A Case of Plight

by HOWARD MUMFORD JONES

I WISH to discuss the secret of the modern literary movement. The secret, the inwardness, of this movement is Plight. Plight is something that has occurred during an era of history known as In Our Time. I am a little confused as to the exact limits of this epoch, except that it is Since. Some writers say it is Since T. S. Eliot, and some writers say it is Since Hiroshima, and still others say it is Since Kierkegaard. A good friend of mine says it is Since the Duration. It seems to me simpler just to say Since.

The chief characteristic of Modern Man during the period known as In Our Time, or Since, is Plightness. Almost everybody has Plight in one form or another, though perhaps only our better writers are fully aware of the extent and nature of the disease. For example, the more serious essayists in our English departments are quite excited over something they call The Plight of the Artist In Our Time, or Since. It appears that In Our Time writers have been more unhappy than ever before, even than they were during the days of Lord Byron. This is because they are living Since. A writer who was living before Since was patronized by the nobility, and this made him happy. He sent his children to the better schools and he was received into the bosom of the prevailing church. He had no Conflict, but on the other hand he was capable of Wholeness or tragic depth, whereas writers after Since have been unable to find any tragic depth. This is why they are unhappy. They do not find Meaning.

Plightness, however, is by no means confined to authors, though courses in Creative Plightness are devoted to helping them in writers’ conferences and symposiums In Our Time. American women also suffer Plight. When they baked all the bread at home, and did the washing, and bore a child every nine months, and knitted stockings, and embroidered slippers for the vicar, Plightness was not known, but now that they are pretty much free to do as they please, and even to read James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, they have taken up Plight. The Plight of modern woman Since the Duration is awful. All kinds of women suffer from it, and not just opera singers, as used to be the case. Nowadays stenographers (especially if they work in advertising agencies), young wives, divorcées, schoolteachers, and even Dorothy Dix have Plight. Miss Dix is of the opinion that after Since, the women have had a tough time of it holding their own. Or holding their men. On the other hand, the colleges, especially the women’s colleges, have done what they could. They prepare young girls for Plight, and then, when their alumnae marry and have children and get fat, and their husbands finally descend from the nuptial Plight to golf and national conventions, the middle-aged women have nothing to do, what with dishwashers and one thing or another. The colleges have therefore set up extracurricular courses known as Plight Education. Others offer the Great Books, or Plight across the centuries.

However, even businessmen do not escape the general epidemic. Ever since Babbitt and The Great Gatsby, it has been clear that the American businessman is really in Plight, Some of our more historical novelists look back upon the wholesome days of Benjamin Franklin with a sort of envy, and I do not find much evidence of Plightness as late as the days of the Erie Canal, when a businessman had a good deal of fun renting out tow horses and watching fist fights. The Plight of the businessman has all happened Since.

Speaking of From Here to Eternity, I ought to point out that Plight has also infected the armed forces. Here and there a general exhibits Plight, but Plightness is really endemic among commissioned officers in the lower echelons, and is also invading the ranks, although corporals and sergeants are pretty well immunized against it, from living in the regular army In Our Time. It is still confined to the ground forces, or so I suppose, because our novelists have not reported on the navy. However, a few appointees from civilian life like Mr. Roberts may prove to be the Typhoid Marys of Plightness on the high seas.

Ministers and professors, of course, have been sunk in Plight for a long time — from even before the Duration. However, poets nowadays suffer from a new and interesting form of this malady. This symptom is something known as Tension and Release, but it is also somehow connected with Texture and Density. A truly modern poet, who has been writing Since, is also almost certain to exhibit not only Texture and Density, but Ambiguity as well. Ambiguity calls for a good deal of skillful diagnosis In Our Time. This diagnosis is known as Insight.

Since the Duration, of course, there has also been a great amount of Plightness among the other arts. A good many painters are currently suffering from it, and their form of suffering seems to come from not being understood. The reason they are in Plight — that is, not appreciated — is principally that the picture speaks for itself. It requires no explanation, which is literary. Its pictorialness (“paintiness”) is all there is to it. This is Plight. Musicians Since have much the same sort of trouble. Their music is Absolute. As paintings must be seen with the noncosmological eye, so music must be heard by the noncosmological ear, and when you listen to it, you find it has Design, but not necessarily Traditional Form. This is Plight.

There is of course much more to be said about Plightness, which is widely diffused, as in the Plight of economic man, the Plight of the modern church, the Plight of parenthood (parents confront an enigmatic being called The Child, and this almost invariably brings on a case of Plight), and the Plight of the non-Communist left, which is the most serious form of Plightness that has appeared in public Since. On the whole, however, these forms of Plight can be subsumed under the general rubric of the Plight of Modern Man (or the Western World). Of course, Hamlet was made to say something about man being noble in reason, yet the quintessence of dust, but that was not Since. Nor was it In Our Time.