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Fallacies of the Postmodern |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / WHAT IS LITERATURE? TEACHING AND THE CANON |
| Author: Carol Iannone |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 10/1/1994 |
| Size: 4,358 Words, 26,790 Characters |
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In the delightful Hollywood screwball comedy Ball of Fire (1941), directed by Howard Hawks and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper, a group of gentle scholars must avert a threat from a bunch of criminal bullies. As they are no physical match for the gangsters, the scholars must employ their superior intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity to defeat their adversaries, and, sure enough, by doing so, they save the day. The viewer soon surmises that the plot is an attempt to symbolize the Nazi threat and is bravely asserting in the face of Hitler's early triumphs that intelligence and goodness will eventually win out over brutality and force.
Although charming, this film contains several fallacies very typical of the naive response to evil: to underestimate it by believing that it ...
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... only destruction momentarily provides meaning by temporarily bringing the individual back into connection with the external recalcitrant world. By stamping out the disorder (disagreement with him) in the external world, he has assimilated it to himself and "proved" that he is real.
--Morton A. Kaplan
From Alienation and Identification by Morton A. Kaplan (Free Press, 1976).
(806 of 26,790 characters)
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