A never-ending story

You know the famous story about Freud and Einstein? Freud writes to Einstein, sending him one of his books and asking for his opinion of it. Einstein writes back, saying he enjoyed the book very much, that he thought it was outstanding, exemplary even, but that, alas, he was in no position to judge its scientific merits. To which Freud replied, if Einstein couldn’t judge its scientific merits, then the book could hardly be judged exemplary. About this, Freud, as in a number of other things, was gloriously and absolutely wrong.

Greil Marcus is no scientist, but we shouldn’t hold that against him. Books like Mystery Train (1975), Lipstick Traces (1989) and Invisible Republic (1997) are all undoubtedly brilliant, though sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly how or why or what on earth they’re being brilliant at or about. Mystery Train is ostensibly about rock n’ roll, Lipstick Traces about punk rock, Invisible Republic about Bob Dylan, but Marcus blends his music criticism with sociology and anthropology and psychology, film studies and literary criticism to produce a sickly-sweet, thesaurus-rich kind of a brew that leaves you both baffled and exhilarated. His method he neatly summarised way back in Mystery Train, explaining that he was not ‘capable of mulling over Elvis without thinking about Herman Melville’ (some people, it should be said, are not capable of mulling over Greil Marcus without thinking about the Emperor’s new clothes). He is a jive-talking one-man Cultural Studies department.

Most cultural criticism is of course a wretched sort of a thing — embarrassing, obfuscating scholasticism. Practitioners who make it interesting and worthwhile — one thinks perhaps of the hilarious hyperactive Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek — are those who take it to its most absurd and amusing limits, without fear of ridicule.