Derrida deconstructs self...Googling books...Norman Mailer's primetime debut
By Kelly Jane Torrance
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida died Friday at the age of 74. But his ideas are alive and well. Derrida was the founder of the postmodern movement deconstructionism. For deconstructionists, there is no such thing as truth. Language is arbitrary; a text--a novel or a poem, for example--can contain an infinite number of meanings, each directly contradicting the others.
When there is no truth, there is no value. No reading of a work of literature is any closer to reality than any other, after all. One can't even say that any work of art is any better than any other--what criteria could one possibly use in a world where anything goes?
The idea of real, lasting values is at the heart of the culture wars--which are still not over. One of the great intellectual warriors on the side of truth and beauty is Roger Kimball. Managing editor of The New Criterion, the country's finest cultural journal, and author of such books as Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education, Kimball's latest foray into the elite has just been published. The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art (Encounter) is a succinct summary of everything that is wrong with art criticism today.
And there is much wrong with it. Some of the greatest geniuses in the history of Western civilization are under attack--in part, because they are great. Sometimes the assault is direct: for example, Marcel Duchamp's moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. But more often, the strike is subtle. Critics dedicate many, many words in books and articles to probing the great works of Western art, after all. The problem is, their concern is not with the art itself. "For theory as practiced in the academy today is primarily an instrument of politics, not inquiry," as Kimball notes. "It used to be that we studied history, including art history, in order to broaden our horizons, to challenge our preconceptions, to get beyond the narrow confines of our present-day culture." No more. Academics now use--in the worst sense of the word--art merely to advance a political agenda. As Kimball says, "what we get is not art history but a species of autobiography or political sermonizing."
This will be familiar to students of literature in the academy over the last few decades. Postmodernism first took hold in English and comparative literature departments. I well remember my own decision to switch fields of study after discovering that few of my professors actually cared about the great works of literature to which they were ostensibly introducing us, let alone about teaching us how to understand them. An introductory class on Shakespeare spent more time on the question of the Bard's sexual orientation than on his special use of language.
But it might surprise even academic veterans to discover that art history is no less immune, that even pictures are used so shamelessly. Through seven case studies, framed by an introduction and epilogue, Kimball shows to what the discipline of art history has been reduced. Each chapter focuses on a single painting (all handsomely reproduced in color) and, often, on a single, eminent critic's response to it. These responses invariably tell us more about the critic than the painting.
One of the most egregious examples is academic David M. Lubin on John Singer Sargent's lovely painting The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. The scene depicts four charming girls, between the ages of four and fourteen, scattered around a room. The youngest, Julia, sits and holds a doll in front of her, between her legs. A pretty scene, but not to Lubin, who inexplicably sees something sinister:
What this buffer zone protectively locks from our gaze and from the revealing light is J's pudendum, as though to disclaim it, deny it, forswear its existence. J may thus . . . be characterized as thoroughly presexual and wholly unavailable to sexual investigation, whether scientific, artistic, or prurient. Nevertheless, that she protects her genital zone reflects how deeply sexualized she is, or how effective an act of repression this painting . . . must achieve in order to abide by an ideology of sexual innocence.
Any viewer of Sargent's painting can see how preposterous such an analysis is. None of the innocent girls in the picture is "deeply sexualized," and it takes a singular mind to see them that way.
The Rape of the Masters is littered with such examples of critics using masterpieces to rail against patriarchy, racism, elitism, and civilization generally. Perhaps they realize that by adding, through the political prisms they cannot lose, what is not there in the work they serve only to make the art something less than what it is.
So why would one want to read an entire book of such nonsense? One reason is because Roger Kimball could make a grilled cheese sandwich fascinating. Perhaps laughing to keep from crying, he retains a sense of humor throughout that shines through on every page. Quoting one critic, he writes, "'Derrida has shown'--doesn't your heart leap up at that phrase?--" And on another: "The idea that language is futile is at the heart of the deconstructionist enterprise: this sort of writing makes it seem almost plausible."
Kimball also writes eloquently and passionately about the works under study. His appreciation of Mark Rothko's minimalist paintings--which he believes are "seductive" works that "exercise a powerful but hard-to-define charm"--made even a skeptic like myself reconsider. His own examinations of the paintings are everything the postmodernists' studies are not, and should serve as a model for those wondering what good criticism should look like.
The fact that they are so brief is the only weakness of the book. Kimball has certainly done academia, and the average art lover, a service by detailing and lampooning the nation's art academicians. But one is left wishing that The Rape of the Masters' 186 pages contained more of Kimball's searching prose and less of that of his enemies, who will much sooner be forgotten.
*****
Remember the uproar in the publishing community when Amazon.com launched its "Search Inside the Book" feature? Publishers feared that their wares would be freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Amazon had to reconsider, reining in some of its hopes. Many cookbooks, for example, are not searchable on the site.
Last week, Google, the king of search engines, unveiled a similar program. Google Print searches the texts of books and other printed materials online. Google will scan in books submitted by publishers for free. Already, a dozen companies have eagerly signed on. So what's the difference between Google Print and Amazon's Search Inside the Book?
Money, of course. Google will sell advertising on its search pages, generously sharing the profits with the publishers.
*****
Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, and Jasper Johns have all lent their voices to "The Simpsons." So why not Norman Mailer guest starring in an upcoming episode of...the WB's "Gilmore Girls"? The distinguished novelist and critic will play himself on the October 26 episode of the single-mother-and-daughter sitcom.
With one of his sons the editor of High Times magazine, perhaps the younger set actually considers the 81-year-old cool. Show creator Amy Sherman-Palladino tells Entertainment Weekly, "This is a series where we've said, implicitly, 'Read a book, read the classics; I know you're cute, but you can still wear lipstick and read Dickens.'"
Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and culture editor of Brainwash. Her website on culture can be found at www.kellyjanetorrance.com.
