Lily Gaga v. Lady Bart
I’m foolish, suppose, for letting it get to me.
One Peter Wood had a piece in Wednesday’s Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Lily Bart vs. Lady Gaga.” The title should have been warning enough.
For if you were innocently to ask, “Who’s Lily Bart?”, you would thereby have proven Wood’s point for him before he’d even started. You mean to say you don’t know Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and its plucky heroine? And—and yet you do know who Lady Gaga is? What better evidence for what Wood asserts in his closing, “the debased tastes of contemporary culture”?
Lily Bart v. Lady Gaga. Two fictional characters; and yet Wood quickly forgets, or conveniently forgets, the fictionality of the singer’s persona, and treats both as living, breathing case studies. “Both Lily Bart and Lady Gaga are essentially ornamental”: well, yes. Both are being moved by artists in the service of a larger critique of their respective cultures. Wharton, Wood suggests, uses Lily as a pawn in her satire of the genteel poverty of early-twentieth-century New York; the novel represents “a firm rejection of its shallowness.”
But Gaga? Apparently her creator, Stefani Germanotta, is granted an independent existence by her critics only when she’s caught making out at the beach by the paparazzi. Otherwise Gaga is, for all intents and purposes, perfectly coincident with Germanotta, in the eyes of Wood and others like him. He opens no critical space between creator and creation; he seems unable to imagine that the singer and her persona differ in any significant way. This is the inverse of what we do when we call the monster created by the good doctor in Mary Shelley’s novel, “Frankenstein”: here, we insist on calling the creator by her monster’s name. As if the artist behind The Fame Monster weren’t just a bit smarter than that?
But more generally, how very tedious the structure of the argument, the fatuous, disingenuous side-by-side treatment; at least when Conservative Cultural Cranks did this kind of thing twenty years ago, they had the lovely homophony of the poet Homer and Homer Simpson to work with. Here, it just feels gratuitous.
Worse yet, the essay moves from predictable exposition and logic to make an entirely fantastic leap at the end. The reason for Lady Gaga, it seems—and why many of Wood’s readers, even in the venerable Chronicle of Higher Education, won’t recognize the first name in his titular pairing—is that “only a tiny fraction of students bother with the liberal arts at all.” And what are they studying instead? “They study fields that teach disdain for their civilization and the supposed advantages of a vaporous ‘global citizenship.’”
Come again? Lady Gaga has triumphed over Lily Bart because we’ve ditched liberal education in favor of the School of Resentment? To be fair Wood’s point is a bit blunted, since I don’t suppose he really means that today’s students study fields that teach disdain for “the supposed advantages of a vaporous ‘global citizenship.’” Pity he didn’t have a proper liberal arts education: might have prevented an embarrassing slip like that one.
Grumble, grumble.
Can I comment on my own bad self? Reader “Steve” sent this bio of Wood this morning in an e-mail:
Peter W. Wood is Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books, 2003) which won the Caldwell Award for Leadership in Higher Education from the John Locke Foundation. He is a graduate of Haverford College, Rutgers University, and the University of Rochester, from which he received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1987. He previously served as provost of The King’s College in new York City, and as associate provost and the president’s chief of staff at Boston University, where he was also a tenured member of the anthropology department. His essays on American culture have appeared in The National Review Online, Partisan Review, Frontpage Magazine, Minding the Campus, The Claremont Review of Books, The American Conservative, Society and other journals.
So he does, presumably, have a decent education: though titling a book “Diversity: The Invention of a Concept”….
He is also the author of this classic gem on so-called #AAAfail. His aim: to show that Horrible Relativists were infesting the discipline of anthropology and threatening the place of Reality and Science. The anthropologist Alex Golub summarized Wood’s argument thus:
Conclusion? He actually is an old-school Conservative Cultural Crank™.
The bigger question is: why does the Chronicle insist on publishing so much flamebait?
“Flamebait”: tee-hee. You young people. . . .
I had expected to find that he was a graduate of Faber College and/or Pendelton State.
With all due respect to Peter of the Wood, if Lily Bart were a) alive (at present or ever), b) showed up at a Barnes & Noble book signing event in an egg, and c) was piped into grocery stores, elevators and dentists’ offices, people would probably have a good idea who she was.
My highly uneducated guess is the lack of a) is the biggest problem since we’re basing all our statements on characters as real people, a stance I understand completely.
I remember how heartbroken I was when I learned that Mr. Green Jeans wasn’t his real name and he wasn’t really a handyman. Don’t even get me started on how long I mourned after finding out Garfield Goose was a puppet.