the way dreams are supposed to do. He had the lyricismof Miró, the afternoon light of de Chirico, and Ernst’s sense of dread derived from subtly changing familiar things. His images – cracked eggs (‘Dalinian DNA’), soft watches, elongated breasts, dead trees in arid landscapes – are visually lubricious and disturbing to the mind. 78 They convey a world pullulating with life, but uncoordinated, as if the guiding principles, the very laws, of nature have broken down, as if biology is coming to an end and the Darwinian struggle has gone mad.
René Magritte (1898–1967) was never part of the salon of surrealists – he spent all his life in Brussels – but he shared their obsession with dread, adding too an almost Wittgensteinian fascination with language and the hold it has on meaning. In his classic paintings, Magritte took ordinary subjects – a bowler hat, a pipe, an apple, an umbrella – and made extraordinary things happen to them (he himself often wore a bowler). 79 For example, in
The Human Condition
(1934), a painting of a view through a window overlaps exactly with the same view, so that they fuse together and one cannot tell where the painting begins and ends. The world ‘out there,’ he is saying, is really a construction of the mind, an echo of Henri Bergson. In
The Rape,
also 1934, a naked female torso, framed in hair, forms a face, a prim yet at the same time wild face, casting doubt on the nature of primness itself, suggesting a raw sexuality that lies hidden. This image is seen against a flat, empty landscape, a purely psychoanalytic wasteland. 80
The surrealists played with images – and the verb is pertinent; they were seriously suggesting that man could play himself out of trouble, for in play the unconscious was released. By the same token they brought eroticism to the surface, because repression of sexuality cut off man from his true nature. But above all, taking their lead from dreams and the unconscious, their work showed a deliberate rejection of reason. Their art sought to show that progress, if it were possible, was never a straight line, that nothing was predictable, and that the alternative to the banalities of the acquisitive society, now that religion was failing, was a new form of enchantment.
Ironically, the wasteland was a very fertile metaphor. What underlines all the works considered here is a sense of disenchantment with the world and with the joint forces of capitalism and science, which created the wasteland. These targets were well chosen. Capitalism and science were to prove the century’s most enduring modes of thought and behaviour. And by no means everyone would find them disenchanting.
* In fact, Ulysses is more deeply mythical than many readers realise, various parts being based on different areas of the body (the kidneys, the flesh); this was spelled out in James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in collaboration with Stuart Gilbert in 1930. It is not necessary to know this for a rich and rewarding experience in reading the book.36
12
BABBITT’S MIDDLETOWN
In the 1920s the eugenicists and scientific racists were especially persistent in America. One of their main texts was a book by C.C. Brigham called
A Study of American Intelligence,
which was published in 1923. Brigham, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, was a disciple of Robert Yerkes, and in his book he relied on the material Yerkes had obtained during the war (Yerkes wrote the foreword for Brigham’s book). Despite evidence that the longer immigrants were in the United States, the better they performed on IQ tests, Brigham’s aim was to show that the southern and eastern peoples of Europe, and Negroes, were of inferior intelligence. In making his arguments he relied on the much earlier notions of such figures as Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who thought that Europe was divided into three racial types, according to the shape of their skulls. Given this, Brigham’s
René Magritte (1898–1967) was never part of the salon of surrealists – he spent all his life in Brussels – but he shared their obsession with dread, adding too an almost Wittgensteinian fascination with language and the hold it has on meaning. In his classic paintings, Magritte took ordinary subjects – a bowler hat, a pipe, an apple, an umbrella – and made extraordinary things happen to them (he himself often wore a bowler). 79 For example, in
The Human Condition
(1934), a painting of a view through a window overlaps exactly with the same view, so that they fuse together and one cannot tell where the painting begins and ends. The world ‘out there,’ he is saying, is really a construction of the mind, an echo of Henri Bergson. In
The Rape,
also 1934, a naked female torso, framed in hair, forms a face, a prim yet at the same time wild face, casting doubt on the nature of primness itself, suggesting a raw sexuality that lies hidden. This image is seen against a flat, empty landscape, a purely psychoanalytic wasteland. 80
The surrealists played with images – and the verb is pertinent; they were seriously suggesting that man could play himself out of trouble, for in play the unconscious was released. By the same token they brought eroticism to the surface, because repression of sexuality cut off man from his true nature. But above all, taking their lead from dreams and the unconscious, their work showed a deliberate rejection of reason. Their art sought to show that progress, if it were possible, was never a straight line, that nothing was predictable, and that the alternative to the banalities of the acquisitive society, now that religion was failing, was a new form of enchantment.
Ironically, the wasteland was a very fertile metaphor. What underlines all the works considered here is a sense of disenchantment with the world and with the joint forces of capitalism and science, which created the wasteland. These targets were well chosen. Capitalism and science were to prove the century’s most enduring modes of thought and behaviour. And by no means everyone would find them disenchanting.
* In fact, Ulysses is more deeply mythical than many readers realise, various parts being based on different areas of the body (the kidneys, the flesh); this was spelled out in James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in collaboration with Stuart Gilbert in 1930. It is not necessary to know this for a rich and rewarding experience in reading the book.36
12
BABBITT’S MIDDLETOWN
In the 1920s the eugenicists and scientific racists were especially persistent in America. One of their main texts was a book by C.C. Brigham called
A Study of American Intelligence,
which was published in 1923. Brigham, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, was a disciple of Robert Yerkes, and in his book he relied on the material Yerkes had obtained during the war (Yerkes wrote the foreword for Brigham’s book). Despite evidence that the longer immigrants were in the United States, the better they performed on IQ tests, Brigham’s aim was to show that the southern and eastern peoples of Europe, and Negroes, were of inferior intelligence. In making his arguments he relied on the much earlier notions of such figures as Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who thought that Europe was divided into three racial types, according to the shape of their skulls. Given this, Brigham’s
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