Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2007 | Page 122

118 Popular Culture Review Charles Sanders Peirce, William James (especially his insistence on the body as the source of all experience), Josiah Royce, and best of all, W.E.B. Du Bois, whose ‘'Souls of Black Folk” (1903) is the nearest thing to a precedent and a model for the kind of work this is—part lyric, part confession, part learned or scientific treatise, part Jeremiad or sermon, and united in all its phases by a large conscience that deplores racism, oppression, brutality, and injustice, and is saddened by the vast wasteland we sententiously call civilized. Like Hamlet, Steeves is tom between two conflicting images: “what a piece of work is man” versus “and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me, nor woman, either . . .” Ambivalence, thy name is human! Like Don Quixote, he has lost his illusions, yet clings fervently to his ideals. And, like George Orwell, who described himself (in 1939) in characterizing Charles Dickens, he is “generously angry” with us for not being what we should, while still loving us for what we are (or aren’t). Like Max Weber, he is disenchanted, but he quests for meaning and purpose, not certainty or absolutes, and here in this world, not outside or beyond it. He is also tom by the dichotomy between classic and romantic archetypes of humanity, but here he effects a sublime synthesis of the universal and the particular, the things that unite and the things that divide us, to create a wonderful tableau of the One and the Many, of living, breathing e pluribus iimim. That may be Steeves’s salvation—and ours. That and a sense of humor, to cope with the folly, frailty, and futility of our sorrowful passage between two eternities: which is the one gift the gods at play forgot to return, when they made the things themselves. Dennis Rohatyn, University of San Diego