Fantastic Metropolis

“The Trojan Horse” begins with an extended image. “At first it looks strange to the Trojans, the wooden horse, off color, outsized, barbaric… Then, little by little, they discover the familiar forms which coincide with those of a horse. Already for them, the Trojans, there have been many forms, various ones, sometimes contradictory, that were put together and worked into creating a horse, for they have an old culture… They come to see as strong, powerful, the work they had considered formless. They want to make it theirs, to adopt it as a monument and shelter it within their walls, a gratuitous object whose only purpose is to be found in itself” (68). Wittig proposes that “any important literary work is like the Trojan Horse at the time it is produced. Any work with a new form operates as a war machine, because its design and its goal is to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions. It is always produced in hostile territory. And the stranger it appears, nonconforming, unassimilable, the longer it will take for the Trojan Horse to be accepted” (69). But because of these Trojan Horses, “the old literary forms, which everybody was used to, will eventually appear to be outdated, inefficient, incapable of transformation” (69).

Reading this essay again in 2003, I find myself bracketing Wittig’s “any important literary work” as anachronistic. And yet conceiving of new forms as “war machines” engages me as much now as it did the first time I encountered it—although I have since become a good deal more critical of the idea. At first sight, in Wittig’s image, the Trojans know that the Greeks’ wooden horse is alien to them. Gradually, though, their perceptions of it change, and they begin to appreciate its artistry. Eventually not only do they come to accept the object but they even come to compare the old forms unfavorably to its new and different form. And so this “war machine” then becomes the new standard for what is strong, powerful, and sophisticated, and the old is deemed passé. In its overall shape, this is actually a rather familiar story, one that could be told about the history of forms and conventions in all the arts. But Wittig tells this familiar story with a difference. We are used to thinking of such changes in form as evolutionary. Wittig describes them as occurring suddenly, by way of alien and singular “war machines,” which have a revolutionizing effect on taste and consciousness, and claims, moreover, that the creators of these “war machines” know exactly what they are doing.

Although I continue to find Wittig’s story engaging, casting this narrative of shock, gradual acceptance, and replacement of the old form with the new as a story of revolution, I am ultimately dissatisfied with it. This narrative cannot, for instance, account for the example of the Beatles. I can still recall my excitement at the analysis we did of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band in my advanced music theory class in the spring of 1970. The album, we found, offered a new formal structure, one very consciously created. Some three years later I was shocked and disgusted to hear a sentimentally orchestrated Beatles song performed as Muzak at my local grocery store. And in the years since, the individual songs on that magnificent album have been cannibalized for ads. Where was the revolution that I and my fellow students had so clearly perceived in that album? Could music continually taken out of context and re-presented in cynically nostalgic and sentimental iterations be considered in any way subversive? In late capitalist society, if a Trojan Horse has any popular appeal, is it not more likely to be assimilated to prevailing cultural forms and uses than to challenge their dominance and alter them?