The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being
nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in
it willingly.
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
Introduction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg29g6D0sPs
“Political World” song by Bob Dylan
Living in a Political World: “As soon as you’re awake /
you’re trained to take / what looks like the easy way out.” (Dylan)
I
n the aftermath of World War II, a great deal of innocence, if not all of it, was lost as the
world reeled from the horrors of fascism (in which individuals were transformed into
compliant masses using cutting edge propaganda and technology), concentration camps (in
which people were eliminated using state of the art science and technology) and atomic bombs
(also the result of astonishing advances in science). It was no longer possible to see science as
certain salvation. Clearly, science could be used for destructive purposes, and there was nothing
in the science itself that would save us. To put it another way, a revolution in technology was not
a revolution in ethics, or wisdom, or self-awareness. One result: the world began to look like a
place where everything was an effect of power—who had it, who didn’t, who lost it, who gained
it. We no longer lived in a world imagined as an ordered creation of God or nature; we lived in a
political world.
It is this distinction that Bob Dylan drives home in his song, “Political World,” which opens
with the following lines:
We live in a political world
Love don't have any place
We're living in times
Where men commit crimes
And crime don't have any face.
We live in a political world
Icicles hanging down
Wedding bells ring
And angels sing
Clouds cover up the ground.
We live in a political world
Wisdom is thrown in jail
It rots in a cell
Is misguided as hell
Leaving no one to pick up a trail.
We live in a political world
Where mercy walks the plank
Life is in mirrors
Death disappears
Up the steps into the nearest bank.
We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past
Houses are haunted
Children unwanted
The next day could be your last.
What is the difference between a world and a “political” world? Why make the distinction at all?
Politics is the art of making up rules we all view as more or less fair. These rules relate to how
resources are to be distributed—and this is the case whether those resources are material or human.
The fairness of the rules is paramount because once they go into effect we are all expected to abide
by them and penalties can be imposed on those who do not. However, rules are also a great way
to gain an unfair advantage. Imagine a rule in a hockey league stating that your team can’t have a
goalie, but every other team can. Then, when your team doesn’t perform well, imagine having this
understood as demonstrating you are a weak team, rather than being the inevitable result of an
unfair situation merely presented by the “law” as fair. Lacking a goalie, while playing a team that
is allowed to have one, guarantees it will be much, much harder for you to win, if it is possible at
all, and, if you ever do, it will be because you put forth ten times the effort of the opposing team,
at a level of intensity you are very unlikely to be able to keep up day after day. Yet, when
exhaustion sets in, this, too, will be seen as evidence of your team being “out of shape” relative to
other teams, when the truth is you are far more fit.
Passing unfair rules while convincing people they are fair (for instance, by means of
political lobbying) is the basic foundation of modern power because it makes oppression and
institutionalized exploitation seem like “that’s just the way things are.” All the centralization and
mass media technology of our age has made it easier than ever before to broadcast these rules,
naturalizing power to such an aggressive extent they seep into every crevice of modern life. Think
how many ads you see daily on YouTube, Facebook, not to mention billboards, walls, and even
public washrooms. All of these ads contribute their little bit to an organized world view that is
very much produced in a way that makes it seem natural, and not produced at all.
In former times, kings and emperors could call on their connection to God for legitimacy,
but in modern times, even the most ruthless dictators must at least pretend they are somehow
representing the will of the people. Thus, we now have a world that is, in fact, always political,
while claiming to still just be the world. This is how the political process can be used to
“naturalize” power—to make it look as if we are all “playing by the same rules.” Such a perception
is crucial to the continuation of a given power regime because the best way to suppress revolution
is to make it seem even if you disapprove of something, it represents the general will of the people
so in the interest of civic harmony you should go along with it.
When it becomes obvious to people that a ruling power is accruing everything of value for
themselves and depriving everyone else, a movement toward revolution begins. However, if the
privileged and the powerful appear to have earned what they have, and done so in a manner equally
available to everyone, then their wealth and power is seen as the “natural” outcome of their abilities
and hard work. Conversely, someone laboring under an institutionalized disadvantage (like the
hockey team forbidden to have a goal) can now be seen as someone lacking the will or character
to “make their way” in the world. For a king, much of his legitimacy came from the assumption
that his bloodline had been anointed as a representation of Divine will. Therefore, any perception
of his operating in bad faith, or for personal gain at the expense of others, amounted to brazenly
questioning the will of God. Given that, protesters could be jailed or beheaded for blasphemy
against God when in fact the engine of their death was a king eliminating threats to his power
without having to acknowledge this is what he is doing.
For political regimes today, their legitimacy comes from the general perception they
represent the will of the people. There is no presumed “transcendent” authority bestowing their
right to rule from above. If they act in such a way as to lose the trust of the people they represent,
their right to rule comes under question. In addition to public perception, ruling parties wield two
other powerful systems: the military and the economy. In a dictatorship, for example, the economy
can be manipulated to make sure one is able to maintain a military that is loyal to the preservation
of the current rulers because they are too well looked after by the system to want to see it changed.
In this system, the taxes of the people are used, at least in part, to pay for the very military that
oppresses them. Equally, any corporation that can make the dictatorship beholden to them (by
loans or bribes, for instance) gains direct access to the law-making machinery, leading us back to
the situation I descried at the beginning of this introduction.
This combination of military and money—better known as the “political economy”—is a
modern phenomenon. The “political economy” takes shape as both the dominant science and the
science of domination. The intricacies of the system are seen to be beyond the scope of the average
intelligent person, and thus “experts” must always be consulted even for change to be considered.
Often such experts, like the well cared for military leaders, have too much invested in the system
to critique it in a meaningful way. Small wonder we are in an age of surveillance and terrorism.
Huge powers, with limitless resources and much to defend, try to manipulate world events to
maintain their advantage. In this way, government, the economy and the military are virtually
seamless, constituting what U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called “the Industrial Military
Complex.” For example, drone strikes manipulated in one place while actually taking place on the
other side of the world represent, at one and the same time, a military action and an economic
action. With “globalization” the political economy goes yet a step further and becomes the geopolitical economy. Now the personal is the political and even the geographical is the political: both
you and the ground under your feet are subject to a ceaseless contest of conflicting ideologies,
each vying for supremacy over the other. This is the case for virtually every square foot of land on
Earth. As Dylan says, “you can travel anywhere and hang yourself there you’ll always find more
than enough rope.”
In this class we will explore the complex, interconnected systems of modernity as they are
expressed and challenged in novels, short stories, poems, films, advertisements, and other forms
of popular culture. A central purpose of this class will be to consider one of the great triumphs of
modern art: its ability to expose the “you can’t have a goalie” rule as unfair, punitive, and quite
destructive to the human spirit if we lack the wherewithal to understand. Although reading
literature and studying films will not grant you sweeping powers to change everything, it will, I
hope, restore your own locality to you, your own ability to at least understand that you are subject
to unfairness when it happens. This insight alone can change a situation from one in which you
might feel ashamed and inadequate to one in which you feel empowered to understand and respond
appropriately. Even in cases where you cannot change the inequity, you at least no longer need to
accept blindly any judgment of you as deserving whatever happens because, somehow, it is strictly
your own inadequacy that has brought it about.
Instead, you may notice the social, military, and industrial systems that police borders and
protect trade in ways that control the flow of resources throughout the entire capitalist system. This
control of resource distribution is difficult to see because the interconnectedness of the system is
“below ground”—an invisible root structure. And so Dylan intones:
We live in a political world
Where mercy walks the plank
Life is in mirrors
Death disappears
Up the steps into the nearest bank.
The geo-political economy illustrates the increasing dynamics of distantiation (in which decisions
made far away directly affect life at the local level) and dis-embeddedness (a sense that one’s
immediate context has no bearing on one’s own well-being anymore). Taken together, the twin
dynamic of distantiation and dis-embeddedness is a hallmark of the modern experience of
globalization where the sense of the “local” has been completely appropriated by the “global.”
How are the masses to be convinced such a system is in any way in their best interests? By
reducing the concept of value or meaning, as much as possible, to either rates of production or
rates of consumption and insisting that a current geo-political economy is the only possible way to
“grow” this economy (i.e. increase the profit margin). An example of this would be regarding
something beneficial to others as not worth producing because it would be too difficult to
”monetize.” Developing pharmaceuticals for diseases of the so-called third world are rarely
undertaken—not because people suffer from such diseases any less, but because they are not a
“consumer market” and no drug developed to their benefit is likely to create a large return
investment for the various stockholders.
Where economics used to be seen as the study and application of fair distribution, it is now
presented as something that must, at all costs, be allowed to “develop.” Such a development is
conceived of as boundless. The economy must “grow” we are told. The reward of this growth in
production, we are told, will be an increase in the possibilities for consumption—for buying things.
We see ourselves reflected in the products we buy (“life is in mirrors”) and wars fought become
the unacknowledged foundation for this “growth” so “death disappears up the steps of the nearest
bank.” The “self” that we think we see in the product is actually the idea the product is designed
to promote (friendly, communal, powerful, seductive, etc.).
This quality is nowhere in the product, but an effect of advertising. In ads, the particular
qualities most often presented—a sense of belonging or purpose, for example—are powerful
appeals precisely because they are no longer easily experienced in everyday life. The product can’t
help with this; consequently, buying the product does not “work” really, which only prompts us to
“try again” (consume more). The rise of fascism in the 1930’s accelerating into World War II,
showed an early, ferocious example of just how powerful a geo-political machine could become
in the era of mass media (newspapers, radio, film) mass production (the assembly line, the factory)
mass transportation (trains, planes and automobiles) and mass consumption (malls).
In the end, after the death of approximately twenty million people (to be added to the ten
million who died in World War I), fascism and Nazism were defeated militarily, but not before
some disturbing modern truths became all too clear. As Joseph Goebbels, the inventor of modern
propaganda and head of propaganda for the Nazi party put it, “if you tell a lie big enough, and keep
repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Of course, the lie can be maintained only
for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military
consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to
repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the
greatest enemy of the State.
With radio, newspapers, and other forms of mass-media it became so much easier to lie, so
much more often, to so many more people, all at once and in the same way, over and over gain.
Propaganda is a form of lying: it is a political form of lying. It is the art of persuading people to
act in a way that is not in their best interests (and/or that goes against their core values) in order to
further the best interests of the people formulating the propaganda. It is a way to cheat people
while persuading them you are anxious about their welfare and willing to work selflessly on their
behalf. It is a con game, a “stacked deck” as Dylan says in “Political World.”
One way to think of propaganda is to think of a shell game—where you put a pea under one of
three shells and then move them about so quickly you may thing you know where the pea is; in
fact, you have lost track, and now the pea is wherever you are told it is—if it is even there anymore
at all.
In 1920, William Butler Yeats said, “the center cannot hold.” Now the center holds; it’s
just not really the center. Or, it’s the center in the way that the death star in Star Wars is a centre.
The death star is the “center” of a self-proclaimed Empire—not because it is a center in any integral
way--but because it is capable of destroying anything around it, and thereby making everything
else the perimeter. Despite all the talk about the need to “create more jobs,” the primary benefactors
of a capitalist industry—those who own the means of production and dictate the terms of
consumption—often prefer high unemployment to a situation where they have to compete for
scarce labor.
The business model of Walmart is a case in point—a sort of “death star” that approaches a
community from the outside only to impose itself as the new “center, banishing or annihilating all
that it distances. First it comes into town and secures tax breaks for building a center because it
promises to hire a great deal of people. Then it wells products manufactured overseas for poverty
wages, thus underselling the traditional markets already in the town. As these local businesses go
out of business, more and more people agree to work for Walmart. As Walmart becomes the
primary employer, it can dictate terms more and more: los hourly wages with little chance for
meaningful raises. These low paid employees cannot afford the prices of local merchandise. They
themselves shop at Walmart, further decimating the local economy.
Just recently (December 2013) a furor broke out because a Walmart put out empty bins
inviting employees to help even less fortunate employees by donating food. Helping out someone
in need is, of course, a nice gesture—but this is a case of people near the poverty line helping those
who have slipped below it entirely, all of which ignores the larger issue which is Walmart’s profit
margins are huge and they could afford to pay wages that would eliminate actual hunger as an
issue for its own employees. The competitive situation among workers sometimes emerges with
particular bitterness when lay-offs lead to conflicts between workers with seniority and groups
who seek a foothold in a particular industry. The conflict can easily become racial—desperate
workers feeling threatened because even more desperate recent immigrants are willing to do the
work for even lower wages. In a situation of job scarcity any newcomers are perceived as a threat.
Workers, instead of feeling solidarity and organizing on the basis of their common interests, find
themselves pitched and played off against each other. The racism and sexism that can frequently
be found among workers is one way in which the general alienation of workers from each other
has found a concrete expression. Once again, this atmosphere of mutual suspicion protects the
owners from having to deal with collective job actions.
Dylan’s song is radical in the sense that he knows he cannot possibly unravel all the lies
presented as truth by people manipulating power, and manipulating it all the more by making it
appear that what they do is “fair.” This is the way Darth Vadar and the Evil Emperor manipulate
power from so far above: nobody even knows they’re there. Nor can Dylan expose all the
propaganda you may have mistaken as good advice. All he can do is tell you your world is always
political—the whole world, all the time. This is the world we will explore over the next twelve
chapters.
Another War to End All Wars
This systematic brutality was part of the total war that was WWII; a war in which there
was a new brutality of civilian bombings, total bureaucratic involvement, and extensive
compartmentalization that involved all social structures. In sum, three things made WWII a “Total
war”:
1) the devastation of the Holocaust
2) the detonation of the atomic bomb
3) and the fact that both of the above were made possible through systematic
compartmentalization
This compartmentalization was made possible by the dominant myths of modernity that we
discussed throughout A10 (technological progress, bureaucratic efficiency, scientific innovation)
as well as through the careful dissemination of the myths of perfection and satisfaction. We see
these PEPSI myths in most of our current ads. They may be used in what seems to be a less
“political” way, such as in cosmetic ads and other ads, but they still “get under our skin” and make
us feel that what we do and consume determines who we are. However, we see these ads used in
a much more overtly political way in propaganda, such as that widely disseminated ads and movies
by the Nazi’s as part of their war effort. For instance, in the propaganda poster below, which was
disseminated by the NAZI’s to promote eugenics (the killing of people deemed no longer capable
of making a contribution to society), we see an Aryan man holding up two physically challenged
men.
Roughly translated, the text reads as follows: “These genetically ill people will cost our people’s
community 50,000 marks over the course of each one’s lifetime. Citizen, that is our money.” A
key word here is “genetically” as this becomes a way to stigmatize ethnic groups and other
“undesirable groups” such as homosexuals.
This kind of brutal dehumanization operates on the basis of the myths of perfection and
efficiency, two myths that Hitler and his propaganda machine exploited ferociously, to the point
that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, based the entire Nazi platform upon them:
“Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the
hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked … Our objectives are different: We must have
a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.” Of course “feeding the hungry” is more than
“starting with the individual. In fact, feeding the hungry is a way to start with community and
with shared responsibility, both characteristics that promote empathy and compassion. Breeding
a super race is the epitome of individualism—sacrificing all shared feeling to a pre-determined
desire to dominate.
This and other such posters privilege the ideal of Aryan perfection (white skin, blond hair,
blue eyes), something that Hitler’s head filmmaker also focused on in her 1934 documentary,
Triumph of the Will, which opens with four title cards that communicate the way the Nazi party
viewed their military pursuits as a pursuit of satisfaction (or, at the very least, the release from
suffering)
1) 20 years after the outbreak of the world war
2) 16 years after the start of the German suffering
3) 19 months after the start of Germany’s rebirth
4) Adolph Hitler flew once again to Nuremburg to hold a military display.
The rest of the propaganda film capitalizes on the myths of modernity in ways that position
Germany as fully justified and capable of using weaker, less efficient humans as standing reserve:
First, it is presented as a massive human machine, as seen in the huge military crowd shots. The
Nazi’s are themselves depicted as machine like in formation and as healthy and strong in the crowd
shots of Aryan youth:
As such they seem poised to use weaker humans as standing reserve.
In closer shots we see young, well-fed, satisfied men and more youthful aryan profiles.
Almost like perfect robots themselves, these young men seem poised to either use or be used by
others, to either consume or be consumed.
Along with the myths of progress, efficiency, perfection, satisfaction, and innovation, Hitler
capitalized on the myth of innovation and progress, using posters and military displays to show
Germany’s superiority to all the world in the1937 Paris World Fair that ran mere months after
Hitler’s planes had bombed Guernica a small town in Spain fighting against a fascist dictator, and
less than a year before Hitler’s forces invaded Poland in what most historians agree was the official
beginning of the second world war. This Mercedes poster, below, hung in the German Pavilion,
under the guise of showcasing “new technology, virtually shouts out the invasions to come.
The beautifully arranged aircrafts in the pavilion similarly show the threat of Germany’s military:
What we see again and again is the fetishization of technology, where machines are seen as
beautiful objects, not as tools for murder and genocide. In other words, we see what Nazi
sympathizer and world-reknowned philosopher Martin Heidegger refers to as the “essence of
technology,” which, according to Heidegger, is not the machines themselves but a “technological
mode of thinking,” What this means is that technology infiltrates human existence more intimately
than anything humans could create (Michael Henry Heim on Heidegger, 61). The danger of
technology, in this context, lies in the transformation of the human being, by which human actions
and aspirations are fundamentally distorted. The problem is not that machines can run amok, or
even that we might misunderstand ourselves through a faulty comparison with machines. The
problem is that technology enters the inmost recesses of human existence, transforming the way
we know and think and will.
Technology is, in essence, a mode of thinking that brings about a particular experience of
human existence, one that is forward-looking and utopic, but also, one that never seems able to
bring this future about and becomes predatory and paranoid (as is still the case in recent movies
such as The Matrix and The Huger Games). As it demands more and more resources, time, and
labor, it also overwhelms any resistance to it by presenting itself as the only possible way forward.
It is embodied by the eyes of the totalitarian regime, perfectly depicted in the world fair poster,
which was everywhere in Paris in 1937 during the months before the war began:
This poster captures not only the fetishization of technology but also the paranoia about who sees
what. At the world fair, there was much more tangible evidence of this paranoia, as well. For
instance, none of the major nations distributed information about the materials and processes used
in their industrial exhibits. Knowledge was the hoarded property of the nation that discovered and
applied it. Guards were posted in every pavilion to stop visitors from photographing the
exhibits. One architect was making sketches of the night-time illumination patterns of the French
buildings, only to have his drawings confiscated and destroyed by the exposition gendarmes. The
attempt to show a world united by technology and its various wonders, showed the opposite:
Nations sequestered in their hate, where “in the nightmare of the dark,/All the dogs of Europe
bark”:
The German pavilion on the left and the Russian pavilion on the right “squared off” one against
the other in manner that foretold of anything but impending peace.
In her 1939 novel, Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys tells us of a dream one of her
characters has after visiting the Paris Exposition:
Everywhere there are placards printed in red letters: This Way to the Exhibition, This Way
to the Exhibition. But I don't want the way to the exhibition--I want the way out. There are
passages to the right and passages to the left, but no exit sign. Everywhere the fingers point
ant the placards read: This Way to the Exhibition.... I touch the shoulder of the man walking
in front of me. I say: 'I want the way out.’ But he points to the placards and his hand is
made of steel.
A later dream presents a surreal image of machinery taking over and depicting a life that has
disappeared into mirrors:
All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable
flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the
eyelashes stiff with mascara. When I look more closely I see that only some of the arms
have these eyes— others have lights. The arms that carry the eyes and the arms that carry
the lights are all extraordinarily flexible and very beautiful. But the grey sky, which is the
background, terrifies me.
The signs that were everywhere stating “this way to the Exhibition,” might just as well have said
“This way to world War II.”
Nor were all the signs merely metaphorical. In April of 1937, Hitler leant out his air force
to the fascist Army trying to topple the Democracy in Spain. The raid was seen not only as a way
to further Hitler’s goals, but also a chance to check out the technical capacity of new airplanes and
bombs, as reported by Herman Goring at his trial in Nuremberg for war crimes:
I urged him (Adolph Hitler) to give support [to fascist leader Franco] under all
circumstances, firstly, in order to prevent the further spread of communism in that theater
and, secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe at this opportunity in this or that technical
respect.
The response to this by Picasso became his famed painting “Guernica”—first exhibited at the
Spanish pavilion in the 1937 Paris expo:
Six months previously, on April 26, 1937, the bombing of Guernica had taken place. Essentially
the first aerial bombardment of World War II by modern aircraft, the bombing of the small town
of Guernica is also notable for the degree to which the entire town, and all its civilians, were
targeted. Guernica had no profile as a military installation, and the ferocity of the bombing seemed
intended more as a spectacle of rapid, total destruction--both for Spain and the rest of the world.
Even the timing of the bombing was set to assure maximum civilian damage: April 26 was a
Monday, market day, and therefore the majority of civilians would be out and about.
The bombing of Guernica by the German Luftwaffe, lacking as it did any serious credibility
as a military tactic, can be more accurately understood as the instant creation of a spectacle of
complete destruction-- a spectacle of an indomitable power able to swoop down at will, either
when provoked, or at a moment of its own choosing, and leave nothing but death and shattered
buildings in its wake. In the context of the Luftwaffe bombing of Guernica only six months
previously, the architecture of the German Pavilion-- topped by an eagle with its wings
outstretched, looking down on the Russian Pavilion --also must be seen as a carefully engineered
spectacle--this time of a dominating power poised to strike again.
When Picasso was asked by the Spanish government to paint a mural for the Spanish
Pavilion, his initial idea was something along the lines of "the artist in his studio." After he heard
of the bombing of Guernica, and saw pictures in the various newspapers, he changed his plans and
began Guernica. The only indication Picasso was aware of the theme of the Exposition--electricity
and technology-- appears as the "sun" at the top of the painting. One can see the filament wires,
effectively reducing the sun to an incandescent light bulb; the odd glaring light that radiates from
it is stark, and cruel. The range of its illumination is narrow, a further comment, perhaps, on how
little is actually illuminated by a celebration of technology that seeks to ignore how much of this
new technology will go toward re-armament and other weaponized functions.
In any event, the ominously belligerent exhibition of peace and progress ended. The
medals were distributed, and the conquering exhibitors of 44 nations politely applauded each
other during the closing ceremonies on November 2, 1937. Soon the participants departed to their
fortified cities and prepared to arm human pride with the unprecedented destructive power of
weaponized technology for the forthcoming tournament of blood. In the City of Light, Paris, the
lamps were extinguished. The ultimate confrontation was at hand. The airplanes so proudly
displayed in the Aeronautics Pavilion would soon be fanning across the globe to deliver deadly
payloads to London, to Dresden, to Hiroshima.
The International Exposition had been an attempt to “find a way out.” It particularly
worked hard promoting the myth that the “progress” of technology would assure that there was
enough of all that might be considered important for everyone. In fact, rapid advances in
technology seemed to be bringing about the opposite situation: as the possibility of controlling
others became technically possible at a level never even imagined before, the mania to impose
self-serving policies based on prejudice, racism and greed also escalated to an unprecedented level.
The holocaust where six million innocent people died was not the first such atrocity in history, but
it was the first one aided and abetted by technology. The death camps were run as factories
devoted to eliminating people as quickly and efficiently as possible, after first working them for
slave labor as long as possible. At every step, and in every way, the efficiency and precision of
the system was honed to a fine point, even including meticulous record keeping as the mass murder
“progressed” (also dubbed, with the typical exaggeration of technological phrasing, as “the final
solution”).
The irony of how well documented it is stems from the fact that it is the perpetrators
themselves who recorded, in triplicate, every order, every transfer, every bit of confiscated goods.
Indeed “record keeping” seemed to be a way to translate the stark reality of what they were doing
into a problem of logistics and accounting rather than morality.
How could there have been such a failure to see? Such willful blindness? The myth of
progress is so dominant that even Hitler’s brutal devastation of a defenseless town—the town of
Guernica that inspired Picasso’s painting, nonetheless earned him Time magazines “Man of the
Year” just a few short months later:
Time Magazine noted then, as it still often notes today, that their “man of the year” is not
necessarily admirable or heroic, but rather a figure that has been the most central in instigating ad
determining world events. In the terms we are discussing here, that is to say the leader of the
political world, and, by extension, the leader of the economic world, as well. All this speaks to the
furthering of the “self” with its chronic hunger for acquisition and acknowledgement, and we see
that where all life is seen only in terms of the potential for monetization, the celebration of the self
threatens to become the death of the soul.
The Personal is Political:
From “Dover Beach” (1867) to “The Dover Bitch” (1967)
This death-of-soul/emergence-of-self is something that the Victorian poet, Matthew Arnold,
depicts with remarkable precision in his 1867 poem, “Dover Beach.” As we discussed at length in
A10 and in Where All the Ladders Start, Arnold resembles modern poets W.H. Auden and William
Butler Yeats in that he, too, makes “a vineyard of the curse” of his time by “farming” his “verse.”
However, the curse of his time differs from that of poets in post-WWI Europe, and so, too, do his
verses. He is less interested in the geopolitical “turning” of the “widening gyre” and more
interested in turning inward, to “love,” so as to manage the anxiety that modernity provokes within
him:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
The speaker compares the loss of faith–what I have referred to in A10 as “the loss of transcendental
certitude”–with the roar of a retreating ocean leaving the rocky beach naked and exposed. The
natural landscape, no longer a source of comfort as it was for the Romantics, becomes sinister. It
merely appears to have joy love and light, but is in fact utterly indifferent. The superstructure (what
is seen) proves a pleasing yet ultimately treacherous façade (like Dorian Gray’s handsome face in
The Picture of Dorian Gray and Kurtz’s noble ideas in The Heart of Darkness), while the
infrastructure (what lies beneath the surface or behind the facade) is hard, cold, and dreary.
On the one hand, Arnold’s poem shows the strain brought about by the publication of
Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species only eight years prior in 1859. As we discussed last term,
previous to Darwin, there was a sense of nature as fixed and decided by God. Darwin shattered
this idea, revealing that species evolved through natural selection with no central divine guiding
hand at the helm. He also revealed that there was no way to “see” this natural selection and
evolution, but that it was happening nonetheless, right before our eyes.
If Darwin presented an existential dilemma—that we are the result of the forces we have
to contend with, rather than the result of some transcendent being’s will—
he also became one of an increasing chorus of scientific, philosophic, and other voices, offering a
curious compensation for a loss of any “top down” notion of divine world order. If life is not a
great chain of being, determined by God, it becomes a great clock. We may be alone in the world,
and it may be indifferent to us, but so much the better: we can study it, learn its secrets, master it,
even enslave it, and not feel bad since it IS indifferent to us. So the sense of being alone in an
indifferent universe becomes an odd strength, and we set ourselves against nature, see science as
the leveraging point that will put us above it, outside of it, beyond, not subject to its laws because
we have learned them.
With the loss of a sense of a higher power comes a loss in focus, and with this loss, comes
a state of anxiety. In this state of anxiety, the speaker appeals to one person to somehow solve all:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as one a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. (my emphasis/italics)
The speaker’s initial defense against the anxiety of losing his faith is that he must turn away from
the eternal and the divine toward the “other.” She is a woman standing next to him, looking out at
the same scene. He begs her to cling to him, as he offers his pledge to cling to her, so they can be
something other than two lost soldiers in the misty fog of war, surrounded by the clashes and
clangs of mortal combat, with no way to distinguish friend from enemy, no direction home, no
understanding of the point of the conflict, and no faith in an ultimately benevolent outcome—or
even an end to the conflict at all except death. This love is now the only thing that can stave off
complete anarchy. This is a faith based not on transcendental certitude but on mutual adaptability,
faith in a Darwinian process of survival of the fittest. One problem with it is that while he is turning
to someone other than himself, he is doing it for himself. He turns to her not out of curiosity about
her spirit, but in a panic about the state of his own soul. What he needs from her is driving what
he wants her to be. A more interdependent approach would be to find out her own concerns, how
she faces the dilemma of the meaning of life. This poem, while beautifully expressed, is all about
his state of anxiety, not hers.
We see here how this speaker is struggling between what Arnold refers to in a different
poem as “two worlds . . . one dead, and the other powerless to be born.” He is struggling between
a faith in the more traditional system based on religious traditions, presuming an omniscient, allloving, all-knowing God and the emerging modern secular culture with its presumption we are all
on our own and must do the best we can to cultivate our individualism in pursuit of success (usually
defined as how much wealth have you accumulated). The difference between religious and secular
beliefs is that religious beliefs presume a "transcendent truth" above and beyond this world, while
secular beliefs presume a relative truth that is in this world and of this world. Arnold’s poem is in
a panic about this move from a moral order where there is a “right” and a “wrong” overseen by an
all-seeing, all-judging God (you can fool everyone on Earth, but not God), and an ethical order
based more on treating others as we would wish to be treated, but without the overarching se sense
of an omniscient force with an unlimited potential to judge us and from whom nothing about our
actions or motivations can be hidden. Anthony Hecht’s 1967 poem, “The Dover Bitch” shows this
clearly.
Hecht wrote “Dover Bitch” one hundred years after “Dover Beach.” In it he makes a
statement about the individual experience in the modern world, one that will resonate with our
later readings this term. There is nothing overtly political about Hecht’s version, and there is
nothing overtly philosophical. In fact, it is the lack of any overall curiosity that is most striking
about the poem, and that makes it most strikingly different than Arnold’s version. Arnold is
wrestling with a vision of world order, of God, of the past, of the future and of the present. There
is a sense of universal crisis. By contrast, Hecht’s version draws out the provincial and trivial
dimension of the encounter:
So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, ‘Try to be true to me,
And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn’t judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’ Amour.
The narrator concedes “it’s true she had read Sophocles in a fairly good translation/And caught
that bitter allusion to the sea,” but the use of the Ocean in Arnold’s poem to suggest a collective
wonder about the meaning of life is quickly passed over in face of the extremely immediate: “But
all the time he was talking she had in mind/The notion of what his whiskers would feel like on the
back of her neck.” She had accepted Arnold’s invitation, according to Hecht’s narrator, in the
hopes that something would happen—both in terms of a relationship and a future. She is
comfortable measuring life by accomplishments and accumulation, thus feeling sad not about
mortality but “thinking of all the wine and enormous beds and blandishments in French and the
perfumes.” Presumably, the hotel she is in is not much and, on top of that, now she finds he has
brought her to this dingy place “all the way down from London, “ only to address her “as a sort of
mournful cosmic last resort.” We’re told this “is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.” The
implication is that she hoped an attraction he had for her might lead to something better—better,
that is, on a practical level: a relationship a home a car . . . something.
Then, there he is, going on about the roar of the waves and how everything is pointless.
And yet, on another level, maybe she should have listened more closely. Her life seems to have
stayed in the same pattern: “I still see her once in a while/And she always treats me right.” Is she
still waiting for that special someone or something that will change everything? Her “busy” life
seems to repeat itself over and over: “there she is, / Running to fat, but dependable as they come.”
On the one hand, this poem seems to be a “corrective” of “Dover Beach.” The narrator is mocking
the pompous, earnest, deeply conflicted man in “Dover Beach” and indicating what a disappointing
man he must be for a young woman to spend a weekend with “all the way down from London.”
But, on second glance, this narrator doesn’t let the woman speak, either. And while he casually
claims to be able to give her what she wants—is that really likely to be the odd hook up every year
or so, and the occasional gift of a bottle of cheap perfume? No. Truth be told, this speaker takes
advantage of the woman, too. And it is here we see the difference one hundred years has wrought.
Yes, Arnold’s speaker is self-involved, anxious, even terrified. But he is awake to his situation.
There is sincerity in his struggle. Hecht’s narrator, by contrast, takes things as they come, refusing
to wonder about anything beyond superficial casual observation. In the end, his cool detachment
seems rather worse than Arnold’s anxious solicitude. Arnold’s moral angst in “Dover Beach” has
been replaced by Hecht’s ethical relativism: anything goes, as long as someone continues to go
along with it.
The woman, older now, still lonely for whatever reason, still responds to the occasional
and rather paltry offerings of the narrator. This is enough for him. He does not wonder, in terms
of some “higher” concept of right and wrong, if this is a moral way to treat someone. To give him
credit, there is no evidence of overt manipulation, but there is ample evidence he is casually
benefitting form the woman’s easy availability. We can presume the woman doesn’t complain at
his sporadic attentions and he compliments her on what a good sport she is (“he’s really all right.”);
but with lines like “there she is running to fat but dependable as they come” we can sense a sad
life developing for her, about which the narrator could not care less. There is no sense of
“accumulation” in their relationship; it is never more or less than it has ever been no matter when
they meet or for how long they continue to meet. Indeed, his comment she is “running to fat”
suggests these occasional “booty calls” may be drawing to a close—and then, for her, what will
there be? Superficial expectations of some grand future will finally crumble into dust. “I give her
a good time,” the narrator boasts, but only in the narrow confines of a one-night stand.
In fact, other than the odd gift of cheap perfume, he has given her nothing at all. The name
of the perfume—“night of love” subtly indicts the wider culture of 1968 which emphasizes
excitement and passion over commitment and devotion; in a “disposable culture” where we throw
things out when they break or something “better” comes along, relationships too begin to reflect
this same idea of “keep your options open.” But without sacrifice, community and commitment,
the culture becomes increasingly superficial with each member seeking to move from immediate
satisfaction to immediate satisfaction without noticing that they are merely consuming as a way of
life rather than actually experiencing their life.
We don’t know this woman’s job in “Dover Bitch.” Presumably it’s a low level one that
just allows her to get by. Beyond that, she seeks to supplement an impoverished existence with
barely credible romantic notions. As a “modern” woman, she would appear to have “leisure time”
for having “fun.” But does she really? One gets the sense that this leisure time—which is all the
narrator knows or cares to know about her—is really an increasingly desperate attempt to ignore
the disappointments of her life. The poem is written in such a way that we sense the “other” poem
not present here—a poem capturing her own internal experience of which the narrator of this poem
knows nothing, and prefers it that way. Her “leisure time,” in other words, is time spent attempting
to compensate for a sense of separation from others, a sense of separation from herself, a sense of
isolation, of anonymity, of substitutability. But her occasional “Nuit d’Amour” only emphasizes
this state of affairs rather than alleviating it or pointing in a new direction.
The speaker of Hecht’s poem, with his lazy, monotonous attitude about occasional sex—
what we charmingly refer to today as “a booty call”—seems oddly like a zombie, mindlessly
consuming a trite pleasure from time to time without any sense of accumulation or satisfaction. As
with a zombie consuming a body, this woman’s body seems pretty much as good as any body’s
body when he’s in the mood, or bored, or just in the neighborhood. Zombies don’t eat you because
they are attracted to the way you make them feel about themselves (Arnold), they eat you because
you’re there. That’s one thing we can say about them: they don’t discriminate. Nor does the speaker
of Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch.” Hecht, gives us his approximation of “the voice of the other”; well,
no voice, actually, as she never speaks in the poem, but rather what she is thinking as he is talking.
One thing she thinks is that he sure does go on about himself, and it’s kind of depressing, or as she
wittily puts it “to have been brought / All the way down from London, and then be addressed / As
a sort of mournful cosmic last resort/Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.” The last phrase
hints at her awareness that this is a negotiation. She still has her looks (“and she was pretty”), and
if this guy is not going to do anything for her, except invite her to dream up different ways to calm
him down, then she is out of there and back on the dating circuit while she still looks hot.
Men and women become mutual exploiters within this post-modern economic system of
negotiation and exchange. Love seems bereft of anything sacred or meaningful. This is love in
Dylan’s (and our) modern political world—which is to say it’s not love at all, as this is a world
where “love don’t have any place.” This model of mutual apathy and exploitation does seem empty
and dead compared to the desperate desire depicted in “Dover Beach,” but is either model really
what we want? While one is zombie-esque, its predecessor is vampiric, as Arnold’s speaker craves
the “blood” of love to stabilize him in the modern world. How can we authentically love other
human beings in our time, where we either drain others to sustain ourselves, or, especially with
WWII and the rise of consumerism that followed it, consume others in a restless fear of having no
self to sustain.
Given these vampiric and zombie-esque models, love no longer evokes mystery and
wonderment (which are increasingly demoted and trivialized as merely evidence of a lack of
understanding). Instead, it is viewed increasingly as a sort of bank, “standing by” until its
usefulness can be made self-evident. Nature, too, including human nature, is seen solely for what
it can do. Nowadays, to be is to be soon doing. Of course it’s not; or, rather, doing is one expression
of being, but being encompasses more than doing. There is an excess of being beyond what doing
can possibly absorb. This excess is not acknowledged, and this excess even makes us
uncomfortable. No wonder we like to keep busy. No wonder we make up ‘to do’ lists as a new
form of the ten commandments of what we need to do. And the political world clamors in our ear
that all there is to being is doing: That what we do, what we have, and what we consume is who
we are. And that, on the flip side, what we fail to do, have, and consume marks our failure to fulfill
“ourselves”.
Once again the zombie shows us the end product of this thinking: the zombie is a perfect
example of doing without being. What is frightening about zombies is not that they are ‘other’—
as is the vampire—but that they are not other: they are us, with all remnants of plausible deniability
removed. Even in the enormously popular series twilight, Edward is a vampire that is only defined
by what he does—he becomes a boyfriend, he becomes a husband, he becomes a father. Edward
is an immortal vampire, but his life ambition seems to be to get married, settle down, take on a
mortgage, and argue with his wife about who’s turn it is to change the kid’s diapers.
In a sense, it seems that this modern retelling of the vampire tale transforms the vampire
into the zombie. Edward is defined by what he does and what he consumes. Consciousness, instead
of an awareness of an immeasurable becoming (what Wordsworth called “something evermore
about to be”), becomes a vehicle for doing that is measurable in terms of agreed upon
accomplishments. What can be done by man is cited as man’s essence (as Descartes declares, “I
think, therefore I am”), the self-evident purpose of all this doing/thinking becomes discovering the
internal function of nature in order to manipulate it more and more effectively into a perpetual
yielding up of itself as a resource—Arnold’s precise attitude to his girlfriend as he turns from
Nature indifferent to him to a woman he now needs to “be true to him.” In Waiting for Godot,
Samuel Beckett interrogates the death of the Cartesian Cogito after WWII, exposing the
hollowness at the core of the self, as we will elaborate in the following chapter. Where Descartes
famously said ‘I think therefore I am,’ Beckett amended this to ‘I suffer therefore I may be.’