Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
George Orwell once described Charles Dickens as a "free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls" (Dickens, Dali & Others, 75). The battlefield of today's culture wars is reeking with orthodoxies no less malodorous than those that stunk up Orwell's own age. Partisans of the right have blasted American universities as "islands of repression in a sea of freedom" inhabited by "Visigoths in tweed" (129). Partisans of the left compare conservative opponents to the coup-plotters who tried to overthrow Gorbachev, and equate proponents of "cultural literacy" with "white missionaries who paved the way for slavetraders" (Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities, Mark Edmundson, editor 274).
Blessedly, we may be entering a phase of the debate where calmer, saner voices are finally being heard. Robert Hughes'Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, Russell Jacoby's Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America, Todd Gitlin's The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars, and, most recently, Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, are all works by "free intelligences" who reject strident simplifications. Instead, these critics stake out complex middle positions that, while less viscerally satisfying than the jeremiads of the far left and right, are far more substantive, productive discussions of these thorny issues.
Steiner's thesis is implied by both halves of her book's title. Exploring a series of key battles in our current kulturkampf--the NEA controversy involving Robert Mapplethorpe, the feminist debate over pornography, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the furor over academic "P.C.," the scandals that followed revelations of the political pasts of scholars Anthony Blunt, Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man--Steiner regularly finds that the positions of both the right and left share the same narrowly fundamentalist view of art. From opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, both groups, Steiner contends, argue that art affects us in direct, literal ways: that evil messages make us evil and that good ones make us good, that "art [isn't] different from life," that "advocacy and representation are...the same thing" (xi & 5).
In challenging these notions, Steiner doesn't endorse pure aestheticism. Seeing art as "neither identical to reality nor isolated from it," she construes it as "a virtual realm tied to the world by acts of interpretation" (8). Neither totally unaffected nor totally manipulated by a work of art, readers and viewers are, instead, engaged in a paradoxical but profoundly beneficial process Steiner calls "enlightened beguilement," which she thinks makes them "tolerant and mentally lithe" (93 & 8).
Steiner confesses that she once "believed that criticism should model itself on science," a belief that made her a devotee of structuralism--the most seemingly "scientific" approach around (7). In time, she came to see the limitations of viewing art through any exclusive theoretical lens. Now critically disarmed, Steiner maintains that artistic interpretation is inherently subjective, that "the essence of the critical act" is "to like, to find important, at this time and in such-and-such a situation" (7).
While some of Steiner's ideas are debatable (for reasons I'll discuss later,) in sum they offer a sensible corrective to the extremist theories she attacks. However, when the author turns to specific examples she is only partially persuasive. At times, she reduces her opponents to "straw men" by characterizing an entire ideological school only by its most fanatical members. For instance, considering anti-porn feminists, Steiner demolishes such easy targets as Andrea Dworkin, who loonily insists that all heterosexual intercourse is rape. But she dodges the stronger arguments of Susan Brownmiller, Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi and others that the multibillion-dollar porn industry exacerbates our culture's already rampant sexual objectification of women.
The best chapters (which are very good indeed) are on Mapplethorpe and Rushdie. Regarding Mapplethorpe, Steiner examines both the NEA dispute, and the obscenity trial of Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center, making a strong, intriguing case for the photographer's artistic importance. While noting the aesthetic merits of Mapplethorpe's work, Steiner doesn't ignore its often controversial content: in particular, the exploration of gay sadomasochism. But Steiner also rejects the simplistic (as well as homophobic) outrage of Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, William Bennett, and other self-appointed guardians of social morality. Instead, she deftly explores the complexity of Mapplethorpe's best work--especially how his photographs often deliberately force the viewer into a disturbing process of self-examination. For example, in the much-discussed "Self-Portrait," showing the artist with a bullwhip up his rectum, Steiner observes how Mapplethorpe "turns round to the camera--to us--acknowledging the fact that we are looking, that we know his pleasure and pain....This work is confrontational, teasing, searching" (44). Noting the wry allusion to Satan in Mapplethorpe's pose, Steiner argues that Mapplethorpe's stance as a "self-proclaimed devil" sends a liberating message that "warrants my right to enjoy my own deviltries, cautious as they may be" ( she overlooks the dangerous message the photo may send to viewers less "cautious" than herself) in this era of AIDS--the disease that killed Mapplethorpe himself. (57)
Steiner deems Salman Rushdie as brilliantly, willfully adversarial an artist as Robert Mapplethorpe. She sees the leitmotif of all Rushdie's fiction, in particular The Satanic Verses, as "mongrelization" --the jumbling of identities that is both the acute reality of postcolonials like Rushdie himself, and also, more broadly, an apt description of the modern condition in general. It is, in fact, Rushdie who provides the book's most eloquent description of mongrelization, in a speech he delivered on the first anniversary of the fatwa: "The Satanic Verses, celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling.... It...fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.... [The novel] is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves" (114). Of course, the "Pure," represented in Rushdie's case by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his millions of rabid followers, fear and despise precisely this kind of undermining of their religious and cultural immaculateness. Indeed, fundamentalists of any stripe loathe the heterogeneity that defines contemporary life, and which postmodern art like Rushdie's so often insists on flaunting.
Steiner correctly frames the Rushdie affair as an international struggle between the forces of democratic liberalism (which foster and protect mongrelization) and the forces of totalitarianism (which seek to destroy it). However, she also claims, oddly, that the liberal tolerance she herself affirms is merely another faith, another fundamentalism. "The liberal,"she concludes, "in insisting on tolerance, is insisting on not only his idea, but his practice"(123). While Steiner deserves credit for honesty, it's Orwellian to assert that true tolerance demands that one be tolerant of intolerance.
Its lapses aside, The Scandal of Pleasure, generally argues convincingly and provocatively that ours is an age of competing fundamentalisms, all intensely hostile to what Nabokov called the power of great art to provide "aesthetic bliss,"through its formal brilliance and inherent ambiguities, paradoxes and mysteries. But how valid is Steiner's fervent belief in art's sublime, redemptive ability to not only please aesthetically, but also to make us "tolerant and mentally lithe"(8)? Is she right to claim that "we will not be led into fascism or rape or child abuse or racial oppression through aesthetic experience. Quite the contrary--the more practiced we are in fantasy the better we will master its difference from the real"(211)?
As an English professor, I'm a sucker for Steiner's claim, one artists have long trumpeted, that great art makes us more virtuous. However, if certain works of art undeniably possess great aesthetic power linked with repugnant ideas--such as Dante's Inferno, which portrays Muslims as damned heretics, or D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which idolizes the Klan--how can we be confident such works will inculcate virtue?
Still, even if Steiner's own view of art is ultimately unpersuasive, the middle path she steers between pro and anti-P.C. fanaticism strikes me as exactly right. I hope her book, along with those of her fellow moderates, augurs a new direction for the debate. The fanatics have raved long enough.