If All Art is Propaganda, Then What is Art Criticism?

While there has been argument over the matter of who said it first, and indeed the remark may be more strongly associated with figures other than himself, Upton Sinclair seems to have originated the remark that "all art is propaganda," and certainly enlarged upon and argued forcefully for the position in his study Mammonart.

Of course, if "all art is propaganda" one may ask what that means for all art criticism. The obvious answer would seem to be that art criticism is, at least in part and on at some level, propaganda criticism.

Thus if it is not just sanctimonious but foolish to assail art for being "propaganda," and folly to sniff about art having a "Message," it is also not just sanctimonious but foolish and folly to sniff about art critics being attentive to the propaganda--to the political content--of the works they examine. Rather one would do better to judge them for how well or how badly they do the job.

Going by what I see of those pros enjoying space on major platforms today, the current cohort tends to do the job about as well as the professional political commentators similarly enjoying space on the major platforms--which is to say very, very badly indeed.

The Frank Cowperwood Saga: Theodore Dreiser's The Financier and The Titan

In discussing Theodore Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood novels it seems common to refer to them as a trilogy (the "Trilogy of Desire") consisting of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1945). However, Theodore Dreiser originally wrote The Financier and The Titan as a single novel that the publisher split into two parts. Moreover, while the close of The Titan does offer a sketch of Dreiser's plans for a third book, he only started the concluding The Stoic much later in the 1930s, and did not live to see it through publication--in a heavily downsized form, to go by what I have read. Given that the first two were completed as a single work and published close together, and that what we have of the third appeared so much later it seems to me worthwhile to take the first two books in the saga and review them together while keeping in mind how they work as individual novels and as one single novel, without reference to the third work (which as of the time of this writing, I have not read).

The reviews of the The Financier and The Titan are now up--along with a third item about how Dreiser and Balzac both treated the figure of the businessman in their tales. (Knowing how much Balzac meant to Dreiser, and being struck by the parallels--and differences--between the writers as I read through the books doing so just seemed natural.)

Frank Cowperwood and the World of "Philanthropy"

In the course of Theodore Dreiser's The Titan the protagonist Frank Cowperwood, fighting to establish his streetcar monopoly in Chicago in the face of determined opposition from vengeful business and personal enemies, finds himself having a tough time getting the credit he needs to continue in his campaign--just when he is approached by an astronomer attached to a certain local university on the grow (implicitly, the then-newly founded University of Chicago) looking for donations for the construction of what he intends to be the world's most powerful observatory.

Dreiser's Cowperwood is sufficiently intellectual to have some respect for such a project and the intelligence and earnestness of the man endeavoring to realize it. However, that is not what is foremost in his mind. Rather it is that if the astronomer merely hopes for only a small part of the total cost from Cowperwood, Cowperwood, who realizes that he could easily afford to pay for the whole project, also realizes that "[o]n such a repute" as would accrue to him from paying for such an observatory end his problems raising credit at a stroke by impressing the financial world with his means. Indeed, he inwardly says "'At last! At last!'" at that very moment, makes the "donation," and gets exactly the result he expected. His "gift" making bankers take "sharp note of the donor" of such extraordinary means, Cowperwood now found his requests for "bond and mortgage loans" on his infrastructure projects "courteously received" even by houses that we had just seen give him the brush-off, and his bonds quickly taken up for sale, so that he had all the money he needed to proceed--while "those who had been scheming to bring about Cowperwood's downfall gnashed impotent teeth."

As it was then, so it remains now, the donations of the rich frequently serving other ends besides altruism--though such realities are apt to be slighted by the elite's courtiers in the mainstream press and the gullible portion of the public which respects its singing of "philanthropists," quite sure that when sex scandal-ridden ex-presidents and tech billionaires say they only hung out with Jeffrey Epstein for the benefit of their charitable foundations they consider it expression of a disbelief of them the mark of a low and shabby mind insufficiently respectful of the elite before whom their sort expect all "right-thinking people" to bow and scrape."

Dreiser, Balzac and the Businessman: A Note on Frank Cowperwood

In reading Theodore Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood novels, especially after having read his memoir A Book About Myself, I instantly found myself, in light of Dreiser's theme and avowed admiration for the great Honoré de Balzac, comparing and contrasting the two authors--not least in respect of their attitudes toward the kind of figure they so often wrote about, the businessman.

As it happens the contrasts are the more striking than any points of similarity in their writing here. After all, if Balzac treats the retired pasta-maker Jean-Joachim Goriot or the printer David Sechard or the iron-monger Claude-Joseph Pillerault with sympathy and respect, Balzac is not unjustly notorious for his disrespect for the bourgeois generally and the businessman particularly, as we see when he presents an obtusely ambitious mediocrity like César Birotteau, a self-indulgent old fool like Célestin Crevel, a miser like Félix Grandet--the flaws with which such figures were riddled the source of a good deal of the drama (and a good deal of the ample fun to be had amid it).

By contrast it is the opposite with Dreiser. If (like Balzac) Dreiser was sincerely and deeply critical of the social world he saw around him, in significant part because he was critical of the capitalist social system, his attitude toward those who rose high within that system was another matter. Dreiser was genuinely in awe of the successful businessman, an utter believer in the propaganda with which we were ceaselessly beaten over the head in his day, and with which we are ceaselessly beaten over the head now for their superiority to the rest of humanity--in acuity and practical vision, in energy and personal force, in charisma, before which others cannot but bow, with all this evident from the earliest beginnings of their lives, with childhood anecdotes to match. (Thus does Dreiser have the young Frank Cowperwood making sixty-two dollars, minus the bank's discount on the money he borrowed to make it happen, in his first business deal at the age of thirteen in an early chapter of The Financier.) Meanwhile, for all his business success Cowperwood as Dreiser presents him cannot be dismissed as "a mere money-grabber," the "brisk, dynamic, seemingly unromantic" figure "conceal[ing] . . . under [the] very forceful exterior . . . a deep underlying element of romance and fire," such that "in spite of his activity" he was "an introspective man, and art, drama and the pathos of broken ideals [were] not beyond him." Indeed, Frank possesses a philosophical bent that strengthens his mental grip on "how the world works" so helpful to him in his endeavors (a philosopher-businessman!), and the broader living of his life--while he displays not just a refined aesthetic sensibility but deep appreciation of beauty that his wealth permits him to indulge in the design of his homes and choice of the objets d'art with which he fills them, as the underlying romance and fire also manifest themselves in his effect on the ladies (of whom there are many in his life), the women responding not merely to his looks and his wealth and his "forceful exterior," but those same inner qualities as well.

In Dreiser's tale Cowperwood is the most formidable of such creatures, but all the same in his depiction of Cowperwood's allies and rivals Dreiser does make clear a respect for the class as a whole on that level--with this respect underlined by the disrespect that Dreiser displays for men of other types, not least the sort of man that Dreiser actually was, an artist, as we see in particular in The Titan. Cowperwood was not likely to encounter any such persons in the course of his business affairs--but more than once he did encounter them as rivals in his love affairs. Thus is the husband of one of his mistresses, the violinist Harold Sohlberg, a man who, suffering the artistic temperament ("'I am an arteest,' he was fond of saying" Dreiser actually writes) without being a great artist, "stormed, dreamed, wept" but was getting nowhere and never would, with the contrast between him and Cowperwood underlined when, as Cowperwood's enraged wife violently attacks his mistress and Harold's wife, the "innate coward" Harold freezes while Cowperwood, the "man of action" physically as in business, breaks down a door to stop her and save the woman's life. (After the episode, to hush things up, Frank pays Harold five thousand dollars a year to get out of town and never come back, something the man does in, again, innately cowardly fashion.)

A blatant and rather brutal caricature, Harold is not the only one, while the self-flagellation involved in Dreiser's presentation of such personages seems the more apparent in the case of a lover of another of Frank's mistresses, Forbes Gurney--and significantly so. Described as a "tall, melancholy youth" who is "touched by an atmosphere of wistfulness, or, let us say, life-hunger," who was "very poor" but "between a penchant for journalism, verse-writing, and some dramatic work, was somewhat undecided as to his future," presently "instalment collector for a furniture company," and "trying, in a mooning way, to identify himself with the Chicago newspaper world," he seems all too obviously the tall, life-hungry, poor, vaguely literary, instalment collecting, newspaper work-aspiring Dreiser describes to us in A Book About Myself (a portrait of this artist as a young man). When a suspicious Frank discovers Stephanie Platow with him and he confronts her with the evidence of her betrayal of him with Forbes right there in the room Frank and Stephanie have it out as if Forbes is nothing at all, as Stephanie thinks to herself that "the pale poet" had been "a mere breath of romance" next to the "grim, wonderful man" Frank was, and her loss of Frank all she can think of after he has stormed out. (Indeed, it could seem that Dreiser shows the artist less respect here than Cowperwood does, to go by Dreiser's remark that, as befit a truly appreciative art collector, "[o]f all individuals [Cowperwood] respected, indeed revered, the sincere artist," who "touched . . . with a vision," "set themselves to quiet tasks of beauty.")

The difference between Dreiser and Balzac is accentuated again when we look at how Balzac, for his part, treated the artist--by and large, much more admiring, to the point of the famously acid Balzac defending them against the tendency of so many to treat them with contempt. Thus do we see in The Two Brothers Joseph Rouget a painter of pictures, yes, but also a model of diligence and responsibility whose earnings from his very painting are what support his profoundly ungrateful brother and mother--whose mind is so narrow that only when she is at death's door is her priest and confessor able to make her realize what has been obvious to him as well as the reader this whole time, that she had never appreciated Joseph as she ought to have done. (Indeed, Joseph even proves to be superior in business acumen to those "practical" relatives who so look down on him at at least one point in the tale as the only one who recognizes the financial value of a cache of paintings they discover and determining upon selling them for the money they need.)

Still, if Dreiser's treatment of businessmen like Cowperwood, and Cowperwood in particular, can seem a testament to Dreiser's credulousness before the conventionalities prevailing in America (again, to a self-flagellating degree), Dreiser also broke with the American mythology of the businessman in a significant respect. This is the tendency to, whenever possible, present businessmen as saintly pillars of personal and commercial virtue who triumphed playing by the rules of a tough but fair game, and in doing so blessed society first with the direct results of their entrepreneurship--giving employment to the worker, goods to the consumer, taxes to the state--and then a second time as "philanthropists" who share some of what they have won for themselves, in every respect "pillars of the community." Indeed, in contrast with the presentation of the businessman as a benefactor to society epitomized by the inventor-entrepreneur who as the General Electric slogan had it "brings good things to life"--and one might add, in line with Cowperwood's survival-of-the-fittest view of the world and its sanction for his unapologetic selfishness ("'I satisfy myself' had ever been his motto")--Cowperwood is a plain old rent-seeking financier whose modus operandi is scheming to gain monopolistic control of some public utility (street-cars, gas, street-cars again) for what it will bring in to him personally and no other reason, and without hesitating at a resort to corrupt and criminal methods to do it. (Thus faced with someone charging a higher price than he wants to pay for a key piece of real estate he hopes to use as an entrance for a street-car tunnel Cowperwood arranges to have the building on that property torn down and the excavation of the tunnel begun on a Sunday because of the difficulties of getting an injunction to stop it, claim a judge had given permission in a now nonexistent document, and count on the cost and duration of the inevitable legal battle to let him in the end get away with his crime.) At the same time "philanthropy" is unlikely to be anything but when it comes from Mr. Cowperwood (pointedly undertaking his principal such act in The Titan for the sake of forwarding his business agenda.)

Indeed, it is in this side of the story--the understanding of "the game" as actually played--that one sees Dreiser's critical intelligence, Dreiser's social vision, at work, and rather powerfully at that. One may see a contradiction between his utter conventionality in his admiration for the successful businessman and his far more critical view of just what it is that businessmen do. Indeed, one may see this as the contradiction in his outlook and his work, torn as Dreiser was between an amoral and brutally Darwinistic view of his life and his rebellion against what such Darwinism was being used to justify in actual society that had the author who was to not very many years later pen the greatest literary denunciation of "the American Dream" grasping after the Dream all the same. It is a contradiction that, I suspect, runs through many, many more of us than we realize, let alone admit.

Book Review: The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser, after having begun the story of Frank Cowperwood in 1912's The Financier, continued it in 1914's The Titan--originally merely the second half of one long book, later split in two for publication. Unsurprisingly they are structured quite differently. The way The Financier is structured has the first third tracing Cowperwood's development from childhood to his position as a man of some wealth and power in post-Civil War Philadelphia in a process that simply has him rolling on from one win to another until, pursuing his grand ambition in the streetcar business, he encounters the crisis that brings him down. The minute detailing of that crisis, his failed legal defense and his incarceration account for almost all of the remaining two-thirds, with at the very end Cowperwood managing to rebuild his life--returning to business, getting a divorce from a wife with whom he can no longer be happy, marrying his mistress Aileen, and departing Philadelphia for a new life out west, the outlines of which Dreiser presents in the book's coda (presented as what the witches from Macbeth might have said to Frank about his destiny out there).

There are important parallels with all this in The Titan. Once again Frank Cowperwood makes his grand business goal pursuit of control of the streetcar system of a major American city. Once again Frank's marriage palls, he pursues other women, and his marriage never recovers. Once again Frank's business project ultimately fails--but at the tale's end he finds comfort in a new love, while a coda hints at the events to follow as, once more, in a new place, with a new woman, he pursues a new venture. However, the differences are hugely important. If Frank's upward path was almost frictionless in the first third of Financier, and the rest dealt with his response to calamity, The Titan, following Frank's foray into the gas business almost as soon as he arrives in Chicago, focuses on his long struggle to build his streetcar system and make it profitable (final failure coming only in the last pages of the book). In line with this Dreiser, in contrast with the journalistic hacks of our time who in their eagerness to glorify rather than to account for or explain treat the founding of businesses as a single-handed act of conjuring by magicians (just as they do the invention of technologies), takes a deep interest in how such things are actually made to happen. The development of social contacts and sniffing out of opportunity that others may equally well see but lack the means to seize, the searching after know-how and capital, the management of relations with backers and partners and creditors and the press and government amid the inevitable emergence of such rivals as there must always be when big money is at stake (often, through methods more mobster-like than those who make a culture hero of the businessman care to have associated with the Frank Cowperwoods of the world)--if Cowperwood as a character often seems a wish-fulfilling fantasy for Dreiser, Dreiser works out the mechanics of all this very meticulously and credibly, while finding color and drama in it as few others have ever done. (Even such a critic of Dreiser's as Upton Sinclair in Money Writes! paid tribute to Dreiser's long observation of "'the local street scenes, institutions, characters, functions' of America," and weaving together his patterns from what seem to him "millions" of their details--words which mean all the more coming from the writer of The Jungle.)

In the process Dreiser also gives us a rather wider and fuller view of the life of Chicago than The Financier afforded of the life of Philadelphia (where in the prior book machine politics loomed importantly in the background, here we see the "machines" with which his and his enemies' endeavors are bound up at work in a crucial election, down into the saloons and slums), combined with a longer time span. Where the bulk of that first book treated the events of a mere two years (the period between the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 and the Panic of 1873 that provides Frank with his opportunity to make his comeback), The Titan spans almost the whole rest of the century (down to 1897), and progresses over that span in relatively steady, even, fashion, reinforced by the way Frank's first dealings make him enemies who will carry on their fight against him down to the end.

Adding to the sense of scope, variety, depth of the drama is the parallel development of Frank's personal life, taking in the heights of social snobbery, those paths of Bohemia to be found along the shores of Lake Michigan, and even something of the wider world as he ventured further from home looking not only for backing for his project but traveling for pleasure with Aileen, collecting art--and of course, his extramarital affairs. The more in as Dreiser displays what C. Wright Mills called "the sociological imagination"--tying Cowperwood's "biography" to the history of his era, with this specifically including the birth of the modern, electrified city, the ascent of the Social Question as seen by this businessman in the very city where the Haymarket riot happened, the consolidation of the "trusts" that saw a handful of oligarchs openly control the American economy, the Populist revolt that so panicked the business elite of the country during the election of 1896, with all this not just part of the background but figuring importantly in Frank's own story--the result is an epic of business in the Gilded Age.

One can also credit The Titan with being an epic of life as Dreiser understood it more broadly, dominated by natural and social forces that make a mockery out of what the "professional moralist" ("at best but a manufacturer of shoddy wares" Dreiser remarks) says about standards of personal behavior and "free will." This is certainly the case in the titular "the titan" ultimately being overwhelmed by hostile forces in business, but in its way more sharply presented in Frank's successive affairs--where Frank's continuation in dalliances that cost him dearly powerfully dramatizes not merely Dreiser's moral views, but his conception of the biochemical springs of human behavior, all as they also force Frank to reckon with the reality of his aging (the more in as the gap in years between himself and the women he chases, and the men rivaling him for those women's affections, keeps growing).

In giving us that epic, as one might guess from the sweep of the narrative and its density with interconnected conflict and incident, The Titan benefits from a briskness of pace, from Dreiser's display of a lot more humor than he is ever given credit for (at times evident in rather broad caricature, at times rather subtle, and consistently a world apart from the dryness that so often afflicted The Financier). Indeed, where reading The Financier it was all too easy to put the book down and forget it, The Titan flows smoothly and easily, and much, much more entertainingly, such that the harder thing was actually pausing in my reading--and not just as Literature with Something to Say About the world but a plain and simple read The Titan made my getting through the slog The Financier so often was seem to have been well worth the while.

Book Review: The Financier by Theodore Dreiser

I first picked up Theodore Dreiser's The Financier just after finishing his most celebrated work, An American Tragedy, precisely because that book had been so affecting.

Alas, I was less impressed with The Financier.

I remember that reading An American Tragedy I put the book down because of my experience of what David Walsh called its "frightening power."

By contrast I put down The Financier because it seemed to have no power at all--at least, not the power to hold a reader's interest, the proceedings in it seeming comparatively flat and lifeless.

Still, after reading Dreiser's memoir A Book About Myself and finding much to admire in it I decided to give The Financier a second chance. Alas, my initial impressions on my second attempt were not too different from those I had in my first--but thinking about the source of them had its own interest, not least the profound difference in the making of the protagonists of the two book. In creating both American Tragedy protagonist Clyde Griffiths and The Financier's Frank Cowperwood Dreiser did draw on real-life cases (Chester Gillette in the former case, Charles Yerkes in the latter), with his painstaking research entirely evident (even more so in The Financier than in An American Tragedy), but the stuff of Dreiser's own life mattered greatly in what he did with that material. As the striking parallels I saw again and again with the trajectory of Griffiths in Dreiser's memoir made clear, he had lived Griffiths' life to a great degree, and it has since seemed to me that this was why he was able to imagine the character so fully and richly. By contrast it is the opposite with Frank Cowperwood, considering whose life I see only contrasts with Dreiser.

Like Griffiths Dreiser was a Midwesterner, raised in a far from affluent urban household he was to recall as a scene of oppression and hardship under an ineffectual, religious father that he (like other siblings of his) less left than escaped as a young man. By contrast Cowperwood was born in Philadelphia the son of a prosperous and well-respected banker in a very comfortable home where he was used to getting his own way, with all that meant for his prospects. Where Dreiser was sensitive and romantic in his attitude toward life, lamenting that the circumstances of his life compelled him to participate in the "rat race" in spite of his having neither the taste for it, nor expectations of success, and in every fiber of his being feeling himself at odds with the social world in which he was forced to contend, Cowperwood never felt himself anything but perfectly adapted to the business world, and indeed reveled in participating in its struggles. Where Dreiser worried that he was unattractive to women physically and in other ways, Cowperwood had no problems there--in the world of women as in the world of business utterly self-confident, the more in as others all seemed to share his high opinion of himself.

Reading the book, in fact, I quickly got an impression of Cowperwood as, in contrast with the Griffiths he created on the basis of knowledge of himself, a fantasy of the man he would have liked to be--alas, a rather less substantial basis for a work of art such as this one. Moreover, where Clyde's story is a train of false hopes and rebuffs and disappointments and catastrophes which thwart and claustrophobically trap and ultimately destroy him, Frank scarcely seems to experience anything as an obstacle, the way forward always easy and smooth and obvious as he proceeds from victory to victory as he enjoys the admiration of everyone--the whole first third of The Financier a succession of such flattering triumphs for the protagonist. Of course, well before that point there is a hint of trouble ahead, but only a very small one, as it takes an extraordinary constellation of disasters to slow Cowperwood down in his progress--literally, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the national panic it caused, combined with the precise timing of the revelation of an affair he is having with the daughter of a major power player in the city to whom he owed much by a jealous former schoolmate of that power player's daughter, and grubby municipal electoral politics involving corruption scandals and public opinion and an upcoming election, and even then it is a narrow thing. Of course, in its wake Cowperwood does fall very low--losing his fortune, suffering the final wreck of his marriage, getting locked up--but in two years he is free again, and rebuilds his fortune, and out of his former unsatisfactory marriage and wed to the mistress who, having stuck faithfully by Frank during his prison term, proceeds to still bigger things out west.

The result is that even though the story does eventually move past its sluggish start it never generates anywhere near the tension with which An American Tragedy crackled from the beginning to the end of its near thousand page length--and indeed proves rather dry stuff for long stretches (well past the point at which I put the book down the first time). Even so, the book did eventually acquire a measure of dramatic interest as Cowperwood actually found himself with a fight on his hands, in some of the characterizations (Edward Malia Butler, who plays so important a part in the narrative, was perhaps the liveliest creation Dreiser had to offer here), in its often Balzacian portrayal of the place and time and the "machinery of civilization" in it, and as the necessary first half of the story that Dreiser continued in what I found to be the much more engaging and rather richer second half of Cowperwood's story, The Titan.

Revisiting the London Times' Editorial "The New Europe"

Remarking the anniversary of the signing of the Versailles Treaty in the weeks after Dunkirk and the fall of France and on the eve of what we today remember as the Battle of Britain The Times on July 1, 1940 published an editorial, "The New Europe," that has since been much cited as reflective of how, even with such an Establishment organ as that, in that moment the old order appeared bankrupt, its continuation impossible even if it were desirable, and the world that had to be fought for in the war and built in its aftermath something more just, something more humane. The piece argued the necessity of European federation after the war in some form, and solid new linkages between such a federation and the New World that was likely to play a key part in it, while more radically still arguing for more profound change in the domestic and international and world order than that. As the editorial declared, "[t]he new order cannot be based on the preservation of privilege . . . be that of a country, of a class, or an individual," with "democracy," "freedom," "equality," "economic reconstruction" no longer usefully definable "in purely nineteenth-century terms." The author very specifically held that they could no longer mean just "the right to vote" with "political equality nullified by economic and social" inequality in the name of "rugged individualism." On the agenda now were "the right to work and the right to live," which could only be assured by a more thoroughgoing eqalitarianism that would extend to "social organization" and even "economic planning."

Of course, if it meant something that such an Establishment organ as the Times did publish these words in July 1940, it is undeniable that the authors of the editorial did not speak for the Establishment as a whole, such that even at the height of the effort to build "a new Europe" the responsible elite fell far short of the standard discussed in the editorial. Indeed, from the start much of that elite unwaveringly fought not to build a new world but to save the old one, and indeed went over from the defensive to the counterattack no later than the 1970s to undo whatever concessions had been made to that vision, the neoliberal-neoconservative vision standing very much for privilege, and for a nineteenth century vision of democracy, freedom, equality, economic reconstruction; for political equality with social and economic inequality taken in stride, for rugged individualism, for sneering at talk of the right to work and live and concern for distribution, and certainly such means as "social organization" and "planning" for realizing it, as it treated the "planning" of which it refused to speak as the exclusive and sacred right of a financial sector with its eyes on its own short-term profits first, last and always. (Capping it all off, what was often mistaken for or cynically passed off as a "left" turned the word "privilege" around, using it not to challenge society's hierarchies but to bash the working people opposing the changes that upended their livelihoods, living standards, communities.)

Considering our present discontents as the world slipped into what only as a courtesy has been called "the Great Recession" and never came out of it, European union and the hopes supposedly held for it foundered, and fascism resurges the world over, it does not seem wholly unreasonable to think that elites' insistence that the fundamentals of human civilization had attained perfection in the nineteenth century has not been irrelevant to bringing us back to the crisis conditions of the early twentieth. Indeed, it seems rather predictable that just as the collapse of the Victorian order faced the world with a particular crisis, the collapse of the neo-Victorian order about us confronts us with a crisis of much the same complexion.

In (Qualified) Defense of Robert Ludlum's Prose

The deficiencies of Robert Ludlum's prose as measured by the conventional criteria of "good style" are of course notoriously legion.

Taking up this subject I will not attempt to debunk the criticisms, because having read, indeed reread, a good deal of Ludlum in recent years I know how much truth there is to them. Indeed, I would be less than honest were I to deny that Ludlum's often melodramatic, heavy-handed, even amateurish tics as a writer (the profuse use of exclamation points and italics and the word "Madness!" and transitional phrases almost Victorian-in-their-telling, etc., etc.), and the general wordiness to which they conduce, have often got on my nerves while reading through his oeuvre, and that indeed I discussed those tics less than I would otherwise have done simply because this would have made my reviews intolerably repetitive as the list of my reviews of his books on this blog lengthened.

Still, if I grant the point I have felt that critics beat up on Ludlum's prose far too much--that, indeed, reading The Gemini Contenders I could not but think of how far he was superior in this area to that more recent writer of religiously-themed mysteries, Dan Brown. (The fact remains that Ludlum was writing for actual adults, whereas I am not so sure about Mr. Brown.) Moreover, even while considering the ways in which Ludlum's prose is not all I might have liked it to be I also find myself thinking of how very effective as a storyteller he is in spite of that fact, and this not only at the level of head-spinning plotting, but how well he conveys to the reader the states, the conditions, of his characters. To cite but one example The Bourne Supremacy Ludlum makes us feel how his protagonist is coming apart in the extreme circumstances, and ready to turn murderously on those he sees as his tormentors--while in The Matlock Paper he manages to make us feel that way about a whole society.

Such achievements are a reminder that storytelling is about much, much more than elegant prose--and that when all is said and done relatively minor failings of form recede into insignificance when that storytelling is strong enough, with such storytelling owing much, much more than proponents of the "art of beauty" allow to content. To, in a word, the writer having something to say, next to which how they say it is secondary. To his credit, Ludlum did have much to say about the world we lived in then, and still live in now, and managed to say it clearly and effectively even as he spun some of the most popular thrillers of his era, which at their best have much to commend them as thrillers--which is rather more than can be said for many a writer of "beautiful sentences."

The Politics of Self-Help

The implicit assumption of the phenomenon we call "self-help" is that people, as individuals, are the causes of their own problems--which is why they can fix their problems, because they need only "fix" what is wrong with their behavior, outlook, etc.. "Systemic" views have no place here, to the point that even if few go so far as to flatly declare that "Society, there is no such thing" in so many words that is exactly how they think about the matter in practice.

At the same time in telling people how to solve the problems they themselves must ultimately be causing the tendency in self-help is to see the answers as essentially banal, familiar ones, with the sufferer only needing an Authority figure to tell them, or maybe just remind them, that acting on these "truths" is really just that simple (with even the recalcitrant mainly needing some Red Forman-style parenting).

It seems to me indisputable that all this reflects a particular politics. The individualism that holds the individual harshly to account as it disdainfully brushes aside systemic views--and not incidentally, also brushes aside any critical examination of society or call for change with which they tend to be connected; the sense that the rules for living are one-size-fits-all, quite simple, and have long been widely known--that "we have made no discoveries, and . . . think that no discoveries are to be made . . . in morality" as a certain philosopher once had it; the authoritarianism implicit in the teaching discussed here, and the implied need for authoritarianism, not least a low opinion of human nature and human intelligence, the view that this makes it natural and right and necessary for a few "superiors" to boss around the rest, who can do little better than follow their orders, or imitate those above them; bespeak a very conservative world-view in the classical sense of the term, and a very bourgeois one as well. By contrast the leftist--by which I do not mean the identity-politics practitioner (whose politics are fundamentally anti-leftist), or the so-called "bleeding-heart liberal" (human sympathy is one thing, a serious critique of society's structure another), but someone who really is persuaded that the System does matter and society exists, and that the stress on individual "responsibility" and view of what people must do to get along or have no one to blame but themselves is false, simplistic and cruel, if not also dishonest, and as a result often entirely irrelevant to dealing with people's real problems.

The result is that the prevalence of self-help in America testifies to the extreme conservatism of the mainstream of the media and official culture in the country traditionally, as well as (however much many may feel unrepresented by or satisfied with these understandings and attitudes) the acceptance, or at least acquiescence, of much of the public in that conservatism (especially that relatively privileged part of it that has the time, money and inclination to buy and read books, to go by the content of our bestseller lists). At the same time self-help culture has been a powerful force for conservatism, promulgating the building blocks of a conservative view of the world far more widely and subtly and effectively than the vast promotion of the tenets of conservative philosophy in more academic fashion online, and sometimes more than that, such that phenomena like Jordan Peterson are by no means coincidental--all as, contrary to what Nathan J. Robinson says of the matter in an otherwise formidable argument for his position, it is unsurprising that the left has not produced such figures. The left simply cannot offer the same kind of "product" and still be "left"--all as one ought to remember that the media's prejudices have had it treating a Peterson with a respect it would never bestow upon any figure really recognizably of the left.

Should the Oscars Go Back to Having Five Best Picture Nominees?

It was in 2009 that the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expanded the final list of nominations for Best Picture from the five that have been the norm here (as in just about every category) since the second ceremony way back in 1928 to ten nominations (as they refrained from expanding the number of nominations in the other categories in anything like such a fashion).

The rationale for this doubling of the number of nominees was apparently to broaden that list beyond the movies actually likely to win such an award (as plausibly deserving candidates for the Big Prize), to include movies that are actually popular--and in the age of the blockbuster's decadence, ever less likely to be anything describable as high cinematic art--so as to help shore up what was already evidently a shaky public interest in the ceremony.

Stated that way it sounds a very dubious stratagem. After all, we all know that if they throw, for example, Top Gun 2 a bone in the Best Picture category that movie's producers are almost certainly not going to be taking that little statue home--and even if there was a chance of their doing so I am not sure that would make fans of the movie watch the four hour ceremony in anticipation of The Big Moment. And unsurprisingly interest in the ceremony has, on the whole, continued to weaken, all as the debasement of the Best Picture nomination by such gestures (and the whiff of desperation about them) cannot possibly have helped the prestige of nomination for the award, or the ceremony.

Does that mean that the Academy is likely to cut the list of nominations down from ten to five? That is what one would expect if the overriding concern was the perceived integrity of the award--but it isn't. Even with the value of an Oscar win, never mind nomination, ever less certain, there being more nominees is attractive to marketing-minded producers and career-minded artists, and these ever ready to make trouble when they do not get recognition (admittedly, out of sheer desperation given the ugly, ugly nature of the business). The result is that their having expanded the number of Best Picture nominees for each to ten a decade and a half ago, and this decision having stood without any opposition ever since, I expect that it would be easier to picture it expanded yet again to fifteen nominations as against its being cut back to five.