Cosmopoetica

Whenever I read Homer, I see ample evidence that women were treated abominably in ancient Greece, and I am very thankful that I live now and not then. In fact, I would rather pay a visit to Procrustes than marry any of Homer’s heroes. Fortunately, none of them is asking me. The invitation Homer offers me is a far broader one: to enter a world that was very different from ours, but that in its own “pretheoretical” [a phrase used in a finicky, feminist, politically correct letter referenced earlier in the chapter] way possessed nobility and beauty. If I had to step into a polling booth and vote on Homer’s sexual politics, I’d pull the NO lever strenuously. I am therefore glad that the Odyssey is a poem, not a referendum.

[…]

In a controversial 1996 article in Harper’s called “Say it Ain’t So, Huck,” Jane Smiley wrote that she was “stunned” by the idea “that this is a great novel, that this is even a serious novel.” According to Smiley, one of the book’s disqualifying flaws is Huck’s decision to take Jim down the Mississippi River instead of across it to Illinois. She sees this as a moral failure on Huck’s part, and therefore on Mark Twain’s part as well.

“So Jane Smiley would have crossed the Mississippi to the free state of Illinois with her Jim and freed him without delay,” responded a reader named Anson J. Cameron. (Mr. Cameron hails from Port Melbourne, Australia, and may thus be above the American fray.)

And if she kept her description of the river and the Southern sky to a minimum and the dialogue to just a few muttering about many slaveholder’s houses he was set to raze, she could probably free Jim inside of a page. Now, supposing she should keep writing (and Huck could keep rowing) at this pace, she might invent and free upwards of three hundred slaves in the course of her Huck Finn, whereas Twain, farting around with humor and other such distractions, only got around to freeing one.

I’m with Mr. Cameron. I’m very grateful that Huck Finn and Mark Twain were so inefficient and unethical that they didn’t manage to wind up their book on page 54, a few paragraphs after the raft sets off down the river. (And that Homer didn’t send Odysseus straight home.)

–Anne Fadiman
from “Procrustes and the Culture Wars”
found in At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

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[…After this he put to death Procrustes, as he was called, who dwelt in what was known as Corydallus in Attica; this man compelled the travelers who passed by to lie down upon a bed, and if any were too long for the bed he cut of the parts of their body which protruded, while in the case of such as were too shot for it he stretched (prokrouein) their legs, this being the reason why he was given the name Procrustes. –Diodorus Siculus]

The Procrustean bed, Diodorus model, suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairman of many English departments.) There’s just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.

By the Culture Wars, I mean that peculiar development of the last two decades or so that takes culture—a multidimensional thing if there ever was one—and attempts to compress it to a skinny line running from left to right. No matter how idiosyncratic, how ambivalent, how anarchic, how complicated, how big, how messy—it’s just got to fit that Procrustean bed. So out comes the handsaw, an WHOP! With a few quick strokes, it’s cut down to size and, as a kind of casual side effect, murdered.

Both armies in the Culture Wars are eager to recruit new soldiers for this limb-attenuation campaign.

[…]

You need not become a conscientious objector—there are plenty of ideas worth shedding blood for—but if in every battle you look around and see the same people fighting alongside you, you should ask yourself whether you are demonstrating an admirable constancy or a Procrustean intransigence.

[…]

College students—over whose souls the goriest battles in the Culture Wars are fought—are, by virtue of their youth, deeply engrossed in character building. Is it wrong to enlist the help of Shakespeare and Plato in this difficult task? But if that’s all that young readers do, then narcissism (Should I emulate Tybalt or Mercutio? If I liberate my soul from dependence on my body, as the Phaedo suggests, can I still have sex with Tiffany?) trumps aesthetics, and great books are reduced, by a process that trims away all the most beautiful parts, to self-help manuals.

–Anne Fadiman
from “Procrustes and the Culture Wars”
found in At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

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