What’s your Literary Cliché for 2016?
The leader of the pack is
probably Yeats’s Second Coming, with
its apocalyptic lines about a rough beast
slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Very few liberal/left commentators
on recent political events have been able to resist the poem’s choice phrases:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This is all “woe is us”
stuff, offering on its surface nothing but unsubtle pessimism. Certainly the
poem is usually wrenched out of its historical context – the end of WW1, and
the turmoil of events in Ireland and Russia, and, most especially, out of the
context of Yeats’s own idiosyncratic and mystical beliefs in unfolding epochs
supplanting one another- the “gyres”. By his calculation, an epoch of
“progress” was doomed to give place to something savage and reactionary. The
fact that over the next decades this actually happened in the West has lent
credence to Yeats’s accidental prophetic powers, if not to his philosophy.
If one is looking for
literary epigrams to fit our times, one could do better by considering the
1930s – not necessarily because there are exact parallels with the rise of
Fascism, but because there are certain similarities. There are the presence of
economic instability, the weakness of liberal democracy, and the growing
appeal, ascendancy even, of authoritarian, populist nationalist politics.
Wise commentators have
pointed out that today’s politicians do not yet head private armies.
I propose albert Camus and WH
Auden as authors of lines that are less melodramatic than Yeats’s – that are
indeed sober and sad reflections on defeat for the liberal, progressive
tradition in recent Western history.
Camus writes about the
victory of a nationalist strongman, Franco, in the Spanish civil war, and gets
straight to the point – History does not guarantee anything, including
“progress” (Yeats would agree, from his own strange perspective):
It was in Spain that my generation learned that one
can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are
times that courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which
explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal
tragedy.
Auden’s poem, 1st September 1939 (days
before the beginning of WW2) is more defiant. But whilst he caricatures and
condemns the populist strongmen (in images some of which are humorously
appropriate now), he appeals to those like-minded to him to keep the
progressive flame burning (literally). Not exactly “Keep calm and carry on”,
but “keep grim and carry on”.
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
…
..the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
……
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and
despair,
Show an affirming flame.
In 1970, at the famous and
notorious Isle of Wight Festival, where massive crowds overwhelmed the site (built
to accommodate 50,000 but besieged and more or less destroyed by 500,00:
Reader, I was there). Late one evening the crowd grew angry and aggressive
(Joni Mitchell was driven off the stage by abuse). When the febrile audience
was at its angriest, Leonard Cohen came on at 2am. In the words of Kris
Kristofferson (also booed off earlier), Cohen “tamed the beast”, by asking
everyone to light a match so I can see you all, and then, in the
ensuing calm (everyone had matches for cigarettes or joints, or both; and
everyone obeyed Cohen) starting his set with Bird on a Wire.
Somewhere between the
hunkering down of Auden’s urging and the inspiration of Cohen’s riposte to mass
ugliness lies, perhaps, the future of decency.
December 2016
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