Literary-Historic Digest 9/14/24

Christopher Lasch, Henry James, Hergé

Hello! I’m working toward getting more of these to you, more often, as I’m still stumped about some of the more longform essays I’ve been promising forever. I hope you won’t begrudge my recycling a little capsule comic review from last year!

The Historian as Skeptic: Christopher Lasch and the New Radicalism in America

This is not Lasch’s most famous book, but it contains what was in some respects the central theme of his oeuvre, the accusation at his fellow intellectuals that ripples out through his subsequent works. In this view, around the turn of the twentieth century the American radical tradition had made a wrong turn, succumbing to an alienated hostility toward middle class life and an impulse toward cultural engineering in lieu of more tangible reform efforts.

Equally important was a tendency to see cultural issues as inseparable from political ones; so that "education," conceived very broadly, came to be seen not merely as a means of raising up an enlightened electorate but as an instrument of social change in its own right. Conversely, the new radicals understood the end of social and political reform to be the improvement of the quality of American culture as a whole, rather than simply a way of equalizing the opportunities for economic self-advancement.

The book is structured very similarly to the last historical text I talked about with you, Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition and the Men who made it, as a series of loose biographical sketches of exemplary figures, or in the case of the discussion of the first world war, cultural moods over the period in question. Figures like Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lincoln Steffens, Jane Adams, as well as Normal Mailer and Dwight MacDonald are used to illustrate broader points about the topic at large.

Lasch’s analysis of the twentieth century intellectual identifies at this point two primary errors. The first consists in a feeling of thoroughgoing alienation from the middle class culture that produced many of the subjects, while the second is the aforementioned conviction in cultural solutions, a faith that it was the inner life of the human rather than the material conditions of poverty or class which held the true answers to social ills.¹

On the one hand, they proposed to improve the quality of American life by means of public administration. On the other hand, they proposed to attack such public problems as the conflict between capital and labor by eliminating the psychological sources of conflict, by "educating" capitalists and laborers to a more altruistic and social point of view-in other words, by improving the quality of men's private lives.

This tendency it seems to me is very much still with us. In the age when The New Radicalism was published it was perhaps identified with the left, but it has spread far and wide since then, and is today associated with virtually every major faction in American politics. We are told that we would have a great nation again if we all went back to church, or if we used different words to express our frustration. We even speak of politics as a “culture war.” That being said, a great deal of this book is quite dated, a capsule of an era when there was a true state-corporate monoculture, when Norman Mailer could be said to be on the bleeding edge of radicalism. Lasch does have some remarkably strong passages in the last third of the text about the role of the intellectual in Cold War liberalism which should give some pause to those of us (myself very much included) who look back toward that era with some fondness and admiration.

The liberalism of the fifties and sixties, with its unconcealed elitism and its adulation of wealth, power, and "style," was firmly rooted in a social fact of prime importance: the rise of the intellectuals to the status of a privileged class, fully integrated into the social organism. If the new radicalism represented the world view of the intellectuals emergent, the liberalism of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era was the ideology of a mature class jealous of its recognized position in the social order.

I’m tempted to say, somewhat unreasonably as I really haven’t read enough of his corpus to justify this, that The New Radicalism is Lasch’s best book: as I expressed last time, I suspect that you can go a little too wild with his insights. In particular it’s hard to beat back a suspicion-once again, probably unreasonable!- of the way Lasch, in his later role as popularizer of the theories of the Freudian sociologist and cultural theorist Philip Rieff, occupies a special role in our time as part of a dyad with Camille Paglia, a favorite historian of a sort of thinker interested in an intellectual justification for cultural conservatism or reaction which transcends the merely partisan or parochial.² In this guise he walks among us today even in death, a thinker at least nominally of the left who can be used to justify the various moral-cultural interdictions of the society which produced us, or earlier stages thereof.

Tintin and the Postmoderns: a Triptych (08/2023)

It’s been a real tradition for a while now on this newsletter to alternate a comic book with some sort of serious work of literature or nonfiction, and I don’t intend to break that trend now-in fact, I revisited some childhood favorites of mine. When it comes to comic books as books, my first real love was Belgian comics, especially Herge’s Adventures of Tintin, which seemed more dignified, somehow more mature than the superhero antics of American comics I encountered as a child.³ As an adult I probably agree-at least with regard to the era of comics Herge was competing with. Tintin begins a decade or so before the creation of the superhero, and if we count the unfinished and posthumous Alph-Art, ends roughly contemporaneously with the early works of Alan Moore.⁴ Tintin makes for a strange companion to Moore, originally the product of an editorial mandate at the far right-almost-fascist Catholic magazine that employed Herge for the first decade of the comics’ existence, it maintained for its entire run something of the slightly stunted quality such a sensibility often entails. The topic of my semi-review today is the concluding trio of 60s and 70s-era albums: The Castafiore Emerald, Flight 714 to Sidney and Tintin and the Picaros, three very different stories in which an aging (and frequently bored by the character) Herge did his best to deconstruct his own comic.

In The Castafiore Emerald, the cast remain at home for the entire book, suffering mishaps and an unexpected visit from the comic’s only consistent representative of femininity, the opera singer Bianca Castafiore. What results is an amusing sendup of the country house comedy of manners/mystery in which multiple Chekhov’s guns are set up and none of them are fired in an album where nothing finally happens.

Flight 714 to Sidney is a different story: an almost-parody of a Tintin story that leaps from extraordinary coincidence to extraordinary coincidence all the way to extraterrestrial rescue from an erupting Indonesian volcano. As a kid I remember disliking this one-there’s a mean-spiritedness to all three of these albums, but Flight is probably the most aggressively so, and the deus ex machina-via space alien ending seemed like a bridge too far-but as an adult it feels somehow appropriate, the ridiculousness of this sort of adventure story taken to its logical conclusion.

Tintin and the Picaros is another one I didn’t particularly like as a kid for all the reasons that stand out to me as somewhat inspired now-it feels like a commentary on how little our intrepid 1920s boy reporter belongs in this 1970s world of bell bottoms, corporate- Great Power backed coups, and scientific invasions of free will. It’s a mean, cynical-the image of the same jackbooted thugs patrolling the favela in different uniforms before and after General Alcazar’s coup is one of the most jarring pieces of satire in any of the Tintin albums- resolution to the series that feels somehow appropriate. Herge thought he had one more story in him after this one, but fate had other plans.

Henry James, Lionel Trilling, Irving howe & The Bostonians

The Bostonians has many virtues to recommend it as one of the best and most interesting books within its author’s vast oeuvre. One of two political novels (the other is The Princess Cassimassima) James released in the 1880s, it chronicles a struggle of will between two cousins, the crypto-lesbian suffragist Olive Chancellor and the southern reactionary lawyer Basil Ransom, over the allegiance and affections of the young Verena Tarrant. It is an often (uncharacteristically for James) very funny book, full of colorful characters and pointed satire.

It is also one of the more troubling entries in the nineteenth century American canon, in some sense a straightforwardly reactionary text which pulls apart and portrays as ridiculous the entire New England reform tradition, while striking a blow in the direction of the feminism of James’ day. Lionel Trilling described the book in 1953 as “a story of the parental house divided against itself, of the keystone falling from the sacred arch, of the sacred mothers refusing their commission and the sacred fathers endangered” and it is this body of criticism of the novel with which I am most familiar, and will thus turn today. Trilling writes:

And the fear of the loss of manhood, which we are familiar with in Yeats, in Lawrence, and in The Waste Land, is given reason for its existence everywhere in The Bostonians. The book is full of malign, archaic influences; it is suffused with primitive fear. It is not for nothing that Olive Chancellor's sister is named Mrs. Luna-with her shallow, possessive sexuality, which has the effect of conjuring away all masculine potency, she might as well have been named Mrs. Hecate. The very name of Olive Chancellor might suggest a deteriorated Minerva, presiding in homosexual chastity over the Athens of the New World.

It is certainly true that the modern reader is likely to be more sympathetic to Olive Chancellor-and less kindly disposed to Basil Ransom-than one imagines James intended, and certainly this was the case during my first reading. On the other hand neither character is especially appealing, and on revisiting the text I was struck by the essential repugnance of both persons contesting over Verena, and the general squalidness of the entire social world sketched out by James.

It is a brilliant novel and it is for those of us who are liberals and sexual egalitarians, a profoundly uncomfortable one. James appears – for it does not seem to me that the midcentury critics who thought that the novel is on the whole more in the party of Ransom were entirely incorrect – to ultimately side with Ransom in more than a strictly narrative sense. As Irving Howe wrote in 1956:

Despite all of James' qualifications in regard to Ransom, he grants him certain attractions and powers. Ransom is no poor shabby gentleman watching life glide away; he is a man of energy and will, as hard as Olive and less frenetic. And for James, always a little uneasy before the more direct forms of masculine energy, there is a fascination in seeing this energy exert itself. But the logic of the book itself demands that Ransom win. For if the struggle between Ransom and Olive over Verena is a struggle between competing ideologies over a passive agent of the natural and the human, then it is a struggle between ideologies that are not equally in opposition to the natural and the human. When she is finally driven to her choice, Verena chooses in accordance with those rhythms of life which Olive bluntly violates but Ransom merely exploits.

At the same time, James does paint a wholly unambiguous picture for us. His resolution seems to gesture in the direction of two related outcomes. The restoration of gender rules, a man of James’ time or a certain sort of ours would say the restoration of nature will prevail, and it will be unhappy. There is nothing in this book of the rapturous, indeed even fascist glory of the restoration of nature envisioned as man always over woman that one sometimes gets with Lawrence or his contemporaries. Like Twain’s Puddinhead Wilson, The Bostonians is perhaps above all else a cynical work.⁵

And yet the tragedy does endure, and is perhaps even more than the satire or the laughs what the reader is left with at the end of The Bostonians. There is more than a little shared DNA between James’ resolution and the less optimistic reading of the conclusion of The Graduate-in both one is left at the end with a distinct suspicion that this pair of young people have just done a very stupid thing. The image he leaves us with is after all not laughter but tears.

But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed.

1. I don’t question the veracity of Lasch’s argument about the novelty of this position in American life, but at the same time I did occasionally find myself wondering. After is not the dream of the intellectual engaging in social engineering to produce the best society by acting upon the inner life of the polis in some sense the inaugural vision of political philosophy which one finds in Plato? (Apologies to the neoplatonists and straussians)

2. This isn’t to discourage the reader from looking into Paglia (or especially Rieff, who longtime readers will know I hold in great regard without agreeing with his overall worldview) so much as to question their role in today’s intellectual ecosystem.

3. In terms of what Scott McCloud calls Sequential Art my first love was newspaper comics, particularly the late-20th century classics whose era slightly overlapped with my childhood. Franco-Belgian comics came second, and then (and much more grudgingly) some of the better superhero comics in my college years. In spite of the somewhat stunted moral and political world (to say nothing of the basically nonexistent sexual world) of series like Tintin, Spirou or Asterix, I confess that there is some part of my that still indexes them as “more adult” than most non-auteur superhero comics!

4. It occurs to me that there is a thread of deconstructing boys-own-adventure stories which binds Moore’s Miracleman and certain elements of Watchmen to these last few Tintin albums.

5. I borrow the comparison from this review by Sharon Cameron, which I found while searching for recent criticism of the book. I found it perhaps overly philosophical to my tastes but at the same time interesting enough to present to you. Cameron charges the book with something like nihilism:

the satiric pleasures of The Bostonians’ plot and the thrill of James’s comedic writing are nowhere exceeded in his oeuvre. But these don’t compensate for, and in fact they contribute to, the novel’s ethical vacuity, and not only because James’s farce can’t be extricated from its mean-spirited glee at the imbecility of its characters. One source of the desolation—a strange but apt word for my experience of the novel’s enduring bleakness—are perspectives that cancel each other out or that are absent in the first place, as, in the novel, is the omission of James’s own point of view—never clear—on The Bostonians, which he once implausibly called “rather a remarkable feat of objectivity.”Thus, unlike “the figure in the carpet”—that image for a secret, discovery of which would explain everything in James’s story of that title—in The Bostonians, there’s a hole in the carpet, a void, nothing that identifies the overarching perspective that would allow us to decipher the target of the satire.

A charge that I could be persuaded by in some moods of reading.