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RESIGNATION


                                             December 2, 2012

                                                       DWIGHT_MAC
What keeps me going with Dwight
Macdonald is the hope that there
may be more passages like this:         From a review of the resigned is
                                        Cozzens', By Love Possessed (a long
                                        forgotten best-seller from 1957).

                                                              1957: the year
                                                              of Kerouac

  "The Novel of Resignation [is] philosophically,
  an inversion, almost a paraody of a kind of
  story Tostoy and other nineteenth-century
  Russian novelists used to tell: of a
  successful, self-satisfied hero who is led by
  experiences in 'extreme situations' to see how
  artificial his life has been and who then
  rejects the conventional world and either dies
  or begins a new, more meaningful life.  In the
  Novel of Resignation, the highest reach of
  enlightenment is to realize how awful the
  System is and yet to accept it on its own          MAGIC
  terms.  Because otherwise there wouldn't be
  any System.  Marquand invented the genre, Sloan
  Wilson carried it on in The Man in the Gray
  Flannel Suit, and Herman Wouk formulated it       With The Late George
  most unmistakably in The Caine Mutiny.         Apley (1937)?             
  Wouk's moral is that it is better to obey a           
  lunatic, cowardly Captain Queeg, even if the          But then: 
  result is disaster, than to follow the sensible                 
  advice of an officer of lower grade (who is              G_IN_THE_AIR
  pictured as a smooth-talking, destructive,
  cynical, irresponsible conniver-- in short, an
  intellectual) and save the ship.  Because
  otherwise there wouldn't be any U.S. navy, (If
  there were many Captain Queegs, there wouldn't
  be a Navy either, a complication Mr. Wouk seems
  not aware of.)  In short, the conventional
  world, the System, is confused with Life.  And    I might quibble about
  since Life is Like That, it is childish if not    this interpretation of
  worse to insist on something better.  This is     the Caine Mutiny (which
  typically American: either juvenile revolt or     I have not read, merely
  the immature acceptance of everything: there is   seen), where the closing
  no modulation, no development, merely the blank   lecture that implies the
  confrontation of untenable extremes: 'maturity'   smooth-talking
  means simply to replace wholesale revolt with     intellectual may also be
  wholesale acceptance."                            at fault is actually
                                                    really interesting...
        -- from "By Cozzens Possesed",
        collected in "Masscult and                  It's always a question as to
        Midcult", p.133                             whether open confrontation
                                                    on an issue is the right
                                                    move, or if there's some
                                                    more subtle approach, some
                                                    way of gently steering the
                                                    opposition in a more
                                                    positive direction.  Direct
                                                    confrontation can cause
                                                    everyone to dig in and hold
                                                    to positions that might be
                                                    counter-productive to
                                                    everyone.

                                                   And as for smooth-talking
                                                   intellectuals with a
                                                   penchant for Freudian
                                                   psych, there are reasons
                                                   one might beware such men.

                                                   If you want to talk about
                                                   untenable extremes,
                                                   "intellectuals good/
                                                   intellectuals bad" would
                    We might also speak a          be a good pair to try to
                    kind word or two for the       modulate.
                    virtues of "working
                    within the system",
                    which might be confused
                    with mere resignation by
                    an armchair radical.





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