{"id":581522,"date":"2010-05-27T09:43:35","date_gmt":"2010-05-27T13:43:35","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341d17e553ef01348216830c970c"},"modified":"2010-05-27T09:43:35","modified_gmt":"2010-05-27T13:43:35","slug":"greil-marcus-notes-on-the-making-of-a-new-literary-history-of-america-part-5-the-speech-of-our-time%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/581522","title":{"rendered":"Greil Marcus – Notes on the making of A New Literary History of America – Part 5 – “The speech of our time\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\"Group<\/a> In this final post in our series of "Notes on the Making of <\/em>A New Literary History of America<\/a>," adapted from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus at the International Conference on Narrative<\/a>, Marcus talks about what Ann Marlowe\u2019s essay \u201cLinda Lovelace\u2019s <\/em>Ordeal\u201d (which you can read here<\/a>) revealed about the evolution of the American voice\u2014a progression central to the book. Parts one<\/a>, two<\/a>, three<\/a>, and four<\/a> in this series appeared earlier.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em><\/o:smarttagtype><\/o:smarttagtype><\/o:smarttagtype>Group of men talking in street of Muskogee<\/st1:city>, Oklahoma," by Russell Lee, 1939. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.<\/st1:state><\/st1:place>
\n<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\n—– <\/p>\n

When Ann Marlowe<\/a> took up Linda Lovelace<\/a>, she watched \u201cDeep Throat<\/a>,\u201d and then found and read all four of Linda Lovelace\u2019s autobiographies. The first two\u2014in which Lovelace declared that she lived for violation and libertinism and loved every second\u2014were written by others. The second two, written with a co-author\u2014with Ordeal<\/a><\/em>, in 1980, the book that mattered\u2014she was a sex slave, violated at every turn. But what Marlowe found was, in a negative sense, the whole story our own book had put itself together to tell\u2014the search for a national voice, a form of speech that everyone could understand, and speak in turn. The true speech of democracy. At bottom, the book was nothing more than hundreds of different speakers, calling out to each other, to the past, to the future, to the present they were trying to enact, to make up the language of the made-up country as if it were everyone\u2019s right to found the nation for the first time. <\/p>\n

\u201cLovelace\u2019s voice,\u201d Marlowe writes\u2014Lovelace describing how her mother gave up the child Lovelace had at twenty\u2014never even mentioning, Marlowe notes, if it was a boy or a girl, only that it was in Lovelace\u2019s word illegitimate\u2014\u201cLovelace\u2019s voice is the studiously bland voice we hear every day from politicians, in the smugness of op-eds, in the passive-aggressive niceness of airline employees. Hypocrisy has always been with us, but the mimicking of the colorless tone of down to earth \u2018good folks,\u2019 of what was once called Middle America, seems to have become prevalent after World War II.\u201d As Gerald Early<\/a> guessed, and Marlowe found, Linda Lovelace spoke the speech of our time. \u201cThe deliberate impersonation of a blameless dailiness\u201d\u2014and what a phrase that is, \u201cblameless dailiness\u201d all but hiding its argument, that in the present day all speech is second hand, received, an impersonation\u2014\u201cmay have been an artifact of television, television commercials, and the televising of political oratory. All of this created a national speech.\u201d <\/p>\n

That was the treasure of ashes the book finally unearthed, without for a moment looking for it. In the narrative the book itself was searching for, the cards lay where they fell, and the people who made the book picked them up where they lay.\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this final post in our series of "Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America," adapted from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus at the International Conference on Narrative, Marcus talks about what Ann Marlowe\u2019s essay \u201cLinda Lovelace\u2019s Ordeal\u201d (which you can read here) revealed about the evolution of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6896,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-581522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6896"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581522\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}