WEB Du Bois wasn't an idealist. He lived his life fighting for equal rights for African Americans, but, from the very beginning, he knew the fight would be long and hard. He knew that even after the African Americans achieved their equal civil rights that life wouldn't be all rainbows and sunshine, that they would still have to deal with "the inevitable suffering that always comes with life" (p. 871). I like this about Du Bois; idealism always has its costs to a person's morale... idealism is having reality up on a high pedestal.
Because Du Bois was so dedicated to his cause and because he knew that the journey was going to be very strenuous, he wanted to make sure that nothing was pointless. "[A]ll art is propaganda," he says, "and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent."
Du Bois was an early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but later became disillusioned with the NAACP's motives as well as with American society in general. He was very opposed to Booker T. Washington's pacifistic attitude (as seen in Washington's Atlanta Compromise Address in which he was willing to sacrifice equality for economic opportunity) and was a strong voice in the Civil Rights Movement. Du Bois was certainly not willing to make any compromises in this battle for equality, and he was willing to take big strides in order to reach the goal.
Du Bois's history and his ardent feelings about African American rights explain in no uncertain terms why he "doesn't give a damn" about art that doesn't serve a purpose other than being aesthetically pleasing. To Du Bois, art that doesn't serve any constructive purpose is wasted... it's stupid for an African American to paint pictures if the pictures don't say something. As my favorite dead guy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, once said, "You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."
Hegemony is all about "the 1%." According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, hegemony is defined as "the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant class." In class, Vince described it as the 1% convincing everyone else that what they (the 1%) want is what is good for everyone. During the Nazi regime, Adolf Hitler (and the high-class, high-ranking Nazi officials, too) used hegemony in order to brainwash the German people into believing that yes, minorities such as Jews, Gypsies, etc really were out to get them.* All of this was an effort to reach a Weltanshauung, or a German worldview. As this video shows, Hitler used the power of words to sway the youth of Germany into adopting his view of what a country should be; as history shows, Hitler used brainwashing and his own charismatic charm to create in Germany's youth the idea that what they were doing was good, when every word Hitler says is contradicted by Germany's action. And although this video doesn't explicitly describe hatred for minorities and even though "altruistic" is used to describe German society, it's important to think of this video and Hitler's words in context with his ideology and the world events around this time. (The subtitles are hard to read, so I typed them out for you.)
The Introducer: Again we experience the hour that makes us proud and happy. By your order here stands a youth-- a youth that knows no class distinction. The youth of our nation is shaped in your image. Because you are the epitome of altruism... this youth wants to be altruistic. Because you are the ideal of loyalty... we also want to be loyal. Adolf Hitler, leader of the German youth, will speak!
Adolf Hitler: My German youth, after a year I again greet you. You here today are only a part of what is spread over all Germany. We want you, my German boys and girls, to absorb all that we expect of Germany. We want to be one people, and you, my youth, are to be that people. In the future there must be no ranks or classes. And you must not let them [be able?] to grow in you. We want to see one nation and you must educate yourselves for it. We want this people to be obedient, and you must practice this obedience. We want this people to be peace-loving and also to be courageous. You must be peaceable and courageous at the same time. We want this nation to be hard, not soft, and you must steel yourselves for it in your youth. You must learn to accept privations and never collapse. No matter what we create today or what we do today... we will pass away. But in you Germany will live. And when nothing remains of us, then you must hold in your fist this flag we tore from nothing. I know this cannot be otherwise because you are the flesh from our flesh and the blood from our blood. The same spirit that dominates us burns in your young minds. As the columns of our movement sweep through Germany today, then I know you will join with them. And we know around us is Germany, in us Germany marches, and behind us Germany followed.
In 1939, Hitler was eager to take control of Poland. He couldn't do this without reason. He staged an attack on a Poland-based German radio station. The German people had already been told via propaganda that Germans in Poland were being abused by native Poles, so they believed Hitler when he blamed the Poles for the attack. The photographs of the Poles doing this helped Hitler's argument (although the "Poles" in the pictures were actually Germans dressed in Pole clothes). On the last day of August 1939, war on Poland began with the full support of Germany.*
As a way to reach the common people, propaganda is a useful tool of hegemony. Hitler, of course, knew this. "All propaganda has to be popular and has to
accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of
those whom it seeks to reach," he says in his book Mein Kampf. Clearly, Hitler had hegemony figured out.
*Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow. New York: Scholastic, 2005. Print.
Sigmund Freud says that the uncanny "is undoubtedly related to what is frightening-- to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term" (825). In other words, the uncanny is something that appears in real life but is presented in such a way that evokes a feeling of dread and discomfort-- it is the return of repressed memories/experiences.
In our world, I think one of the most uncanny things that has happened in recent history is the Jewish Holocaust during World War Two. It is uncanny because, although we see and hear about killings day in and day out, seeing such horrible brutality happen in real life made our families then and makes us today so uncomfortable that some people find it easier to ignore that it happened altogether. As much as people deny it, most people are somehow racist/xenophobic/prejudiced, and we DO NOT want to identify with the Nazis. In a way, the memories of the Holocaust in the minds of many people in the world have become repressed, and when those memories resurface... no one wants to confront them; confronting them would mean acknowledging them.
This is the famous gate from Auschwitz: "Work will make you free." This, to me, is very uncanny because it is a motto we have all sort of adopted. While most diligent people don't believe that work might make them physically free, as in liberated, they do believe that work will set them free from the stress of taking out loans, having to use food stamps, being on unemployment. "Work will set you free" is something we all tell ourselves when we need motivation to keep on keeping on, to work harder than we did yesterday because harder work means more freedom. What's uncanny about this gate is that work did not set the victims free. Work bought them time, maybe... and in some cases, work killed them. Many of them worked themselves to death because their bodies didn't have adequate nutrition to work as hard as they were. Something that is generally thought of in a positive light turns into something that wears a mask; you're told work will make you free, so you work, but it only ends up making you exhausted. And then you die anyway.
Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby in the 1974 version of the Great Gatsby
All the while I was reading Baudelaire's section on The Dandy and all the while Vince talked about Dandies in class, I couldn't get The Great Gatsby out of my head. I think Jay Gatsby is a perfect example of the Dandy because he makes great efforts to integrate himself into a crowd without actually being a PART of the crowd. Throughout the novel, Gatsby throws lavish parties to which he invites hundreds of strangers. All of the party guests have heard of Gatsby and know who Gatsby is, but none of them have ever seen him or could point him out in a crowd. At one such party, Nick Carraway, Gatsby's narrator, stumbles upon Gatsby: "[M]y eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased"* (Fitzgerald 50). Gatsby seems like a 1920s version of George Clooney-- quiet and withdrawn yet somewhat... intriguing in a way that is irresistible.
Baudelaire says, "Whether these men [Dandies] are nicknamed exquisites, incroyables, beaux, lions or dandies, they all spring from the same womb; they all partake of the same characteristic quality of opposition and revolt; they are all representatives of what is finest in human pride, of that compelling need, alas only too dandies obtain that haughty exclusiveness, provocative in its very coldness" (687 of our textbook).
Dandies have an elegant quality about them that seems effortless and perfect.Style, for the Dandy, is a way of life-- it is a function. However, it is my suspicion that the Dandy's effortless beauty is not effortless at all. Being a Dandy is in fact a hard feat to accomplish, and I think it exemplifies a sadness in the character-- particularly in Jay Gatsby: "He smiled understandingly-- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced-- or seemed to face-- the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished-- and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care" (Fitzgerald 48).
Gatsby's life in a nutshell.
I think Gatsby is a Dandy to a fault. He has spent who knows how much money on who knows how many parties in hopes that his long lost love, Daisy, will drop by... he makes sure that he is withdrawn enough from his own parties to be able to scout her out on the off chance that she will actually make an appearance. His perfection is heartbreaking, his eloquence is carefully thought out, his hair is perfectly arranged. Gatsby is so perfect, the Dandy is so perfect, that I don't think he will be able to comfortably function in real life. I think being a Dandy would create hollow relationships and would mean putting yourself so high on your own private pedestal that you are essentially untouchable and unable to associate with anyone in a meaningful way.
*Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. Print.
"Shakespeare is about all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life." -Samuel Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare (page 374 in our book)
Samuel Johnson praised William Shakespeare as being a maker of classics. Even today, we can find this to be true because we're still reading his plays and watching movies that are inspired by his plays. We love Shakespeare, we feed off him, we quote him, we believe him. His works, so ancient, still ring true in our culture today, even if we don't get the same things out of them that Queen Elizabeth did. While Aristotle would have found Shakespeare's plays to be absurd because they don't follow the strict Aristotelian Laws of Unity, Johnson claims that Shakespeare's total disregard for the unities is forgivable: "The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible" (382 of our textbook).
I've always had trouble with Aristotle because he is so cold. I know he was a physician and therefore was very scientific and calculating, but I never understood why literature and poetry, by Aristotle's standards, has to be so... rigid. Literature and other media, in my opinion, wouldn't be as enjoyable if they were "believable" and if they obeyed the rules set forth by Aristotle. Hamlet, for example, breaks the Unities of Time and Space (Hamlet's travels would take far longer than the time it takes to perform the play; Hamlet's scenes take place mostly in Elsinore, but also at Hamlet's college); Johnson, I think, understood that Hamlet needed to break the Unities in order to provide backstory and suspense. It's become commonplace in today's movies and books to have flashbacks and long breaks in time (e.g: in James Cameron's 1997 movie Titanic, most of the movie takes place 80 years in the past while being interrupted throughout by the present), and this disobedience does nothing but ADD to the story.
Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet is a classic because it stands the test of time. On the left is a clip from the 1968 version of Romeo & Juliet, performed in the style we always associate with Shakespeare's time and culture. On the right is the 1996 version, which is set in modern day-- even though the movie takes place some 400+ years after the play was written, it still stays faithful to the dialogue and scenes.
Johnson also praises Shakespeare for writing characters who could be any normal person. It's hard to feel sorry for characters like Odysseus or Hercules or even Superman because we can't really relate to them-- their tragedies are not the same as our tragedies. Shakespeare's characters, although they are often in high places in society, could be identified with our next door neighbors, our sisters, our friends, or ourselves. Shakespeare's plays probably wouldn't have become "classics" by Johnson's standards if the characters didn't have qualities that we can all relate to. And, let's face it, even though The Odyssey is considered to be one of the great Classics of all history, it is rare that anyone would feel more for Odysseus than he or she would for Macbeth or Ophelia.
