The Greek heroic was an elect property, comprised of birth,
class, and system. As opposed to an average man in an extraordinary ethical
moment, the heroic moment was the volition of its hero--the appearance of the
heroic man. The Greek Mind dominated nearly every educated modernist. Its rise
was understood in mystical terms and considered the high point of cosmic
mischance--the Greeks were considered
fated. Boys in classrooms in Europe read Homer while their fathers warred
with great imperial dignity in India and Africa. Yet by the time the early
modernists found themselves in the trenches, the Greek esteem seemed to have
crumbled. Moral philosophers had for too long extrapolated from their
(emotional) biases greater social enthusiasms that were simply nonexistent.
Joyce wrote it was "a damned lie that there could not be a substitute for
individual passion as the motive power for everything." Men were killing
and mangling one another in high numbers "in the defense of the outmoded
epic codes" they had read in schoolbooks. It was far too likely that the
people were dissimilar from their descriptions; and their models had likewise
been grossly handled. That is, that the descriptions of their Greek models did
not match what was being described; or it was as if they had been
mischaracterized by their proximity to a strange and sentimental fiction of
culture itself--that things had once been good somewhere at some point in time.
It seems inevitable then that the modernists accused the
social and political culture of a kind of collectively bad interpretation of
the classics; how could the same source produce any two more utter and
divergent readings? The chance of war was not equal--it is never one or the
other, but both. If such were not the virtues of the day, the day was as it
was, because Philistines were at the helm. Pound attempted a mastery of
classics as show of his fitness for political and social activity. It is both,
Pound would argue. Joyce turned to the Greek epic, in order to shrink its
"virtual" effects into the span of a single day. In his way, he said
it was both. Pound and Joyce worked from a principle of ordinariness--either of
style or of content. Both reverted to the old forms for the modern epic of
social ordinariness. Simplicity or austerity are almost exclusively examples of
a sort of reclamation.
This was primarily a moral and material reclamation and
critique, rescuing and creating an art concerned with having a body and a mind
as means of experiencing the social production of the world. It was therefore
critical of both the apparatus and its subsequent production, which had to at that
point include a cultural assessment of Greek virtue and historical military virtue,
writes Kiberd. The heroic man, argued the modernist, was nonexistent, insofar
as every man played such a role merely going through his day--(Bloom, Prufrock).
What amounted to an existential crisis in America in the 1950s was the loss of
the meaning of the big work; the major narrative; and this loss proved
incommensurable at the end of the Cold War, where after a ten year period an imperially
heroic ordinariness reigned supreme and the novel all but disappeared.
The new dominance is predicated upon wars, which lack or do
not even demand, individual heroics; at most, we have troops; but the real
heroes of the new age are the average citizen-victims, intermittently ripped
apart in terroristic bomb blasts; their "epic ordinariness" in the
social systems makes "enemy combatants" of them. The gulf between
this ordinary citizen and one of the troops, it would seem, if we're being
honest, is only an investment of time (this also corresponds roughly to the
national trend of de-specialization of labor in the United States). What prevents
any man from firing remote controlled missiles and finishing a puzzle are
almost identical. "Time was God judged," writes Hölderlin.
Only things that are in their very nature stable are capable
of being disrupted or terrorized. It is because of this that the age of terror
demands a stable social age. The paradox is that the most stable of systems are
always host to explicitly unstable citizenry. These new people are composed of
many differing sub-individuals, a loose arrangement of parts that in part
denote the essential presence of an individual. The principle motive of terror
is social disruption--to set off within not the system at large but
individually something on the threshold of panic; a sense of the loss of
function, disruption or contamination. Terror tolerates the loss of life for
this shock; yet so too does the system, in its ability to maintain itself and
its appearance of stability. It tolerates a startling number of the murdered. Yet
the average citizen is always anticipatory of terror; such is the tension
produced by living in a discursively coherent system. The social systems it
exists within do not register this panic so much as it retransmits these
energies through its communications networks. It hardly even trembles. An event
of terror is merely a confirmation of its stability.
I am not belittling the phenomenal consequences of terror,
but am merely recapitulating, in different terms, what our leaders have already
told us--and usually ask of us in the aftermath of its event. The new-heroic
day is ever always just about to be but not quite broken apart by strange
chances, and in spasms of this possibility of "breaking apart", one
recognizes the moment of a new age--a time for people ceaselessly and
creatively unchanging themselves; to
remain or to hope to remain the various component parts given at the outset by the
system in which the "self" finds itself constructing its self.
For this terror in its essence can never become a norm, it
will have either defeated itself, or the system it resided in could no longer
house its diffusive energies. Terror succeeding its own boundaries will
necessarily return to check itself. It is effective insofar as it seems only
like a gross or absurd deviation, which for it to function, at least
periodically, must be a deviation from a norm solidly in place.
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