Le Flâneur

I can’t believe I’ve not been following this little fight from the start. Ronan Bennett’s recent article in G2 denouncing Martin Amis as a racist, has resulted in Hitchens coming to the defense of his friend in an article published in the Guardian today. I think Bennett is absolutely right in his questioning of Amis’s motives and his dubious choice of language at times. What is a ‘thought experiment’ anyway? Is it where you pretend to be a bit racist to test the responses of other people - and only the truly intellectual and enlightened liberal mind can partake of it? Sounds a bit dubious to put it mildly.

But Hitchens equally makes some good points and rather settles this I feel. I think Amis is lucky in this instance to have such an eloquent advocate as Hitchens. Hitchens and Amis would never tolerate the label ‘islamaphobe’. But I think when they express a strong distaste for ‘islamism’, that’s what they are. But this is different from being racist towards all Muslims isn’t it? Or is the distinction irrelevant?

This whole spat started as a dispute between Amis and fellow Manchester University Professor of English Terry Eagleton. Hitchens seems to have taken it as a compliment that Eagleton has expressed disappointment in Hitchens turning out not to be the new George Orwell, but rather the new Evelyn Waugh. Hasn’t he heard, right is the new left?

Tom Wolfe’s latest novel charts the the trials and trepidations of a beautiful, poor, working class southerner in her first semester at a fictional elite University. Critically the book was poorly received but having just finished it myself I think that this general appraisal is unfair. If anything this book is not so much intended for the audience that lapped up The Bonfire of the Vanities in the 80s. I believe this book is of more interest to, and perhaps intended for a younger generation of readers.

As a novelist who only releases an opus into the world every ten years or so, it’s only natural for him to try and capture the zeitgeist in some way. Though in some respects true to form, this is more than just an expansive journalistic novel about life for American University students in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

I believe it’s telling that one of the ‘athlete friendly’ courses available to students of Dupont University is entitled ‘The French Novel: From Flaubert to Houellebecq’ (and I don’t believe this to be just a casual reference). For me Houellebecq is the most successful contemporary novelist in capturing the spirit of our times and unfortunately, it ain’t pretty. There are themes and set-pieces in Wolf’e’s last novel that synthesise the nihilistic houellebecqian world-view that reduces us just to the subject of our drives. I am Charlotte Simmons, like all of his novels, positively oozes testosterone despite the principle character being an eighteen year old girl. Indeed, they are in accordance with the way in which societies denigrate status along alpha beta distinctions, and one’s success or failure is further complicated by the unrealistic expectations fostered by a hyper-sexualised consumerist society. Weedy beta-male Adam who is Wolfes’s counterpoint to all the muscular superstar jocks and frat boys is a sexual failure and makes desperate trips to the gym in order to ‘buff up’ and adhere to the fashionable ideal for male students. He indulges in revenge fantasies about Dupont’s celebrity ’student athletes’ who are the source of much of his torment.

Amongst other things, this book is very much about sport and the pre-eminent position it occupies in the American University system. How the system works, of kids going to college primarily to play ‘football’ for instance, on the basis of sporting prowess rather than academic ability, had always been something of a mystery to me. My conclusion: it’s just plain weird; and a little creepy. In Wolfe’s novels the main athletes and alpha-fratboys think of themselves as a privileged warrior class who are entitled to all the spoils of war.

The ‘might is right’ attitude that reflects America’s imperial ethos and pervades its educational system has crept steadily into the British system also. The Yealmpton press the other month had an article about Yealmpton Primary school and it reminded me of my experience there as a student teacher on an observation week in late September last year. It was quite an enjoyable week in that I was able to walk there through the woods everyday as I had done as a child, and be home again by about a quarter to four each day. The children were incredibly sweet, some of them at least, and I was quite smitten with them towards the end of the week. I got a sense of the school as being at the heart of the community with parents (mostly mums) having an integrated relationship with the institution. Rural village primary schools are a little microcosm, everyone knows everyone else, parents are involved on a day to day basis with the running of the school, and staff have to be amenable to this. This aspect of village life remains constant and rightly so, but much has changed in the last twenty years or so.

When I attended it form the mid eighties to the early nineties it was a primary school with a second to none reputation for music tuition in the county. This was due largely to the commitment of the then Head, the eccentric but well meaning Dennis Breeze. He must represent the last of a generation of teachers for whom the national curriculum was something to be promptly disposed of each year. For better or worse, you wouldn’t be able to get away with it now. He taught what he knew and what he knew was music, perhaps to the detriment of non-musical children, but nevertheless he was widely respected, despite some of his more unsavoury views. The local community was aware of what the school was like, what it valued and tried to nurture, and could opt out of sending children there if it wanted to.

These days the school is still widely respected but in a different field altogether. Now it is regarded an exemplar in the world of primary physical education. I picked up on this in my time there by the fact that a few of the staff were wearing tracksuits; all of the time. Now, I believe that as a youngster myself I would have found this slightly out of the ordinary and questionable. The reason being that staff on the days they were teaching P.E (which seemed to be most days) there simply wasn’t enough time to get changed, with all the demands on your time that the job entails. I believe however, that attire is important as it gives of certain messages, it reflects deeper structures. Call me old fashioned, but doesn’t a school master have a duty to dress smartly and like an educator, not like an athlete?

It’s a slippery slope if you ask me. Once our culture has been so utterly ravaged beyond all recognition all that’ll be left is sport and millions of baying screaming morons at the side-line.

Tom Wolfe doesn’t do things by half and there’s no doubting his dedication and success, to my mind, in capturing the vernacular of his young subjects, an aspect that some critics found unsatisfactory. Unfortunately the book is more infamous for it’s winning the Bad Sex Award in 2004. This in my view is not entirely undeserved, the excrutiating accounts of copulation are calculatedly cringe-worthy. And at times he lays in on a bit thick and you can’t get that voice out your head reminding you that this is a book about modern teenagers written by someone in the their seventies.

If I am Charlotte Simmons has one main flaw it is that that it is overly long at nearly seven hundred densely printed pages. I think this maybe Wolfe’s ‘up-yours’ to the contemporary convention of shorter novels. Having finally gotten through it myself I feel I have spent a whole semester at ‘Dupont’ University my self - and that is how it should be. Personally I like longer novels - it becomes more of a voyage, the joy of the novel is that it is long and involving process in way that a piece of cinema never can be for instance. Wolfe consciously adopts a literary style that predates cinema and television and I admire his commitment to this ideal. I think more people should read this book and that the popular press did us a disservice by so promptly dismissing it, bad sex and all.

In ‘researching’ my MA dissertation I came across this little gem, a Good Housekeeping advert from would you believe it 1988, obviously riding on the back of much anti-feminist sentiment. This poster is used by a scholar in an essay to make some very serious points about so-called ‘post-feminism’, but though I see point they’re making, I just can’t help seeing this kind of thing as rather funny. There’s an event better picture from Women’s Day (that I can’t be bothered to scan in), of Barbara Bush posing immaculately in Pearls on a White House sofa, superimposed with speech marks it reads: “Women’s Lib made me feel inadequate and useless”.

I feel like this dissertation, now more then anything else, is impeding me from getting on with the rest of my life. What doesn’t help matters is that I’ve been reading some fairly subversive literature recently slamming post-modern academia, and feminists in particular. Nick Cohen posits that, as well as certain historical factors, it is the academic left’s insistence on ‘theorizing’ identity politics, it’s zombie like fixation on ‘otherness’ and ‘the tyranny of the signifier’, that accounts for its current impotency and lack of moral compass. It’s an argument I find rather appealing having just come through the ‘cultural studies’ experience myself. A typical reading list at a university in the thrall of the ‘post’ies will contain a couple of essays by Enlightenment thinkers early on, and then the rest will be reams and reams of post-modern ‘theory’ characterised for the most part by unnecessary complex language and obscurantism. The general feeling is that the harder to read or understand something is, then the more worthy and important it must be. Maybe this sounds a bit anti-intellectual or plebeian even. But I honestly think George Orwell would be turning in his grave at some of this crap.

In 1996 Dennis Dutton, the editor of Philosophy and literature, opened an annual Bad Writing Contest. The winner in 1999, as Cohen highlights in his book What’s Left: How Liberals Lost their Way, was the radical marxist feminist theorist Judith Butler. There are several of her texts on my reading list, all of potential use in my dissertation – so help me god. Here is the winning entry in all its glory:

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 rearctiulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

What, except on a very abstract level, does this have to do with reality? And what right do the writers of such stuff have to claim they are coming from the left? Is it any wonder that I’m beginning to take the view that the ‘University experience’ for many of my generation is a complete sham and a swindle?