Unquiet Americans
Greil Marcus searches for the prophetic voices of America and finds them in Abraham Lincoln, David Lynch and Riot Grrrl bands of the '90s.
By J. Gabriel Boylan
Read more: Books, Greil Marcus, Reviews, Martin Luther King Jr., Book reviews
Oct. 12, 2006 | There are no love songs in this book, none of the knowledgeable musings on doe-eyed crooners, wild-eyed blues shouters or pin-eyed punk rockers one might expect from Greil Marcus, the noted cultural critic, music historian and pop champion. Instead, Marcus has taken a somber subject for his latest exploration of American cultural history. That subject is nothing short of our own annihilation.
In "The Shape of Things to Come," curtains go up with a series of quotations from famous thinkers and others either directly or analogically related to 9/11, which seems a decent enough place to start thinking about America's destruction. From there, Marcus' introduction summons the voices of John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., who, in their most seminal speeches, repeat differing versions of a contract between Americans and God, as well as Americans and other Americans. For all three, the golden opportunity offered by the New Jerusalem of America, the opportunity to create a perfect community, comes with the threat that should perfection remain unattained, divine and mortal judgment will be swift, damning, eternal and seriously unpleasant (we're talking hail of bullets and brimstone). Basically, get with the utopia or nice knowing you.
Obviously, Marcus is up to something deeper than pop music interpretation here. In separate chapters, he explores his ideas by refracting the notion of the apocalyptic contract through the later novels of Philip Roth, "Bill Pullman's face" in "Lost Highway," "Twin Peaks'" Laura Palmer, and, most successfully, woozy punk singer David Thomas. As the title recommends, Marcus is looking for evidence of the prophecies of his three primary voices in the ones that follow. One can hear the clear, if hysterical, echoes of this all-or-nothing conception in the rhetoric of the Christian right or on Fox News, but Marcus contends that it truly speaks in the dark corners of art.
This is a Greil Marcus book, after all. Those dark corners are where he has always felt most comfortable, resurrecting marginalized voices, songs and figures to lay bare the nature of the culture. "Mystery Train" (1975) and "Lipstick Traces" (1989) remain two of the most compelling investigations of music ever published. "Invisible Republic" (1997) imagined Bob Dylan and the Band's 1967 "Basement Tapes" as a pivotal cultural moment foreseeing the fallout of the Summer of Love while connecting with musical currents from a deep past. More recently, in "Double Trouble" (2000) and "Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads" (2005), he delved into the psyche of the nation by showing how key cultural landmarks (Clinton's presidency, Dylan's epochal tune) resonated with America's struggle with sin and redemption. In "The Shape of Things to Come," his loci are weirder and, frankly, less compelling, as is his argumentative approach, normally so fluid and breezy. Here his writing feels stifled, dry and slowed by its own intricacies.
Marcus' establishing shots are sturdy enough, as he lays out his conception of the prophetic voice that builds America. John Winthrop's 1630 speech "A Model of Christian Charity" envisioned for the Puritans a "City upon a hill" that would shine forth through the ages, as its citizens were given the opportunity, through freedom, to speak, act and judge for the glorification, or the damnation, of all. As Marcus writes: "The American blessing or curse -- the terror or embrace that is found as a reward -- is to live out that absolute, or live in its shadow." Marcus skips 200 years ahead to Lincoln's second inaugural address, quoted on the wall inside his monument, which wonders whether the horror of civil war will ever be enough to appease God for America's sins. Marcus finds Lincoln holding to Winthrop's bargain, to the potential for absolute salvation or damnation. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial comes the voice of Martin Luther King Jr., at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. King reminds his listeners that those who seek to build a better America risk that same catastrophic retribution should they fall short of righteous success.
The trouble is that "The Shape of Things to Come" mostly fails to live up to the drama of these originary speakers. Marcus is hard at work fitting Roth, Lynch, Thomas and the dozens of lesser subjects he examines to the brutal prophecies they supposedly represent. He bulks up Philip Roth's late oeuvre of paranoid dystopianism, David Lynch's bizarre vision of an American film noir nightmare, and David Thomas' cranky yet hopeful visionary rock with ancillary referents and sprawling meanings that mean to cut to the heart of the American experience, but end up becoming mostly tangled in the long journey to connect them to his chosen American prophets.
This book grew out of a series of lectures, classes and teaching fellowships, and like the hip professor Marcus certainly makes, flashes of punk rock, noir film and old-timey music peek from every corner of the book. Yet Marcus' readers, it would seem, have not done their homework, and the prof must explain everything they have missed in detail, while still sticking to the lesson plan. This causes two problems that make reading this book a frustration: Endless narration overshadows illuminating references, while super-dense references act more to confuse than to illustrate. Marcus is a gifted writer, but the complex narratives at work in Roth's novels and Lynch's films require so much exposition that discussion becomes messy and drawn out. Also, Marcus has a hard time stopping. So after we enter the world of Laura Palmer and "Two FBI agents arrive in Deer Meadow to take over the Banks case..." we have a long progression of and then ... and then ... and then.
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