Harpsichord Exercises and the My Lai Massacre

Abstract

In his essay and My Lai: A Literary-Political Speculation (Critical Inquiry 5 [Summer 1979]: 651-61), Strother Purdy claims that we do not have and are not likely to have a literary work that is an adequate response to such horrible events as the My Lai massacre because modern writers avoid didacticism, moral lessons, and the sentimentality so characteristic of the preceding century in favor of dryness, acerbity [and] irony .. . (p. 661). So far I have no serious disagreement. In fact, I would go further and say not only that modern writers like Giinter Grass and Samuel Beckett fail to give us moral lessons but that modern criticism has succeeded to a large degree in making us disregard the sentimentality and didacticism of the great works of the past. The most influential criticism, whether on George Eliot or George Herbert, Dickens or Shakespeare, has emphasized the moments of doubt, the aporias, the negation of meaning in the authors' most famous works, rather than the affirmation of meaning and moral values. But I disagree with Purdy in his conclusion that such literature, or literature read in such a way, is similar to harpsichord exercises, that it lacks the resonance and the commitment that is required for a proper response to the horrors in the real world, so that we may now be in a position where our aesthetics works to block our morality (p. 661). Purdy supports his position by comparing Theodor Plievier's Stalingrad with Grass' Tim Drum. Although the latter a disturbing and powerful book today, it is an inadequate response to Hitler because its moral direction is so unclear that as a parable it remains nearly impenetrable (p. 652). Stalingrad, on the other hand, although written