The Valve - A Literary Organ | Eighties and Nineties Political Censoriousness: Where?

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Monday, December 12, 2005

Eighties and Nineties Political Censoriousness: Where?

Posted by Jonathan Goodwin on 12/12/05 at 12:08 PM

From a long review of John Worthen’s D. H. Lawrence: Life of an Outsider:

Now that the eighties and nineties fashion of censoriously political reading has come to seem a narrow cut, and nearly as dated as those postwar clichés about the sickness of civilized humanity, Lawrence can be rescued from both the moralists and the Lawrentians. No doubt his vitalism was a sick man’s dream of health, and the sickness sometimes corrupts the dream with misanthropy, misogyny, and self-despair. But it would take a robust human animal indeed not to suspect, reading Lawrence, the unused possibility of a quicker, deeper life just beneath the one we live, and not to feel, reading about the man, that he sometimes knew whereof he spoke.

What is Benjamin Kunkel thinking of, exactly? The “postwar clichés about the sickness of civilized humanity,” are, I think, easily distinguishable from recent norms of academic discourse; and several Kunkel-candidates come to mind, sure. But this is more of an asking you what you think post. An invitation to discussion.

Comments

If only to rescue a worthy post from undeserved comment-neglect: My take on Lawrence is colored for better or worse by the character based on him in Point Counterpoint, mostly for worse I suspect. Still I find it difficult to relate to the particular kind of “deeper life just beneath the one we live” that was being sought in the early 20th century. The particular sickness seems too foreign and the cure too easily imagined. A marketing industry that can invent neccessities and create the need for them seems like a potentially larger and certainly more insidious challenge for man and womankind and for literature than simple cultural collapse and approaching armageddon. I’m not sure what Kunkel is thinking, but I’m thinking that rescuing Lawrence from distorted readings and restoring him in what I presume would be a purer state might not help much if his ideas themselves seem dated to us.

By on 12/13/05 at 06:24 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Thank you, Lennet, but we here at the Valve decided long ago that the worthiness of a post was in inverse proportion to its number of comments.

I’m not sure that the evidence for a significant search for a “deeper life” is necessarily present in the post-war era. It has been used as a convenient summary of the intellectual history. The engineering of consent was developed and used on a large scale in the post-war period. Churchill, for instance, was a master propagandist during the General Strike.

By Jonathan on 12/13/05 at 10:39 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Lawrence used to be the “Modern” most favored by the establishment, true. And then he became much less fashionable, true. Some of this process happened during my adulthood. In the mid-1970s, I could still hear English professors call James Joyce a fake, to be left to the sentimental departmental drunk, whereas around 1990, I encountered an English professor who taught Joyce but would much rather have been teaching Lawrence, which seems like a fine indicator of establishment acceptance.

Since Worthen doesn’t like this change in fashion, he naturally wants to find an enemy to blame for it, but “political correctness” (which is, I’m sure, how “the eighties and nineties fashion of censoriously political reading” read in the first draft) is a pretty embarrassing choice. There are any number of reasons to be left cold by Lawrence’s writing, and the only “moralist” Worthen actually cites is—Martin Amis!

Since the shift away from Lawrence is very much to my own taste, I’m more inclined to wonder why his work became so popular in the first place. But, if we take Worthen’s summary as valid (as at least a valid example of establishment interpretation), it’s easy to picture how a martyred prophet of apolitical talk-rugged look-sickly primitivist individualism might appeal to post-WWII Anglo-American academics.

By Ray Davis on 12/17/05 at 10:55 AM | Permanent link to this comment

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Monday, December 12, 2005

Eighties and Nineties Political Censoriousness: Where?

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