THE ARTIFICIAL WHITE MAN
Essays on Authenticity
By Stanley Crouch
Basic. 244 pp. $24
An essay by Stanley Crouch is guaranteed to be an event for the reader: The author's personality, his persona, manifests itself with such force that one is compelled to enter into a kind of active dialogue with him. This dialogue can be an enormous pleasure or an enormous irritation, depending upon one's position on the subject Crouch happens to be examining. The work and its rhetoric are by turns ferociously intelligent, homespun, hortatory and hectoring. As Crouch himself proclaims: "Some are celebrated, some are spanked, some are celebrated and spanked."
"The Artificial White Man" is Crouch's latest in a line of nonfiction (he is also the author of a novel). He is urgently preoccupied in these nine essays with "our obsession with authenticity" and the proliferation of political, media and entertainment personalities "who present themselves as authentic or claim to expose the inauthentic while actually pushing forward a high- or low-quality version of counterfeit." Crouch finds it absurd that an increasing number of Americans, in an era of unprecedented cultural fluidity and opportunity, are choosing to cast themselves in what amount to reductive identities. In his view, "cool" is equated with an empty-headed youth culture; a general ignorance of the summits of American achievement goes unremarked; and most distressing, African American, as well as suburban, youths' ambition and identity are being corrupted by hip-hop and street thug "new minstrelsy."
In the essay "Segregated Fiction Blues," Crouch bemoans the failure of serious fiction to address these pressing matters: American literature has shut itself off from the "big sweep" of our "roiling, ever more surprising society," instead confining itself to a vague narcissism "broken up into ethnic, religious, sexual, class, and regional franchises."
This is nothing less than "cowardice" on the part of authors, he asserts. "That once proverbial Martian would get a much stronger sense of what the United States is about these days if he or she or it were to spend a week or two looking at HBO." These are deeply provocative statements, but -- in what can be a weakness of Crouch's method -- rather than building and examining the argument in depth, he digresses to attack William Styron, and, by way of his critique of "The Confessions of Nat Turner," James Baldwin and Malcolm X.
It is not that Crouch does not make interesting points, but the reader longs to follow his reasoning into an analysis of controversies more recent than 40 years ago. Crouch makes brief mention of Richard Price and Cormac McCarthy as exemplars who have successfully transcended racial and ethnic boundaries, but he does not fully argue the ways in which they have done so and in which their achievements could be emulated. He comes closest to articulating his vision of what might be possible for an American writer in his examination of Philip Roth -- praising "American Pastoral" for its attempt to push "across ethnic lines based on color," while chastising Roth for not imagining black power advocate Angela Davis in all her complexity.
In "Blues for the Artificial White Man," Crouch develops a thorough critique of David Shields's memoir "Black Planet" as an example of the dangers of cross-cultural simplification. Crouch challenges many of Shields's assumptions, and rightly so, given that in the book Shields is prone to a "wigger" romanticization of black athletes. But, as Crouch himself points out, this posture is not entirely unexamined by Shields; and in any event, Crouch's position -- that Shields's work is intriguing but not honest or far-reaching enough -- is marred by dyspeptic, ad hominem attacks. (Crouch takes a detour, for example, to say that Shields's "Christian wife from suburban Chicago . . . might not actually be as dull as he presents her" and that Shields's daughter "is given plenty of attention but little of the emotion he reserves for those shadow figures with rubber balls.") Given Crouch's range of knowledge and depth of insight, this meanness is unnecessary, undermining what would otherwise be a cogent analysis of the many tragedies of identity -- particularly black identity -- tied to the American obsession with athletics and athletes.
Crouch is at his acute best in praise; his writing is animated and stimulating -- even if one disagrees -- bringing the reader along as he figures out why he loves something. "Blues in More Than One Color: The Films of Quentin Tarantino" is one such example. Crouch works through his ideas on the myriad ways in which Tarantino turns racial and ethnic stereotypes on their heads, and in the process Crouch's own moral and artistic aesthetic becomes clear: "Tarantino's obsessions and the questions they raise are not encompassed in single-syllable words like 'race' . . . not one of those gummy sets of statistics or theories tells us much about the ethnic dreams and styles of our culture, which move from one mask to another -- like the pea in the shell game -- often leaving no more than their gritty marks in the greasy trends of our declining popular arts and fashions."
As they accumulate over time, Crouch's essays begin to constitute a sort of autobiography as seen through his range of concerns -- from the streets of Los Angeles to jazz to cyberspace. He himself has become his true subject. Such a stance has been a strategy of essayists since Montaigne, if not before; in the case of Crouch, this is a strength when he is dealing with issues commensurate with his ambition. If he will keep his attention fixed on the whale, and not on demonstrating his skill with the harpoon, there is no telling what he might haul in.
An African American and son of the working class who has risen to the salons of the Upper East Side, he has seen much of America; his simultaneously tragic and hopeful view is that America is better than it was, and needs to continue to rise to the challenge of becoming better than it is: "The ultimate truth of humanity is fairly simple: No qualities of any sort that have to do with intelligence or will or spirit can be assumed on the basis of our favorite lines of demarcation. Color, sex, religion, class, and point of geographic origin are just more blanks that, even at close range, don't leave powder burns on the target board of Americana."
