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The Outsider’s Outsider: A Review of Wayne Burns, Resisting our Culture of Conformity—In the Hills of Southern Ohio and in the Groves of Academe with an
Introduction by Ellen Tallman (Alpine: Blue Daylight Books, 2006)
By Jerry Zaslove
The Rain 5:1 (Summer 2007): 2-3
“I have to live, breathing and bolshevescent, laboring with language, disobeying, I and one other.” - Osip Mandelstam, 1935 (in exile in Cherdyn, Urals with no thanks to Stalin)
Wayne Burns taught at the University of Washington from 1948 and including partial retirement he didn’t stop until 1986. In the last years of his teaching he went through a period when, as he describes it in his book The Vanishing Individual (1995), the vigilante nature of the American student movement made teaching in his own way impossible. He took early retirement. He taught previously at Miami of Ohio, Cornell, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley. His influence on students constitutes part of an unwritten history of West Coast culture and its affinities with many cultural-political and literary movements including British Columbia. At Berkeley he was indirectly associated with the poetry movements and figures now known as the San Francisco Renaissance. These movements became important to Vancouver poetry circles and modern movements in literature and criticism.
His mentorship, friendship and critical outlook traveled to Vancouver in the fifties through his close association with Warren Tallman, Ellen Tallman and John Doheny. I came in 1965. Others came to Simon Fraser in the sixties: Dan Callahan, a brilliant authority on Alex Comfort and the erotic idiom, and the carefully astute Dickens critic, Michael Steig. Poets like James Wright wrote in devotion and dedication to his work. Wright’s letters to Wayne Burns were collected, edited and introduced by John Doheny, James Wright In Defense Against this Exile: Letters to Wayne Burns (Seattle: Genitron Press, 1985). John Doheny taught Hardy and Lawrence from an anarchist perspective at the University of British Columbia for almost forty years. Two journals illuminated by Burns’ thinking, Paunch, edited by Arthur Efron at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Recovering Literature, edited by Gerald Butler and Evelyn Butler in San Diego, follow several leads developed in Burns’ classes and writing, the one a Reichean-Deweyan approach to literature and the other an approach dedicated to the contextualist aesthetics of Stephen Pepper. Burns refers to these journals in his books. Other students have taught elsewhere in Canada, some moving here at a timewhen Canada seemed a haven for dissident teachers and artists. Many of them never thought of professorial work and teaching in the way the academy has now turned teaching and teaching evaluations into an apparatus that measures mediocrity and fulfillment with techniques similar to those used in business. This was a generation that flourished in what seems a very long time ago, which shows that the speed of change in intellectual fashions in the last half-generation has been more intense than at any time in over a hundred years. John Doheny quotes Burns about James Wright’s generation:
By the mid-fifties ... I turned more and more to sympathetic graduate students for intellectual stimulation and support. After all they were reading much of what I was reading, and they were willing, even anxious, to talk for hours on end about the contextualist questions that most concerned me—something I could hardly expect even my closest friends on the faculty to do.
Burns’ students have gone on to write novels, poetry and critical studies including Stephanie Johnson’s dazzling The Downtrodden Worker’s Workplace Survival Guide (1997), published in Canada, which was used in several courses on both sides of the border. Burns’ likely unpopular sentiments about students pervade the approach to his life taken in this book that upsets the genre applecart. Resisting our Culture completes a trilogy with Journey Through the Dark Woods (1982) and The Vanishing Individual: A Voice from the Dustheap of History, or How to be Happy Without Being Hopeful (1994).It describeshis odyssey of growing up in America, moving from small towns in southern Ohio into the heartlands of elite university cultures in the east and then the west. The story not only shows the way American culture and its institutions have become more brutally philistine than even de Tocqueville could predict, but how the academic walls have tumbled down around us without our knowing it.
Burns’ consciousness of what he is doing is clearly stated in the preface where he writes about his Panzaic version of authorship and how the “I—Narrator” and “author-as-I” are struggling to understand the very “sketch” being written under our eyes, much as this dialogical quality might happen in a novel. But this is not a novel. The “author-as-I” turns over the telling of the story of his life to Wayne Burns “the I-narrator who acts and speaks as if he is living the events he is telling”. The author steps out of the story at times and gives the reader a “present day perspective on the I-narrator’s revelations”. These present day perspectives attune us to the parasitic anarchist breathing holes for the reader who may still be living the American, or the Canadian version of that dream. And they are revelations! One is amazed that one could survive this culture of conformity at all. This, then is an exemplary lesson to the writer as autobiographer and to the reader who may not have the understanding or cultural memory to see how things have gotten worse since 1968, Burns’ date of the great divide between then and now.
We discover that this dissident’s journey is not a “memoir” based on letters or accounts, which he finds uncongenial in any case. He wants to write a “type of autobiography ... which permits me to select what I believe are the significant experiences of my life, and then to present them in such a way as to give a sense of who I was, and what I was doing, and what I felt and thought about what I was doing.” As if to support Freud’s own restlessness about autobiographies, which Freud thought bordered on the fraudulent because they were impossible to write with any truthful intent, Burns explains his method in careful detail. Autobiographies, Freud writes in a letter to Edward Bernays (1929), that are “a psychologically complete and honest confession of life ... would require so much indiscretion (on my part as well as on that of others) about family, friends, and enemies, most of them still alive, that it is simply out of the question. What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.” Freud goes further: in biographies one doesn’t recognize one’s own portrait made by others. As if he is speaking to Freud, or any other dubious critic or reader, Burns writes that his only authority is his own memory, and many who might confirm his tale are dead; the reader may chose to read his memories as “self-serving fantasies”.
In naturalistic, Zola-like prose the reader is lead to from childhood, boyhood and youth to his present day understanding of “the groves of academe”. For someone like myself who is incapable of reading novels about academic life, the revelations about McCarthy-type hearings at the University of Washington are one of many places where we learn about universities from the outsider’s viewpoint. Burns left Berkeley, for the University of Washington, not because he may have been a Marxist or anarchist or someone with sympathies for Trotsky (Washington had its share of left wing academics from the ‘thirties onward), but because it seemed an open literature department where a Panzaic-contextualist-in-the-making might thrive. Lived history about the politics of teaching is created in the writing about teaching; however, the details are too numerous to mention here. One potential publisher rejected the “sketch” because it was “too self-centered”, ignoring the historical insights of the self provided by a really existing history. This ignorance toward history as memory of an impending “exile” has been around a long time and masks a censorship of experience common in our time. Some examples would help.
When Dante created “Dante” and the mentor, Vergil, to guide the naïve figure “Dante” through the religious and moral conformism of the times he created a figure that did not know what he knew. He was a little slow. Tacit knowledge based on Panzaic qualities seemed to wait for events to show how one might resist the grain of the culture and the management of symbols of religion. Similarly Montaigne created “Montaigne” and discovered his own emerging humanist-I, contradictory character in a deadly feudal culture that made the inner life taboo. Diderot created Rameau’s Nephew and realized that the doubleness of a baroque boutique culture was leading to the death of the spirit. Dostoevsky created the “I monologist”, the Underground Man, an epiphenomal “I” voice that taught the “author-hero-I” how the culture had made him crazy. Freud in Interpretation of Dreams created “Freud” the dreamer who had to learn about the sixth sense that supported the speaking I narrator internal to the self. Even T.W. Adorno’s wartime essayistic “memoir”, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, repaired his damaged self “I-narrator” by finding those breathing holes and reparation against the lethal culture of fascist conformity—American culture notwithstanding. A paradigmatic form, retarded awareness, could be said to emerge in the encounter of the “I-narrator” with, what Burns in his case, calls his “Panzaic Contextualist anarchist view of the world”.
What kind of a “sketch” is this? To one raised on the novel it feels like a proto-novel, but he denies the fact but not the affinity. I thought it could make a great film script and, bearing in mind that Burns grew up in small town southern Ohio America with a family-owned movie house, this scenario could convey the commonplaces of an odyssey from boyhood through institutions of culture. Yet, why were we all not Panzaic contextualists? What is wrong with us? The journey from a sometime utopian childhood to the dark woods of an America gone berserk with systemic conformity leads to remembering and recollecting at an advanced age on how one can come through—how one survives and recognizes who are our enemies and our true friends? Would a Dickensian, Balzacian novel suit? This novelistic sensitivity of heart, mind and understanding is part and parcel of Burns’ book, a critical homage to Céline, Enfin Céline Vint: a Contextualist Reading of Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan(1988),perhaps themost important book on Louis Ferdinand Céline in any language. Burns’ sensitivity toward the problem of truth and counterfeit in fiction and criticism includes trenchant critiques of “Liberal-democratic capitalism as one of the biggest con-jobs in the history of the world’’. This exilic truth runs through his “sketch” and also informs his critiques of Dickens, Lawrence and Kafka as well as his attitude toward failed potential allies like Terry Eagelton, Edward Said or Noam Chomsky, as well those like Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, or in a different vein the critic Robert Heilman. All may be said to have ultimately failed the test of partial solidarity with Burns’ Panzaic contextual anarchism.
Like many others today who wandered into institutions of learning as if they were the Pearly Gates of Culture, we have learned to become lean and hungry, and, anticipating no relief from corporate universities, we may have become immune to the burden of this tragedy of culture, or simply have become “The Vanishing Individual”. Burns refers to folk-hero relatives, his Uncle Mike, or Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as forerunners. But today Howl is a growl not a shriek (Burns deposited his typescript of “Howl”, given to him by Ginsberg, to the Simon Fraser Library many years ago). Ginsberg’s howl about Moloch, no longer prophetic, has been upstaged and outdated by the events of the times.
Beneath his portrayal of the self-creation of a literary mind is the radical consciousness of the growing realization of one’s difference from the culture, expressed in a multitude of ways, although consistently throughout his life framed by sometimes Marxist sometimes anarchist often just deeply reflective literary values. The voice of what he began to name, in the late sixties, “parasitic anarchism” echoed Falstaff, Cervantes, Stirner, Céline, Kafka, Ginsberg and many others, including more quietist writers like E.M. Forster and Herbert Read. Today this speaks to what he increasingly names “a dead past” where such names are no longer post-modern enough to speak to what is in essence a civil war on the individuals today who are outsiders. A reader, American or Canadian, lost in the neo-feudal world of ever-narrowing perspectives would not recognize that Burns, amusingly describing himself as a self-professed “hillbilly kid”, had always been writing “a strange mixture of personal experience, literary criticism, and intellectual history expressed through the ever-present ‘I’. Moreover this “kid” seemed to be setting himself up as a spokesman for “the few remaining individuals in the Western world” (The Vanishing Individual). The Thoreau-like pariah state of such individuals in American life, seen retrospectively, became the stuff of his anarchist “mind in the making” that sought to affirm his Dante-like exodus from the American dream. The novel as a revolutionary genre turns out to be his “Vergil” as it was for many other romantic anti-capitalists like Georg Lukács, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster or Ralph Ellison.
I had to think about what relevance this might have for contemporary Canadian readers. In Ellen Tallman’s introduction I am quoted as saying that this is not an autobiography, which is a coming to terms story of overcoming trauma or reconciling with the past as an exile or survivor might write. I am quoted as saying that it is a genre-breaking story of how to survive; if it had been written in Russia, Prague, Hungary or China by a dissident who was in prison and came out to tell his story then the reader would be able to relate the story to the generation of dissidents or non-conformists or watchers-on who shared these experiences. I said that “conformist America is the ‘superaddressee’—that is, the object of the story—the reader who has ‘conformed’ to America and sublimated [his/her] stories into the institutions is also the ‘ideal reader’.” With these words I was thinking of the turn to memory in the twentieth century and how far away memory seems in the race to let the new fast-lane institutions of our present neofeudal age sweep us up. This is a generational account of growing up in America. It may seem quaint to those in Canada who have only recently seen how Canadian institutions of higher learning have become adjuncts to the liberal corporate culture. Canada may be innocent, or complicit in other ways, because the dissenting tradition in Canada doesn’t exist with the same history as in the United States.
When I read Wayne Burns’ autobiographical story a third time I realized why his characteristically understated manner is important to this story. His story is “an image of language” of the reader as potential co-anarchist. The reader is the analysand. Freud would understand. The “Autobiographical sketch” of his growing up does not mock the reader who conforms, but shows his personal war with conformist America in a style, like Tolstoy’s prose, that provokes a diversity of responses to conformism that has become a way of life. In fiction Tolstoy does this in his story “The Death of Ivan Ilytch”. Mikhail Bakhtin’s paradigmatic comment in The Dialogical Imagination that “an illiterate peasant, miles away from an urban center, naively immersed in an unmoving and for him unshakable everyday world, nevertheless lived in several language systems...” explains why novelists and prose writers of any worth need to “maintain the unity of his own creative personality”. We are all “illiterate peasants” in this sense. These complex questions are raised through Burns’ critique of his “creative personality”. This may inspire by creating resistance in others who are seeking ways out of groups and mobs and unctuous prayers to crowds who displace their leaders’ murderous propaganda by joining the ranks of believers in the fraud of “democratic” warmaking.
I know of no Canadian book similar to this one. Outsiders in Canada will not, even today, understand the depths of conformity in American life even though traces leak over the border. The inevitable association of theories about identity that claim truth-value for collective identity is on the agenda. Everywhere we want preventive identity bundled in with security, which means the security and domination of the national state. Today’s massacres in foreign wars or university campuses bear witness to this dissociation of state, capital and violence. No American writer or teacher worth any latent Panzaic qualities could have avoided speaking against American culture or, put another way, finding the complexity of the culture in its modes of resistance: Melville, Twain, Crane, Emerson, Dickinson, Faulkner, Ellison, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson—one goes back to these classics and finds this tradition of war on the individual through the assimilation of the forms of dissent into the swamp of the obedient culture itself.
Where can one take a Canadian counter-cultural autobiographical impulse today? Would it look for proletarian consciousness? The essay form as antidote to counterfeit novels? New Marxist criticism? Parasitic anarchism? The forms that exile take? The still untold history of West Coast cultural and literary movements and their universal significance beyond the local or appeals to “identity”? Finally, Who will turn the lights back on in the Groves of Academe, which are becoming corporate versions of the oldest Oligarchies? If everything is inside there can be no outside.
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