(I’ve
called this post ‘belatedness’ since that’s what it’s about but it should
really be called ‘belabouredness’, since I fear that’s what it is. Anyway, you go
do your Rain Man thing on it, break it down into whatever constellation you fancy.
I’m just here to belch up the materials.)
After I put
up that tossed-off post last week about the things Facebook has decided I’m
interested in, I kept thinking about Ghost World – no doubt in part I was
reminded of it because I finally managed to say something about how much I dig
Lunch Box and the various other work and projects of Lennon and Skoog. I found
that difficult to do because it’s complicated. As I tried to say, they interest
me as writers and I also like them in the same way one likes one’s friends, in
particular one’s internet ‘friends’ who one feels intimately attached to while
also being uncomfortably aware that it’s a one-way relationship. The
connection with Ghost World is that I remember a throwaway reference in a past
podcast episode to some music or other as being ‘Blueshammer’. And I liked that
because I knew exactly what species of depressing travesty they were talking
about, and also because I enjoyed coming across a Ghost World reference without
it being accompanied by a commentary on everything which Ghost World has wrong
with it.
I found this index card in my copy of Daniel Clowes's comic. 82 is the mark I gave when I was unenthusiastic about an essay but it was probably good enough for an A. |
Now,
though, I have to admit that it’s not so easy for me to like everything about
Ghost World. I think it does concentrate on the one time in a person’s life
when that voyage of discovery into the back catalogue of the world can
permissibly be an uncomplicated undertaking. Through Seymour, Enid finds out
about rich and hard realities of American culture –appropriated art and
mainstreamed racism. Having grown up on the whitewashed imitations, she’s now
learning that they were preceded by potent originals which they now replace and
suppress. So her immediate response to the originals is, rightly, entirely
visceral and aesthetic. That gives the work its due. She’s captivated by the old blues record and she’s
disturbed by the racist advertising, and her first use of these discoveries is
to pit them against the junk she’s been
fed up till now. But she can’t continue to do that. If she’s going to avoid
becoming just another amnesiac appropriator, she’s going to have to put aside
that innocence and pay attention to her own place and role in the cultural
history she’s just begun to observe.
That
moment of cultural innocence is such a brief one but we make such a suspiciously
big deal of it. When it was me standing in relation to the literary-critical
tradition as Enid stands in relation to race and art in America, Harold Bloom
was one of my big discoveries (and it pissed me off that some of my lecturers
wanted to belittle him). It wasn’t the latter-day reactionary old canon-defender
I liked but the inspired young person who threw Romanticism, psychoanalysis and
Kabbalah into the pot and cooked up A Map of Misreading and The Anxiety of Influence. I still think
it’s a paradigm-making insight to see that this feeling of belatedness that the
young artist has to have when encountering the overwhelmingly complete and
accomplished work of the precursor is a necessary feeling – a spur - not a
disabling one. So, innocence of powerful art is not an Edenic state, it’s enervated,
deadly, idealised weakness. Bloom’s model of the creative artist is Lucifer,
the angel fallen into knowledge and experience and with some strong things to
say about his condition and the elders who threw him into it. (In other words,
fuck spoiler warnings: texts that are only good when encountered in innocence
aren’t worth even that much effort.)
Another
feature of Enid’s situation that doesn’t apply more broadly is also that her
ignorance is a simple thing which doesn’t need to be accounted for. As my life
trundles on I find that I can feel okay about fewer and fewer instances of my
own continuing ignorance and belatedness as they manifest themselves in the
cultural spheres which matter to me. (I don’t know anything about sport and I
don’t give a shit.) I find out about new
things all the time but usually they’re not new enough to be surprising. This
is good, mostly – other qualities than novelty become important. There are exceptions, naturally, and
variations. I finally got around to reading Annihilation
last week, after hearing of it when it was published several years ago, and I
fucking loved the book and also somewhat enjoyed the interesting and mildly
confronting sensation of feeling highly guilty and furtive about hopping onto
the heres-a-movie-on-Netflix-now-read-the-novel bandwagon. Being weirded out by
the novel satisfyingly matched being weirded out by my own lateness to its
cultural moment. (When I finally found
my way to LCD Soundsystem a couple of years ago it was the same sort of deal.) And, then, there are still occasional unlooked-for
starbursts of illumination. Also last week I went to Castlemaine to hear music played by Michael Hurley, about whom I knew absolutely nothing beforehand, and
when I saw and heard him he was so great, and in such an immediately
intelligible way, that I spent a lot of time afterwards wondering how it was
that I’d never heard of him before. This still strikes me as an almost
supernatural omission. One doesn’t often get the opportunity to make such a
complete personal discovery and to have the delight of something reveal itself which
you never knew was missing.
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