"Pretentious Stupidity"

What always bugged me the most about the postmodern, deconstructionist drivel I was forced to study in college was not the trademark duo of impenetrable prose and lazy thinking. My frustration was that once you made the effort to get past all that and by sheer force of will figured out the great thinker's point, well, it was obvious. Not wrong, usually, just really obvious. Stupid obvious. Like, "a picture of a tree isn't itself a real tree" obvious, and I'm not even making that one up. That's why their writing is so muddled, because if they came out and said their point clearly, not only would their essays be a great deal shorter, but the reader's inevitable reaction would be, quite simply, "um, duh."
But lord, do they ever think they are clever. They'll come up with books and plays and entire artistic movements based on the earth-shattering observation that, say, actors are actually, you know, acting. As if it never occured to Shakespeare that the guy playing the king in Hamlet wasn't, in reality, his and the nation's sovereign. No, if only the bard had been a tad more clever, he would have had his characters reflecting on their own inescapable characterness, and then of course he would have written himself as a character into all the plays, too, right before throwing out the last few pages of each one, naturally, because endings are just so artificial.
But postmodern thinkers have no talent and no real intelligence, just a smug belief in their own cleverness, a cleverness which is nothing more than pointing out that which has always been obvious to everybody else and which has simply never been remarked upon before precisely because it was so obvious. They remind me more than anything of a ten year old who thinks he's a genius because he's figured out Santa Claus isn't real, then devotes his entire life to spreading the word. Maybe I'm nuts, but I much prefer the kid who plays along with the illusion, because it's fun for his folks and it's a good tradition. You know, the kid who isn't a giant tool.
These postmodernists are so consumed with stating the obvious about the artificiality of art that the actual truth of art, its beauty and its divinity, goes straight over their heads. But enough of my rambling, go here and read "Obstinate Orthodoxy" and have Chesterton explain it all. Very crudely excerpting:

So long as we are thinking of the thing as copied mechanically and for money, as a piece of monotonous and mercenary ornament,we naturally feel that the flower is in a special sense an artificial flower and that the moonlight is all moonshine.[...]But the moon is the moon and the rose is the rose; and we do not expect the real things to alter. [...] The moon will continue to affect the tides, whether we paint it blue or green or pink with purple spots. And the man who imagines that artistic revolutions must always affect morals is like a man who should say, "I am so bored with seeing pink roses painted on chocolate-boxes that I refuse to believe that roses grow well in a clay soil." [...] Falling in love remains radiant and mysterious, however threadbare be the thousandth repetition of a rhyme as a valentine or a cracker-motto. To see this fact is to live in a world of facts.To be always thinking of the banality of bad wallpapers and valentines is to live in a world of fictions.

Please excuse me as I anticlimax, because all of this is just a very long preamble for me to say that I really liked this review of Watchmen by Debbie Schlussel. She's getting attacked by "graphic novel" fans for highlighting their special brand of "pretentious stupidity," but I'm loving it. Because she's attacking exactly what I can't stand, this bizarre belief in one's own remarkable cleverness for noticing the obvious. As she puts it, "Guess what? We know there are bad people and that people are everyday people with problems. If you don't know that, and you think a movie like this is necessary to make the point, you're even more warped and stupid than I originally diagnosed." I love this part, too, when she attacks the perverted love for sexual violence against women, which its drooling fans justify in the name of edgy realism and sophisticated art:

You're a bunch of dummies with no moral compass, but liking this stupid comic book which pretends violence and the depraved is "edgy" or "sophisticated," makes you feel smart. [...] Quit your pretentious drivel about this being important because it's a "graphic novel." Memo to the creators of Richie Rich and Archie: You missed your calling. If only you'd called your product a "graphic novel" and added scenes of Archie raping Betty and Veronica and Jughead sawing off Reggie's Arms, you'd be in businesss. Dummies.

What she says goes not just for Watchmen, by the way, but for most of the movie industry ever since the seventies. We're so daring and edgy and sophisticated, we're incapable of making decent movies anymore. Argh. And so I end this post like I've ended so many others, thinking God Bless TCM.

p.s. yes, I did like the "graphic novel" The Dark Knight Returns. It's not hypocrisy, it's sophistication, deal with it.

UPDATE: Related, and very true :

[Our cultural critics'] highest words of praise are adjectives like
“shocking,” “disturbing,” “searing,” and “radical.” They swoon over films like
Towelhead, The Woodsman and The Reader that seek to wrong foot our moral senses
by presenting us with sympathetic child molesters and Nazis.
But the truth
is, any fool can pull off crap like that. It’s easy.
The single hardest thing
to do in the arts is not to shock or disturb or sear or radicalize—but to
delight.

Very much worth a read

Especially the Hall excerpts towards the end. The comparison between Hall and Harris tells you everything you need to know.

See also here. I'm with Dalrymple and the Dutchman, no question.

Camille Paglia

I'm a big fan of hers, and was thrilled to hear of her return to Salon. Even when you disagree with her (and her fiesty originality guarantees that you will), she is, well, just somethin' else. I think her writing comes closer than anyone's to capturing the ineffable nature of thought, all the simultaneous asides, memories, jumps, ideas that form each moment of consciousness - the way your mind remains undaunted by crossroads, as it insists on going all ways at once, dragging you along, pulling you apart for the ride whether you like it or not.

All that having been said, here are my two favorite lines from her latest installment (both from the last page):

On Art: "For contemporary art to revive, it must shed its residual, shallow postmodernist ironies and re-embrace emotion and spirituality." I took, and excelled in, a modern art class at Harvard. Yet I have no training, no refined artistic sensibilities, and absolutely no respect for modern art. So how come I could do so well, to the point that the TF recommended I seriously consider making the field my career? Well, because I'm a smart-ass. That's all that art is about these days. Not beauty, not truth, not even novelty - nothing but cleverness. Write something clever (again, it need not be true, and it can be, and in fact often is, blatantly false; this doesn't matter), and you've got it made. Notice I said 'write something clever,' and not 'create something clever' - this is because the cleverness does not exist in the art itself. The art, in fact, is all but irrelevant. What matters is what the artist (or the critic) says about the art. Believe me, this approach is a lot of fun - in the smirky, smarmy, self-centered, and incredibly obnoxious way that being a smart-ass is fun. Present the world with an empty box, or a few metal tubes, or some fluorescent lights, say something profound about them, and be proclaimed a genius. The obvious problem here, and I repeat myself only out of years of pent-up frustration, is that the wit, the cleverness, lies entirely in the artist, and not at all in the art itself. That is why, as people often remark these days, anything can be art. As long as the artist is clever, he can pick anything he wants to say something clever about, and voila, a modern masterpiece. The art, on its own, without any observers to nod seriously at it, has no worth. On the other hand, even if Da Vinci or Caravaggio were illiterate morons (they weren't! I'm just saying), their works would still, and always, be beautiful - the value of great art lies, for eternity, in the works themselves, not in the related literature. To revisit the old cliche, if Botticelli's Venus is in a forest with nobody around to see it, it's still beautiful, it's still a work of art. If a piece of contemporary art is in a forest (or, just as likely, is the forest itself) with nobody to write about it, well, I'd probably take a chainsaw to it.

On the Humanities: "The teaching profession in the humanities has lost an entire generation of smart, imaginative young people who were driven away from graduate school because of its infestation by pointless, pretentious, Continental 'theory.'" This problem is related to the artistic one, I believe - I think the exact same scourge of ego-driven cleverness is to blame for deconstructionism, post-structuralism, the whole lot. I received an email yesterday from a high school student, in response to this brilliant, must-read Orwell essay, asking me this question: "The dilemma I am having is whether I should conform to what society accepts as 'intellectual' writing in order to receive a good grade, or write concisely and honestly so as to assist in the healing of the English language." I did not know what to reply. I just told him the truth, which is that, thanks to the very phenomenon he (and Paglia, and Orwell) pointed out, college was a near-complete waste of four years of my life, and no promise of 72 virgins, or even of just two or three kinky, hot-to-trot English majors, could ever lure me into even considering graduate school.

Wow, that post sure turned into a rant awful quick. I guess that's what happens when I don't blog for a while! Well, goodnight!