Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [128]
“Yes, sir!” from one half. “No, sir!” from the other.
“Of course No,” said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. “Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste is only another name for Fact.”
Before Bitzer gives his factual picture, Mr. Gradgrind has asked Sissy Jupe to define a horse. She is unable to satisfy him although her father is a horse trainer and she has ridden and worked with horses all her life. This, indeed, is precisely why she cannot conceive of a horse in the Gradgrind-Bitzer manner. If facts take on meaning only from experience, the converse is also true: experience makes it impossible to reduce the thing experienced to abstract factuality.
The above passage also suggests the difference between the practical approach to facts and the aesthetic. Half the children see nothing wrong in horses walking up and down a wall, since theirs is the innocent eye of the artist rather than the sophisticated (using the word in its older sense of corrupted) eye of the fact-fetishist.
A hunter looks at a wood in one way, an artist in another. The latter’s eye takes in every twig, branch, trunk, shadow, color, highlight, etc. The former’s eye also records all this data, but his mind rejects everything except the particular Fact (brown fur, speckled feathers) it is looking for. The hunter knows what he will see (or rather, what he hopes he will see) before he looks. Since the artist’s aim is to render the wood in itself and as a whole (he may do it by three lines, as in a Chinese landscape, or by a Dutch proliferation of detail) his problem is how to be conscious of everything. The hunter’s problem is just the reverse: to be conscious of only what he has decided, in advance, to see. The same distinction could be made between the way a Wordsworth looks at a field and the way a farmer looks at it.
We Americans are hunters rather than artists, a practical race, narrow in our perceptions, men of action rather than of thought or feeling. Our chief contribution to philosophy is pragmatism (pragma is Greek for factum); technique rather than theory distinguishes our science;[9] our homes, our cities, our landscapes are designed for profit or practicality but not generally for beauty; we think it odd that a man should devote his life to writing poems but natural that he should devote it to inducing children to breakfast on Crunchies instead of Krispies; our scholars are strong on research, weak on interpreting the masses of data they collect; we say “That’s just a fact” and we mean not “That’s merely a fact” but rather “Because that is a fact, there is nothing more to be said.”
This tropism toward the Fact deforms our thinking and impoverishes our humanity. “Theory” (Greek theoria) is literally a “looking at” and thence “contemplation, reflection, speculation.” Children are told: “You may look but you mustn’t touch,” that is, “You mustn’t change what you look at.” This would be good discipline for Americans, just to look at things once in a while without touching them, using them, converting them into means to achieve power, profit, or some other practical end. The artist’s vision, not the hunter’s.
[1] The atrocious prose style of most of our academic historians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and even literary scholars is a case in point—cf. that three-volume Literary History of the United States, edited by Spiller, Thorp, Johnson, and Canby. The late Richard Chase wrote a memorable review of it in the winter, 1950, Sewanee Review.
[2] “This smooth and easy assimilation of fact, this air of over-all sophistication, is what Americans have learned more and more to admire in journalism, in business, in conversation....It is our national style, intellect-wise. A recent article in a liberal weekly on ‘The Mind of John F. Kennedy’ turns out to be an entirely admiring study of Kennedy