Context

Readers of CONTEXT should be aware of the work of one of the most forceful culture critics of recent years who has argued precisely in the name of "context" in two very significant books. George W. S. Trow is the author of Within the Context of No Context, and, in 1999, My Pilgrim’s Progress. Before writing these books, Trow was a New Yorker staff writer for nearly thirty years. From this position, according to his publicist at Pantheon, he "helped to shape our nation’s conscience." This may well be, but—for good or bad—he had no role in the shaping of my conscience during this time because I have consistently and purposefully not read the New Yorker. I have not read the New Yorker because it has represented the opposite of everything I value in contemporary fiction: Updike and his minions. (But then there was always the New Yorker’s baffling fondness for Donald Barthelme!) (Oh, hell, I’ll tell you the truth, the deciding factor for me was that I rarely "got" the famous New Yorker cartoons in any significant sense. I didn’t think they were funny. They all seemed to be about very gray characters from another world, the opaque world of New York. New Yorker humor was all "insider" humor. Well, the magazine is called the New Yorker. What the hell was I doing reading it in the first place, in California, or Iowa, or Illinois?)

I begin with my long-time aversion to the New Yorker because Trow’s most recent book, My Pilgrim’s Progress, is a work of social criticism whose real contribution to the genre (and, more importantly, to our situation) is a very persuasive ability to determine when a social formation (Trow’s term is "social aesthetic") is alive and dominant, and when it is dead. He can tell us when the "Roosevelt aesthetic" was powerful and how and when it died. The peculiar thing that I want to point out here is that I’ve been assuming since 1969 that the New Yorker was dead ("irrelevant"). So, how does this work? If Trow has a brilliant grasp of when a "cultural aesthetic" is alive and when dead (and he does), how is it that he could, for thirty years, make these critical and intellectually lively distinctions from within something that is itself dead?

I’ll return to this question.

I hate to try to simplify this book, because when it is good (and I think that it is most often superb) it is good "in the thickets." Trow is capable of taking us into the finest texture of a given historical "moment" and finding compelling symptoms of a more general dysfunction. For example, Trow provides a tour de force, improvisational close reading of the "theater" of a front page of The New York Times from February of 1950. It is the particularity and content that such close readings give his arguments that make his critique so forceful.

Nonetheless, it is possible to generalize. Trow argues that for the last fifty years the United States, at the height of its world dominance and authority, has been caught in a process of persistent social devolution that has left us with a world dominated by television and the likes of David Letterman. It is a world emptied of all honor and truthfulness, and whose only depth is the abysmal depth of self-reflection and "ironic self-contempt." (Bless him, here, for not playing Alan Sokal and blaming it all on something called "postmodernism." Trow has too much intellectual self-respect for that demagogic gambit. He understands that if the present is bad, it is not a badness out of nothing and nowhere. Rather, this badness has been in process for a long time, cooking up through the culture.)

Trow presents his version of recent Western history as a movement from one dominant "aesthetic" into another. (I wonder if Trow understands how Hegelian this movement is?) He begins with the Roosevelt aesthetic, the aesthetic into which he was born, and its dependence on the "country club" (i.e., extensive social networks of people who know, who have "information," and who know many others who know). It is the last moment of a certain kind of social integration, even if this integration is taking place at a very rarified level of the social hierarchy.

Of course, this sort of presentation papers over a lot. It was, as Trow himself discusses later, a murderous hatred of the social privilege implied in this aesthetic that fueled the social rebellion of the ‘60s (witness Ginsberg’s Howl). But the important thing for Trow is the aesthetic. In Trow’s usage, the "aesthetic" is really a general proposition for how we all might choose to live together, and how we will live together in the moment in which a given aesthetic is powerful and dominant. Trow’s point would seem to be, never mind how flawed those old social aesthetics were (how dependent on small clusters of wealthy, privileged and, yes, often cruel people) because things have only gotten worse since then, and it is instructive for us to look at what was good in them, poor dead things that they are.

Next is the Eisenhower aesthetic. As Trow says frequently, he "likes Ike." For Trow, Eisenhower was the last exemplar of a healthy, informed masculinity. (Unhappily, girls, it’s a boy’s life in Trow’s world.) It’s difficult at times to tell the difference between the Roosevelt and the Eisenhower aesthetics, but it seems that the crucial factor is the intervention of the Second World War and the consequent isolation of Eisenhower as the last man with enough information to make critical social decisions. He is the final end of the old patriarchal system which sounds about right and doesn’t sound so unfortunate, even, except that, from Trow’s perspective, it was also the end of a certain natural, honest decency far superior to what we have now either in our leaders or in our culture in general. Roosevelt and Eisenhower were honest and decent in a way Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton never could be.

The third moment to which Trow calls our attention is the moment of "Vitalitarianism" (i.e., the cultural revolution of the 1960s) whose purpose was to overthrow the fraud of a life dominated by the "creeping catatonia" of television and the tabloid mind. Trow urges us to imagine Elvis in 1956 appearing for the first time on national television on the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey Show. The incredible incongruity of it! Death of the past, birth of the future in that moment, crystallized, and on TV. The failure of this revolution of the "vitalitarians" (think Allen Ginsberg) was inherent in the fact that the only context for its energy was the very source of the problem it was trying to defeat: the media mind. Trow’s moral: a revolution for the good cannot happen in the "context of no information" (echoing the title of Trow’s earlier book Within the Context of No Context). But how interesting Trow’s insight is that the ‘60s were not about the new or the Mod, but about nostalgia for a lost authenticity, an authenticity which the citizens of that moment could not themselves ever have experienced, except intuitively. In this regard, Eisenhower and hippies are unlikely co-conspirators not only against the Military Industrial Complex but against Howdy Doody as well.

The final moment, which apparently began in 1997, if we are to take Trow’s dates very literally, is the triumph of "ironic self-contempt." Here is the real suffering heart of the matter for Trow: Growing Up Damaged. This is the world of MTV, Jim Carey and David Letterman. His primary evidence is the "Cold Child," the child whose mind is first formed within the atmosphere of the Candice Bergen Sprint advertisements. Our moment, in the wake of the wreck of the ‘60s, is isolated, utterly lacking context, illiterate, illiberal, empty of useful information (information is all for "exchange," as Marx might say), narcissistic, and incapable of a single serious moment. That’s our post-Reagan, Clinton-in-ascendance, cultural dominant. And damned if I know why Trow is wrong to say so.

This, it seems to me, is a very persuasive description. My primary reservations about this powerful critique are, first, that it is modernist in its tendency to look back for models of a more desirable sociality, in spite of the fact that he has shown us repeatedly just how dead that past is. What is the public point of the powerful, emotional, fatherly attraction of Ike for Trow? One wants to ask how this very informed nostalgia translates into a program for the present? Wasn’t it exactly the attempt to re-create Eisenhower’s ‘50s in Reaganism—but without the information and the social context that made Eisenhower’s moment possible—that led to the social debacle (oh, a "prosperous" debacle it was and is, to be sure) of the ‘80s and ‘90s?

There is a second issue I’d like to take up with Trow’s book (and I hope it is understood that I am not "criticizing" but "thinking with" the text). It is this: where in this elaborate social history, this contextualizing of how we got to a place where we have no context, where is this vantage point from which the Trowist observes the fifty-year downward spiral of our cultural purpose?

I find some troubling curiosities here, one of which I have already mentioned. Trow frequently acknowledges the New Yorker, his long-time employer, the journal for which he was a journalist, but he never accounts for its social energies. Is the New Yorker part of the old pre-Roosevelt world of Brahmins and mavens? Isn’t it dead, then? I don’t mean to be picky here. My point is, when Trow worked for the New Yorker, was his perspective a New Yorker perspective? Everyone else in this book seems restricted to the determining particulars of his/her social context, even the mighty Eisenhower. Was Trow, as Byron said of Childe Harold, "among but not of" the New Yorker crowd? Is everybody in America a function of social aesthetics except George W. S. Trow? Or does he need to loosen the girdle on his account and allow for the possibility of an ever wayward, iconoclastic, reluctant if not resistant, intellectually nomadic North American mind? (No doubt, to find these eccentrics Trow would have to look elsewhere than in The New York Times or mass media, something he seems ill prepared to do. (He’s a New Yorker, stupid!) Maybe he’d even find an alternative hero to Eisenhower.) (Gack. I’m sorry. I am persuaded by Trow’s point of view, but Eisenhower! I can’t go there.)

Another curiosity: the style of this book is not the formal, sincere, proper style of the old seriousness. It is not William Bennett. It is not even Paul Goodman. Trow’s style is informal, gimmicky ("I’m going to rock-and-roll with this," he says), playful, odd in its juxtapositions, syntactically quirky, and full of rhetorical tics (that’s the "Vonnegut of it," as Trow might say). In fact, this book often reads like a very good experimental novel of the Tristram Shandy variety, in which personal originality is a sure sign of virtue, and you never meet a digression you don’t like. And yet My Pilgrim’s Progress is capable of many moments of great pathos and moral "sentence," as we used to say. In short, this book is—of all things—stylistically postmodern, and effectively so. It’s Theodor Adorno meeting David Foster Wallace. Don’t get me wrong, this is something I approve of! But isn’t it strange that this old-school lover of decency, and honesty, and naturalness is dependent on a language which is impossible to imagine outside of the context of the last twenty years, exactly the period in which, by Trow’s own account, we are most fallen! ‘Tis passing strange!

Finally, I wonder how Trow thinks it possible that a book like this—such an admirable blend of intelligence, perception, independence and deep caring—can be received in a moment so crippled by the problem Trow addresses: the media, television, celebrity, the gibberish of tabloids, the appealing nothingness that comes from the deep vacuum that is American life, culture and thought in this year of the millennium, 2000? Is this book itself not already "down the drain," a part of the dead past, and precisely because of its persistent intelligence? How can intelligence function in a period dominated by the cynical will-to-stupidity?

In the last analysis, Trow looks out on the world from an old, old precipice that he calls "liberal arts." He does admit that the liberal arts perspective is dead, or is part of a never-to-be-recuperated past. Nonetheless, in Trow’s aesthetic, even "irrelevant people get to keep the sense of being they’ve traditionally had." In this fact is the pathos of what Trow has created: the intelligence and care that characterize his work are dead and irrelevant to the present "operating order" of social reality. To extend this problem to ourselves, Trow’s readers, we might ask, "What does it mean, then, to read Trow and be convinced or persuaded by him, in short, to be persuaded by a social logic you know from the outset to be without hope?" How depressing is that?

But for the purposes of this essay, let’s confound the cultural dominant and allow Trow’s liberal arts view the last word. The liberal arts aesthetic is of and for those people:

And I don’t mean just WASPs here. I mean Jews especially; people for whom books and book learning constituted not just a diversion, or a dominance reference, but a kind of prophetic factor in life. People for whom Thomas Hardy, on the one hand, or James Joyce, on the other, or both, if you were really smart and could make the connection, people for whom the best of the best constituted a kind of evolving bible of our American life.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

CONTEXT is available at bookstores nationwide.