Symptoms of Culture (review)

Marjorie Garber’s Symptoms of Culture is a witty book that makes for an entertaining and graciously intelligent read through some notable icons and events of popular American culture. Garber’s narrative is both erudite and light as we breeze through her commentaries on football and fundamentalism; jewishness and gentility; “Jell-O” and the Rosenbergs’ trial; the Anita Hill trial; evolution, creationism and the law; faking orgasms; and even Shakespeare’s “second best” bed, to name only a few. Her skill as a narrator and critic is demonstrated by her ability to lead us seamlessly through such disparate subjects, making unanticipated associations and acute observations and analysis as she goes. In her hands, representations of culture assume a dream-like quality as a network of uncanny associations that “encodes wishes and fears, projections and identifications, all of whose elements are overdetermined and contingent.” Accordingly, Freud is often used as a guide through these cultural contingencies and intuitive connections. Garber also displays her scholarly ease with Shakespeare whose works she also uses as a point of reference. Unlike Freud, however, Shakespeare is an example of a cultural icon homogenized, commodified and taken to heart by a culture—even by congressional luminaries who may not necessarily know their Shakespeare, but certainly know their Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

Garber’s discursive method is the most consistent unifying element in a book that is really a collection of discrete essays. Perhaps best described as a play of intuition and tuition, the singularity of the particular balanced against the achievement of criticism, her discussion is an adumbration, a medley of coincidences, puns, metaphors and metonyms which function connotatively to escape the “tyranny” of empirical evidence or conclusive argument. In the chapter “Greatness” for example, the slogan “Some Pig” segues metonymically from Charlotte’s characterization of Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web to Jerry Rubin and the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention to Richard Nixon’s success story. Rather than prosecuting a fundamental or determining relationship between these events and characters, Garber simply points to the contingencies and ironies embedded in the logic of their cultural circulation.

Of crucial importance to Garber’s method is her distinction between a symbol and a symptom: the symbol, according to Coleridge, derives its power from its ability to universalize whereas Garber’s emphasis on the symptom reverses the direction of the symbol’s power by finding in the particular and the specific “a clue to fantasies of the universal, the general, the eternal” all of which are made possible precisely by the omission or suppression of context. This emphasis re-orients our attention away from symptom as symptomatic of deeper structure or pathology to reading practices that reveal coded likenesses in a series of cultural anecdotes bound thematically in the loosest of ways.

Symptoms of Culture is therefore an entirely superficial work in the sense that it deals only with surface and representation. It is doubtful that this approach is “revolutionary” for the humanities (as Jonathan Dollimore claims on the dust jacket notes). After all, Nietzsche was employing such a method more than a century ago. But it does illuminate provocative and quirky fields of connotation acted out in cultural practices that give us a clue to the withheld motivations operating behind them.