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Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Tom Wolfe…

…was a disappointment. The NEH’s Jefferson Lecture is a big deal, and maybe he got intimidated. Whatever the reason, the speech was a mess.

He still looks spiffy, though clearly old, in his fine white suit; and when at one point he pushed his hair back you could see he still really had it -- hair that is, and there was a sort of youthful romantic effect in the gesture. He’s undeniably an elegant man, with a soft cultivated Southern drawl and all…

Maybe he got intimidated, or maybe it’s the nature of the Jefferson - the nation’s highest award in the humanities - to tempt recipients in the direction of oracular Truths about Human Being (Wolfe’s talk was titled “The Human Beast“). He began by flattering us, telling us we were “the kind of audience you don’t even dare imagination ever getting.“ And I worried even then that this playing to the narcissism of a crowd that’s maybe ten percent cultured and ninety percent culture vulture, was a bad sign.

Maybe it’s simply that he’s a novelist, a satirist, a chronicler of mores, and not a polemicist or a philosopher… but he simply couldn’t formulate and defend an argument. His strength is story-telling, and the parts of the speech we all enjoyed were Wolfe’s various anecdotes about -- his grand subject -- status: the centrality of status in our mentalities (“Status insinuates itself into all situations.”), the way we’re always trying to avoid social humiliation, the way most of our behavior involves the search for status…

I mean, that point of view made for funny stories, but what if you don’t agree that the Fulcrum of Human Nature is the search for status? Like his hero, Emile Zola, Wolfe is a social determinist -- for him, there’s really no autonomous mind but only a mechanism of social response. Which seems to me a pretty impoverished point of view. At its most productive, it generates great social satires like Bonfire of the Vanities; at its worst, the Diana Blaine blog.



At one point (not at any particular point; there wasn’t any organization), Wolfe lit into intellectuals, people who “think they have a set of values that make them superior, and who are aloof from their country… This is something people on the east coast can’t understand -- we’re the parenthesis states -- the entire sentence is in between.” This got hearty applause from all the aloof parenthetical people in the audience.

Then Wolfe talked about the cool NASCAR people he recently hung out with, one-issue folk (guns guns guns) who like to fight and like common sense, etc. Etc.? And? The absence of a thesis -- or even a discernable point of view - plus the weird endorsement from the audience of all the bad things Wolfe was saying about it gave the event a surreal feel -- wild and whirling words…

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Via Hiram Hover, here's the Washington Post's writer on the same event.