Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 00:00:38 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: MCGANN, THE GHETTO, AND ME


This post is not about Blake, but I risk deflecting off the main
course in order to complete some thoughts I introduced into my
last post on Jerome McGann.  I am still awaiting a response from
him, but I imagine he is a busy man.

In the previous post, I began by noting some passages from McGann
that could be helpful in relating and contrasting Blake to other
"intellectuals" of the 18th and 19th centuries.  Then I veered off
my own topic somewhat by questioning McGann's deployment of Marx's
11th thesis on Feuerbach, which he used to end the article
concerned in his book SOCIAL VALUES AND POETIC ACTS: THE
HISTORICAL JUDGMENT OF LITERARY WORK.  I expressed my
dissatisfaction with this ending in as technical and diplomatic
terms as I could.  Deep down I thought it was pretentious and
vacuous, an all-too familiar manifestation of liberal guilt.
Originality, social relevance, and the like are _results_ of what
you are, what you do, and what you have to say; they cannot be
wished into existence from outside.  The category of utility
cannot be abstracted out of the intrinsic, objective character of
an activity and then imposed on it externally.  This way of
thinking is old and by now a dead end.

I also don't believe that academic intellectuals can boo-hoo about
their detachment from pressing social needs and then will
commitment into being as an alternative to their abstract
existence.  What you can accomplish is completely dependent on
objective realities and not on abstract moralism, which is what
all this blowhard talk of social commitment is.

Anyway, I read the other major Blake essay on the book, which is
also a vital topic for discussion.  Then I read the book's
concluding chapter, which is also heavily Blake-laden.  Then I
read the preface.  Then I started the introduction.  Reading the
book in this manner, no wonder it took me so long to figure out
what McGann was up to.  In the very preface he pits Blake against
Kant and states his project is based the dichotomy between
detached and committed literature.

I am so disappointed, because such a project is utterly bankrupt
as so formulated.  By 1988 one would think a man as brilliant as
McGann would know better than to pursue such a worthless goal
based on a dichotomy that must be obliterated if any progress is
to be made.

Blake wrote somewhere that everyone's life is filled with miracles
and every one who lives must know the experience.  Since Blake's
subject is human experience, regardless of the literal meaning of
'miracle' and what we think of it, we ought to check out what he
meant.  So let me give you an example.

Today I had the most uncanny experience, of which the McGann book
forms one vector of a triple convergence.  I brought the book with
me to my local, along with the local free paper I had just picked
up en route.  A feature story in the paper was written by a black
poet who described his tour of duty teaching poetry in the most
horrendous of local ghetto schools.  The article didn't have a
happy ending exactly, but by the end of his sojourn the situation
had progressed from a total nightmare to something fairly
positive.  The author was describing the outcome of the sacrifice
he made to social commitment.  I was highly dissatisfied with the
piece, because it left so many issues implied in this experience
untouched.  I don't do settlement work, and martyrdom does not
solve the problem of how to develop people in a society which
distorts their development.

After reading the paper, I picked up the McGann book and continued
to read the various chapters in non-sequential fashion.  Though I
found much to stimulate my thought, I was still perturbed by the
"professionalism" of the book, i.e. how it reflects the concerns
of literary criticism as a professional discipline.  Not that I'm
protesting this in a moralistic manner -- it's a field of study --
but I don't live in that world, so I care about it only insofar as
it meets my own human needs.  If I lived my life in the rarified
superstructures of society, I would be more concerned, perhaps.
The introduction starting off with De Man did not hit me where I
live, so I thought, well, isn't this just like academic life in
America?

First vector, article on teaching poetry in the ghetto.  Second
vector, reading McGann.  Third vector smacked into the other two
while I was busy.  A couple of young black kids suddenly announced
they were doing a poetry reading, interrupting my table reading.
Had I known this would happen at this particular moment, I would
have been gone, because I have zero patience for ignorant
ghettocentric ranting, which is what I always have to suffer at
all events of this kind.  Something about bigmouth young kids
getting up in their elders' faces and spouting tired old nonsense
doesn't set with me.

This experience was as unpleasant as previous ones, but I gained
new insight into why their poetry was so bad, aside from general
youth and inexperience.  It's really part of the underdevelopment
of people and not just of poetry and what happens when the human
mind does not properly engage its environment to produce
imaginative insight.  (I could also talk about the class
differences between these two kids and its impact on their
expression, but that's another issue.)  So as I summed up the
problem I saw in my own mind, I realized I was facing directly, in
daily life, the very problem that McGann pontificates about in the
groves of academe, except that McGann had nothing at all to offer
regarding the analysis of the problem, let alone the solution.
Developing a human being as a human being first is the only thing
that can lead to that person being able to either write or
appreciate a poem, and a poem is not just a glittering ornament
for consumption by the professional middle class (as it is for
white, official Washington); it really can tell you and others who
you are and what you are, and, if you dare to write one, it can
only be a product of who and what you have become.  And lack of
skills and education does not seal the book for you if you have
some aspiration and inkling of what it means to actually develop
your outlook on life and the means to express it, for you know
what you are working toward.  But if you are utterly clueless as
to what it means to develop your own mind as an individual,
responsible mind and not just to hide behind cliches, worst of
all, ethnic and turf cliches, you will never develop but just
bullshit your way through the rest of your life.  I am not about
to encourage any such thing.

So I put myself to thinking amidst my frustration, anguish, and
rage, thinking about the things a poem could be and do, thinking
about the ways I could fight the mentality I'm faced with, and I
mean faced with all day every day, not just on this one occasion.
Suddenly lightning flashed in my brain, and it all came together.
Without hesitation or deliberation, I wrote out a short poem in a
flash of inspiration, describing what it is I am fighting and
showing in contrast by its own example what a poem can really do
to shock the mind into consciousness of itself and the world it
lives in.  One cannot force people to open up their minds, but one
can confront them with the problem itself, not just your problem
but theirs too, and if the problem is correctly formulated, one is
then fulfilling the very function one is supposed to be fulfilling
and is doing the one thing that is to be done.

This is not academic speculation; it really is about life on this
bitter earth.

Can I get a witness?


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