The Twenties Earl Rovit (bio) Contemporary theory warns us about the ambiguities of determining origins or boundaries too stringently, of accepting too readily firm distinctions between genres, between popular and serious art, between the different ways in which human beings express themselves imaginatively; most especially we are warned that aesthetic evaluation is either a subjective indulgence or a possibly sinister manifestation of special interests exerting their power in order to impose their own hegemonic ends. Doubtless there is some truth in these positions—perhaps more in some than in others—but, it seems to me, full acquiescence to all these admonitions would lead to one of two possible results—both of which I find disagreeable and, in different ways, exploitative. We can accept these charges and follow them to their most remote and logical implications—at which point, the profligate cynicism of the position would allow only for a Thersites-like rant or intellectual paralysis. Or we can embrace unashamedly one particular special interest—assuming we have one—and pursue its extra-literary purposes with singleminded ruthlessness. I am aware that literature has some use—or can be put to some uses—as a service, a commodity, or a coded ideology of social control; but I resist the notion that this use-factor is the sole and whole raison d’etre of the aesthetic enterprise. In fact there is an older perspective that aims to distinguish between the practical arts and the fine arts precisely on the basis that, like ceramics and cookery, the former was produced primarily to be used—and consequently consumed or used-up—while the latter, without being useless, was thought to have a powerful resistance to being entirely consumed. The great masterworks of Western civilization—The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, Hamlet—were supposed, through the test of time, to possess an inexhaustible vitality which made them ever-renewable sources of meditative delight—much like Prometheus’s ever-regenerating liver at which the voracious eagle gnawed through endless aeons. Ordinary livers—like the practical arts—flush the blood through the circulatory system, wearing out in the course of time or under abnormal assaults of alcohol or hematological deficiency. Prometheus’s liver—Eurocentric, sexist, logocentric, phallocentric, and doubtless determined to exert hegemony and cultural imperialism—is imperishable art. And what does this prolegomenon have to do with my topic—an exploration of the American decade between the end of World War i and the onset of the Great Depression? Among other things it suggests that those ten years—variously termed “The Roaring Twenties,” “The Jazz Age,” “The [End Page 115] Lost Generation Years,” “The Waste Land Decade”—will, like any other historical demarcation, be an arbitrary sequence of years with some very few personages and events plucked to center-stage to perform their star-turns, while, behind them, shrouded in darkness and effectively ignored, is the Preterite, the Passed Over, the persons and events and achievements held to be of little or no significance. I find these considerations troublesome. In some areas—gross national product, demographic statistics—quantification can justify inclusion and exclusion. Babe Ruth’s 1927 baseball season with the New York Yankees needs no special pleading for its eminence—although it was, admittedly, a phallocentric achievement and quite bad for his liver. Leafing through the newspapers, we can chronicle such phenomena as race-riots in 1919—partly brought on by the consciousness-raising factor of Negro participation in the U.S. Army in the war, partly the huge exodus of southern blacks to northern industrial cities (between 1915–1920 Chicago’s black population increased by 148 percent), and perhaps the fact that in the mid-twenties the rejuvenated Ku Klux Klan boasted a membership of five million—approximately 5 percent of the entire U.S. population. One must remember, of course, that although the Klan’s most obvious targets were black, their motto was to be against “Jew, Jug, and Jesuit”; and it is likely that in the large majority of cases, individual klansmen were not necessarily monsters of bigotry and vigilantism so much as anxious people, registering their own insecurities at the accelerating disappearance of a traditional church- and family-centered village and rural existence...
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Apr 2, 2015
Silvia Casale + 1
Open Access
