A Living Oxymoron: Norman O. Brown's Criticism of John Cage

Abstract

MBPggrw , mmmm~mmmWnEKKmm' i"l:"""IIJIU"j' iJ' l_^^-^_______________________Kv'- -m ::lf^^____________________________________l _r_d_____________i__________HR * :^^rj|^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^h ___________________^^S_P|:^"" ____________H_________________H ___________________ __?_H!*y* ,____^__^__^__2__^__^__^__^__^__^__i ____________________________jlip^''^^& iiiiii-tn ~^~^-^. -4-^^^^^^^BB^_______________________i John Cage and Norman O. Brown atWesleyan University, 1988. Photo by Nancy Walz; ? 2006 Wesleyan University Communications A Living Oxymoron: Norman O. Brown's Criticism of John Cage I 4 * i? % Christopher Shultis In this essay Iwill briefly introduce Norman O. Brown to those who might be unfamiliar with his work, giving some sense of the relation ship between Cage and Brown, which began in the early '60s.11 will then review and discuss two occasions where Brown criticized Cage, the firsta lecture entitled "John Cage," presented at a conference celebrating Cage's 75th birthday atWesleyan University (where Cage and Brown first met) and the second a conference at Stanford University that took place a short time before Cage died in 1992.2 My intent is to present Norman O. Brown as Cage's "best critic," pointing in a direction away from the occasionally partisan studies of Cage currently available and appreciating Cage's work as the challenge it really is: thorny, difficult, complicated, controversial. 68 Perspectives of New Music Some readers will possibly remember the impact of Norman O. Brown's book, Life Against Death, when Wesleyan University Press pub lished it in 1959. Brown's book, subtitled The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, began with the following: "In 1953 I turned to a deep study of Freud, feeling the need to reappraise the nature and destiny ofman."3 Heady words, especially coming from a Professor of Classics whose first book, a reworking of his dissertation, was titledHermes theThief: The Evolution ofa Myth.4 How Brown, student of antiquity, became a part of the so-called "neo-Freudians" including the work of Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization from 1955)5 is something beyond the scope of this essay.However, it is important to point to the fact that Brown was not a comfortable fitamongst those individuals, in some cases because his reappraisal was not of Freud, per se, but of his taking seriously Freud's views concerning the "destiny ofman." When John Cage became a Fellow at the Wesleyan Center for Advanced Studies in 1960, Brown was amember of the Wesleyan faculty and already famous for having written Life Against Death, which was? according to Richard K. Winslow, a faculty representative toWesleyan University Press at the time of its publication?the "firstnational best seller ever published by an academic press."6 By the end of that academic year, Cage himself, also with the help ofWesleyan University Press, would have written a book thatmade him famous too, that being Silence, his firstbook of lectures and writings which was published in 1961.7 Silence is one of the books Brown cites in the bibliography of Lovers Body,8 Brown's follow-up to Life Against Death, an even more famous book in some circles, particularly by those who?mistakenly inmy opin ion?saw it as part of the then-current movement termed the "sexual revo lution."While this isnot the place to go much furtherinto Brown's work, Iwill cite here some quotations from the finalchapter of LoversBody, titled "Nothing," because of its strong connection to thework of Cage. "The rest is silence; after the last judgment, the silence." "How to be silent. In a dialectical view: silence and speech, these two, are one."9 "Get the noth ingness back intowords. The aim iswords with nothing to them; words that point beyond themselves rather than to themselves; transparencies, emptywords. Empty words, corresponding to the void in things."10 Silence and Empty Words are of course the titles of two of Cage's books. They are also words of importance to Cage's work and, at some level, one might think that this is indicative of common views between these two colleagues and friends. This is not the case. One of the key points in Silencing the Sounded Self11 my book on John Cage, was how Cage aligned himself with an important historical movement in the arts thatworks against the symbolic, positing instead what...