The Dustbin of History
Greil Marcus
Picador pbk, 274 pgs, £6.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
Time, the bespectacled Pop Prof declares with this solemn collection, to throw off the shackles of mere rock’n’roll and be reborn as Greil Marcus: Cultural Commentator. A laudable and largely successful ambition, even if just now and again he does leave us to wonder if some of his contrary positioning is not simply affect. Witness his astonishingly ill-argued take on Altman’s masterly Nashville: a station adopted, one suspects, because he can. Maybe he is repentant and the piece’s inclusion (it was written in 1975, after all) is an act of clear-minded contrition on its author’s part. Then again, looking at his picture on the back, maybe not.
Marcus’ task in this book is to show how there is really no such thing as that titular receptacle: "one of our terms for finality, for putting history behind us." His challenge is to demonstrate, via a collection of yellowing journalism, just how history is a flexible, expanding, mutating beast. He never actually comes out and says it but his meta-narrative is that those who fail to learn from history are surely condemned to repeat it:
"Cultural awakening comes not when one learns the contours of the master-narrative, but when one realises - thanks to a teacher, a book, or the disruptions of an unpredicted historical event - that what one has always been told is incomplete, backward, false, a lie."
Marcus covers a lot of territory in here: from Umberto Eco to Camille Paglia; Robert Johnson to Jan and Dean; from Wim Wenders to The Beats; The Manchurian Candidate to American Hot Wax. It’s his career, he gets to cherry-pick the best bits, and some of them, we have to say, are well worth revisiting. But not - repeat not - his 1979 essay on The Duke:
"...you understand that Wayne is judging the motives and actions of his characters and finding them correct, necessary - satisfying. With a thousand details of expression, inflection, carriage...Wayne conveys to his audience the hard reality..."
Bad, but then he loses it completely, drawing comparison with Pacino (The Godfather) and De Niro (Taxi Driver), and failing entirely to address Wayne’s ghastly politics. Shit inevitably stinks, Mr Marcus. We are reminded of the same author’s dotty gushings over Springsteen in the (better) punk-inspired collection, In The Fascist Bathroom.
The truth is that Marcus is just better on the firm ground of music. His essay on Blues monarch Robert Johnson occasionally needs the scholastic brakes applied - "he is a sociological exemplar of an ethnographic cultural incident" - but remains ultimately honest and genuinely illuminating. He also has a sense of humour, but too often is prepared to bury it, lest we fail to take him as seriously as he clearly takes himself. Discussing Jan and Dean’s matched hits ‘Surf City’ and ‘Drag City’, he mourns: "the seemingly necessary follow-up, ‘Fuck City’, never appeared."
By turns eye-opening, banal and even down-right annoying, The Dustbin of History is hardly ever boring. Marcus drags us on by the sheer force of argument alone, even when that argument is pedestrian or, at times, flat-out wrong. Still, as he writes: "History is a story: we want a story that makes sense, is poetically whole, that fits what we think we already know." And how’s that for covering all your bases?