Cultural Amnesia - or what we forget

Cultural Amnesia
(Clive James)
I picked up this work – a collection of reflective essays on writers about the arts, mainly of our own times – not knowing what to expect, but intrigued by the title.
What I have found is a gem of English writing. The author, an Australian by birth, and in age technically a war-time baby, has spent a life reading, studying, and finally writing and broadcasting on the arts – verbal and visual – in the United Kingdom. His essays are a plea for affective writing and clear thought. He is, in the best sense of the word, a Humanist, one for whom the best study, the only really worthwhile study, is Man himself, in all his glory, with all his weaknesses and all his foibles. That men have been – are, at times – evil he does not deny, nor that these same evil men can be, as Hitler was, artistic.
His writing is not a matter of whitewash – that the evil among us are the victims of some overwhelming compulsion. He will insist on the individual, personal responsibility of each for his own actions. However, he also agrees that there is an ethos in an era, or society, that is very difficult for members to fight. Such was, he felt, the case in Nazi Germany. That many writers DID fight it was not surprising – most of them were not IN the society – they were automatically excluded, as Jews, as Slavs, as not worth living.
However, what is most interesting, to me, is not his thesis – his underlying interest in the Arts, and what others think and say, but his affective use of language.
His writing I found strewn with gems of expression –little lapidary gems that illuminate an idea, or a word; descriptions that change ones perception of a particular habit of writing or thinking.
An example of this I found in his essay on Paul Pavlovich Muratov, an essayist, novelist, and, for Clive, the most learned, original, and gifted Russian art historian of his time – but now totally unknown. In writing of this man’s work Clive said that as a student of the High renaissance in Italy, in the 1960’s, he had read, and swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, Heinrich Wölfflinn’s teaching. About other eras, he could, he said, form the occasional independent judgement, but for the Cinquecento, he had "a seeing-eye dogma, and the snorting beast was provided by Wölfflinn."
The phrase struck me like a thunderbolt - for it exemplifies all that is wrong with acceptance of a dogma as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It does take over our critical faculties, guides us whither we know not, and keeps us at its mercy.
Another example – and I’ll stop with this, for the whole book is far too full to cite in one essay – He writes, in the introduction, of the difficulties of being a Scholar, and Jewish, in Vienna in the years leading up to the Anschluss. There was a real, stultifying, quota system throughout society. As a result, he claims, there was a great tendency for scholarship and humanism to be pursued outside, rather than inside the university. That a case could be made, and was, that this redounded to the benefit if those excluded, he grants.
"But it was a bad case. The humiliations were real, and the resentments lasting. But there was one "undoubted benefit to us all. Whole generations of Jewish literati were denied the opportunity to "waste their energies on compiling abstruse doctoral theses. They were driven instead to "journalism, plain speech, direct observation and the necessity to entertain. The necessity to "entertain could sometimes be the enemy of learning, but not as often as the deadly freedom to "write as if nobody would ever read the results except a faculty supervisor who owed his own post "to the same exemption." (p.2, Overture: Vienna)
You see here his ability to illuminate, to transform our perceptions of a system. This also contains, for young readers, a plea: "Make your work interesting – have an audience in mind, whose thoughts you wish to sway. Sell your work, and your self. " It is not enough that the ducks be lined up, that the weapon be properly charged aimed and fired. That is a technical matter, one that anyone can master, given sufficient practice and time. No – his is a plea for the use of formal rhetoric – and an exemplar there of.
This is not a book one can sit down with, and read through from cover to cover. There is no connected narrative, no over-riding theme of life. There is, though, a series of reflections on writers and thinkers – some good, some evil, and most mixed, very thoroughly. In anything, it most closely resembles a book of sermons – to be sampled, thought about, pondered on, and then dipped into again. The gems are there, page after page of them. I have by no means caught them all – some, I suspect, are dependant on our knowledge of writers, or their subjects, and the more we know, the more we’ll find. If asked for one word, I’d have to say:"Thought-provoking".