Shades of grey

Post-modernism is a talking point in our household because the F-word is an artist. To an artist post-modernism means something different from what it meant to me as an academic woman, and what it means to me now as a cultural participant. I think post-modernism is a uselessly, broadly accurate (not to mention ugly) term for a kind of relativism whose absence these days renders any academic or cultural inquiry worthless, and whose presence renders art wankerish.

But when it comes to cultural documents I sit around and read, keep your doubtless clever-ish post-war reinterpretations of everything, and give me a raging Oxbridge maso-queen who thought of women as 'raddled meat' and of Arabs as a society of lazy gorgeous dreaming males whose limbs quivered when they sexlessly, hygienically fucked each other in the sand.

Long way about of saying that so far The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an absolute lark. I don't know how long I'll continue with it though. 600 more pages to go, when there are so many other books in the world. . . And the bulk of my fascination with it is of the sort I feel when I'm listening to a sauced Englishman blathering about ethnic groups without any restraint borne of modesty or cultural relativism - I can enjoy it for an evening, and after that he's just another liquor-soaked twat who might as well be talking about football teams, and who thinks, if he thinks at all, that post-modernism is a communist tool to rob him of all credibility.

In that blathery sense The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is even better than my old favourite Wilfrid Thesinger - another of those hygienic, 'sexless' types who dug young Arabs and who had an enjoyably terse, funny writing style - because Thesinger seemed to have tried his best to become one of them (living for a long time with the Marsh Arabs in Iraq, who did badly under Saddam Hussein). Whereas, in his writing at least, Lawrence is so awfully English and the Arabs - not to mention the Turks and Jews - are so awfully not. I don't know if he loved them - he's certainly rather crueler than Thesinger about them - and so far he gives the impression that everything good they did was more or less an accident until he came along.

The thing is, books like Seven Pillars are the story of me, of us, as western Anglophones (nobody else reads this blog, do they?) - our identity documents. Post-modernist or not, I can't understand being impatient with or dismissive of these texts or the general Dead White Male canon, or primary sources in general. Incomplete, maybe; but meaningless? Certainly not! We can't invent a post-modernist past when we have such a profoundly pre-modernist history; we can't be revisionists; that's the only thing that's worse than being an asshole in the first place, and it stops us from knowing ourselves. When Lawrence writes that Arabs are incapable of seeing shades of grey, only being capable of seeing black and white, thus 'despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns', it tells us so little about Arabs but so much about us.