Radiant Truths by Jeff Sharlet

Author:Jeff Sharlet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

1977

Beginning to See the Light, the collection of essays from which “Truth and Consequences” is excerpted, was out of print when I came across it in an artists’ colony library committed to saving the work of everyone who’d ever been through there. It’s criticism. Narrative criticism: responses to Dylan, Elvis, the Who, the Velvet Underground, and others that are also works of literary journalism, stories of experience fully sensual and fully intellectual at the same time. I’d never read anything like them. This was before I knew that Willis was one of the great rock writers of the sixties and seventies, easily as fabulous as Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, and the rest of the men who became a canon. Willis wasn’t included. First, because she was a woman. Second, because she demolished the fan boys’ fetishization of authenticity, their obsession with the original blues and the bootleg riff, the esoteric over the democratic.

Her concern, she wrote in her introduction, wasn’t purity, it was liberation, and she’d seize it wherever she could find it. “Why,” she asked, “regard commercial art as intrinsically more compromised than art produced under the auspices of the medieval church, or aristocratic patrons? Art has always been in some sense propaganda for ruling classes and at the same time a form of struggle against them. Art that succeeds manages to evade or transcend or turn to its own purposes the strictures imposed on the artist; on the deepest level it is the enemy of authority, as Plato understood.”

“Next Year in Jerusalem,” the essay from which “Truth and Consequences” is taken, is a twenty thousand–word investigation, originally produced under the auspices of Rolling Stone, of what it might mean to Willis to become a religious Jew. Twenty thousand words! About ordinary Jews, in a mass media magazine about pop culture. This really was new journalism. Not that it came out of a vacuum. Willis’s deliberately plain prose echoes the reportage of Meridel Le Sueur, another feminist writer for whom the ornamentation of literary fashion seemed an unnecessary, even dangerous, burden. And what Willis describes in her introduction as her fundamental, animating quarrel with the “puritanical discomfort with the urge—whatever form it takes—to gratification now” recalls the redeeming quality of Mencken’s rage against religion, his hatred of those he saw as the enemies of pleasure. Willis’s antidote to that anger—” it is the longing for happiness that is potentially radical,” she writes, “while the morality of sacrifice is an age-old weapon of rulers”—might almost have been written by that Christian crusader W. T. Stead, the original “new journalist,” in 1894.

What follows is this book’s second trip to the Holy Land, with Willis as a not-so-innocent abroad, immersing herself in the world of her brother Mike, a once-secular Jew who has recently converted to Orthodoxy.

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