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Acts of Interpretation (4): John McPhee
From Chapter One, "The Prophetic Pattern."
Carlyle and The Act of Interpretation
Ruskin and the Trivial
Joan Didion and Twentieth-Century Acts of Interpretation
John McPhee
Opposing the Audience
Thoreau and Arnold
Ruskin and Thoreau
The Prophet's Warning
Carlyle, Ruskin, and Others
Visonary Promises
Thomas Carlyle
John Ruskin
Henry David Thoreau
W. E. DuBois
Matthew Arnold
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 n contrast to Didion's almost despairing presentation of the need to make such acts of interpretation, John McPhee never explicitly announces their problematic nature. McPhee, one of the host classical or Johnsonian of those twentieth-century practitioners of this genre, earns his position in this study of secular prophets by his resolute intention to interpret those contemporary phenomena that he finds to be clues to the heart and mind of his society. This superb reader of the Signs of the Times, who frequently invokes the Carlylean contrast of past and present, rarely emphasizes the grotesque elements of his symbolic al materials even when they might seem to demand such emphasis. For example, The Crofter and the Laird opens and closes with obviously grotesque matters involving murders, bizarre loyalties, and equally bizarre betrayals of others. These tales of the McPhee clan's past serve to frame the balanced view of the modem tale that provides the subject of most of the book, but by placing them outside the main action, as it were, McPhee manages rather nicely to prevent them from obtruding upon a view of reality they might disturb and even disprove. Such grotesqueries provide interesting, entertaining reading, but they do not, as similar facts would in Carlyle or Mailer, appear particularly relevant to the present.
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Unlike many of his predecessors, McPhee does not transform grotesques into what Ruskin termed symbolical grotesques, and he does not do so because his basic method necessarily must defuse such materials to prevent them from obtruding upon his main themes. This avoidance of the grotesque -- or rather this commitment to making his audience perceive that even the most seemingly grotesque phenomena have relevance to their lives -- sharply contrasts him to those other ages, including Carlyle, Thoreau, Ruskin, Lawrence, and Mailer, who emphasize the grotesque nature of so many Signs of the Times precisely because they wish to emphasize how badly their contemporaries have fallen away from the true path. McPhee, one suspects, does not emphasize the obviously grotesque nature of some of the phenomena he cites for the same reason that he explicitly adopts a balanced structure in The Crofter and the Laird, Coming into the Country, and Levels of the Game: Grotesqueness is a product and sign of unbalance, and McPhee desires to present a balanced view, a view that simultaneously communicates an intellectual interpretation and a moral judgment (though in fact this moral judgment usually takes the form of spelling out the rights and wrongs of opposing sides). McPhee thus resembles Samuel Johnson more than any of the other. sages, even Arnold; but whereas Johnson used balanced periods in individual sentences and balanced paragraphs, McPhee's classicism, if I may term it that, appears in his judicially arranged major arguments. In other words, he most frequently begins a book by presenting one side of a case he does appear to conceive them as cases -- and follows this first view by one that opposes it.
Two things demand remark about his method. First, he does not generally follow his argument and counter argument with a conclusion, for he does not seem interested in, or apparently feel himself capable of, a synthesis. Indeed, the purpose of his method, which here appears very Arnoldian, seems to lie precisely in this final balance and tension; like that Victorian sage, McPhee holds up as an ideal the critical, inquiring mind that can examine both sides of a controversial question, thereby doing self and society a major service. It is not clear -- just as it is not clear in Arnold -- if such presentation of opposing views (often the politically liberal and the politically conservative) arises more from a pure commitment to the ideal of balance or merely from the journalist's inability to take sides.
Second, his method has as an unspoken assumption the notion that only two views exist, or that all possible views of a subject can be justly and accurately separated into two opposing positions. For all its obvious judiciousness and its equally obvious rhetorical advantages for McPhee, this means of presenting his subjects fits them into a mold as firmly as does the prose of Johnson or Macaulay, leaving no room for phenomena that have more than two rival interpretations.
