The Politics of Sex and Other Essays: On Conservatism, Culture and Imagination

260 Pages·2000·2.024 MB·English

by  Robert Grant (auth.)

The Politics of Sex and
Other Essays
On Conservatism, Culture and Imagination
Robert Grant
The Politics of Sex and Other Essays
Also by Robert Grant
OAKESHOTT
The Politics of Sex
and Other Essays
On Conservatism, Culture
and Imagination
Robert Grant
Foreword by Raymond Tallis
First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-41352-2 ISBN 978-0-333-98242-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780333982426
First published in the United States of America 2000 by
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-23024-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grant, Robert, 1945–
The politics of sex and other essays : on conservatism, culture, and imagination /
Robert Grant ; foreword by Raymond Tallis
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-23024-1 (cloth)
1. Politics and culture. 2. Conservatism. I. Title
JA75.7 .G73 2000
306.2—dc21
99–048156
© Robert Grant 2000
Reprint of the original edition 2000
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written
permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright
Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P0LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained
forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
Contents
Foreword by Raymond Tallis ix
Author’s Preface xiv
Part One: Practice versus Theory 1
1. Conservatism: an Outline 3
2. Edmund Burke 10
3. Michael Oakeshott 23
4. The Unknown Oakeshott 40
5. Writers and Ideology: Three Case Studies 50
1. Václav Havel 50
2. Raymond Williams 53
3. Salman Rushdie and the Politics
of Credulity 55
6. The Disenchanted Flute: Opera and the
Rule of the Concept 59
Part Two: Culture and Society 75
7. On Culture 77
8. The Politics of Sex 88
9. The Politics of Death 102
10. Culture, Technology and Value 115
11. Organic Society: a Note 125
12. Four Cheers for Normality 127
1. Arnold’s Cultural Politics 127
2. The Politics of Soap 130
3. In Defence of Viz 132
4. A Voice from the Fringe: Jim Rose 139
13. Home Truths: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the
House Beautiful 145
viii Contents
Part Three: The Truth of Fiction 161
14. Religion, Art and the Limits of the Sayable 163
15. Statecraft and Metapolitics in Shakespeare 170
16. Jane Austen: Ethics and Social Order 184
17. Trollope, Tact and Virtue 196
18. Tolstoy and Enlightenment: an
Exchange with Isaiah Berlin 201
19. Aerodromes and Aspidistras: the
Worlds of Thirties Fiction 212
20. The Survivor’s Guilt: Wiesel and Sciascia on
Terror and the Holocaust 217
Index 223
Notes are situated at the end of each essay
Foreword
Raymond Tallis
Cyril Connolly said that George Orwell’s personality shone out of
everything he wrote. The same is true of the author of The Politics of Sex
and Other Essays. He is genial, sceptical, humorous – but also profoundly
serious. His convictions are deep; but one of his deepest is our need to
maintain a responsive openness to actuality. His prose, accordingly, is
punchy, witty (in all senses), lyrical, impassioned and engaged. A per-
fect instrument of communication, it rises at times to artistry of a very
high order.
The Politics of Sex and Other Essays is the first instalment of a planned
three-volume collection of Robert Grant’s papers, articles and reviews.
Grant, though a teacher of literature, is a recognized authority on the
philosopher Michael Oakeshott. He will also be familiar to the ordinary
educated reader from publications such as The Times Literary Supplement.
Few, however, will be acquainted with more than a fraction of his
oeuvre, which is otherwise scattered through little-known magazines,
encyclopaedias and heavyweight academic journals and symposia. The
scope of the present volume alone – Viz magazine, opera both real and
soap, Jane Austen, a self-styled freak show, sex, death, interior decora-
tion and more – is astonishing.
There is no shallow polymathy here, but a coherent vision: that,
Iwould say, of a ‘conservative intellectual’, were the words not so apt to
mislead. For Grant’s intelligence is truly hospitable, and imbued with a
critical common sense which examines the world around it without
fear or prejudice. Further, unlike so many intellectuals, he is not pre-
pared, in the words of his lethally accurate judgement on Raymond
Williams, to sacrifice his critical sensibility on the altar of ideology (see
Essay 5, §2). Moreover, his writing is consistently lucid (something that
post-1968 French intellectuals have taught many to despise) and pep-
pered with observations which, to adapt a metaphor of Wittgenstein’s,
reduce a roomful of steam to a drop of clear water.
Like Burke and Oakeshott (see Essays 2–4), Grant is not hostile to
ideas as such, and certainly not to the application of intelligence or
reason to human affairs. His objection is rather to high-level abstract
ix
x Foreword
thought untouched by common sense and common experience, and its
most dangerous product: top-down, theory-driven, goal-directed politics.
In a short passage on Burke almost every variety of revolutionary is
implicitly captured, from real-life political monsters to ivory-tower
would-be ‘subversives’. This unflattering group portrait is rounded out,
in Grant’s brief, compassionate notice of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust trilogy,
by his comments on terrorism’s ethical self-delusions (Essay 20).
In Grant’s understanding of it (see Essay 1), true conservatism is no
more hostile to change than to ideas. Some change is inevitable, some
positively necessary; but it must be properly informed, preserve con-
tinuity and respect tradition (‘embodied practical knowledge’). Grant’s
conservatism is not a matter of party, nor confined to politics. It grows
out of his perception of the interconnectedness of human concerns,
and his respect for whatever has evolved peaceably and naturally out
ofour long-term dealings with each other. Such things, among them
culture, elude a narrowly technological, rationalist perspective.
This interconnectedness is literally enacted in Grant’s dictionary
article ‘On Culture’ (Essay 7), a masterpiece of compression, synthesis and
judgement. The article traces ‘culture’ from its ground-floor sense of
socially transmitted thought and behaviour generally, up through its
various layers and subdivisions, to high culture, showing its underlying
continuity and its (positive) political implications. (In another diction-
ary entry, Essay 11, rejecting the communitarian nostalgia usually asso-
ciated with the ‘organic society’, Grant shows that in a genuinely
organic society individuals do matter.)
Grant’s distrust of overbearing ‘theory’ resurfaces in his criticisms of
operatic ‘concept productions’ (Essay 6, on The Magic Flute). Directors of
this stamp fail to understand that, ideally, a work of art is already com-
plete and self-sufficient. The director’s job is not to suppress its surface
meaning in favour of its alleged underlying ‘ideas’ (or any others), but,
as in Ingmar Bergman’s truly ‘magic’film version of Mozart’s opera, ‘to
realize the work at its maximum of transparency...with its various
strands of significance as harmoniously and intelligibly displayed as the
work itself permits’.
This too is the critic’s task. Grant’s observations on Jane Austen are
revelatory because they illuminate her by a light that is her own.
Unpacking her implicit ethics, he assists at the process by which, as
Auden says, great books read us. Grant’s courteous receptivity is the
antipodes of the ‘theory’ industry’s rape of literature and literary studies
(including Jane Austen) in recent decades. (He shows similar respect to
Trollope, rescued in Essay 17 from a well-meaning but too program-
matic interpreter.)