Lies, of course, even the whitest of ones, require agency, a choice to fib or not. Moreover, a lie necessarily presupposes some agreed-upon standard of truth: what constitutes legitimate evidence in a court case, for instance, or valid testimony, or what proves a scientific hypothesis or constitutes fraud. In this way, lies are strangely reassuring, confirming as they do both free will and the reality they violate.
What is terrifying, however, is the possibility that both truth and lie are arbitrary antinomies—as are good and evil, rebellion and conformity, even, strange to say, life and death—in the collective narrative we have chosen to call reality.
Recently, sick and tired of my “death is life” dog and pony show—I’ve carved out about four books with that old saw (to change the metaphor abruptly)—and weary also of the melancholy literature I obsessively read (Lord Byron, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard), I fell into a period of reading Greil Marcus, the great psychologist of rock ’n’ roll. I first read his Invisible Republic (also titled The Old, Weird America), in which he describes how Bob Dylan and The Band channeled in their Basement Tapes the macabre deadpan lyricism of old-time Appalachian mountain singers like Dock Boggs (aforementioned), Buell Kazee, and Clarence Ashley. The book is powerful and nervy. “There’s weather—the ordinary, the everyday, dirt kicked up by wind, a joke that leaves everyone gasping for breath, ten nights in a barroom and the boredom of waiting around for something to change—in the basement recordings most suffused with Judgment Day, and there is Judgment Day—a sense of visitation, the smell of fear, the appearance of the unwanted, ten nights in a barroom and the thrill of waiting for the end of the world—in the most weather-bound.”
I thought: “Why the hell am I not reading Greil Marcus all the time?” And so I read Mystery Train, on the origins of rock ’n’ roll, with a wondrous final chapter on Elvis, titled “Presliad,” where Marcus describes the Sun recordings of ’54, focusing on the “Milkcow Blues Boogie.” Then I studied Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, a history of the iconoclasm of the UK punk movement. In describing how the Sex Pistols created a record that changed the world by making “a breach in the pop milieu,” Marcus recalls that old standby of sixties, seventies, and eighties French literary theory, championed by Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Louis Althusser: “received cultural assumptions are hegemonic propositions about the way the world is supposed to work—ideological constructs perceived and experienced as natural facts.”
For these French theorists, all so-called realities are actually signs in a ubiquitous, arbitrary language system into which we are born and that therefore “always already” shapes how we think, feel, and perceive. Inscribed in this vast volume are the primary values of the culture the words perpetuate. Generally, and sadly, these are the values of those in power, the 1 percent, and therefore rarely equitable. Hence our constant struggle against the sexist, classist, and racist biases embedded in our speech. (Remember the scene in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X when Malcolm looks up the word “black” in the dictionary and finds all those negative meanings?) Even our “common sense” is a construct imbued with the assumptions, often unconscious, of the ideologies ruling our historical moment. And it’s not as if we can rebel against these ideologies. They are so thoroughly embedded in how we think and speak that we can’t get outside them, much less oppose them. And if we could rebel, we couldn’t, since we possess no self we can rouse to revolt; we are but sites through which the master text works its way. No individual, no authorship of books, paintings, movies, music. This is what Barthes says. Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, Greil Marcus, Eric G. Wilson: all of us are simply exponents of the discourse universe into which we have been hurled.
(In 1980, Althusser, afflicted with a severe form of bipolar disorder, was massaging his wife Hélène’s neck. Next thing he knew, he had strangled her to death. He alleged that he had no memory of the crime. The French legal system deemed him unfit to stand trial. After being confined for three years in an insane asylum, he was released. He wrote about his wife’s murder in a memoir, The Future Lasts Forever.)
Marcus, optimistic, thinks we can break out of language’s prison, that the cacophonous eruptions of Johnny Rotten and Elvis’s Sun studio wellllll’s are creative, opening us to something contingent, unpredictable, mysterious, alive.
But most writers steeped in French theory, and not nearly as schooled in Elvis or Rotten, or Robbie Robertson or Sly Stone, believe there is no escape.
Let’s take an example of how “common sense” infects our ways of seeing, to italicize the phrase that is also the title of the 1975 book from which I’m going to borrow my illustration, by John Berger, the British essayist and novelist, Marxist in mood, heavy influence, as well, on Geoff Dyer, the great Montaignean essayist of our time, whose Out of Sheer Rage, a book about D. H. Lawrence, about Dyer’s inability to write a book on D. H. Lawrence, turned me into a Dyer wannabe; he is so witty, honest, idiosyncratic, obsessive, petulant, weak, distracted, brilliant, insightful, lyrical, heroic. (“According to Huxley, Lawrence knew how to do nothing. He could just sit and be perfectly content. Not like me. I am always on the edge of what I am doing. I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing—which I do anxiously, distractedly, wondering all the time if there isn’t something else I should be getting on with.”)
An image is “man-made,” Berger asserts, and so is different from a fleeting visual perception. When an “image is presented as a work of art,” he argues, the “way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art,” concerning beauty, truth, genius, and so on. For Berger, these assumptions are often taken as reality, or “common sense.” He calls this mistake mystification.
In 1664, the Dutch painter Frans Hals was over eighty and destitute. If it hadn’t been for the charity of the local public administrators, who gave him three loads of peat to burn, he would have frozen to death. These same administrators commissioned him the same year to paint their portraits. He produced two, one of the regents of the old men’s almshouse, another of the regentesses. The expressions on some of the subjects are striking, strange. One woman stares straight ahead, bitterly, judgmentally. Another’s head is tilted to the right (her left); the half of her visage not covered in shadow looks askance at the viewer, as though she were a little surprised at what she’s seeing, befuddled maybe, but no, it now seems that she’s not confused in the least but has seen this all too many times and is tired of it, and can hope only for the third-rate solace of resignation. Of the men, one looks melancholy and drunk. His hat is not on straight; his hair is unkempt; one of his eyes is half closed, and the other, unfocused.
Most viewers of the painting, critics, art historians, and otherwise, have assumed that Hals in this painting set out to reveal the complexity of the human condition, fusing particular with general, dark with light, surface and depth, realism and allegory. Such interpretations grow from a basic cultural assumption about what great art does: it depicts with compelling accuracy feelings and thoughts that have universally troubled and enlivened the human race. Other assumptions underlie this one: there is a shared reality that the painter represents; some representations of this reality are truer, more beautiful, and better than others; there is something called the human that we all share. But these assumptions, which we take for common sense, obscure, Berger believes, the “drama of these paintings”: between the gaze of the public officials and that of the “destitute older painter,” who examines these officials “through the eyes of a pauper who must nevertheless try to be objective, i.e., must try to surmount the way he sees as a pauper.”
In addition to obscuring this more interesting—for Berger—drama, these commonsense assumptions reinforce the political status quo, implying that the current power structure is an expression of reality, not a construct that can be destroyed. And a main feature of this business-as-usual scenario is capitalism: superior works of art—the most real, the most beautiful, the most universal—are the most expensive ones.
If we accept these assumptions as self-evident reality, we don’t exercise our ability to shape experience. We forget that powerful art, if we approach it without mystification, can, no matter its market price, grant us “the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history of which we can become active agents.” To remember our agency is essential, unless we are to remain nothing more than quantified bits in a world of quantified bits, a world that has been reduced to commodity, where value originates not in intrinsic worth, in qualities like bravery, diligence, skill, prudence, compassion, but rather in how much something costs.
Of course, who’s to say if Berger’s account of the real isn’t an ideologically driven interpretation as well? But if Berger’s interpretation is ideologically driven, I want that ideology, since it empowers Berger to make this and other compelling claims that open possibilities for creative, invigorating, democratic interpretation.