[AGL] Roger Shattuck Obit. Page 2

[Frances Morey]

                Obituaries                                 
        The Times  December 20, 2005
Professor Roger Shattuck
August 20, 1923 - December 1, 2005
Outspoken man of letters who denounced intellectual fads while writing perceptively on Proust and the French Modernists
                ROGER SHATTUCK, writer and intellectual historian, famously represented a wideranging curiosity and learning, together with a sharply opinionated viewpoint on literature and life. His Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education, and the Arts (2000) followed on his 1996 book Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, both deliberately provocative in their archconservative stance.   Like Harold Bloom, Shattuck enjoyed making lists of books to be highly praised and determinedly damned. Among the former he celebrated Camus’ The Stranger and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, as well as Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, on which he wrote three books: Marcel Proust (1982), Proust’s Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time and Recognition in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1983), and Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time (2000).                 NI_MPU('middle');  Among the damned, he cited three Frenchmen: Foucault, Sartre (for his political writing) and de
 Sade.   In Forbidden Knowledge, he said we should know a bit less about more, practising a “wise agnosticism”. He claimed repeatedly that we should above all celebrate the classics, reading every text aloud whenever possible, setting each work in its own historical environment and eschewing interpretations of the kind many contemporary teachers advocate as fruitful.   The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, which he co-founded, situates itself at the other pole from gender-based and semiotic analysis, deconstruction and the like.   However, very much on the positive side, Shattuck was the author of the most readable and influential study of the avant-garde in France: The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885-1918 (1958), which featured Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, and Erik Satie.   His studies of Helen Keller (a shorter edition of The World I Live In and The Story of My Life: The Restored Classic, Complete and Unabridged, Centennial Edition, both
 2003) and of The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of The Wild Boy of Aveyron (1980) both exemplify his intense interest in, and defence of, the human intelligence coming to its full flowering.   Shattuck put his passionate involvement in the topic to work in daily life, as a member of the school board of Mount Abraham Union High School in Bristol, Vermont, and as a frequent commentator on the need for a standard curriculum, in a continuing dialogue with educators.   His piece for The New York Review of Books, “The Shame of the Schools” (April 7, 2005), took on the topic with his accustomed fire and anger: “Here lies the great pedagogical short-circuit and break-down, brought on by the empty promises and dummy documents called ‘standards’. Without a specific curriculum, there can be no standards.”   It awakened, naturally enough, the accustomed storm of protest from the expected quarters, as well as the admiration of many. He always took the trouble to respond carefully to every
 single communication concerning anything about which he felt strongly.   A writer and editor of immense international standing, Shattuck wrote forewords to such useful compilations as Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902-1918 (2001) and The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (2003). One of his most engaging works is his The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts (1984), which takes up various controversies with great clarity and his usual wit, perfectly incarnating the role of the highly learned and articulate amateur, in the best sense of the word.   Shattuck was in every one of his works the most readable of authors. Even when one disagreed fundamentally with his point of view, one might well enjoy his argument. In one of their lengthy exchanges over the dangers of reading the Marquis de Sade, Luc Santé expressed what many have experienced in their quarrels with Shattuck: “This game has been a pleasure.”   Among all his other writings and declarations, his
 book reviews bear their own witness to his careful examination of every point. He wrote numerous reviews and letters to The New York Review of Books on such topics as the Mormons, Marcel Duchamp, Émile Zola, Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould, and the debate between religion and science.   He was an authority on Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, as well as a lifelong Pataphysician, even writing a book on the subject: Au seuil de la pataphysique.   Born in 1923, in Manhattan, Roger Whitney Shattuck was the son of a physician. He began his studies at Yale as a pre-med student, then enlisted in the US Army Air Force. He piloted a combat cargo aircraft in the Pacific, flying over Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped, an experience that proved the catalyst for his subsequent meditation on knowledge and morality in Forbidden Knowledge. 
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