The Wisdom of Roger Shattuck

These last days of the 20th century there is an irresistible attraction to works that seem to offer a summing-up of its characteristics. We yearn to draw a line on our time and place beneath it a sort of total: the achievements, the failures, in an arbitrarily calculated span of what has been done with human existence.

Thought and sensibility: This aspect is not satisfied by the snap lists produced by newspapers and participants in radio phone-ins--the atom bomb, the Holocaust, the moon walk--with their relative moral values ignored as my leveled sequence suggests. The total cannot be a totality. We can only hope to have extrapolated for us, above and below and around the events by which our century will be named, sectors, genres of what comprised its experience. Although he may not have had this in mind, Roger Shattuck’s “Candor and Perversion” has a strong bid to present in its chosen range--literature, education and the arts--the broad account of the century’s cultural experience. Everything in the triad is not there--each reader, though awed, will wish to add works that have been essential to him or her. But the breadth and searching depth of Shattuck’s cultural exploration is near to all-encompassing, and the vitality of his mind ignites latent responses in a flare of rare reciprocal intellectual pleasure. He is candid, and where you or I, here or there, might find him perverse (in a sense other than that of his title), he certainly will accept this assertion of free thought.

Part One of this work engages, Titan-like, contemporary cultural debate in what, giving the activity its full weight of responsibility, he terms practice of “the calling of criticism.” Part Two is devoted to the everyday: “A Critic’s Job of Work”; his literary journalism of the end-of-century decades deals with individual “works and figures” he considers to be of “lasting appeal and significance.”

The first part, “Intellectual Craftsmanship,” sets out to define in 19 crisp theses what literature is, its “amalgam of representation and imagination, of clarity and mystery, of the particular and the general . . . revealing evidence about material nature and human nature and whatever may lie beyond.” These brief theses provide the terms of reference for the defense of literature threatened by “two categories of interests: politics (including race, class, feminism, minority and cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies), and theory (reliance on a prior methodology or approach by which to read all works). These interests, perfectly legitimate as adjuncts to literature, have become increasingly dominant, specialized, and doctrinaire. The cumulative effect is to eliminate the very category of literature.”

The clarity and precision by which the 19 theses have been arrived demand that all be quoted here as a basis for discussion, but space does not allow this, and so I must resort to the reluctant presumption of restricting myself to those--in the subjective-objectivity of my temporary calling of critic rather than reader--to which I respond most compellingly. At full gallop, lance in hand, I shall join Roger Shattuck’s crusade to “affirm literature in its full humanist sense . . . by eschewing the free-standing word, text . . . the doctrine of textuality” as a deadening catch-all by which the variety of literary forms that is the myriad of story telling is killed off. No one has defended this thesis more convincingly than he does from the unassailable ground of a vast appreciation of experiments in literature which absolves him from any accusations of being hostile, in principle, to an avant-garde. The Word is a miracle, but it is not an end in Itself.

In his book “Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography,” Shattuck challenged the levels of freedom of expression with a conviction many of us, for various reasons, fashionable or grave, would hesitate to reveal. The world is so beset by censorship both of plain information and of independent acts of creative thought that one fears to support any modification whatsoever of what may or may not be made known, whether in a poem, a play, a novel, a painting, sculpture or photograph. I come from a society that until only five years ago banned in the arts anything that was proscribed by the prudery of the Dutch Reformed Church or criticized the apartheid regime, but the connection between the devaluing of the right to the privacy of the human body and the elevation of violence and cruelty as the ultimate in ecstatic spirituality is a progression I cannot pretend to ignore. I find myself concurring with Shattuck’s proposition that there is a limit to what we should seek to “know.” There is a crucial difference between--let me cite--Robert Musil’s attempt to understand the sex murderer, Moosbrugger; Salman Rushdie’s attempt to place the tragic raison d’e^tre of the compulsive murderer, Cyrus Cama; and the serial killer hailed as “the new anti-hero [who] is both tasteful and camp . . . no wonder the literary editors are drooling over him,” remarked recently by a crime thriller writer. The present elevation of the Marquis de Sade’s lyrical effusions--recounting the sexual savagery which was given his name--to the status of great French literature and the trendy acceptance of the film “Pulp Fiction” not as a celebration of gratuitous violence but as contemporary freedom, were devastatingly exposed in Shattuck’s earlier book. In this one he follows the trajectory to its alarming conclusion. What began as Blakean revolt, through the arts, against hypocritical convention--sexual and moral hypocrisy and fuddy-duddyism--becomes a new convention: “ . . . what our society sees as the ultimate act of autonomy and empowerment, murder,” as another writer, Robert Stone, defines it. The trashing of sensibility: It is as this that the latest convention emerges in an essay “The Alibi of Art,” Shattuck’s superbly argued exposition of the arts as having “real and lasting effects on our behavior.”

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In our political affinities, Shattuck and I are apart: He is a liberal and I am a leftist convinced that its share of the 20th century’s ghastly inhuman distortions is not the end of socialism, any more than the distortions of the Crusades and the good Christian Nazis were the end of Christian ideals; yet he and I belong together in the phalanstery of literature. I regard, as he does, literature as education in wholeness; that is why we reject the text-dictatorship’s exclusivity. But when it comes to the legitimacy of subjects in the teaching of literature--whatever claims to the contrary liberalism may make, as all faiths do--liberalism itself is not objective, nor is it perceived objectively, as he appears to assume.

In the immediate post-colonial world, liberalism is historically, inevitably linked with paternalism: decisions made for the good of others, not according to the decisions of the “others” by and for themselves. An important opening section of this book is devoted to questioning contemporary education, its modes and methodology. In this context, while it is without question, as Shattuck cites, that it is cultural self-mutilation for students of literature to abandon the freedom of the treasury of intellectual tradition to be found in the world’s library, for a growing number of students in the post-colonial African countries and the United States, the intellectual tradition of their people is missing from “the tradition.” This cannot be justified summarily by the late development of the written word in their history; intellectual tradition exists independently of a sole means. So far as their tradition is concerned, the philosophies, traditional technologies, ontological and existential thinking, the highly developed image- and idea-making of their languages was long categorized outside “the tradition”: as anthropology. The continuing use of the terms “primitive” and “primitivism” as the category for achievements of the traditional African intellect and imagination--I concede that when Shattuck uses these he could hardly be expected to coin a term commensurate, as there should be, for example, with those coined as Cubism, Surrealism, Modernism et al, since museums and art historians have established them--yet his is a case in point. It crops up ironically when, in the broad context of the arts, he speaks of the “relation between primitivism and modernism” even while writing a deeply appreciative essay on the works of Senegal’s poet-president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, recognizing fully the cultural elements therein, African and European, as imaginatively equal.

Levi-Strauss is not Shakespeare. Largely deprived of record and recognition of the intellectual past which was their people’s own, recognition that there was such a past for them at all, it is understandable, a matter of psychic necessity, to wish to place foremost in the literary study of being the manifestations currently experienced or available through the descendants’ resurrection of what was discounted and ignored. That is the case for the literary choices in “black studies” in the curricula. Once--in the new millennium?--the intellectual establishment of “the tradition” accepts that there has been a lack in its cultural concepts long after “The Lady Murasaki,” the “Upanishads” and other art works in various media were admitted, and once Africans and African Americans realize that the African intellectual tradition is not theirs alone but part of the universal collective illumination of our being as humans, the balance may be arrived at: We all have the right to claim all intellectual achievement, all creativity as our own human story. But that, because of aleatory circumstances of economics and racial prejudice will not come about as soon as the next semester.

Do not be discouraged by my space-dictated selectivity in discussing this book. There is such abundance here, from Sarah Bernhardt to Artaud to a shrewdly frolicking foray into a musical by someone I’m glad to hear of for the first time; from Rilke to Foucault, Arthur Miller and Arp--this last a series of exquisite transmissions in the spirit of Baudelaire’s correspondences.

Roger Shattuck is again the polymath who leaves you roused to think about those things you don’t want to think about. And, with gratitude, need to.*