Mary McCarthy on the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
I don’t know why people complain about the loss of public intellectuals or the decline of intellectual life more generally. I just finished Mary McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936-1938. As far as I can tell, there’s more action on one night of Facebook than she reports over the entirety of two years.
That said, McCarthy makes one fascinating—at least to me—observation about how we learn to read newness in the arts.
In our Beekman Place apartment, besides PR [Partisan Review], I was trying to read Ulysses. John, in the breakfast nook, was typing his play “University” (about his father and never produced), and I was writing book reviews. Every year I started Ulysses, but I could not get beyond the first chapter—”stately, plump Buck Mulligan”—page 47, I think it was. Then one day, long after, in a different apartment, with a different man (which?), I found myself on page 48 and never looked back. This happened with many of us: Ulysses gradually—but with an effect of suddenness—became accessible. It was because in the interim we had been reading diluted Joyce in writers like Faulkner and so had got used to his ways, at second remove. During the modernist crisis this was happening in all the arts: imitators and borrowers taught the “reading” of an artist at first thought to beyond the public power of comprehension. In the visual arts, techniques of mass reproduction—imitation on a wide scale—had the same function. Thanks to reproduction, the public got used to faces with two noses or an eye in the middle of the forehead, just as a bit earlier the “funny” colors of the Fauves stopped looking funny except to a few.
7 Comments
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For my generation (Early Gen-X/Late-Boomer) the challenge is to find the original, creative work underneath all of the crap the corporate culture industry throws up to obscure it.
For example, every fratboy movie in the 1980s is a ripoff of Animal House. But Animal House, in turn, is just a right-wing appropriation of Lindsey Anderson’s “If!,” which, in turn, was an homage/remake of Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct.
The problem is that by the time the corporate culture industry is finished with a narrative, it’s almost impossible to enjoy any more.
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I hope someone suggested to her that Ulysses is a very funny book. Once one gets out of the mindset that it’s a “serious” or “difficult” work, it makes a heck of a lot more sense. (It also absolves one of having to read it sequentially or even completely).
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I don’t have the book, so maybe she discusses music next (although I doubt it), but just in case she didn’t: this happened in music for sure. On the entirely vulgar, mechanico-repetitious side of things, techniques that, say, Stravinsky or Debussy invented early in the 20th century – e.g. ‘comic’ effects like crazy xylophone runs, etc – became movie soundtrack cliches as early as the 30s and 40s, I guess mainly in cartoons.
Moreover, some artists, like Frank Zappa, consciously tried to do what McCarthy ascribes to Faulkner. For example, “Igor’s Boogie” parodied Stravinsky’s “Histoire du Soldat”; “Nun Suit Painted on Some Old Boxes” is a kind of send-up of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire”, among many others (Edgar Varese was quoted, commented on, and just evoked, too many times to list).
The explicit idea was to get ‘teenaged’ ears used to the sound of modernism. I think he had some success at that. I would say some modernist jazz guys kind of went that direction too (e.g. Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman).
Something else struck me as interesting about that passage: I don’t know how it is for others, but the way she describes learning how to read Joyce – long effort followed by the ‘effect of suddenness’ – describes how it has been for me learning a new language. One day things just seem to click.
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Of course this is a long-winded version of what Picabia said in 1920.
«Pour que vous aimiez quelque chose il faut que vous l’ayez vu et entendu depuis longtemps tas d’idiots.»
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But that isn’t *all* she’s saying, is it, OSM? Seems like she’s saying two rather different things here – the Faulkner Effect thing and the Repetition thing.
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This cuts in a direction that is causing us real problems though–mechanical reproduction (and I’d even suggest “Industrial human reproduction” can be included) creates a distance between the “created” thing and the reception of the replication, changing it into a “reception” and a kind of tidal wave that leads to a kind of forced acceptance (the wave does crash over you). I think this was suggested as an aspect of the use of the “robot bomb” to kill the sniper in Dallas. We will accept this and we will be changed.