In earlier Brussels Journal contributions under the general rubric of “Ideology and Literature” I have made reference to Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Isak Dinesen,Jorge Luis Borges, and Ray Bradbury, among others. The West’s cultural crisis has deep roots; the awareness and analysis of that crisis also have deep roots. We tend to look to “experts,” rather than novelists and poets, to understand the prevailing condition. Perhaps the literary men would be better advisors. The corrosive doctrine called multiculturalism, for example, has an ancestry traceable to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s proto-revolutionary rejection of modern European civilization and his notion of “the Noble Savage.” Herman Melville’s South-Sea novel Typee (1848) engages Rousseau keenly. Indirectly, as fiction typically does, but incisively, Typee suggests the gross inadequacy of Rousseau’s “rejectionist” argument and its accompanying “Noble Savage” theory. We may therefore say of Melville’s novel that, in addition to its fascination as a story, it has a cognitive function: in reading it we participate with Melville in careful consideration of the question, answered in the prejudicial affirmative by the author of The Social Contract, whether savagery is preferable to civilization. When Melville’s contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne brings the psychological structure of fanaticism under scrutiny in The Blithedale Romance(1852), his narrative too is a deflationary analysis of socialism, which he regards as misplaced crusading religiosity.Culture Wars by Gary Wolf
Monday 12 October 2009
From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Mon, 2009-10-12 10:41
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