The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature

8. Bootleg Romanticism

ART (including literature) is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society’s deepest philosophical values: not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view, of man and of existence. The image of an entire society stretched out on a psychologist’s couch, revealing its naked subconscious, is an impossible concept; yet that is what art accomplishes: it presents the equivalent of such a session, a transcript which is more eloquent and easier to diagnose than any other set of symptoms.

This does not mean that an entire society is bound by the mediocrities who may choose to posture in the field of art at any given time; but it does mean that if no better men chose to enter the field, this tells us something about the state of that society. There are always exceptions who rebel against the dominant trend in the art of their age; but the fact that they are exceptions tells us something about the state of that age. The dominant trend may not, in fact, express the soul of an entire people; it may be rejected, resented or ignored by an overwhelming majority; but if it is the dominant voice of a given period, this tells us something about the state of the people’s souls.

In politics, the panic-blinded advocates of today’s status quo, clinging to the shambles of their mixed economy in a rising flood of statism, are now adopting the line that there’s nothing wrong with the world, that this is a century of progress, that we are morally and mentally healthy, that we never had it so good. If you find political issues too complex to diagnose, take a look at today’s art: it will leave you no doubt in regard to the health or disease of our culture.

The composite picture of man that emerges from the art of our time is the gigantic figure of an aborted embryo whose limbs suggest a vaguely anthropoid shape, who twists his upper extremity in a frantic quest for a light that cannot penetrate its empty sockets, who emits inarticulate sounds resembling snarls and moans, who crawls through a bloody muck, red froth dripping from his jaws, and struggles to throw the froth at his own non-existent face, who pauses periodically and, lifting the stumps of his arms, screams in abysmal terror at the universe at large.

Engendered by generations of anti-rational philosophy, three emotions dominate the sense of life of modern man: fear, guilt and pity (more precisely, self-pity). Fear, as the appropriate emotion of a creature deprived of his means of survival, his mind; guilt, as the appropriate emotion of a creature devoid of moral values; pity, as the means of escape from these two, as the only response such a creature could beg for. A sensitive, discriminating man, who has absorbed that sense of life, but retained some vestige of self-esteem, will avoid so revealing a profession as art. But this does not stop the others.

Fear, guilt and the quest for pity combine to set the trend of art in the same direction, in order to express, justify and rationalize the artists’ own feelings. To justify a chronic fear, one has to portray existence as evil; to escape from guilt and arouse pity, one has to portray man as impotent and innately loathsome. Hence the competition among modern artists to find ever lower levels of depravity and ever higher degrees of mawkishness—a competition to shock the public out of its wits and jerk its tears. Hence the frantic search for misery, the descent from compassionate studies of alcoholism and sexual perversion to dope, incest, psychosis, murder, cannibalism.

To illustrate the moral implications of this trend—the fact that pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent—I submit an enthusiastic review that commends a current movie for arousing compassion for kidnappers. “One’s attention and, indeed, one’s anxiety is centered more upon them than upon the kidnapped youngster,” states the review. And: “As a matter of fact, the motivation is not so clearly defined that it bears analysis or criticism on psychological grounds. But it is sufficiently established to compel our anguished sympathy for the two incredible kidnappers.” (The New York Times, November 6, 1964.)

Sewers are not very rich nor very deep, and today’s dramatists seem to be scratching bottom. As to literature, it has shot its bolt. There is no way to beat the following, which I reproduce in full from the August 30, 1963, issue of Time. The heading is “Books,” the subhead “Best Reading,” then: “Cat and Mouse, by Günter Grass. Best-selling novelist Grass (The Tin Drum) relates the torment of a young man whose prominent Adam’s apple makes him an outcast to his classmates. He strives for achievement and wins it, but to the ‘cat’—human conformity—he is still a curiosity.”

No, all this is not presented to us “tongue in cheek.” There is an old French theater that specializes in presenting that sort of stuff “tongue-in-cheek.” It is called “Grand Guignol.” But today the spirit of Grand Guignol has been elevated into a metaphysical system and demands to be taken seriously. What, then, is not to be taken seriously? Any representation of human virtue.

One would think that that maudlin preoccupation with chambers of horror, that waxworks-museum view of life, was bad enough. But there is something still worse and, morally, more evil: the recent attempts to concoct so-called “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers.

The trouble with the sewer school of art is that fear, guilt and pity are self-defeating dead ends: after the first few “daring revelations of human depravity,” people cease to be shocked by anything; after experiencing pity for a few dozen of the depraved, the deformed, the demented, people cease to feel anything. And just as the “non-commercial” economics of modern “idealists” tells them to take over commercial establishments, so the “non-commercial” esthetics of modern “artists” prompts them to attempt the takeover of commercial (i.e., popular) art forms.

“Thrillers” are detective, spy or adventure stories. Their basic characteristic is conflict, which means: a clash of goals, which means: purposeful action in pursuit of values. Thrillers are the product, the popular offshoot, of the Romantic school of art that sees man, not as a helpless pawn of fate, but as a being who possesses volition, whose life is directed by his own value-choices. Romanticism is a value-oriented, morality-centered movement: its material is not journalistic minutiae, but the abstract, the essential, the universal principles of man’s nature—and its basic literary commandment is to portray man “as he might be and ought to be.”

Thrillers are a simplified, elementary version of Romantic literature. They are not concerned with a delineation of values, but, taking certain fundamental values for granted, they are concerned with only one aspect of a moral being’s existence: the battle of good against evil in terms of purposeful action—a dramatized abstraction of the basic pattern of: choice, goal, conflict, danger, struggle, victory.

Thrillers are the kindergarten arithmetic, of which the higher mathematics is the greatest novels of world literature. Thrillers deal only with the skeleton—the plot structure—to which serious Romantic literature adds the flesh, the blood, the mind. The plots in the novels of Victor Hugo or Dostoevsky are pure thriller-plots, un-equaled and unsurpassed by the writers of thrillers.

In today’s culture, Romantic art is virtually nonexistent (but for some very rare exceptions): it requires a view of man incompatible with modern philosophy. The last remnants of Romanticism are flickering only in the field of popular art, like bright sparks in a stagnant gray fog. Thrillers are the last refuge of the qualities that have vanished from modern literature: life, color, imagination; they are like a mirror still holding a distant reflection of man.

Bear that in mind when you consider the meaning of the attempt to present thrillers “tongue-in-cheek.”

Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.

There are two types of cowards in this connection. One type is the man who dares not reveal his profound hatred of existence and seeks to undercut all values under cover of a chuckle, who gets away with offensive, malicious utterances and, if caught, runs for cover by declaring: “I was only kidding.”

The other type is the man who dares not reveal or uphold his values and seeks to smuggle them into existence under cover of a chuckle, who tries to get away with some concept of virtue or beauty and, at the first sign of opposition, drops it and runs, declaring: “I was only kidding.”

In the first case, humor serves as an apology for evil; in the second—as an apology for the good. Which, morally, is the more contemptible policy?

The motives of both types can be united and served by a phenomenon such as “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers.

What are such thrillers laughing at? At values, at man’s struggle for values, at man’s capacity to achieve his values, at man; at man the hero.

Regardless of their creators’ conscious or subconscious motives, such thrillers, in fact, carry a message or intention of their own, implicit in their nature: to arouse people’s interest in some daring venture, to hold them in suspense by the intricacy of a battle for great stakes, to inspire them by the spectacle of human efficacy, to evoke their admiration for the hero’s courage, ingenuity, endurance and unswerving integrity of purpose, to make them cheer his triumph—and then to spit in their faces, declaring: “Don’t take me seriously—I was only kidding—who are we, you and I, to aspire to be anything but absurd and swinish?”

To whom are such thrillers apologizing? To the sewer school of art. In today’s culture, the gutter-worshiper needs and makes no apology. But the hero-worshiper chooses to crawl on his belly, crying: “I didn’t mean it, boys! It’s all in fun! I’m not so corrupt as to believe in virtue, I’m not so cowardly as to fight for values, I’m not so evil as to long for an ideal—I’m one of you!”

The social status of thrillers reveals the profound gulf splitting today’s culture—the gulf between the people and its alleged intellectual leaders. The people’s need for a ray of Romanticism’s light is enormous and tragically eager. Observe the extraordinary popularity of Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming. There are hundreds of thriller writers who, sharing the modern sense of life, write sordid concoctions that amount to a battle of evil against evil or, at best, gray against black. None of them have the ardent, devoted, almost addicted following earned by Spillane and Fleming. This is not to say that the novels of Spillane and Fleming project a faultlessly rational sense of life; both are touched by the cynicism and despair of today’s “malevolent universe”; but, in strikingly different ways, both offer the cardinal element of Romantic fiction: Mike Hammer and James Bond are heroes.

This universal need is precisely what today’s intellectuals cannot grasp or fill. A seedy, emasculated, unventilated “elite”—a basement “elite” transported, by default, into vacant drawing rooms and barricaded behind dusty curtains against light, air, grammar and reality—today’s intellectuals cling to the stagnant illusion of their altruist-collectivist upbringing: the vision of a cloddish, humble, inarticulate people whose “voice” (and masters) they were to be.

Observe their anxious, part-patronizing, part-obsequious pursuit of “folk” art, of the primitive, the anonymous, the undeveloped, the unintellectual—or their “lusty,” “earthy” movies that portray man as an obscene subanimal. Politically, the reality of a non-cloddish people would destroy them: the collectivist jig would be up. Morally, the existence, possibility or image of a hero would be intolerable to their overwhelming sense of guilt; it would wipe out the slogan that permits them to go on wallowing in sewers: “I couldn’t help it!” A heroes-seeking people is what they cannot admit into their view of the universe.

A sample of that cultural gulf—a small sample of a vast modern tragedy—may be seen in an interesting little article in TV Guide (May 9, 1964), under the title “Violence Can Be Fun” and with the eloquent subtitle: “In Britain, everybody laughs at ‘The Avengers’—except the audience.”

The Avengers is a sensationally successful British television series featuring the adventures of secret agent John Steed and his attractive assistant Catherine Gale—“surrounded by some delightfully ingenious plots…” states the article. “The Avengers is compulsive viewing for a huge audience. Steed and Mrs. Gale are household words.”

But recently “the secret sorrow of producer John Bryce was revealed: The Avengers was conceived as a satire of counterespionage thrillers, but the British public still insists on taking it seriously.”

The manner in which that “revelation” came about is interesting. “The fact that The Avengers is satire was probably the best-kept secret in British television for almost a year. It might have remained that way, but the series came up for discussion during another show called The Critics…” One of these critics—to the astonishment of the others—declared that “surely everybody realized it was being played for laughs.” Nobody had, but the producer of The Avengers confirmed that view and “moodily” blamed the public for its failure to understand his intentions: its failure to laugh at his product.

Bear in mind that Romantic thrillers are an exceedingly difficult job: they require such a degree of skill, ingenuity, inventiveness, imagination and logic—such a great amount of talent on the part of the producer or the director or the writer or the cast, or all of them—that it is virtually impossible to fool an entire nation for a whole year. Somebody’s values were being shamefully exploited and betrayed, besides the public’s.

It is obvious that the modern intellectuals’ rush to the thriller bandwagon was precipitated by the spectacular figure and success of James Bond. But, in keeping with modern philosophy, they want to ride the wagon and spit at it, too.

If you think that the producers of mass-media entertainment are motivated primarily by commercial greed, check your premises and observe that the producers of the James Bond movies seem to be intent on undercutting their own success.

Contrary to somebody’s strenuously spread assertions, there was nothing “tongue-in-cheek” about the first of these movies, Dr. No. It was a brilliant example of Romantic screen art—in production, direction, writing, photography and, most particularly, in the performance of Sean Connery. His first introduction on the screen was a gem of dramatic technique, elegance, wit and understatement: when, in response to a question about his name, we saw his first close-up and he answered quietly: “Bond. James Bond”—the audience, on the night I saw it, burst into applause.

There wasn’t much applause on the night when I saw his second movie, From Russia with Love. Here, Bond was introduced pecking with schoolboy kisses at the face of a vapid-looking girl in a bathing suit. The story was muddled and, at times, unintelligible. The skillfully constructed, dramatic suspense of Fleming’s climax was replaced by conventional stuff, such as old-fashioned chases, involving nothing but crude physical danger.

I shall still go to see the third movie, Goldfinger, but with heavy misgivings. The misgivings are based on an article by Richard Maibaum, who adapted all three novels to the screen (The New York Times, December 13, 1964).

“Fleming’s tongue-in-cheek attitude toward his material (intrigue, expertise, violence, love, death) finds a ready mass response in a world where audiences enjoy sick jokes,” writes Mr. Maibaum. “Incidentally, it is the aspect of Fleming which the films have most developed.” So much for his understanding of the appeal of Romantic thrillers—or of Fleming.

Discussing his own work, Mr. Maibaum remarks: “Do I hear anyone asking sotto voce about the screenwriter’s blushes? If he was the blushing type he wouldn’t be doing Bond screenplays in the first place. Besides, it’s good clean fun, or so he tells himself.”

Draw your own conclusions about the nature of the ethical standards involved. Note also that the writer of the movie about “the two incredible [but sympathetic] kidnappers” did not feel called upon to blush.

“The actual characterization of James Bond…” Mr. Maibaum continues, “was also a departure from the novels… . That concept retained a basic super-sleuth, super-fighter, super-hedonist, super-lover of Fleming’s, but added another large dimension: humor. Humor vocalized in wry comments at critical moments. In the books, Bond was singularly lacking in this.” Which is not true, as any reader of the books can ascertain.

And finally: “A bright young producer accosted me one day with glittering eyes. ‘I’m making a parody of the James Bond films.’ How, I asked myself, does one make a parody of a parody? For that is precisely, in the final analysis, what we have done with Fleming’s books. Parodied them. I’m not sure that Ian himself ever completely realized this.”

This is said about the work of a man whose talent, achievement and fame gave a group of previously undistinguished persons their chance at distinction and at piles of money.

Observe that in the issue of humor versus thrillers, modern intellectuals are using the term “humor” as an anti-concept, i.e., as a “package-deal” of two meanings, with the proper meaning serving to cover and to smuggle the improper one into people’s minds. The purpose is to obliterate the distinction between “humor” and “mockery,” particularly self-mockery—and thus bring men to defile their own values and self-esteem, for fear of being accused of lacking “a sense of humor.”

Remember that humor is not an unconditional virtue and depends on its object. One may laugh with a hero, but never at him—just as a satire may laugh at some object, but never at itself. A composition that laughs at itself is a fraud on the audience.

In Fleming’s novels, James Bond is constantly making witty, humorous remarks, which are part of his charm. But, apparently, this is not what Mr. Maibaum meant by the word “humor.” What he meant, apparently, was humor at Bond’s expense—the sort of humor intended to undercut Bond’s stature, to make him ridiculous, which means: to destroy him.

Such is the basic contradiction—and the terrible, parasitic immorality—of any attempt to create “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers. It requires that one employ all the values of a thriller in order to hold the audience’s interest, yet turn these values against themselves, that one damage the very elements one is using and counting on. It means an attempt to cash in on the thing one is mocking, to profit by the audience’s hunger for Romanticism while seeking to destroy it. This is not the method of a legitimate satire: a satire does not share the values of that which it denounces; it denounces by means and in the context of an opposite set of values.

The failure to understand the nature and appeal of Romanticism is an eloquent measure of the modern intellectuals’ epistemological disintegration. Only an appallingly concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality would lose its faculty of abstraction to such an extent as to be incapable of grasping an abstract meaning which an unskilled laborer can grasp and a United States President can enjoy. Only an arrested modern mentality would go on protesting that the events portrayed in a thriller are incredible or improbable, that there are no heroes, that “life is not like that”—all of which is thoroughly irrelevant.

Nobody takes thrillers literally, nor cares about their specific events, nor harbors any frustrated desire to become a secret agent or a private eye. Thrillers are taken symbolically; they dramatize one of man’s widest and most crucial abstractions: the abstraction of moral conflict.

What people seek in thrillers is the spectacle of man’s efficacy: of his ability to fight for his values and to achieve them. What they see is a condensed, simplified pattern, reduced to its essentials: a man fighting for a vital goal—overcoming one obstacle after another—facing terrible dangers and risks—persisting through an excruciating struggle—and winning. Far from suggesting an easy or “unrealistic” view of life, a thriller suggests the necessity of a difficult struggle; if the hero is “largerthan-life,” so are the villains and the dangers.

An abstraction has to be “larger-than-life”—to encompass any concretes that individual men may be concerned with, each according to the scale of his own values, goals and ambition. The scale varies; the psychological relationships involved remain the same. The obstacles confronting an average man are, to him, as formidable as Bond’s adversaries; but what the image of Bond tells him is: “It can be done.”

What men find in the spectacle of the ultimate triumph of the good is the inspiration to fight for one’s own values in the moral conflicts of one’s own life.

If the proclaimers of human impotence, the seekers of automatic security, protest that “life is not like that, happy endings are not guaranteed to man”—the answer is: a thriller is more realistic than such views of existence, it shows men the only road that can make any sort of happy ending possible.

Here, we come to an interesting paradox. It is only the superficiality of the Naturalists that classifies Romanticism as “an escape”; this is true only in the very superficial sense of contemplating a glamorous vision as a relief from the gray burden of “real-life” problems. But in the deeper, metaphysical-moral-psychological sense, it is Naturalism that represents an escape—an escape from choice, from values, from moral responsibility—and it is Romanticism that trains and equips man for the battles he has to face in reality.

In the privacy of his own soul, nobody identifies himself with the folks next door, unless he has given up. But the generalized abstraction of a hero permits every man to identify himself with James Bond, each supplying his own concretes which are illuminated and supported by that abstraction. It is not a conscious process, but an emotional integration, and most people may not know that that is the reason of the enjoyment they find in thrillers. It is not a leader or a protector that they seek in a hero, since his exploits are always highly individualistic and un-social. What they seek is profoundly personal: self-confidence and self-assertion. Inspired by James Bond, a man may find the courage to rebel against the impositions of his in-laws—or to ask for a deserved raise—or to change his job—or to propose to the girl he loves—or to embark on the career he wants—or to defy the whole world for the sake of his new invention.

This is what Naturalistic art can never give him.

For example, consider one of the best works of modern Naturalism—Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. It is an extremely sensitive, perceptive, touching portrayal of a humble man’s struggle for self-assertion. One can feel sympathy for Marty, and a sad kind of pleasure at his final success. But it is highly doubtful that anyone—including the thousands of real-life Martys—would be inspired by his example. No one could feel: “I want to be like Marty.” Everyone (except the most corrupt) can feel: “I want to be like James Bond.”

Such is the meaning of that popular art form which today’s “friends of the people” are attacking with hysterical hatred.

The guiltiest men involved—both among the professionals and the public—are the moral cowards who do not share that hatred, but seek to appease it, who are willing to regard their own Romantic values as a secret vice, to keep them underground, to slip them furtively to black-market customers, and to pay off the established intellectual authorities, in the currency demanded: self-mockery.

The game will continue, and the bandwagon-riders will destroy James Bond, as they have destroyed Mike Hammer, as they have destroyed Eliot Ness, then will look for another victim to “parody”—until some future sacrificial worm turns and declares that he’ll be damned if he’ll allow Romanticism to be treated as bootleg merchandise.

The public, too, will have to do its share: it will have to cease being satisfied with esthetic speakeasies, and demand the repeal of the Joyce-Kafka Amendment, which prohibits the sale and drinking of clean water, unless denatured by humor, while unconscionable rot-gut is being sold and drunk at every bookstore counter.

(January 1965)