Context
Requiem for a Dead White Male, Part II
Curtis White
Correct me, please, if I’m wrong in this, but I believe I have noticed something very subtle and dark in the on-going "culture war" of various "marginals" (especially feminists, but also multi-culturalists and pop-culturalists) against "the law of the father," especially insofar as that law has worked in the interest of persons known as Dead White Males. I’ve noticed a certain glee in the idea that the "White Males" in question are dead. As if the fact of their death were a sign of failure. Or fraud. It’s as if they wish to say: if you were so great, why are you dead? So for the erstwhile Great Men, their greatness is reduced to death and their humanity is reduced to its most trivial political consequence, their "male privilege."
The battlefield for this war against Dead White Males is the so-called "canon," a term originally used in order to account for what books are and what books are not part of the Bible. The Talmud, or Pentateuch, is a canon. It is those five books and no others. "Canon" is, without question, a loaded and probably very wrong concept to use in order to talk about literary or artistic works. (When exactly did we accept the idea that art needed a bible?) If we must, however, use this term, I think it behooves us to use it knowingly. The root of the word "canon" does not mean "those things which are properly included." The root word (from the Greek, kanon) means a device for measuring what ought to go in whatever receptacle one has in mind. So, the canon is not really the list of included books, it is the principles (or, we might say, aesthetics) which allow for inclusion.
We seem somehow to have lost view of this etymology. The canon now is treated as if it were territory to be sacrificed for war reparations. "Okay, we the defeated Dead White Males agree to toss out old George Meredith (although we really sorta liked The Ordeal of Richard Feveral) and you can occupy his spot with Edith Wharton or Peewee Herman or whoever. We don’t give a shit." But nary a word is said by either side about why it was appropriate in the first place for George Meredith to be in every Victorian anthology or why it is good and proper for Edith Wharton to take his place. (Henry James would have kicked them both out, and for very particular reasons.) It’s really the contempt for the dead that I’m interested in here. Death seen as political failure. I’d like to try to correct or balance this tendency by writing a sort of requiem for these Great Men or Dead White Males (take your pick).
I’ll begin with KANT.
I begin with Kant because in thinking about the deaths of these Great and/or White Men, I remembered Kant’s concept of "antinomy." An antinomy is a pair of mutually exclusive philosophical claims (there is a God; there isn’t a God) both of which are equally open to philosophic proof/disproof. Kant intended that the existence of antinomies would indicate the limits of reason, or what it was possible for people to know.
Let me describe for you the form this antinomic meditation took for me.
First, I thought of MOZART (representative DWM) on his deathbed (appropriately). He’s swollen, his body collecting fluids from kidney failure. His wife and sister-in-law are weeping at his bedside. He has been trying to explain to that "fatuous ass" Süssmayr how to go about finishing the Requiem. (Mozart’s "last words" were his attempt to produce the sound of the kettledrums in his Requiem.) But on his last night, at one point, he turned to his wife and said, "I am appointed to a situation [chapel master at St. Stephens Church] which will afford me leisure to write in the future just what I like myself, and I feel capable of doing something worthy of the fame I have acquired, but instead of that I must die."
This, plainly, is death as tragedy, waste, loss, and cheat.
But then, to provide the other term to this perplex, I thought of MARCUS AURELIUS who argued, essentially, "Whenever death comes, it comes too soon." It’s like the weird experience reported by PAUL AUSTER (Living White Male) in his The Invention of Solitude. He describes a conversation with an old friend who, in spite of his eighty plus years, can still claim that death is "such a strange thing to happen to a little boy."
At any rate, the other horn of this dilemma (or antinomy) is called "Mozart’s self-pitying delusion." Whenever we die, it’s too soon. "I was just about to finish the Requiem." Too bad. "I was just starting to understand life." Sure. "I was just about to stop drinking every night." Right. "My new car only had ten thousand miles on it." Cry me a river. So from the view of a Marcus Aurelius, the forever emotionally incontinent Mozart should have cut it with the tragic boo-hoo and accepted his fate stoically. Who did he think he was? Some sort of World Historic Individual? Mr. Smarty-pants? A Genius, maybe?
My conclusion about this antinomy (if not antinomies in general) is that Marcus Aurelius shares the contempt of the modern feminist or pop culture advocate, not necessarily for dead white guys as such (if for no other reason than that he’s one of ‘em), but for the more subtle, maybe even recondite, human capacity of making distinctions based upon quality. In short, no dry-eyed stoics are needed by Mozart’s deathbed because MOZART WAS MOZART! (I have to admit, "George Meredith was George Meredith" doesn’t have quite the same force. And that’s my point!)
On the other hand, the force of the argument which rails against the reign of Dead White Males is to create "the night in which all cows are black" (Hegel). This is another kind of death. Death of difference. Death of the manifold. Death of content. Death of the ambition of our culture to want to understand, develop, and live in what the young Marx used to speak of as the project to realize the full creative capacities of our "species."
Mere "inclusion" in a canon in which there is no kanon, or measuring stick, is a victory about as interesting as inclusion in a "prime-time fall line up" of network television shows. It is a political victory, perhaps, but it allows in principle many kinds of stupidity. (Consider Amy Tan. Oh hell, consider "The Simpsons." That’s greatness, right? But compared to what?!) It would be far better to do away with the notion of a canon and insist instead on a shared understanding of the qualities of what we have called beauty, ethics, and meaning, and that we would choose to be the most advanced edge of our human project (which is a long way from being done if it is ever to be done "well"; everything hangs on that "well").
What cultural memory has done is to conserve the idea of "Mozart" as an ideal of conceptual intricacy, formal and thematic beauty, and even spiritual intuition. I don’t want to leave this "spiritual" aspect vague. My argument would be that some time around the composition of the three "grand" piano concertos (#s 15, 16, 17), Mozart had a leading role in the invention and elaboration of "human intimacy," of the creation of the "feeling" individual whose value would then be taken up by the radical formal innovations of Beethoven and the Romantics and elaborated politically by the great Enlightenment Revolutions. This is, in substantial part, what Jurgen Habermas is talking about in his notion of "the unfinished project of enlightenment." There is a still strongly contested history of what it means to be human embedded in the progression of artists and thinkers like Mozart and Beethoven, Kant and Hegel.
By misrecognizing this history as mere Idealism (beauty) or Ideology (the Reign of the Father), we risk replacing it with what is generally less astute. Rock’n’roll is not sufficient to displace the music that moves from Bach through Glass; hyper-reality is not an adequate substitution for the narrative reality that literature has provided; "informative" Internet sites (www.hegel.com!) are not an adequate substitution for the great works of linear intellect that philosophy provides; and "equal representation" for historically marginalized groups is not in itself an adequate substitution for real content. This is so even if identity politics are essentially correct in their political claims (and I’m ready to believe that they are). The great danger in losing art and aesthetics and thought to popular culture and identity politics is that we lose connection with history, which falls into forgetfulness. We lose history’s projects, and we lose our opportunity to choose among these projects. And this, need I point out, is a state of affairs that late-capitalist consumer culture, the society of the spectacle, the culture of what Baudrillard called "the ecstasy of communication," can’t be unhappy to see.
Finally, we should also recall that cultural memory’s job isn’t only to raise the "noble" and keep it there. It must also maintain cogently why the low is low. It has to maintain Mozart’s lowly assistant Süssmayr as the "fatuous ass" who created the rote recititivos in Mozart’s operas. But Süssmayr-the-fatuous-ass is also an important metaphor for all of us not-Mozarts. By knowing Mozart he was humanly richer, we could even say he was more human, or more complete. (One might want to add here the caveat that he was a more complete European human, and I’m happy to, but that caveat is not, in my opinion, the devastating admission that many critics of Eurocentrism imagine it to be.) To be more fully or successfully human is what we ought to want not simply for ourselves as individuals (because, quite frankly, no one much cares about Süssmayr’s "self-realization," long-dead thing that that is), but for the wealth of that quality contributed to by all of our Dead, those "dying generations" Yeats spoke of, guys and gals alike, Dead White Males and all the others, even the rest of us fatuous asses who look to art to provide us with models for how the World Might Thrive.
