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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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