Thursday, October 4, 2007

Norman Rockwell and "lost innocence"

Last year, I wrote a column about a scholar's contention that behind the greeting-card surface of many Rockwell paintings lurked something more complex and provocative -- sometimes sexually complex and provocative. Globe readers -- some of them anyway -- were not amused: What the scholar claimed to see simply did not exist.

Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and a noted cultural critic, read the book that inspired that article, "Norman Rockwell: The Dark Side of Innocence," by Richard Halpern, and was as struck with it as I was. Inspired by Halpern's book, Weschler has now organized a symposium at NYU titled "Shocked! Shocked!" Its subtitle is "Just How Many Times Can a Country Lose Its Innocence?" and the gathering is scheduled for this weekend.

I emailed Weschler, asking him to briefly explain how the book led to the symposium, and this was his response:

With metronomic regularity, the United States, for one, always seems to be losing its innocence -- the Kennedy assassination, the urban disturbances of the sixties, Vietnam, the Church committee's CIA revelations, Three Mile Island, the smoking cancer scandals, the John Lennon assassination, Iran Contra, the priest pedophile imbroglio, September 11, Abu Ghraib (to detail just one recent trill) -- and yet Americans never seems to learn anything, repeatedly emerging as resolutely innocent (which is to say, unknowing) as they were before the latest brief seizure of lucidity.

Or is that the right way of thinking about things? Richard Halpern, the Johns Hopkins literature professor, recently studied one particular nexus in what he characterizes as the country's "Innocence Industry" in his book "Norman Rockwell: The Dark Side of Innocence." There he considered a series of Saturday Evening Post covers in which Rockwell depicted his perennial boy perennially shocked at his discovery of the true identity of Santa Claus -- when, for example, burrowing about, he happens upon Saint Nick's outfit in his father's dresser drawer, regarding which, Halpern glosses:

"There are sometimes moments of shocked discovery, to be sure, but these usually release a built-up reservoir of previously unacknowledged doubt. Otherwise, they can always be explained away. And this gets at a crucial truth about shocked recognition: it is not the moment of emergence from disavowal into enlightenment. Rather, it places the seal on disavowal by insisting (falsely) that up until that moment one did not know…. The protecting of a factitious innocence by pretending (to ourselves) to be shocked is an infantile stratagem of which people never seem to tire. Our dresser drawer is Abu Ghraib prison, from which we extract not an empty Santa suit but hooded, naked prisoners, and we stand there with the wide-eyed surprise of Rockwell's boy. Who knew?"

Who knew, indeed. Except that we all of us always knew -- a hearty, seemingly indestructible bad faith seeming to be at the very root of our country's national identity.

How could a country founded on the genocide of the prior indigenous population and the forced enslavement of a large part of it workforce ever have any "innocence" to lose in the first place? But just how unique is the United States in that regard? (Consider, by contrast, the example of Japan, where a sort of national fetishization of Hiroshima allows for the systematic occlusion of any other potentially less purely victimized wartime memories.) And how specifically does that bad faith play out in the American instance?

Such at any rate were some of the questions that occurred to this reader of Halpern's remarkably evocative book, thoughts which in turn occasioned the convening of a daylong conference to be held this coming Saturday at NYU's Cantor Film Center, starting at 11 a.m. ... the specific schedule for which can be found here

Weschler's most recent book is "Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences," which won this year's National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:28 PM

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