The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice

by Greil Marcus

Book Overview

From the author of Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces, comes an exhilarating and provocative investigation of the tangle of American identity.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374104387
• ISBN13: 9780374104382
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

An Arguable Pantheon

The Shape of Things to Come - Prophecy and the American Voice By Greil Marcus For many years now Greil Marcus has been readdressing what it means to be a "cultural critic." His books - this is his 10th - have become cornerstones for the analysis of popular culture. Marcus' 1975 analysis of the mythos of Elvis Presley, Mystery Train, arguably remains one of the best books ever written on The King, if not rock'n'roll in general. His 1989 Lipstick Traces - A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, managed to draw parallels between heretical movements of medieval Europe, the Parisian-based Situationists of the 1960s and the advent of the punk movement in Jubilee England. The result was a staggering, albeit very weird, alternate history of the world as we know it. Marcus' razor-sharp radar scan of popular culture is unique in its breadth. Early in his career he became renowned as a rock critic and journalist for Rolling Stone. Reading his profile of Francis Ford Coppola and the making of Apocalypse Now was like breathing in the steamy air of a fetid jungle. But, reflecting the seething culture of post-'60s America, his intellectual restlessness and curiosity saw him embrace almost any subject. His recent Like A Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, released in 2005, was as much an excuse to analyze American current socio-political crises as it was a loving recreation of the recording of one of Dylan's major works. Alongside his cultural and political savvy, what sets Marcus apart from his contemporaries is his sheer enthusiasm, which sparks from the page in electrical surges of lyrical description. In short, Marcus is a fan, albeit a highly selective and eccentric one. Which brings us to The Shape of Things to Come - Prophecy and the American Voice. It's most certainly an ambitious title, and one that Marcus sadly struggles to address. Marcus has never set out to be a futurist. If anything he is an historian who brings the past to life with rock'n'roll adrenalin. But the title of this group of writings on contemporary culture inevitably leads the reader to await an analysis of current `prophecy' and just where that will lead us. This element of the title remains unaddressed. Where he does succeed in his analyses of the "American Voice," - albeit with some terrible omissions. However he does begin his book with a cornucopia of myriad voices, with quotes from Noam Chomsky and The Reverend Jerry Falwell, Bob Dylan and Herman Melville. He immediately moves into the most lively account of the speeches of Martin Luther King imaginable, a brief but poignant history of the Puritans and the politics of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, the voices of King and Lincoln, along with Kennedy, Clinton, Presley and Dylan haunt these pages like an unseen and unruly choir against a backdrop of the traumatic vision of 9/11. But, as always, Marcus' own voice comes through the idiosyncratic selection of subjects that The Shape of Things embraces. At its core it is a

Archive of American vernacular prophecy... in this our time of need....

In his splendid reading of Philip Roth's trilogy on Nathan Zuckerman as belated American Jeremiah, mapping the hollowing out of its prophetic codes and citizens, Greil Marcus makes an unexpected yet utterly shattering connection to a latter-day Dylan album kindred to "American Pastoral"'s subjects of brokenness. "Only Bob Dylan, in 1997 [when American Pastoral was published], with Time Out of Mind, a state-by-state, city-by-city guided tour of an America that has used itself up and a portrait of an American who has used up his country, comes close to occupying the same territory; and Roth stayed longer" (The Shape of Things to Come, 43). Dylan's conversion into "the indigenous American berserk" would never stand stable, as such, would be subject to reversal and transformation into fits or stanzas of prophetic blessing on it all. Marcus gets at all this instability, and more in this innovative archive outlining the American vernacular prophecy coming back in this our time of worldly need.

A Lot of Predictions Ignored

In reading this book I was reminded of the old saying that predicting the future is easy, it's being right that is hard. I find Mr. Marcus's book to be very interesting reading, but in places confusing. He seem to be saying that he doesn't see the politicians making as much sense as do the artists of our time. Politics, it could be argued, is an art form. In the early days of the republic there were relatively few voters, land owning men. As the enfranchisement has expanded, so has the level of political communications. You can't say what you think, you can only say what you think will get you elected. The politician is an actor being fed a script. His comments on the predictions of from the music of rock bands is simply not understandable to me. Their bag, like the politician is to say something that their listeners want to hear. I don't see in his writings anything from writers I see making serious predictions: Al Gore, 'Inconvenient Truth;' 'Hubbard's Peak;' 'The Limits to Growth;' Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations.' Our children will face interesting times.

Brilliant writing stye, dazzling command of popular culture, depressing and depressed view of Americ

Greil Marcus has made his bones as a journalist, critic, historian, and his own genus of philosopher of pop music and related cultural issues. His writing style is very much his own. It is quite mannered, and feels to me to be much like musical improvisation (but is carefully worked out) mixed with a more or less leftist political sensibilities and pessimistic dismissal of political and historical America as the cause of all misery and pain in the world mixed in with a spoonful or two of ADHD. For Marcus, there is no authority to appeal to; nothing outside of oneself to serve or protect. His whole universe is a collection of images, sounds, and words that come to mind, are linked in some way and that linkage and presentation creates or gives voice to some emotionally needy sense of reality. He seems to have taken in the lessons of deconstructionist philosophy. If there are only personal narratives with no possibility of objective communication, why not just riff and try to get the reader to agree with and share your feelings about things by sharing common images and sounds. Figures in literature or the movies are just as valid as any historical figure, since both are constructed and presented to us by some author communicating his or her own narrative through those characters. Yeah, I know. This book consists of seven essays. The conceit of the book is that there are voices in America's past that vibrate sympathetically to our time and that as we hear those voices we can see the reality of our own time, terrible as it is. These past voices are our true prophets and their artistic works are the true prophecies. I have to say that I am quite impressed with Marcus' writing style. It is an interesting achievement and his broad knowledge of popular culture and command of its artifacts is quite dazzling. While much of each essay reads like sparks of ideas flashing intensely and quickly before our eyes, there are also small periods of discourse that go on for a few paragraphs. But these are more about telling the story of something he is using as illustration rather than presentation of any argument. Because, again, if all there can be is personal narrative, it makes not sense to try and use logic, reason, evidence, and conclusion (you know, the tools that enabled the human race to leave the caves and trees). All there can be is persuasion and emotional affinity, a redoubt of the well schooled but poorly educated. For this author, America is past decline, it is less than a failure, it was a promise never fulfilled but still owed, and our ideals nothing more than comforting bedtime stories (pg. 260). In an extended riff on Steve Darnall's 1997 comic book "Uncle Sam", Marcus conflates the battlefields of our Revolutionary War with the Andersonville prison camp of the Civil war with the 1832 massacre of the Blackhawks by the U. S. Army with the "massacre of union workers by private police at the Rouge River Ford plant in Dearborn, Mich