by Tom Wolfe
One student told me the only problem was that when she wrote her papers on her word processor and used spell check, all hell broke loose. “You get these little wavy red lines all over the screen, under ‘womyn.’ Spell check doesn’t have ‘womyn.’” Then she shrugged. “Or at least mine doesn’t.”
The undisputed queen of feminist theory is Judith Butler, a forty-four-year-old Hegel scholar with (like Fish) a Ph.D. from Yale, who is also known as the diva of Queer Studies. She is small and not very prepossessing, but graduate students all over the country say “diva” at the mere mention of her name. A group of them put out a fan magazine called Judy! devoted to chronicling the way she rams home her “performativity” theory of speech and sexual behavior as forms of anarchy.
“All gender roles are an imitation for which there is no original,” runs her most famous paradox. She is even more famous for her convoluted Theoryese. In 1998 the journal Philosophy and Literature named her winner of their Bad Writing Contest for a sentence that began “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation …”—and went on for fifty-nine words more. Her zine fans love the insouciant yet erudite way she dismisses such attacks. “Ponderousness,” she says, referring to Hegel, “is part of the phenomenological challenge of his text.”
The battle of the Fools versus the Young Turks has escalated beyond words, however. In 1987 the traditionalists formed a self-defense organization called the National Association of Scholars; 1,000 joined. In a public statement, Fish, while at Duke, branded them with the R word, the S word, and the H word—racist, sexist, and homophobic—and sent a memo to Duke’s provost recommending that no member of the tainted organization be allowed on key university committees. The provost refused. The Scholars accused Fish of trying to blacklist them. At more than one major university, Young Turks roamed about in Gen X clothes, red ballpoint pens at the ready, sniffing out deviationists … sexists … racists … classists (sic) … homophobes … ethnophobes … The stories of Young Turks nudging and whispering to keep graduate students away from Fool courses, to the point where some Fool ends up with zero students for the year, would make a fairly grisly chapter in a book.
In the face of such confidence and aggressiveness on the part of the Young Turks and such devotion on the part of their graduate-student T.A. followers, who is left to support a student in her misgivings about “womyn” or any other manifestation of Rococo Marxism? Her other teachers? Some dean? The university’s president? The most unlikely of all, believe me, is the president.
Recently I met a student who told me he was taking a cross-disciplinary course entitled Civilizations of North America. “Cross-disciplinary” is a fashionable term in academia just now, not to be confused with the old (Fool) term “interdisciplinary,” which refers to the use of concepts from two or more conventional scholarly disciplines to study a particular subject, such as using the concepts of sociology and economics to write history. No, “cross-disciplinary” refers to crossing all disciplines … much the way a 747 crosses the North Pole at 40,000 feet above an impenetrable cloud cover … on the way to a single destination: Rococo Marxism. So the instructor informs the class that while Americans might have more money, possessions, technological advantages, and conveniences than Mexicans or Canadians, when it comes to “social cleavages”—along the lines of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and regional imbalances—Americans are the primitives. On this subject—life’s fundamentals—we need to take lessons at the knees of the Mexicans and the Canadians.
The Canadians? The Mexicans? No kidding? … Didn’t the French of Quebec province get so bitter about the British majority that they almost seceded from Canada just five years ago? And just six years ago didn’t the Indians in Mexico’s southernmost province, Chiapas, rise up in an armed rebellion? And gender … gosh … isn’t it an open secret that foreign corporations like to employ women on their assembly lines in Mexico because Mexican women are taught all their lives to submit to male authority? Or am I dreaming?
Shrugging: “Hey, I don’t know. That’s what he told us.”
By now, in the year 2000, that’s what anyone is apt to do … shrug and go on about his business. For eighty-two years now, America’s intellectuals, right on time, as Nietzsche predicted it, have expressed their skepticism toward American life. And, as the French say, “Skepticism soon hardens into contempt.” As any Fool sociologist could tell you, there are only two objectively detectable social classes in America: people above the bachelor’s-degree line—i.e., people who have graduated from four-year colleges—and people below it, who haven’t. By now people above it have learned to shrug and acquiesce to “political correctness,” to Rococo Marxism, because they know that to oppose it out loud is in poor taste. It is a … breach of the etiquette you must observe to establish yourself as an educated person.
Meanwhile, in the ranks of people below that sheerly dividing line, the bachelor’s degree, all those limo drivers and cable TV linesmen on the cruises, there are plenty who voice their opposition—at night, over cigarettes, in the ship’s Palais Doré cocktail lounge … muttering, grousing, grousing, muttering … all the while doubting their own common sense. Is it any wonder, then, when survey after survey shows Americans entering the Second American Century, the Pax Americana, in a state of … whatever …
We are left, finally, with one question. What exactly do the intellectuals want out of their Rococo Marxist mental acrobatics? Is it change they want, change for all the para-proletariats whose ideological benefactors they proclaim themselves to be? Of course not. Actual change would involve irksome toil. So what do they want?
It’s a simple business, at bottom. All the intellectual wants, in his heart of hearts, is to hold on to what was magically given to him one shining moment a century ago. He asks for nothing more than to remain aloof, removed, as Revel once put it, from the mob, the philistines … “the middle class.”
Just think of the fun Nietzsche could have had, if only God were not dead! Think of what it would have been like for him if he could have lolled for the past hundred years—he died in 1900—on a king-size cloud in Heaven, with angels playing Richard Strauss (he had given up on Wagner) in harp quartets as he gazed down upon the creatures only he had been brilliant enough to foresee … the barbaric brethren … the world warriors … the Truth demolition crews prowling about in children’s clothes … A prophet, I presume, enjoys seeing his prophecies come true, but I have the feeling Nietzsche would have become bored by a hundred years of … “the intellectual” … I can almost hear that hortatory and apostrophic voice of his: How could you writers and academics have settled for such an easy, indolent role—for so long! How could you have chosen a facile snobbery over the hard work, the endless work, the Herculean work of gaining knowledge? I think he would have shaken his head over their ponderous, amateurish theories of cognition and sexuality. I think he would have grown weary of their dogged skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt and would have said, Why don’t you admit it to me (no one need know—after all, I’m dead): if you must rate nations, at this moment in history your “accursed” America is the very micrometer by which all others must be measured.
And he would have been right.
The Marxists of the Soviets’ East European empire had their Havel; the Marxists of the Soviet Union itself, their Solzhenitsyn; and the Rococo Marxists of America—
“Chauvinism!” cry the intellectuals. “Patriotism!”
—may profit by their example. If this be patriotism … make the most of it!
The Invisible Artist
Frederick Hart died at the age of fifty-five on August 13, 1999, two days after a team of doctors at Johns Hopkins discovered he had lung cancer, abruptly concluding one of the most bizarre stories in the history of twentieth-century art. While still in his twenties Hart conscio
usly, pointedly, aimed for the ultimate in the Western tradition of sculpture, achieved it in a single stroke, then became invisible, and remained as invisible as Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, who was invisible “simply because people refused to see me.”
Not even Giotto, the twelve-year-old shepherd boy who was out in the meadow with the flock one day circa 1280, using a piece of flint to draw a picture of sheep on the face of a boulder, when the vacationing Florentine artist Cimabue happened to stroll by and discover the baby genius—not even Giotto could match Frederick Hart’s storybook rise from obscurity.
Hart was born in Atlanta to a failed actress and a couldn’t-bebothered newspaper reporter. He was only three when his mother died, whereupon he was packed off to an aunt in a part of rural South Carolina where people ate peanuts boiled in salty water. He developed into an incorrigible Conway, South Carolina, juvenile delinquent, failed the ninth grade on his first try, and got thrown out of school on his second. Yet at the age of sixteen, by then a high-school dropout, he managed, to universal or at least Conway-wide amazement, to gain admission to the University of South Carolina by scoring a composite 35 out of a maximum 36 on an ACT college entrance test, the equivalent of a 1,560 on the College Boards.
He lasted six months. He became the lone white student to join 250 black students in a civil rights protest, was arrested, then expelled from the university. Informed that the Ku Klux Klan was looking for him, he fled to Washington.
In Washington he managed to get a job as a clerk at the Washington National Cathedral, a stupendous stone structure built in the Middle English Gothic style. The cathedral employed a crew of Italian masons full-time, and Hart became intrigued with their skill at stone carving. Several times he asked the master carver, an Italian named Roger Morigi, to take him on as an apprentice, but got nowhere. There was no one on the job but experienced Italians. By and by, Hart got to know the crew and took to borrowing tools and having a go at discarded pieces of stone. Morigi was so happily surprised by his aptitude, he made him an apprentice, after all, and soon began urging him to become a sculptor. Hart turned out to have Giotto’s seemingly God-given genius—Giotto was a sculptor as well as a painter—for pulling perfectly formed human figures out of stone and clay at will and rapidly.
In 1971, Hart learned that the cathedral was holding an international competition to find a sculptor to adorn the building’s west façade with a vast and elaborate spread of deep bas-reliefs and statuary on the theme of the Creation. Morigi urged Hart to enter. He entered and won. A working-class boy nobody had ever heard of, an apprentice stone carver, had won what would turn out to be the biggest and most prestigious commission for religious sculpture in America in the twentieth century.
The project brought him unimaginable dividends. The erstwhile juvenile delinquent from Conway, South Carolina, was a creature of hot passions, a handsome, slender boy with long, wavy, light brown hair, an artist by night with a rebellious hairdo and a rebellious attitude who was a big hit with the girls. In the late afternoons he had taken to hanging about Dupont Circle in Washington, which had become something of a bohemian quarter. Afternoon after afternoon he saw the same ravishing young woman walking home from work down Connecticut Avenue. His hot Hart flame lit, he introduced himself and asked her if she would pose for his rendition of the Creation, an array of idealized young men and women rising nude from out of the chaotic swirl of Creation’s dawn. She posed. They married. Great artists and the models they fell in love with already accounted for the most romantic part of art history. But probably no model in all that lengthy, not to say lubricious, lore was ever so stunningly beautiful as Lindy Lain Hart. Her face and figure were to recur in his work throughout his career.
The hot-blooded boy’s passion, as Hart developed his vision of the Creation, could not be consummated by Woman alone. He fell in love with God. For Hart, the process began with his at first purely pragmatic research into the biblical story of the Creation in the Book of Genesis. He had been baptized in the Presbyterian Church, and he was working for the Episcopal Church at the Washington National Cathedral. But by the 1970s, neither of these proper, old-line, in-town Protestant faiths offered the strong wine a boy who was in love with God was looking for. He became a Roman Catholic and began to regard his talent as a charisma, a gift from God. He dedicated his work to the idealization of the possibilities God offered man.
From his conception of Ex Nihilo, as he called the centerpiece of his huge Creation design (literally, “out of nothing”; figuratively, out of the chaos that preceded Creation), to the first small-scale clay model, through to the final carving of the stone—all this took eleven years.
In 1982, Ex Nihilo was unveiled in a dedication ceremony. The next day, Hart scanned the newspapers for reviews … The Washington Post … The New York Times … nothing … nothing the next day, either … nor the next week nor the week after that. The one mention of any sort was an obiter dictum in the Post’s Style (read: Women’s) section indicating that the west façade of the cathedral now had some new but earnestly traditional (read: old-fashioned) decoration. So Hart started monitoring the art magazines. Months went by … nothing. It reached the point that he began yearning for a single paragraph by an art critic who would say how much he loathed Ex Nihilo … anything, anything at all … to prove there was someone out there in the art world who in some way, however slightly or rudely, cared.
The truth was, no one did, not in the least. Ex Nihilo never got ex nihilo simply because art worldlings refused to see it.
Hart had become so absorbed in his “triumph” that he had next to no comprehension of the American art world as it existed in the 1980s. In fact, the art world was strictly the New York art world, and it was scarcely a world, if world was meant to connote a great many people. In the one sociological study of the subject, The Painted Word, the author estimated the entire art “world” consisted of some three thousand curators, dealers, collectors, scholars, critics, and artists in New York. Art critics, even in the most remote outbacks of the heartland, were perfectly content to be obedient couriers of the word as received from New York. And the word was that School of Renaissance sculpture like Hart’s was nonart. Art worldlings just couldn’t see it.
The art magazines opened Hart’s eyes until they were bleary with bafflement. Classical statues were “pictures in the air.” They used a devious means—skill—to fool the eye into believing that bronze or stone had turned into human flesh. Therefore, they were artificial, false, meretricious. By 1982, no ambitious artist was going to display skill, even if he had it. The great sculptors of the time did things like have unionized elves put arrangements of rocks or bricks flat on the ground, objects they, the artists, hadn’t laid a finger on (Carl Andre), or prop up slabs of Cor-Ten steel straight from the foundry, edgewise (Richard Serra); or they took G.E. fluorescent light tubes straight out of the box from the hardware store and arranged them this way and that (Dan Flavin); or they welded I-beams and scraps of metal together (Anthony Caro). This expressed the material’s true nature, its “gravity” (no stone pictures floating in the air), its “objectness.”
This was greatness in sculpture. As Tom Stoppard put it in his play Artist Descending a Staircase, “Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.”
Hart lurched from bafflement to shock, then to outrage. He would force the art world to see what great sculpture looked like.
By 1982, he was already involved in another competition for a huge piece of public sculpture in Washington. A group of Vietnam veterans had just obtained congressional approval for a memorial that would pay long-delayed tribute to those who had fought in Vietnam with honor and courage in a lost and highly unpopular cause. They had chosen a jury of architects and art worldlings to make a blind selection in an open competition; that is, anyone could enter, and no one could put his name on his entry. Every proposal had to include something—a wall, a plinth, a column—on which a hired engraver could inscribe the names of all 57,000
-plus members of the American military who had died in Vietnam. Nine of the top ten choices were abstract designs that could be executed without resorting to that devious and accursed bit of trickery: skill. Only the number-three choice was representational. Up on one end of a semicircular wall bearing the 57,000 names was an infantryman on his knees beside a fallen comrade, looking about for help. At the other end, a third infantryman had begun to run along the top of the wall toward them. The sculptor was Frederick Hart.
The winning entry was by a young Yale undergraduate architectural student named Maya Lin. Her proposal was a V-shaped wall, period, a wall of polished black granite inscribed only with the names; no mention of honor, courage, or gratitude; not even a flag. Absolutely skillproof, it was.
Many veterans were furious. They regarded her wall as a gigantic pitiless tombstone that said, “Your so-called service was an absolutely pointless disaster.” They made so much noise that a compromise was struck. An American flag and statue would be added to the site. Hart was chosen to do the statue. He came up with a group of three soldiers, realistic down to the aglets of their boot strings, who appear to have just emerged from the jungle into a clearing, where they are startled to see Maya Lin’s V-shaped black wall bearing the names of their dead comrades.
Naturally enough, Maya Lin was miffed at the intrusion, and so a make-peace get-together was arranged in Plainview, New York, where the foundry had just completed casting the soldiers. Doing her best to play the part, Maya Lin asked Hart—as Hart recounted it—if the young men used as models for the three soldiers had complained of any pain when the plaster casts were removed from their faces and arms. Hart couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. Then it dawned on him. She assumed that he had followed the lead of the ingenious art worldling George Segal, who had contrived a way of sculpturing the human figure without any skill whatsoever: by covering the model’s body in wet plaster and removing it when it began to harden. No artist of her generation (she was twenty-one) could even conceive of a sculptor starting out solely with a picture in his head, a stylus, a brick of moist clay and some armature wire. No artist of her generation could even speculate about … skill.
