THE POOREST JOHNNY ONE-NOTE

Back in this essay I wrote of Freud and Levi-Strauss:"the two scholars are alike in their attempt to fit humankind into a monocausal straitjacket, based on a Johnny-One-Note conception of empirical evaluation."

And I stand by that, but I must admit that even if the two of them were Johnny One-Notes, they both sang their one note on key, resulting in some worthy applications of their theories to literary criticism.

The poorest Johnny One-Note, though, has to be the guy who "sang only one note" but couldn't even stay on key: none other than Kapital-Hatin' Karl Marx, whose ideology has propounded more subintellectual drivel in literary studies than any other one-note-singer can claim. Comics-criticism, still in its infancy, is still particularly vulnerable to this game of "Spot the Evil Colonial Influence," as is clear from the dominant tropes of elitist criticism by Gary Groth and his Merry Bund.

However, every once in a while, one gets a glimmer of hope in darkness. I quoted one such elitist in INCEST WE TRUST PART 2, my sometime-opponent Noah Berlatsky, as an example of "overinterpretation," though not specifically of a Marxist bent. However, in a more recent blogpost, Berlatsky wrote the following:

"A lot of pulp narratives, from Sherlock Holmes to Fu Manchu, draw much of their spark from colonial fever dreams, and that’s certainly the case for Tintin as well...
This, then, is really a case where I don’t like the sequence despite its racism and imperialism. As far as I can tell, I like it because of them. The fascination/repulsion Herge feels towards the strange gods of colonized cultures generates real creative frisson. Which makes me wonder if maybe that’s true of racism and stereotypes in general. It seems like, beyond their other uses, they sometimes have an appeal which might be called aesthetic. A certain amount of cultural creativity goes into shaping the person in front of you into a phantom monstrosity, and that creativity can itself be exciting and fascinating. The dream’s appeal is its vividly imagined ugliness; the exhilaration of imposing on the world the gothic products of one’s skull."

The twaddle about "colonial fever dreams" is the usual Marxist cant, which fails to perceive the universality of cultural chauvinism beyond the boundaries of Marx's dialectic. But the perception that there is "cultural creativity" in such acts of chauvinistic projection has the pure sound of Sigmund Freud's single good note, even down to the "fascination/repulsion" ambivalence.

Of course, though Sigmund kicks Karl M.'s ass, the former is just as well-and-truly kicked by another Carl: Freud's sometime follower Jung. In another essay I'll talk about why Jung's phenomenology of evil has much wider relevance to cultures popular and otherwise than even Freud's best insight(s). But for now I'll finish by saying:

Attaboy, Noah.