No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
In his early writing on language, truth, and art, Nietzsche notes that art “treats illusion as illusion; therefore it does not wish to deceive; it is true.” Insofar as art is an illusion whose only truth is that it is illusion, art is only true as a lie. When the illusion of art is mistaken for truth, art is destroyed. Nietzsche's observations about the truth of a work of art are instructive when considering the questions raised by postmodern artworks such as Blue Velvet, a film written and directed by David Lynch.
As Lynch explores the consequences of mistaking illusion for truth in Blue Velvet, he offers a disquieting analysis of the American Dream, its icons, and the cultural idolatry that sustains it. With a degree of suspicion characteristic of postmodern interpretative strategies, Lynch examines the values that define the “American Way of Life” and provides evidence to challenge the truth claim of traditional notions of good and evil.
* This article is a significantly revised and expanded version of a paper presented in Boston, Massachusetts, December, 1987, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in the “Art, Literature and Religion” section.
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks, trans. and ed. Breazeale, David (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 84.Google Scholar
2. Herberg, Will, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York: Doubleday, 1956), Chapter 5.Google Scholar Herberg describes the “common religion” of America as the System known as the American Way of Life, which he sees as the operative faith of the American people. See, also, Marty, Martin E., Rosenberg, Stuart E. and Greeley, Andrew M., What Do We Believe? The Stance of Religion In America (New York: Meredith Press, 1968), 29ff.Google Scholar Marty describes the “real” religion of America as civic religion. The American Way of Life (32), he argues, is defined by common beliefs, values, and practices sustained by the continuous presence of Christian symbols that are perceived as immutable truths to be defended and preserved. These common values constitute the core of America's religious self-understanding.
3. Ibid.
4. For a discussion of postmodernism, see Hassan, Ihab, “Toward a Concept of Post Modernism,” in The Postmodern Turn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 84–98.Google Scholar
5. Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 88; Marty, What Do We Believe, 29ff; Bellah, Robert, “Civil Religion in America,” in Beyond Belief (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 169-89.Google Scholar
6. Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 93.
7. Ibid.
8. Foster, Hai, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Foster, Hai (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), xii.Google Scholar
9. Marty, Martin E., The Pro and Con Book of Religious America: A Bicentennial Argument (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1975)Google Scholar. Marty analyzes the conflictual and dysfunctional attitudes that are prevalent within the culture by focusing on ten opposing categories of common behaviors and attitudes, such as: material vs. Spiritual, Community vs. individual, prejudice vs. tolerance, and so forth.
10. Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essay on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, 57ff.
11. Fletcher, Angus, Allegory: The Theory ofa Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1964), 305.Google Scholar
12. de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 14.Google Scholar
13. Owens, Craig, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 13 (Summer 1980): 59–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14. Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hai Foster, 95.
15. Ibid., 86.
16. Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 274ff.Google Scholar
17. Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 68ff.Google Scholar
18. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann, Walter and Hollingdale, R. J. (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 7ff.Google Scholar
19. Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Bouchard, Donald and Simon, Sherry (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 58.Google Scholar