Watch the 2015 Edmund Wilson Symposium: Narratives of the Periphery
On March 28, 2015, The Nassau Literary Review hosted its first annual Edmund Wilson Symposium in Princeton University’s Chancellor Green Rotunda. Titled “Narratives of the Periphery,” the symposium sought to answer these questions:
What is the ethical and political responsibility of the arts towards marginalized communities? Can and should the arts speak for those who have no voice in our larger culture because of their race and social class — and if so, how can they do this?
You can watch the discussion in its entirety in the video below. Included here are the transcripts of the opening remarks by Aaron Robertson, Editor-in-Chief of The Nassau Literary Review, and an introduction by J.M. Colón, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of The Nassau Literary Review.
Opening Remarks — Aaron Robertson
Good afternoon,
My name is Aaron Robertson and, alongside John Colón, I am co-editor in chief of The Nassau Literary Review. Our staff, with the support of various departments and on-campus organizations, is proud to host the first annual Edmund Wilson Symposium. Our supporters include the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, the Council of the Humanities, the Lewis Center for the Arts, the Program in American Studies, and the Departments of English and Latin American Studies. I’d also like to extend thanks to Sahand Rahbar, Justin Poser, and Andrea D’Souza, who handled many of the logistical details that John and I were either too lazy or too incompetent to handle.
To describe Edmund Wilson, especially as someone who so recently came to know his work, is a challenge. It can’t be argued that Wilson was a critic, an essayist, and an occasional writer of prose, drama, and poetry. Wilson was born in 1895, not too far away in Red Bank, NJ. He attended the Hill School in Pottstown, PA before entering Princeton as a freshman in 1912. Here he fell in love with literature and, as editor of the The Nassau Literary Magazine almost one-hundred years ago, befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both he and Fitzgerald prospered under the aegis of Christian Gauss, a professor of French and Italian who was not only a mentor but also a dear friend. Although Gauss produced no sizeable body of work, Wilson notes, “He gave me the vision of language and literature as something representing the continuous and never-ending flow of man’s struggle to think the thoughts which, when put into action, constitute in the aggregate the advance of civilization.”
It surprises me that a man who seemed to know all the “Who’s Who” among the literati and intelligentsia of his time is mostly unknown today. He produced an impressive body of work, including a historic survey of the Symbolist movement (Axel’s Castle), an acclaimed and accessible history of socialism (To the Finland Station), and multiple volumes that documented the American political and cultural landscapes from the ’20s to the ’60s. Every person who calls Wilson “a public intellectual” will find someone who disagrees. Some, like art critic Hilton Kramer, believed the phrase subordinated literature to politics. As Louis Menand, a cultural historian, contended, “The public intellectual is not a universal type. This is not only becase intellectuals change, but because publics change.” Certainly Wilson, always surprised at the continuity of his beliefs and character, was attuned to the volatile ideological and cultural shifts of the 20th century. Wilson knew that art could be appraised for its formal aesthetic merits alone. But how much richer the interpretation when a work of literature was contextualized in its proper historical moment. And, in some modest way, that’s what we hope to accomplish this afternoon.
It is critical that this publication escape the insularity of high gates and tall spires. Let us engage with our contemporaries. We are here in a spirit of communion, where everyone is a novice and a teacher. And it’s time to ask: as producers and consumers of literature, what do we want? In his essay “Communist Criticism,” Wilson writes, “The times, it is true, are confusing. It is not always easy to know what to do…One has to make up one’s mind in what capacity one is going to function…
And so I ask again: what do we want now and what will we want to return to later? And probably the answers are legion. Unity, beauty, novelty, surprise, subversion, instruction, direction. I’ll contend that healthy literature exists neither in the domain of isolated aesthetes who produce work “just because” nor in that of propaganda and party politics. Rather, “good” literature, good writing, is diagnostic, productive, and lay somewhere between activism and hedonism. We’re all eager to hear from these writers and so now I’ll step aside and let John introduce the theme of our panel and today’s speakers. Thank you.
Introduction — J.M.Colón
Should art be political? Can it, without ceasing to be art? How and When is art political? What is the political responsibility of the arts — and to whom are they ultimately responsible? Above all, who decides all this, anyway?
To us these seem like urgent questions, but surprisingly they’re relatively new ones, at least in the West. The ancients, for instance, had no problem saying art had a concrete moral purpose in our lives: not just to delight and entertain us but also to instruct. But for these Greek and Roman writers, and many of the early modern Europeans who emulated them, the instruction you’re receiving is a kind of moral truth from on high: absolute truths about how to live virtuously, whether from the divine law in heaven or the moral law within, not a political or ethical set of values to that can be debated and negotiated democratically. (Contrary to what we’re often told in school, many of these people didn’t believe in democracy, certainly not in matters as important as art or morals!) And so the questions surrounding art were things like, can art be immoral? What do you do about art that depicts immoral acts? It’s only really been in the 200 or so years since the French Revolution that we start raising the question of the arts as political, when many artists in almost every discipline — painters and novelists and essayists and poets — felt they had to decide one way or the other to side with revolution or reaction, reform and progress or tradition and the past. The most extreme formulations of the “political” view of art all come from the war-torn and apocalyptic twentieth century, and they can be summed up in George Orwell’s famous quote that “all art is, to an extent, propaganda.” But at about the same time there also arose the opposite view — that art is entirely its own separate (perhaps even sacred, semi-religious) sphere, that it has no set purpose or usefulness, and that to defile art by injecting it with politics goes against its entire purpose, since art only exists “for art’s sake.” These two views — the “art as propaganda” view and the “art for art’s sake” view — have coexisted and battled it out for about a century now. As far as the art world goes, the group consensus has veered wildly back and forth from time period to time period.
But at the risk of making a generalization not everyone will agree with, I believe we increasingly live in a world and in a country where profound political questions are unavoidable, even to people who’d rather avoid politics altogether, even to artists. Because this is a country where 37% of drug-related arrests are black Americans and a full 2/3 of life sentences are given to nonwhites, despite similar rates of drug use between the races; where black males are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police, whether armed or not, than whites; where a third of Americans — one in three people — self-identify as lower class, and over a quarter — one of every four — American children are born into families below the poverty line; where the richest 1% of Americans own over a third of the wealth, and the next 20% own half, leaving a paltry 11% for the other 80% of the population. Yet you wouldn’t know it by looking at the arts would you? Our novels are full of stories of struggling twentysomething white artists in Brooklyn and depressive fortysomething white professors in college towns; turn on your TV or go to a movie theater and you’ll see many spectacles, but you’ll rarely see people of color, and never see anyone in a story set nowadays below upper-middle-class. We don’t see the hopeless and futureless and neglected children of the inner city ghetto, or the undocumented immigrant mother working two minimum-wage jobs and still on food stamps, or the white Appalachian boy born in a trailer to a family of meth-heads whose high school’s idea of career advice was to funnel him into the military to fight overseas in an illegal war.
In a society like ours, those whose race and social class exclude them from the country’s enormous wealth and prosperity — and, taken together, that’s almost certainly the majority of the population — are pushed to the margins, ignored by both popular and high culture, so they may as well be invisible. They remind me, in many respects, of the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s great novel Invisible Man — a young black man who tells us, “You often doubt if you really exist. You wonder if you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds.” And I’m reminded of a poem by the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, who calls them
The nobodies: sons of nobody,
owners of nothing.
The nobodies: the nones who are turned into no-ones,
chasers of carrots, dying through life, fucked
and fucked again:
(…)
Who are not human beings
but human resources.
Who have not faces, but arms.
Who have not names, but numbers.
Who appear not in the history books
but in the local papers’ police blotters.
The nobodies,
who are worth less
than the bullet that kills them.
“Worth less than the bullet that kills them” — after Ferguson, after the killings of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant and Eric Garner and so many others, it doesn’t sound so far-fetched, does it? In a society like this — and more to the point, a society in denial about being like this — there’s no such thing as art which isn’t political because art that refuses to engage in some way with the world around it simply endorses the status quo. And so the question of whether art can even be political yields to a more urgent one: what is the political responsibility of art towards these communities, so often working-class communities of color, but in general communities of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised whom our prosperous classes would prefer to keep safely out of sight and sweep under the rug?
It’s a hard question and other hard questions arise from asking it. Because a work of art is not a political pamphlet. Art is to an extent propaganda inasmuch as no work of art can help coming from a certain point of view — but art’s also about creating a beautiful object or a little world, about capturing certain things so that they aren’t lost to the passage of time, about expressing an inner vision or teaching us to see with new eyes — all sorts of things, in other words, besides conveying a message. Can an artist who wants to be political do so without compromising what makes art worthwhile? Maybe not — but, maybe so: James Baldwin’s essays are self-consciously about issues of race, but they touch upon the whole fabric of human experience and are probably the wisest and most perfect essays written by an American of any color in the twentieth century. On the other hand, writers are often most eloquent about things they have no idea they’re writing about. Marxist literary criticism begins when Friedrich Engels reads the novels of Balzac, a noted ultra-conservative, and realizes they’re the perfect depiction of class warfare in capitalist society. So maybe what I was calling a failure of contemporary art is really a failure of contemporary audiences to see how the art around us is already political, and of art criticism in the newspapers and magazines to make this clear to us.
Other questions arise. How political can art actually get? It’s one thing for a writer to be subversive, but what about a museum artist, whose career and reputation are built on how high a price their work sells for on the art market to Wall Street oligarchs, or an architect, who can only build what is contracted of them by those rich and powerful enough to fund his buildings? And we’ve talked about representing or speaking for marginalized communities — but who are we, as artists and intellectuals, to do this? Because if you are an artist or an intellectual in this country it means you’re probably white and at least upper-middle class by birth, or if you’re not white — a Latino like me or an African American — it still probably means you have the sort of education and socialization and class background that isolates you from the most marginalized, the most invisible. Who are you to speak for them? Can’t they just as well speak for themselves? What would that even look like, or mean? Who has the right to speak for whom, to write in the voice of whom, to make a film or write an essay about whom? And who decides all this — who could possibly have the right to decide?
These are among most important questions we face today as artists and intellectuals — and the most important questions, which are never asked. Yet we cannot help but ask them — not in a country with such economic and racial inequality, whose prison system is the envy of the world’s dictatorships, whose wars kill hundreds of thousands of innocents, whose political system is an oligarchy. Because it’s too easy to forget all that, when you pass through rooms as beautiful as this and don’t see the way normal people actually live. And so I want to ask these questions, and other questions, and I want to discuss them with three of the most amazing people you could discuss them with.
Tracy K. Smith is a poet and, not insignificantly, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 collection Life on Mars. More importantly she’s perhaps the best poet this country has produced since the 1970s, or at any rate one of them. Her poetry is formally complex but deeply musical, an unmistakably contemporary poetry which is nevertheless unafraid of using meter and rhyme at key moments of unity or disjuncture. It reminds me of the poems of Langston Hughs and Roberto Bolaño, but also at times of hip hop and spoken word, their swagger and directness (though she is just as often mysterious and opaque). Her poetry has a wide range of subject matters: science fiction and the streets of American cities, the body and the cosmos, David Bowie and travels in South America, the atrocities of history and the ominous promise of the high-tech future. Marginalized communities figure prominently in her poetry but are not confined to an ethnic or identitarian ghetto; rather, they’re embedded in a history and social structure and a mythology which encompasses us all, and in which we’re all complicit. She has a memoir, Ordinary Light, coming out this year.
Marco Roth is an essayist and an intellectual, and a co-founder of n+1, one of the first of a wave of absolutely brilliant little magazines founded in the past ten years which are currently engaged in changing the course of American letters. He’s also the author of a memoir, The Scientists. Roth has written extensively on racial and socioeconomic issues, not as newspaper writers and social scientists do but in pensive and meditative essays which often employ novelistic techniques and infuse these issues with an urgency worthy of the subject at hand. He was denouncing police brutality long before Ferguson, back in 2011 in the aftermath of the Oscar Grant killing; and his essay “The Drone Philosopher” is, in my opinion, mandatory reading for everyone in this room. It begins as a vicious denunciation of a real philosophy professor who wrote an op-ed defending the use of drone strikes in the Washington Post but it quickly becomes an even more vicious fictionalized satire of this professor’s life and then, beautifully and mysteriously, takes us into the mind of a fictional Pashtun villager who stands in for the sort of people — invisible to us except as statistics — whom our military kills on our behalf. Roth was generous enough to join us tonight after our first n+1 guest, co-founder Ben Kunkel, came down with the plague, so I’d like to give you a special thanks for that.
Finally, Nikole Hannah-Jones is an investigative reporter whose incisive and brilliant work has focused on socioeconomic inequality and institutional racism. She’s won a panoply of awards: the Society of Professional Journalists Pacific Northwest Excellence in Journalism Award (three times!) and the Gannett Foundation Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism, as well as reporting fellowships to Cuba and Barbados. Formerly a beat reporter for newspapers in Oregon and North Carolina, she now works for ProPublica, a non-profit dedicated to doing the real investigative reporting too many for-profit newspapers are unwilling to do. Her most recent report, “Segregation Now,” is also mandatory reading for everyone in this room, because it explodes the myth that the fight for civil rights is over, or was ever even definitively won. Her piece uses Tuscaloosa, AL’s Central High School as a case study for the way that across the nation school districts which were once integration success stories have been split back into racially homogeneous districts, with predominantly white schools reaping the benefits and predominantly black “apartheid schools” like the new Central (and the impoverished communities they serve) suffering an immense drop in quality. Her reporting shows that this isn’t accidental — when Civil Rights-era court orders demanding desegregation cease to be enforced by courts (often as a result of constant pressure for those courts to rule that they’ve done their job), it doesn’t take very long for officials responsible for districting to gerrymander school districts into segregated ones. The new segregation, like the old, is no accident and is fully intentional. Hannah-Jones’s writing is rigorously journalistic, but it is also heavily narrative and beautifully constructed.
