So first the context: I was rather pleased with myself today, and feeling almost capable of the hard work ahead – I liked my own entry on blog aesthetics (and could I say that about a published work? no, which shows what I mean about blogging); the meeting went well and no one argued much; and then the mail came, and it was the third anthology I've received in the past month that includes an academic article of mine, so that was proud-making too. As it happens, none of those three articles are very solid scholarship – they're more belles-lettres (as John P. told me his London colleagues would say of my work; but again, see below for why blogging makes this seem acceptable to me) – but they're expressive and interesting (which is why, though their scholarly apparatus might have been a bit thin, they were all placed at the beginnings or ends of the anthologies).
So I was feeling pretty good. Well... then we had our first guest speaker of the semester. Intelligent, no doubt about it; not very prepared, rambled a lot, in a journalistic/polemical/monomaniacal way – someone who has had a difficult career; but the worst part was his need to attack some things I care about, including postmodernism, Heidegger, and especially Americans (he complained about a book that disagreed with him as "the product of a typically lousy American education", or words to that effect). What a jackass, I thought. I couldn't leave, though I wanted to – it's always unfortunate when you don't sit near the door; and since the room was full of new postgraduates, it would have been a strategic mistake to do anything unprofessional. So I sat there and took it (while blahfeme tried to argue with him, rather unproductively as one could have predicted; and spurious was actually quite reasonable with him, far more than I think he deserved).
It reminded me of the sheer difficulty of living here sometimes: I'm lucky I guess, because being in the north of England is better than the south for this particular problem – the south may be more cosmopolitan, more entertaining, and frankly more gay, but too many southern British intellectuals do seem to think that attacking things and scoring off each other are appropriate means of discourse. It's kind of an Oxbridge-in-the-fifties thing – I associate it with F.R. Leavis, Cambridge criticism, a particular kind of rage that tries to identify with the working class, and a polemical pseudo-Marxism that can only attack. There is, certainly, a brutality, a cynicism, a savagery endemic to British postwar intellectual culture that seems such a powerful reversal of Victorian manners – after all, this is a place where Martin Amis and Will Self are major novelists.
One of my favorite examples of this, which I sometimes show to people for fun, is Martin Seymour-Smith's New Guide to Modern World Literature (3rd ed., 1985). It's an impressive volume – nearly 1,400 pages of small print, where an astounding array of world literatures and authors are explained and analyzed (which of course raises questions: how the heck can he know so much about the Estonian novel in the 1930s, or Korean poetry before the war, or Polish essayists who have also written short stories?). But, weirdly enough, it is also 1,400 pages of dismissals and bad reviews – here is someone who has looked at an amazing range of world literature, and made a point of attacking virtually every example of it as inadequate and unsuccessful. It's almost like the alien in Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who has decided to spend his vast life span insulting every being in the universe, in alphabetical order.
Oh, well; so he was a jerk. But it's harder to take this kind of crap when you're a foreigner: not because cultural difference itself is so hard – frankly, I usually like it – but because when there are conflicts, you are always the loser, by force of sheer numbers. Which is why, even though the Brits around me are often kind, or sensible, or wise, or intelligent, the occasions when they aren't put me so much on edge – one feels overwhelmed in any question by sheer consensus, by the fact that whatever you think that might have its source in a different culture is always already a minority opinion.
And simply going back to the United States is not a real solution to the problem: not only because my country is going through an exceptionally unattractive time in terms of politics and social support; but also, and more trickily, because when you are in foreign countries too long you change shape, as it were – you become neither fish nor fowl, and can't quite fit in at home any more than you fit in abroad. You can see this in Elizabeth Bishop (though she was a diplomat, of all things) and in James (though he was the toast of the town) – that they end up, ultimately, isolated in their own universes.
Yeah, yeah: he was just a jerk. But it's a bit like being mugged at the bus stop: you can reassure yourself that the people doing it were thugs and beneath consideration – but it can still be hard to get past it....
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