoretical webs of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and the French textual critics.

Textuality is one of the pitfalls. The book’s central figure is the French intellectual Guy Debord, who was a kind of guru of both the Lettrists and their Situationist successors. All we get of him is quotes from his contradictory, elliptical, gnomic writings; Marcus almost entirely neglects to present him as a living figure. He suggests that Debord was the principal architect of May, 1968. But where was he during the eruptions? Did he go out? Did he stay home? Did he even know they were going on?

Not Plausible

If Marcus were writing about sports, we might well hear of the teleology of the sinker; and because he is Marcus, we would know exactly what a sinker feels like and does. We would even see the plausibility of its marriage to teleology. Unfortunately, plausibility is not the essence of marriage.

It is one thing to note that Adorno, among others, blasted the placidities of “midcult”; and that midcult could equally be comfortable attendance at a symphony matinee or at an established rock-band concert. It is another to write that “you can find punk between every other line of (Adorno’s) Minima Moralia.”

It is another thing to write that Marguerite Porete, burned at the stake as a heretic, “could have written James Wolcott’s Village Voice review of ‘Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols.’ ” Yes, he has a point and a connection; Wolcott wanted more fire. Connections, particularly unexpected, are liberating. Too many connections in sequence are a chain gang. Reaching for Marcus’ insights I find myself tangled in his vague, insistent and convoluted prose; I am quite unable to follow his abstract jumping back and forth through his secret history.