On George W.S. Trow’s The Harvard Black Rock Forest and His Formally Unique Cultural Criticism

Texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society—in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly… The same implications are undoubtedly true of critics in their capacities as readers and writers in the world.                                        

—Edward Said

I have enough trouble as it is in trying to say what I think I know.

—Samuel Beckett

First, some background: George W. S. Trow was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, on Sept. 28, 1943, into a printing and “demo­graphic” family.¹ He was an Exeter-Harvard kid, privileged and connected. His father, George Swift Trow, was a powerful newspaperman, a higher-up at the New York Post, a creator of culture and a preserver of “the traditions of the upper-middle class,” a man with his hand in the making of “WASP civilization.” The younger Trow writes extensively about his father in his sometimes brilliant, idiosyncratic, and occasionally maddening 1998 work of cultural criticism, My Pilgrim’s Progress, which reads like Spalding Gray channeling Ador­no—a personal/critical mo­nologue about media life from 1950 to 1998, large portions of which were spoken into a recorder and then transcribed and edited, a technique I’ve borrowed here. That book proceeds, formally, like an experimental novel as much as anything else—slangy, lapidary, syntactically playful, full of ideas but in no hurry to arrive anywhere at all.² In its message, though, My Pilgrim’s Progress is an old-fashioned liberal arts lament, à la the old-school, pre-post-structuralist art/�cultural criticism of Christopher Lasch, Paul Goodman, or Clement Greenberg, for a time with a context beyond the babble and ­self-referentiality of media life, one less illiterate, narcissistic, and incapable of seriousness. Trow, since his days as one of the founding editors of the late, great National Lampoon,³ where he worked from 1970 to ’74, and through his long stint as a staff writer at the New Yorker, which ended in 1994, after disagreements with Tina Brown⁴ about the ­editorial direction of the magazine, has always used what I’ll call an experimental/formalist tinkering and affect in his (new) journalism, criticism, fiction, and playwriting⁵ to critique the cultural condition of postmodernity, by which I mean—and forgive the gross oversimplification—the breakdown of all organizing narratives, i.e. history, politics, religion, art, etc., and this free-floating, vapid, anything-is-as-good-as-the-next-thing-as-long-as-it-makes-money-and-fills-a-need, consum­erist place where we now find ourselves.⁶ He’s a cranky conservative in a way, a modernist at heart, some kind of neo-New ­Critic trafficking in the language and outré fragmented and ­self-conscious structures of “literary postmodernism,” especially its ac­cent on how narrative and meaning are...