Justin wrote: Is good taste politically incorrect? Snobbish? An indication of unjustified feelings of class superiority? Is it, in short, in bad taste to claim to have good taste?
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I think my original post answered these question by not in fact raising them. I dealt with the use of taste as a weapon. Core to the argument is that many people (at all levels of society) use negative judgment of texts, activities, visual data consciously as ways of dividing themselves from others. The post does not object to claims that X is Good; it does not even object to claims that "X is good, and others ought to experience its goodness" (though that raises problems); it objects to a certain (common) use of the claim that X is (in some sense) bad. This post harked back to Dennis Perrin, who wrote:
- - - - - Quick aging anecdote -- Just picked up my daughter at her high school (she's working on sets for the fall musical), and I had Springsteen's "Rosalita" playing in the car, windows down. She's runs up to the car door and says, "Dad! Please turn that down! It's embarrassing!"
"One of Springsteen's best songs (and perhaps one of my fave rock songs ever) is embarrassing?"
"Yes! It's soooo uncool!"
Did I mention that I turn 45 on Sat? How uncool is that? - DP - - - - -
Dennis's daughter was the victim of "taste" (coolness) used as a weapon. If "cool" and (particularly) "uncool" were not weapons and (intentionally or not) _used_ as weapons, there would have been no basis for her embarassment. And note, we really don't know whether she actually disliked Springsteen: She did NOT say "His music is bad" but (paraphrasing it) "People who admit to liking his music are subject to social constraints." Listening to his music, then (for her), would not be analogous to having to read the poetry of Eddie Guest (Parker: I'd rather flunk my Wasserman test / Than read a poem by Eddie Guest), but analogous to (going back about 20 years) wear ing a shirt to junior high without an Izod label on it.
I mentioned Marianne Moore in my original post. Kenneth Burke reports that when she edited _The Dial_, her preference in book reviews was to give books she liked long reviews, books she liked less short reviews, and not review books she disliked. In other words, as an editor she felt no need continually to prove that she was above liking certain works, preferring to feature what she liked. Moore did _not_ use bad taste as a weapon, unlike those on this list who have to remind us several times a year that _they_ don't like banjo music. The image I always have in my mind in the presence of such attitudes is the proper Victorian matron drawing in her skirts as she passes a prostitute in the street.
Several on this list hastened to join Dennis's daughter in dissociating themselves from the embarassment of liking Springsteen. Positive judgments got in, but almost always subordinate to this avoidance of the embarassment of being caught liking the "uncool" (a good synonym for "bad taste"). So my topic is the political importance of the fear of being "uncool," and the deliberate exploitation of that fear. Hence the questions Justin poses above, while interesting in their own right, do not touch on the thrust of my original post.
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When I started collecting the material which follows below I thought I could connect it to both the topic of "bad taste" and the thread on the Sopranos. I still think there may be a connection, but I can't formulate one. But I rather like what I wrote anyhow, so I'm sending it.
Re in which lbo-talk defends 'the sopranos' Tue, 05 Oct 2004 20:57:30
Justin wrote: Oh, I don't dispute that great art can be politically regressive and have bad effects. Take the Iliad --a celebration of violence, hierarchy, brutality, lust for revenge and renoun, macho physical bravado, denigration of women -- it has almost no progressive content. By mining it here and there you can see ambivalence, like references to hateful Ares and the like, but in the main insofar as it has any mass audience its effect is liable to be entirely anti-liberal and counter revolutionary. Apart from the lack of religious dogmatism, the Iliad is a poem for George Bush.
Cox: I'm not sure exactly how to respond to this. Perhaps complicating our reading of the Iliad would help. I know you offer a deliberate simplification, but I think it may still be misleading. There happens to have been a long debate on the poem on the Milton list in December/January 1999/2000. I copy my parts of that debate here, with enough of the other posters to provide context.
It began when, during a discussion of "the hero of Paradise Lost," one poster concluded: "But as for the "hero," since Milton rejects traditional heroic values and replaces them with "patience and heroic martyrdom," since militarism is inferior to the Logos, there is a sense in which the "hero" is Satan, sulking in Hell like Achilles, who sulks in his tent because his arete is insufficiently honoured, killing Adam and Eve, as Achilles kills the beloved Hektor, and, like Achilles, inevitably destroyed by his own nature. So Satan is the old rejected "hero," good only for "wars" and "tedious havoc." Truly superior to such heroes is "our Saviour meek / Sung victor" (PR 4. 636-7). - Derek Wood
[Text in curly brackets {} is added in this post]
Stella Revard (a well known Milton critic, and classically trained) replied briefly (clipped here), evoking the following (Carol Barton):
===== Stella Revard writes: You are rather hard on Achilles, who is the victim of Agamemnon's [clip]
I think the argument turns on the nature of Achilles' "affection" for Briseis, Stella: [clip] =====
I entered the discussion then with a response to Prof. Barton.
[FIRST POST]
Subject: In praise of Achilles, was Re: Hero of Paradise Lost From: Carrol Cox
Carol Barton wrote: [clip] I think the argument turns on the nature of Achilles' "affection" for Briseis [clip]
CBC: This treats the _Iliad_ as a novel (or at least post-PL) and assumes that in it as in PL and the novel the reader is endlessly re-isolated and re-individualized by the compulsion to judge freely the rightness or wrongness of the character's action or the narrator's judgment. But the Iliad predates the triumph of commodity production by some millenia, and to make such moral judgments of Achilles is to impoverish the epic.
Achilles is perhaps the one character in all literature who knows he is going to die -- an awareness underlined by contrast to Hector's pompous self-deception on his own impending death. When Achilles achieves the glory promised him by his mother -- that is when he kills Hector-- he will die. His mother has told him so and he accepts this. Without that complex, the poem is meaningless. And Briseis does not symbolize or represent or reward that glory -- she constitutes it. He would not be Achilles were he to accept Agamemnon's denial of his purpose at even being at Troy.
(And complaints re his whining or weeping are anachronistic.)
'So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it? Patroklos also is dead, who was better by far than you are. Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal? Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny, and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also either with a spearcast or an arrow flown from the bowstring' (Lattimore tr., 21.106ff)
This by itself is enough to make me mourn my ignorance of Greek. Achilles is not boasting (boasting in our sense did not exist in Homer's world) but simply stating reality, as he always does. What point would there be to the _Iliad_ if Achilles were to conform to the Victorian conception of manliness and keep a stiff upper lip. Disgusting. This is not James's Christopher Newman we are discussing.
[Barton] I see no indication in Homer that he is lovesick for loss of the girl: and I would [clip]
CBC: Of course not. Why would you expect him to be? That kind of love doesn't exist in the Homeric epics. I bet you think Odysseus gives up immortality for Penelope rather than for his _oikos_.
[Barton] I have to agree with Derek that to that degree at least it is arete and not a broken heart that motivates him
CBC: Of course. And that is his proper motive. For him to give up Briseis would make nonsense of the whole Trojan War (and thus of the poem). His mother, a goddess, approves! He came knowing that his death is the price of that arete, and now Agamemnon denies him that. What would you die for? Give the possession of Briseis that same moral weight. (About 80 years or so ago some fool, I forget who, whined that Achilles was not patriotic! Forsooth!)
[Barton] (the way the reverse is true after the loss of his much-beloved Patroclus). He is not grand enough to be a Satan -- more like Harapha, with half a brain.
CBC: Consider the episode of the Funeral Games? Is there any greater dignity and self-command in literature than Achilles shows in his handling of those games? Or the even greater wonder of his reception of Priam. (Some critic points out that it marks the human discovery that the death of an enemy can be tragic.) And without his sulking in his tent and his madness after the death of Patroclus would those games or his reception of Priam have the force that they do? You seem contemptuous of everything that gives the poem coherence?
That homeric ethos would be as destructive in the 20th century as are the unfortunately still surviving world views of Milton and Austen, but why should we tolerate their christianity and metaphysical individualism and not accept Homer's celebration of arete? - Carrol Cox
P.S. I consider sneers at Achilles' intellect particularly strange:
Then Achilleus Called out to his serving-maids to wash the body and anoint it all over; but take it first aside, since otherwise Priam might see his son and in the heart's sorrow not hold in his anger at the sight, and the deep heart in Achilleus be shaken to anger; that he might not kill Priam and be guilty before the god's orders.
(24.581ff) That {self-knowledge and foresight} is brainless?
This is the first of three posts.