The
ubiquity of television seems to have rattled some writers the way the
internet does writers today. In 1980, three years before Lost In The Cosmos
was published, George W.S.
Trow released
a shrapnel-grenade of ironic observations entitled Within
The Context Of No Context.
Trow saw television's accommodation of the immediate and argued that
this speed-of-light process of adoption and abandonment created an
entirely new context for the viewer: that of no context whatsoever.
By essay's end, the only whimper Trow could muster was, “Irony has
seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned — not out
of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me
without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and
kill me.” Trow's final refuge was a nostalgia for the era and mores
of his parents (which he indulged to squirm-inducing effect in his
final publications).
Percy's observations are somewhat similar, occasionally even in tone:
The salvation
of art derives in the best of modern times from a celebration of the
triumph of the autonomous self — as in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony —
and in the worst of times from naming the unspeakable: the strange
and feckless movements of the self trying to escape itself.
If
Kafka's Metamorphosis
is presently a
more accurate account of the self than Beethoven's Ninth, it is the
more exhilarating for being so . . .
Further
down the same page:
Unlike the
scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and
catastrophic.
And, if the reader needs any help visualizing the problem, Percy
offers this cheeky illustration:
Percy sees television, and particularly Phil Donahue (the ur-Oprah),
as the final embodiment of both expressions — the Celebration of
the Unspeakable, you might say (“Man-Turned-Cockroach Marries
Childhood Sweetheart: Exclusive Footage — Next!”). Throw in
Percy's steely adherence to an all-but-extinct pre-Nietzschean
classicism, the absurdity of which he wearily acknowledges, and
what's not to love about this blunderbuss of eccentricity?
Well,
there is the insistence on thought
experiments
as a genre, some of which fall with an undeniable thud. Witness this
bit from “The Last Donahue Show”:
DONAHUE:
C'mon, Allen. What are ya handing me? What d'ya mean you're happily
married? You mean you're
happy.
ALLEN: No, no.
Vera's happy, too.
AUDIENCE
(mostly
women, groaning):
Noooooooo.
DONAHUE:
Okay-okay, ladies, hold it a second. What do you mean, Vera's happy?
I mean, how do you manage — help me out, I'm about to get in
trouble — hold the letters, folks —
Etc,
etc. Scenes of this nature tend to generate unintended
thought experiments of my own. To wit: Reader
rolls eyes, sighs loudly and says, “Yes, yes, Doctor Percy: we
get it.”
Part of this frustration is generated by a frustration I sense (help
me out, I'm about to get in trouble) from the author himself.
Here's a passage preceding the one I just quoted, from ALLEN'S
Point-Of-View:
I'm a good
person, I think. I work hard, am happily married, love my wife and
family, also support United Way, served in the army. I drink very
little, don't do drugs, have never been to a porn movie. My idea of R
& R — maybe I got it in the army — is to meet an attractive
woman. What a delight it is, to see a handsome mature woman, maybe in
the secretarial pool, maybe in a bar, restaurant, anywhere, exchange
eye contact, speak to her in a nice way, respect her as a person,
invite her to join me for lunch . . . what a joy to go with her up in
the elevator of the downtown Holiday Inn, both of you silent,
relaxed, smiling, anticipating . . . .
Here we have a voice that Percy's readers know intimately: that of a
self-satisfied roué who has mastered the ability to overlook the
considerable impediments of his own character. It is also jarringly
out-of-character with the piece that contains it, the bulk of which
reads like an awkward parody of a show that could — within the
context of no context — already be seen as self-parody.
This bit leaves me wondering if Percy didn't originally attempt to
place his larger concerns within the context of a novelist — said
novelist having already exploited the many suspensions of disbelief a
movie-goer permits himself. Reading on, I have to wonder if Percy
didn't also attempt the essayist's context, before giving up on that,
as well. Lost In The Cosmos is a strange enough book that it
might finally have revealed its relatively unique format to Percy by
happy(ish) accident. Whatever the case, there are enough uneven (I'd
go so far as to say, “indulgent”) passages to prevent the most
trenchant of the book's insights from hitting with the force of
authority Percy struggled to muster.
But then here am I, struggling to muster a little authority of my
own. Whatever you do, don't give me the final word — sharper people than I (Tom Bartlett and Alan Jacobs, for starters) think this book is a terrific
read. Get a copy and decide for yourself. I'll be returning to The
Moviegoer and Lancelot for what I consider to be the
deeper and more disturbing insights Percy has to offer.
"Say, I'm pretty LOST too, y'all. Get it? Do ya? I'm LOST, I'm LOST, I'm ... Never mind." |
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