Marx the answer?
Walter Benjamin, a long dead German genius . . . dissects [19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire] the author of "Les Fleurs du Mal" ("The Flowers of Evil") with a Marxist scalpel, among other unusual literary procedures.
Unusual? The reviewer, Leslie H. Whitten, Jr. in Wash Times, must be kidding. The Marxist scalpel is standard in many quarters, where the great visionary’s notions hold full sway. Thoroughly romantic notions, we must add, to go with us latter-day romantics who love grand schemes and never heard of Occam’s advice not to multiply things without good reasons.
When Stanley Fish, recently UIC dean and much-cited Milton scholar, became head of English dept. at Duke U., for instance, “he pretty much single-handedly transformed a staid and tweedy department of old-fashioned litterateurs into a teeming, buzzing hotbed of trendy, avant-garde professors touting the very latest in Marxist, Queer, feminist, and deconstructionist criticism,” said Edward T. Oakes in First Things for Nov. 2001.
When Frederick Crews sent up Fish with his “How Milne Works” panel, a takeoff on Fish’s How Milton Works in his 2001 book Postmodern Pooh, one of the panelists was the Marxist Carla Gulag, who quotes her mentor Frederic Jameson, including Jameson’s real-life contention that the German philosopher Heidegger's "political commitment" to Hitler was "morally and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism."
Of course, the Marxist preference much predated Fish at Duke in 2001. “Marx goes to the heart of the problem,” the critic Dwight MacDonald wrote to a college classmate in 1936. To the same man he wrote: “I’m growing more and more intolerant of those who stand—or rather squat — in the way of radical progress, the more I learn about the conservative businesses that run this country and the more I see of the injustices done people under this horrible capitalist system.”
Joseph Epstein is quoting MacDonald in his review of A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald (Ivan R. Dee) in The New Criterion for November 2001.
It’s all an infitesimal part of the American intellectals’ love affair with pie in the sky as offered by the sage of the British Museum, who had not the slightest idea how his vision would become reality but loved it anyhow, as did and do his followers in academe — like the guy looking into the clear but deep pond (still waters, you know) who bent over to kiss his reflection and fell in, never more to breath God’s air. Yes, it’s you I’m talking about, Narcissus, wherever you are in 2006.
As for Benjamin, he “saw in Baudelaire a tragic magnificence,” says reviewer Whitten, who credits him with giving us “extraordinary insights” into Baudelaire, who died of illness related to the veneral disease he had gotten in his teens. The book is THE WRITER OF MODERN LIFE: ESSAYS ON CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, by Benjamin, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Belknap Press). Whitten, author of The Rebel: Poems by Charles Baudelaire -- American Versions, takes Benjamin seriously here, let the record show.
posted by Jim Bowman @ 12/24/2006 09:37:00 AM
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