Nothing I have read … has brought home the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does. The only thing I can relate it to at all is The Red Badge of Courage. It's a remarkable song, the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Richard and Rick in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn't some traditional material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of 1865 to today. It has that ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity.-Ralph J. Gleason in Rolling Stone
"You sound like a bolero," Rosa Amalfitano told her."Oh, so that's it," answered Rosa Méndez, "well, boleros are true, mana, the words of the songs come from deep inside all of us and they're always right.""No," said Rosa Amalfitano, "they seem right, they seem authentic, but they're actually full of shit."-2666
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is a great song, undeniably, and one of The Band's best. It's also a highly romanticized version of the Civil War in which the southerners are all yeoman farmers, gentlemen, and noble souls like Robert E. Lee, with nary a mention of, you know, slavery. The song raises three issues for me: is it right to assume that the lyrics are an expression of the views of its writer, or is there a more complex relationship between the two? Are the song's politics relevant to our judgment of it? Does it matter if a song's authenticity is fake?
i. The particulars of the song might be forgivable on a number of pretexts: if it's intended to express only the limited perspective of one soldier, if it's aware of the irony that separates personal motivations for war from reasons war is fought, if any member of The Band (all Canadians except for Levon Helm) could give any reason for the song's existence except Robbie Robertson heard the phrase "the south with rise again" and found it touching: 'I thought, "God, because I keep hearing this, there's pain here, there is a sadness here." In Americana land, it's a kind of a beautiful sadness.'
There's a discussion in the HBO special Talking Funny in which the comedians discuss two crude, dumb jokes, and argue about whether one is better than the other and how one would tell. Ricky Gervais makes the argument that one of the jokes is superior because the comedian is well known for his absurdist, sophisticated embrace of stupid jokes and thus has built irony into the joke: he knows it's bad but is telling it to you anyway. Better, on Gervais' argument, a dumb joke told to you by someone who knows it to be dumb than someone who thinks it's a good joke (or can't tell). The same applies to Robbie Robertson: he does not seem to understand the ironic or authorial distance which would make any of the interpretations in the above paragraph possible. He more or less means it. It may be a misguided embrace of a mythic, a-historical past, but it's an embrace all the same. (This is the same problem as Gone With the Wind, another Lost Cause showcase I can't watch anymore)
ii. In my younger and more conservative years, I took to an argument that went something like the following: we know that the problem with Theory and Postmodernism is that they reduce all artistic impulses to political motivations. Because not everything is political, the view must be false. As a remedy to this view, we have to remember that the politics of an artist and the work they create are often unrelated: we can love Wagner's music but deplore his politics within one coherent view of the man. Indeed, even better: we can love Wagner's music and ignore his politics, which have nothing to do with the music anyway.
Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile takes up this latter view and demolishes it. I'll not give away the plot--it's 120ish pages and an easy read--except to say that it concerns a right-wing priest who believes that aesthetic and political judgments can be separated and ends up morally compromised. What I found most impressive about the book, though, was that the most outrageous sections, the ones in which I was most convinced Bolaño was attempting to score a cheap rhetorical point for his thesis, turn out to have actually happened.
Ignoring the politics of authors and artists is not, inevitably, a short road to fascism. The dangers of ignoring politics are of a more mundane sort: doing violence to works of literature and art by preemptively removing interesting lines of argument, or necessitating a misreading to read something at all. To pick a case I know something about: Graham Greene is read nowadays primarily by conservative Catholics who flock to his 'Catholic novels:' Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter. One can read appreciations of Greene from this camp for a long time without learning that he was a die-hard Communist and a heterodox, if not heretical, Christian. His politics and religious views are there in all his novels, including the Catholic ones, but are invariably read out because they would blunt the theological points that interest his present-day readers.* So also T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism is rendered irrelevant to his work (he only said anti-Semitic things a few times, so that's okay), and his blood-and-nation politics is reduced to a kind of Churchill-and-Tocqueville skepticism of modern liberalism and remembrance of Tradition. So also any Cold War anti-communist writer, whose politics inevitably become right of center (see Czeslaw Milosz), and who all hold lesser places in the firmament than Whittaker Chambers, who came over to the proper view of things. The end result is a view in which politics are irrelevant, unless author in question is judged to be bad in which case their politics constitute a reason to dismiss them. If the author in question is good, then any troublesome politics are ignored. The separation of politics and aesthetics ends up doing violence to both.
iii. What grates most particularly about the song is there in the Ralph Gleason quote: it inspires a feeling of verisimilitude without the reality of it. (See also "Ashokan Farewell," aka that song on the violin from Ken Burns' The Civil War, notably composed in 1982). It's no problem being a creation with a historic aspect that is a product of some other time--I like Wolf Hall too much to care in all respects about verisimilitude--but that liking it as an authentic expression of the time is to like it falsely, as something it isn't and never could be.
My current feeling is closer to that of Rosa Amalfitano in 2666: it's a bad kind of playacting which is worse for believing itself to be true. If there was a moment that conservatism seemed finally impossible to me, it's when I realized that tradition (much less Tradition) is a set of fuzzy claims about the past for which there is often verifiable empirical evidence, which is ignored in favor of myth or Tradition. This is what I find so admirably clear-sighted about Hugo Grotius: his total rejection of myth, philosophy and tradition in favor of history and law. He is not the Englishman who will dissolve lots of particular laws into a Common Law which is always and everywhere the same, like Blackstone; he has no patience for theoretical or mythic reflections about the origins of a people or a state.** There is, and always has been, a mess of laws, of agreements, of complex interactions amongst people and somewhere in there is the truth of the matter. That the truth is hard to discern is no argument against trying to find it.
Of course, as the postmodernists (or conservatives who don't like the attack on tradition) would have it, this sort of position ('politics without illusions') is itself a polemical stance that is unlikely to read the mythic-traditional charitably. Perhaps that's true. But it seems reasonable to ask that something that claims to authenticity be authentic, and that its greatness as a song is not separable from its difficult politics.
*If (inside baseball) Greene is a universalist, as he implies at points in his novels, then the sacramental focus Catholic conservative readers like so much is, strictly speaking, unnecessary from a theological point of view.
**Indeed, in De jure belli ac pacis, he comes close to implying that all states begin with some act of usurpation or injustice.
My current feeling is closer to that of Rosa Amalfitano in 2666: it's a bad kind of playacting which is worse for believing itself to be true. If there was a moment that conservatism seemed finally impossible to me, it's when I realized that tradition (much less Tradition) is a set of fuzzy claims about the past for which there is often verifiable empirical evidence, which is ignored in favor of myth or Tradition. This is what I find so admirably clear-sighted about Hugo Grotius: his total rejection of myth, philosophy and tradition in favor of history and law. He is not the Englishman who will dissolve lots of particular laws into a Common Law which is always and everywhere the same, like Blackstone; he has no patience for theoretical or mythic reflections about the origins of a people or a state.** There is, and always has been, a mess of laws, of agreements, of complex interactions amongst people and somewhere in there is the truth of the matter. That the truth is hard to discern is no argument against trying to find it.
Of course, as the postmodernists (or conservatives who don't like the attack on tradition) would have it, this sort of position ('politics without illusions') is itself a polemical stance that is unlikely to read the mythic-traditional charitably. Perhaps that's true. But it seems reasonable to ask that something that claims to authenticity be authentic, and that its greatness as a song is not separable from its difficult politics.
*If (inside baseball) Greene is a universalist, as he implies at points in his novels, then the sacramental focus Catholic conservative readers like so much is, strictly speaking, unnecessary from a theological point of view.
**Indeed, in De jure belli ac pacis, he comes close to implying that all states begin with some act of usurpation or injustice.
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