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4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
deliberate digression, 10 Jul 1999
By A Customer
Here is a book which can best be characterized as an inspired failure. That is no insult: academic literature is rife with works that either don't prove what they set out to prove and thus provoke indipensable rebuttals, or which set out to prove the obvious, and prove it to nobody's startlement or particular satisfaction, but, although their conclusions are unexciting, contrive to retain their currency by virtue of their usefulness as info-mines. Had Casaubon's _Key To All Mythologies_ been published, it might have been of the second type. (_Evil Sisters_ belongs to both categories.) Inspired academic failures are often nifty and in my opinion they are even necessary, since academic life depends on discourse and, in order to maintain discourse, someone always has to take the losing position. Henry Petroski writes books on the importance of failure in design; well, failure is no more expendable in discourse than in design; Dijkstra in _Evil Sisters_ proves as much, intentionally or not. Dijkstra's main contention, that racist and sexist books, pictures, and films led to the Nazification of Europe, is hooey. Sure, the books, films, and pictures existed, and sure the conquest of Europe by Nazi Germany took place, but that doesn't prove that the one LED TO the other. Events may demonstrably correlate statistically without correlating causally--as I learned in High School Social Studies. If racist pictures and literature abound, and if the Nazification of a continent occurs, isn't it at least as likely that both phenomena are due to some antecedent cause as that one phenomenon impels the other? Sure it is, as high school kids flunk Social Studies tests for failing to realize. Dijkstra's minor contention, that specific strains of antifeminism, anti-Semitism, and race-baiting were ubiquitous throughout the Western world around the turn of the century and up till World War II, is correct, but it's so indisputably correct that Dijkstra, never a fellow to let a blind alley go unexplored, experiences difficulty choosing among his sources. So much so that one is left wondering why Dijkstra should choose to pick on only certain people: why should he scold Fitzgerald and Hemingway for their unacceptable racial and sexual assumptions when London and Cather beckon as temptingly? Could it be because Fitzgerald and Hemingway are bigger literary game and consequently more fun to bag? Pretty much anything pop-cultural published around 1909 would be castigated as racist/sexist by today's standards; and, as per usual, the stereotypes perpetuated in the pulps found themselves echoed ("archetypally") in the pages of reputable writers. Dijkstra is spot-on in his observation that the basic difference between a stereotype and an archetype inheres in the reputability of the artist who invokes it. Hence, Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer" has come to be an embarrassment while Willa Cather's blind, instinctually musical, perpetually nodding "small-brained" mulatto pianist in _My Antonia_ is still Art. Unfortunately Dijkstra is not content to make this thouroughly accurate observation only once: he makes it again and again and really, it's too self-evident to need that much repetition. Again, Dijkstra errs, as I see it, when he attributes to the ubiquitous race-baiting of the early Twentieth century a nasty triumphalism which I don't believe it possessed. The lessons of High School and of the playground are always at hand: secure people do not taunt the |
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