Hugh Kenner - The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy

This book is about the familiar world, three cross-sections of which yield the following:

(1) Counterfeiting. Undergraduates used to affront the System by staging a juxtaposition, inventively incongruous: the horse in the bedroom, the Chevy in the lobby, the cow in the bell-tower. But today's fashion is to create a nonexistent student, who by outwitting the System's punchcards may be carried from Freshman English to Senior Math (Phys Ed being the dangerous salient) and at last installed, in full Bachelorhood, on the Alumni mailinglists. There is scarcely an academy in the country where this folk art of IBM man has not been attempted.

(2) Phosphorescent Quotation. It was long supposed that a politician was best mocked by parody: by isolating traits and exaggerating them. But in the mid-1950's satirists discovered that to mock Dwight Eisenhower it was sufficient to quote him verbatim. Nor was this a function of presidential dyslexia; for in 1961 verbatim excerpts proved John Kennedy's press conferences to be indistinguishable in detail from those of the previous regime. It is now commonplace to remark of a wide range of phenomena that they "parody themselves." Pop art--the contrived application of this principle--was a product of the Kennedy period.

(3) Connoisseurship. Antiques were once sought out because they embodied a timeless authority of design sup

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posed to be no longer attainable (Chippendale, Sheraton; and compare the finality of Egyptian sculpture). They are now prized just when no such claims are to be plausibly made for them; only that in some former pocket of time they were purposeful (stained glass lampshades, French telephones; and compare the rectitude of the Cigar Store Indian). This phenomenon is less obscure than its analysts, who circulate the impenetrable term "camp." The artifacts are stylistic quotations; the environment they create is a cultural echo-chamber, reverberant with amusing scraps of dead languages. Things are utterances.

These are generic examples; it is easy to supply many more in each category. We perceive each kind by contrast with an earlier imaginative mode. The first eludes people trained on a poetic of juxtaposition, the second people who understand parody, the third people alert to classic norms. Juxtaposition, parody, the classic norm; the fact that these three obsolete modes summarize, say, the aesthetic of Ulysses was part of what Pound meant when he called Ulysses an end, not a beginning, or Wyndham Lewis when he called it a terminal moraine. It terminated the Romantic Interlude, which by 16 June 1904 could be said to have become degenerate. Keats's sensuality had declined into Bloom's, Byron's noble savagery into Boylan's, Shelley's lan into Stephen's. In the music, the painting, the theatre and the literature of that time corresponding postures had evolved, all ridiculous, all seen by normal people as normal. Joyce's strategy was to reduce them by juxtaposition, by parody, by the evocation of classic norms. He terminated an era. He also pointed forward to another, counterfeiting a document, quoting actual sources, cutting the

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reader free among unweighted facts earmarked by many times.

Nearly fifty years after Ulysses, juxtaposition has wholly given way to counterfeiting, in a world of image-duplicators; parody to quotation, in a world of nonfictional fiction; classicizing to eclectic connoisseurship, in a world that has turned into one huge muse sans murs.

By counterfeit, by quotation, by connoisseurship: the great artists of an astonishing half-century, 1690-1740, proceeded so. We call them satirists, they called themselves (having no better word) satirists; they were, Swift and Pope, great realists, great modernists. They had responded, we are going to see, to a new definition of man, proper to the new universe of empirical fact, which definition still obtains because we are still in that universe. They transmuted, to the point of destruction, the old ritual genres, tragedy, comedy, epic, which were proper to an older universe. They were at the leading edge of an age which was moving toward an age like our own, at home with the machine and with utter ambivalence. The mind of Europe, unable to face machine or ambivalence, retreated (after an ominous calm) into the Romantic Interlude, restoring the genres since phenomena were held to be inherently sad, funny, noble, making a value of the pure intention, and achieving meanwhile such memorable feats (its adrenalin roused like a frightened stag's) as quite to conceal its posture of retreat. This movement ran down into nonsense, having pretended for one hundred fifty years that a world created by human beings was not human. And it was finally cauterized ( 1910-1930) by juxtaposition, parody, classic norms; and now we pick up the old themes, the themes