Author: Ophelia Benson

Is it a possibility that music can impact on culture in such a way so as to affect people’s behaviour? Apparently not, at least not if the music is rap, the behaviour violent, and you agree with Viv Craske, editor of Mixmag and would be sociologist. To suggest such a thing is “racist, out of touch and bigoted”. But Mr Craske is a little confused. On the one hand, he claims that “if gun crime is up 55%, it can’t be down to music in any part” (he didn’t elaborate on whether it might be down to music in some part if gun crime is up say 54%). But, on the other hand, he doesn’t accept that guns are fashion accessories for everyone (so that’s cleared that one up then) “but rather for the kind of person who is brought up in a culture who believes that’s the right thing to do.” Right, Mr Craske, but obviously a culture which cannot have been influenced by music in even the smallest way…

Anyway, in Mr Craske’s view, all this is stuff and nonsense, because if music were powerful enough to contribute to gun violence, then it would be used by governments. And there we all were thinking that governments have been using music for millennia…

Well, those silly Victorians, you know, of course they thought about sex every instant of their lives just as we do, but they wouldn’t admit it, the nasty hypocritical creatures, but we’ll fix them, we’ll just make a lot of movies and tv shows based on 19th century novels and if the sex isn’t there we’ll just damn well insert it! So to speak. There is an excellent article on this subject in the Boston Globe today. In it Abby Wolf reports, among other things, that child sexual abuse was featured in a tv drama based on Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, a feature that is entirely absent from the novel. This is one reason not to see movie or tv ‘adaptations’ of novels and expecially of novels that were written more than about five minutes ago. They just can’t get it right. All those Elizabeth Rs and Shakespeare & Lady Violas and Queen Margots having gleeful free-spirited fearless consequence-free sex on ten minutes’ acquaintance or less (Margot grabs the first man she sees on the street and they copulate against the nearest wall, implausible behavior for a 16th century princess, I would have thought, even a French one). We just can’t believe that they really were more inhibited than we are, and for good reason. We also can’t believe that they just weren’t as interested as we are, because we take it for granted that we’ve got it right and they had it wrong. But as Wolf says, ‘That we see sex wherever we see Victorians may say less about them than it does about us and the way we see things now.’

Another, more minor point from the MLA convention.

“The famous line about the M.L.A. is that you’ve never seen a convention where people drink so much and fuck so little,” said Michael Bérubé, an English professor from Penn State University.

Really. That’s so interesting, because I had always heard that was philosophers.

I always knew I didn’t want to be an academic, and a story like this reminds me why. Oh God. The jostling, the ogling, the sucking up, the trend-sniffing, the star-chasing, the pretension. I’d rather be a prison warden, a chicken plucker, a bus driver.

And that’s especially true of the MLA. There’s something about…what used to be called literary criticism, but is now called, in a move that to my mind reeks of pretension and seriosity-envy, ‘literary theory’, that makes me want to grab a shovel and cover myself in mud. Which is odd enough, because I’ve always been a literary type. But then again maybe that’s why: after all literature, unlike other academic fields, has always been a ‘popular’ or general or non-technical subject. The mystification and guild protectiveness and fencing-off aspect of academic literary study is bound to raise the hackles of people who think that at a pinch we can read Shakespeare and Keats on our own.

And that thought may have something to do with the main subject of the article: the scarcity of jobs and opportunities to publish for literary academics. The sad truth is that it’s hard to care very much. How many books and articles about literature do we need? How much research can literary ‘theorists’ do, what sort of discoveries can they make? It’s odd that the article never mentions this aspect of the subject, for all the time it spends on cutbacks and job interviews. But perhaps it’s not odd after all, when the people in the field are so divided (or is it opportunistic?) about whether they speak to Everyone or only to Specialized Professionals. Witness these two comments from Stephen Greenblatt:

“We need to remind ourselves and gesture toward the fact that this is not an esoteric private club,” said Mr. Greenblatt. “It’s as big as the people riding on the subways with their noses in books, or at home watching television shows. Our culture is saturated with the making and consuming of stories.”

“It would be great to sell a lot of books,” said Mr. Greenblatt, “but you don’t say to a physicist or a chemist, ‘Write for a larger audience!’ Any serious profession produces specialized work that is obviously not going to sell tens of thousands or hundreds or thousands, but a very small number of copies.”

Well which is it? Whichever one is needed for the argument at hand, probably. (Not to mention the fact that surely literature is about more than ‘stories’, which one would think Greenblatt of all people would know.) But it’s that tell-tale ‘physicist or chemist’ that gives the game away. Oh dear oh dear. Sad but true: lit crit, even literary theory, is not physics or chemistry. It is a mistake to compare them. Now, where is my shovel…

There is an interesting comment on the letters page of the New York Times Science section.

The conversation with David Sloan Wilson quotes him as saying, “I tell people I’m an atheist, but a nice atheist” (“The Origins of Religion, From a Distinctly Darwinian View”). The idea that atheists, secular humanists, agnostics and other free thinkers are not “nice” or, as is often more bluntly put, “cannot be moral without a belief in God” is highly offensive to the millions of Americans who are nonbelievers.

I entirely agree with the basic thought, but I would have phrased it a little differently. (Plus, in Wilson’s defense, I think he is reacting to the prejudices of other people, not expressing his own.) For one thing, why specify Americans? But that is a minor point, and probably just a habit picked up from political rhetoric. But more to the point, I think offensive is the wrong word here. Even though the implication is offensive, the point is surely that it’s inaccurate and a non sequitur. There are good reasons for de-linking religion and ethics, and good reasons for saying the link is not necessary. John Stuart Mill is incisive on the subject in his Autobiography, for example, describing his father’s contempt for the bribe-taking view of morality religion purveys: be good and you’ll go to heaven, be bad and you won’t. I think such issues are both more interesting and more useful than crying “offense”.