A Modern Gulliver
Gottfried, Paul
"A Modern Gulliver" Duncan Williams, who is currently my colleague at Rockford College, is a man of varied talents. A former officer in the Royal Marines, a popular lecturer on English literature and a widely published...
...The one conceivable difference that might arise betweennthe, protagonists of these two positions atiicerns a justification for censorship...
...Both races, however, were at most pale imitations of human beings, since neither one had the sensitivities characteristic of a civilized group...
...And that's why I write on education and try to appeal to whomever I can reach...
...he rejoins...
...Williams then turns to those characteristics of modern literature which are repeatedly found in some of its most respected representatives...
...Yes, I quite agree...
...And teach he does, for at the age of forty-seven with three places of residence and a wife and three children, he continues to cross oceans and continents to urge people to become civilized, and students to read the classics again...
...And once we've done that, what do you think will happen...
...11“.....aar,••^e...
...Without overlooking the brutal side of human nature, these writers offered a measured portrayal of life as containing both virtue and vice, and recognizedliterature as serving a moral and educational intent...
...His work, a study in cultural criticism, has been described as both learned and bitter, while its writer has often been presented as a reactionary pessimist looking toward the onset of his self-proclaimed apocalypse...
...In modern literature, the same quest for authenticity has resulted in the continuing predilection for the boorish antihero and for the violent pervert...
...While Mr...
...Once having made this point, however, I should immediately indicate that it does nothing to give the lie to Professor Williams' other observations, which seem well founded...
...Since I do enjoy his pungent debating style and resonant Welsh brogue, I have often held discussions with Duncan Williams on the value of censorship...
...Bennett gently rebukes his wife for being vain, Osborne's hero (or antihero) goes off to complain to a friend, before whom he truculently ridicules his spouse's sexual behavior...
...Inasmuch as Williams believes that "literature and the arts are real, formative social forces moulding the face of an age," the tendencies described give him cause for concern...
...Let's take your point that literature is a cause for social and other changes...
...For, given the truth of his cultural analysis, it makes little difference in terms of the survival of civilization whether nihilistic literature in fact turns readers into nihilists or whether it is written for those already so disposed...
...For one thing, his view of literature as a "real, formative social force" assigns to the object of his study an importance that has not been empirically confirmed...
...Drawing upon the creations of Swift, he makes reference to Gulliver's experiences among two tribes, the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos...
...He also dwells, in Trousered Apes and in his essays, on the steady erosion of the belief in moral custom in modern culture...
...For, although Williams does -view literature as a more crucial social determinant than I do, he is also opposed (unlike myself) to almost every kind of censorship...
...By the same token, literature may and does influence the particular acts of particular individuals and groups (Mr...
...He stresses the fact that he would rather teach than censor...
...Thus he argues as a defender of neoclassicism: "There is nothing fundamentally more realistic or more 'natural' about a public urinal or a kitchen sink or a paranoid-schizophrenic than there is about a tranquil lawn or a cultivated household or a balanced mind...
...It is possible that those who assign to literature more of a causative than symptomatic role, might be more inclined to favor restricting what they see as a corrupting form of expression than those who disagree with their perception...
...A former officer in the Royal Marines, a popular lecturer on English literature and a widely published educational theorist, he has also gained distinction since 1971 as the author of the English bestseller, Trousered Apes...
...After all, civilization must have some way of protecting itself against its enemies...
...He would rather see it as one more thematic opportunity for showing, and frequently exalting, the ferocity of human nature...
...Violent and often perverse sexuality, savage hatred, and utter despair over the possibility of discovering meaning in life are all recurrent themes in such widely admired writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, John Osborne, Edward Albee, and Norman Mailer...
...But to say that novels and poems can directly remould an entire age or society, or that the operation of cultural forces in generalcaa 4C .. mauc: 541/JCUL 1.4 WILIC vL causal analysis, involves an assumption which no scholar should be willing to concede...
...If that premise is true, then certainly we do have a duty to inhibit whatever forms of expression are intended to turn us into trousered apes...
...What can be conceded is only that popular literature transmits and mirrors cultural and social values and that it therefore provides an indispensable key for their study...
...and Mrs...
...Bennett in Austen's Pride and Prejudice...
...In the process, they have turned their mockery against all traditional impulses (which are described as "programming") except for those forms of self-assertion that enable men "to become authentic...
...Williams, I believe that the fears of such pessimists were at least partly justified...
...No less a misanthrope than Swift, according to Williams, stressed the didactic purpose of his satire, and even spoke of his affection for men as individuals if not collectively...
...and the other, a denunciation of his upper-class wife given by John Osborne's proletarian protagonist in the play Look Back in Anger...
...But as for censorship, it will never work unless we succeed in making over this country into one enormous police state...
...Because of their attraction to coarseness and animality, Williams characterizes the devotees of the new literary culture as "trousered apes," after the reference of C. S. Lewis to the morally insensitive products of an antitraditionalist education...
...so ry the eighteenth century whole—or, as one lady put it, "with plumbing and all...
...Indeed since the emergence of the counterculture, it seems almost impossible to ignore his warnings about the growing "bestialization" of modern man...
...Thus the give-and-take usually continues at lunch and elsewhere, until our duties summon us back to class...
...Williams likes to point to the spate of suicides among frustrated poets and artists following the appearance of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Weaker...
...All right...
...While the first people appeared to turn lotemectuaoteu beyond any resemblance to men, Gulliver found . the second to consist, of mere brutes...
...The other side, as soon as it gains political control, will use whatever we've created against us...
...And he attempts to fight them by calling attention to their underlying fallacies...
...Throwing to the wind all thematic restraints, modern authors have also become fixated on frank expression, even to the point of reveling in brutal and scatological speech...
...As Aristotle knew, it is better to do good without knowing why than to be a clever knave...
...At Rockford College during the fall, I heard him respond to another extravagant accusation, with his accustomed civility, this one being that he was opposed to the very concept of social and artistic experimentation...
...Unfortunately, however, authenticity is too often equated by existentialists and psychologists with a victory over social constraint...
...These ideals are identified with the Western classical heritage, and while this heritage can be traced back to ancient social teachings and Aristotelian esthetics, its values, according to Williams, were particularly well expressed in eighteenth century British literature...
...Unlike the eighteenth-century writer, the modern one feels no obligation to present marriage as aninstitution that should and often does rest on civility...
...Thus he argues: "If any reader can honestly feel that -the gas ovens at Buchenwald were neither tight nor wrong, then he is a. true relativist...
...What was common to the satires of Dryden and Jane Austen and to the artistic maxims of Pope, Johnson, and Burke was the belief in a distinction between pure effusiveness and the demands of proper literary expression...
...After all, no one has thus far demonstrated that the publication of a story or a piece of poetry has caused any actual social change...
...But certainly," he exclaimed, "one need not be against creativity, simply because one opposes the tedious duplication of sexual violence and human despair in literature--or because one gets sick of novels featuring four-letter obscenities on every line...
...I'll start...
...On the next day we resume the discussion without even hoping to resolve our differences, but simply for the pleasure of further debate...
...Like Aristotle, who stressed habituation as well as philosophical understanding in moral formation, Williams asserts the need for a renewed ethical consciousness that is grounded in feeling as well as intellect...
...If, on the other hand, he regards such things as innately evil, then, despite the modishness of contemporary ethical relativism, he is still a member of the human race, even if he cannot rationally explain why he regards such things to be evil...
...Some of Williams' ideas raise questions in my mind...
...There is of course much in his observations that is reminiscent of earlier thinkers (Burckhardt, Spengler, Henry Adams, et al...
...Both scenes concern themselves with marital friction, but the characters and their relations bear no resemblance to each other...
...who had similar misgivings about the breakdown of moral and artistic standards in their own generation...
...Both at Oxford (where he took his degrees) and at the University of London, he was obliged to answer the charges of his1:1111A-J, 11141...
...Instead of assuming the need for moral standards—and at least the partial validity of existing ones—within each society, the Western intelligentsia for some time now has been engaged in attacking ethical conventions...
...Since his book deals with cultural decadence, it rightly begins by defining those ideals from which the present age has fallen...
...To illustrate the distance between classical and current literary values, Williams offers two lengthy citations: the first, the opening tiff between Mr...
...And yet, on the other hand, this distinction might not be entirely valid...
...Nonetheless, like Mr...
...Williams is perhaps at his best in pointing out the thrust of this nihilism...
Vol. 8 • April 1975 • No. 7
