Read Leonard Cohen and Philosophy Online

Authors: Jason Holt

Tags: #Philosophy, #Essays, #Music, #Individual Composer & Musician, #Poetry, #Canadian

Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (8 page)

BOOK: Leonard Cohen and Philosophy
11.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

He’s Our Man, and Then Some

In one of his most enduring anthems (and one which he continues to perform in his concerts to this very day), Leonard Cohen tells his audience, “I’m your man.” Having performed the song over the course of nearly three decades, Cohen still pulls off a remarkable feat that is part of the crooner’s handbook: making each audience member believe that she or he alone is the sole addressee of this promise. But the statement can also be read in a slightly different way, for unlike other languages, English does not distinguish between the second person singular and plural: not only does it remain ambiguous who exactly “you” is, but also how many people are meant (“you” the individual, or “you” the crowd). If Leonard is different people’s man, then this would mean that he can be different people’s
idea
of a man, and oh boy (or should that be, “oh man”?), can these ideas differ!

Maybe you’ve heard: there’s “a war between the man and the woman” (“There Is a War”). It’s been going on for some time, but turned into a full-on academic battle of the sexes (and genders) in the twentieth century, as feminism became far more prominent in the Western world, especially throughout the 1960s and 1970s, even though some people slept through those wild years in a room in the Chelsea Hotel. Feminists challenged much of traditional Western philosophy and thought, fighting against social injustice and for political participation, killing one or another ladies’ man in the process. It took some time, however, before men, rather than being merely attacked for the injustices they had wreaked, became studied and theorized
as men
. It wasn’t until a few years later—around the same time Leonard Cohen wrote said song, which you can find on the album of the same name—that men and masculinities were examined in a variety of fields, which even resulted in the founding of
a new academic discipline: first known as Men’s Studies, later as Masculinity Studies.

Up until then, men had played a surprisingly small role in the field of Gender Studies, which was more or less synonymous with the study of women. Yet by focusing mostly on women, much of the story remains untold, for we can only hope to improve society gender-wise if we acknowledge that part of the reason women (or members of the LGBT community) often get treated so unfairly is that so many dominant notions of masculinity are just never questioned. Though it is their task to put received wisdom in doubt and to question what we take for granted, many philosophers have contributed to this state of things. Many of them (including Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer) not only took the dominance of men for granted, but also assumed that women have limited intellectual capacities.

At the same time, it’s not exactly like the majority of men were crying out to subject themselves to the critical eye of sociologists or psychoanalysts. On the contrary, when feminists called out for the boys to sing another song (as the previous one had grown old and bitter), most of them turned a deaf ear. It took some time for middle-class white men to understand, as Michael Kimmel put it, “that race, class, and gender didn’t refer only to other people, who were marginalized by race, class, or gender privilege,” and that they had been pretending their masculinity was invisible, as if “gender applied only to women”
(The Gendered Society,
pp. 6–7).

Since putting the category of masculinity on the map, scholars in Masculinity Studies have dedicated a lot to coming to terms with several ideas that seem mutually exclusive at first sight: that masculinity is, on the one hand, privileged yet somehow also, on the other, troubled by contrasting demands; that in a patriarchal society, men are generally considered the more powerful group, yet this pressure can simultaneously lead to expectations nobody can really fulfill; and—maybe the weirdest paradox of them all—that masculinity is perceived as something that is steadfast and reliable, but also in flux all the time—in other words,
“a man is still a man,” even though he’s constantly “passing through.”

Leonard Cohen’s songs reflect this strange predicament. A large part of his work’s appeal can be traced back to it, for he seems able to deliver any kind of masculinity his audience could possibly want. Sometimes we need him naked, sometimes we need him wild, and Leonard-the-singer is extremely versatile as he adopts a variety of male disguises, all of which come with their very own history of manhood and involve not just
old
ideas, but really
ancient
ones. Like the lovers he sings about in “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” Cohen’s men are not new and many have been there before them, but the gallery he assembles is still impressive. There is the suave, fearless “Field Commander Cohen,” the super-spy who crashes diplomatic cocktail parties and nearly drives Castro out of Cuba (not even 007 succeeded on this front). There are countless soldiers, some of them fighting in the army of Joan of Arc, some of them fighting for children of snow (“Winter Lady”). And there are all kinds of religious men: rabbis, Biblical shepherds, saints, and pilgrims (many of which symbols have certainly been inspired by Leonard’s own spiritual guide, the legendary Roshi).

It is very tempting to see Leonard Cohen not just as someone whose songs are brimming with archaic male images (even the knight in “Bird on the Wire” is borrowed from “some old-fashioned book”), but also as someone wholeheartedly in favor of this kind of manhood: the enigmatic stranger who will leave you in the morning, the deserting soldier, the eternal pilgrim—all of whom struggle with companionship and prefer to remain alone, renting rooms in the Tower of Song or browsing through their very own Book of Longing. Hollywood film producers evidently went with this first association, the enigmatic stranger, and have employed Cohen’s music accordingly (in addition to casting Cohen himself as the mysterious François Zolan in a 1986 episode of
Miami Vice
). If you want to learn his songs exclusively through film soundtracks, then brace yourself for a rough ride through the most male-centered movie genres you can
think of: the Western (Robert Altman’s
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
, 1970), the action movie (John Badham’s
Bird on a Wire
, 1990), the serial-killer film (Oliver Stone’s
Natural Born Killers
, 1994), or the superhero tale (Zack Snyder’s
Watchmen
, 2009). But there is more to it, for the masculinities advertised in Cohen’s lyrics are not as simple and straightforward as they appear at first glance. This is philosophy, after all—the only field where you can tell people about a mysterious stranger or about Superman and they will think Albert Camus (not Clint Eastwood) and Friedrich Nietzsche (not the last survivor of Krypton).

Working for Our Smile

You didn’t think it was that easy, did you? Just when we thought we had him categorized as the favorite balladeer of cowboys, sportsmen, and shepherds, a more careful glance reveals Cohen’s masculinities to be a lot more elusive than that. He is not one of your typical guys to hang out with, even though one of his most famous songs has him brag about sexual favors received from a then-unidentified if later revealed fellow celebrity (“Chelsea Hotel #2”)—a rare kiss-and-tell, but maybe it doesn’t count if you sing it. We owe Leonard Cohen a thorough reading of his lyrics, if only in order to find out that masculinity is a little more complicated and that we have to acknowledge various positions, not just one.

One major factor that puts a twist on Cohen’s masculinities is his well-known association with Jewish faith and tradition, which can be grasped in many of his songs. Historically, Jewish men were frequently subjected to mockery and discrimination, especially since the Jewish people have so often suffered persecution and injustice. Following centuries of marginalization and violence against Jews, this anti-Semitic heritage prevails in the form of stereotypes that are everywhere in popular culture. The classic comedy
Airplane!
(1980), for example, features a scene where one of the passengers asks the flight attendant for a bit of light reading,
and is handed a suspiciously slim pamphlet about “Famous Jewish Sports Legends.”

The alleged lack of athletic skill is just one of the stereotypes about Jewish men that can overshadow other, more important achievements: Woody Allen keeps telling interviewers that he was neither a bookworm nor a troubled existentialist in his youth but a gifted athlete, but somehow, it hasn’t really affected his persona. According to other, equally dominant stereotypes, Jewish men are associated with virtues such as wisdom and religious scholarship, which results in their being depicted in cartoons throughout history as hunched over books and wearing glasses. Thus, as Harry Brod says in “Jewish Men,” oppositions such as “mind over body, or brains over brawn,” are very important “in the lives of Jewish men, resulting in the life of the mind becoming valued and over-valued as a source of Jewish male identity” ( p. 442). All this amounts to a denigration of male Jews as somewhat incomplete men—“real men” don’t read but lead, and when they get into a dispute, they prefer to rely on their fists instead of well-crafted arguments.

Cohen himself often acknowledges these stereotypes and addresses them in his songs, sometimes with cynicism and anger (like when he identifies with the money lender or “the very reverend Freud” in “Is This What You Wanted”), but usually with irony and self-deprecating wit. He frequently reminds us of an inconvenient truth that anti-Semites will find hard to stomach: it is the Jewish tradition which is at the heart of Christian culture, and not just because it was a “little Jew who wrote the Bible” (“The Future”). One strategy which Cohen often resorts to in order to put a spin on stereotypes is to seemingly embrace and affirm them, before turning them all the more strikingly on their head—which means we have to add Socrates and his elaborate use of irony to the list of Cohen’s spiritual ancestors. Cohen’s pilgrims and saints, for instance, are not quite as pure and abstinent as you might think: On one occasion, Leonard practices on his sainthood, giving generously to everyone, before we’re informed that all he’s interested in is building a reputation for
himself as virtuous so as to impress a woman (“Came So Far for Beauty”). Master-pupil relationships are similarly infused with sexual undertones (“Master Song”).

Similarly, we may have said that archaic images of respected kinds of manhood prevail in Cohen’s songs, but that doesn’t stop him from mocking them wherever he can. The Old Testament world that his characters inhabit offers plenty of occasions for this, with its sheer endless story about the most dysfunctional family you can think of, where “murder, theft, deception, and other crimes too numerous to mention” are the rule rather than the exception (“Jewish Men,” p. 441). The Old Testament may teach us to obey our parents and instruct wives to remain under the authority of their husbands, but what a world dominated by these stern patriarchal views would look like is frequently illustrated in Cohen’s songs—and it is hardly the Garden of Eden which the listener will be reminded of. Cohen adapts the well-known “Story of Isaac” to show where father can lead son, and that it is a truly terrible world in which fathers are willing to sacrifice their children because they believe themselves to be on a divine mission. For the sons, inheriting the world and its rulebook from their fathers carries all kinds of burdens and obstacles, and you’ll often find them rejecting the legacy, or begging their fathers to change their names which are “covered up / with fear and filth and cowardice and shame” (“Lover Lover Lover”). And troubled manhood doesn’t end here.

Even if you are part of the pantheon of male role models, you can still fall short of the ideal. Sure, Cohen’s lyrical self often claims to be a soldier or a proud captain—but what good are these ranks if you are not part of the winning army in a battle, but a partisan whose side has already lost and who is now at the mercy of old women (“The Partisan”)? A cowboy who is neither patrolling the frontier nor protecting a town from bandits but one whose horse has run away (“Ballad of the Absent Mare”)? A captain whose ship is either leaking (“Everybody Knows”) or has not even been built (“Heart with No Companion”), or whose crew has left him
(“The Captain”)? All these examples show that the uniforms and badges which allegedly make a man are easy to mock—and, more troublingly for the men in question, they are even easier to mimic. Anybody, as Cohen himself will tell you, can pin an iron cross to his lapel, walk up to “the tallest and the blondest girl,” and ask her to remove her clothes (“Memories”), and the idea that much-admired men, whom young boys are supposed to look up to in order to learn about the importance of duty and ethics, might be frauds and impostors can be difficult to handle.

Some men (biological essentialists) thus take the view that a “real man” should not be defined by the medals he has won or the ideas he has created, but mainly by his alleged genetic “nature”: what they mean usually amounts to a dangerous cocktail of chromosomes, testosterone, and primary sexual characteristics. Is Cohen one of those guys because of the jokes he heaps on military men and sailors? Absolutely not. If anything, his humor turns even darker when he considers the kind of man who likes to eat meat, or who feels some kind of primordial beast awakening in him. Some of them are gently reminded that a mighty erection might not be the best of advisors (“Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-on”), some of them are lampooned for howling with the wolves (“I’m Your Man”). And don’t forget the artwork of that particular record:
I’m Your Man
comes with a photo of Cohen, the most enigmatic singer-songwriter, holding a peeled banana. The raw and uncivilized idea of a man comes dangerously close to an ape—not really a creature you’d want to model your gender identity on.

Giving Us All He’s Got

His rejection of a biological approach to gender and masculinity brings us to Cohen-the-performer, one (and, since the launch of his monumental world tour in 2008, maybe the most popular) of Leonard Cohen’s various fields of activity as an artist. Within Gender Studies, the concept of performance and performativity is linked to one of the most influential
and radical theories of the recent past. Few thinkers are as strongly opposed to defining relationships between men and women solely on the basis of their biological makeup as Judith Butler. In her groundbreaking book,
Gender Trouble
(1990), Butler introduces the idea that the classic distinction between sex (as biological) and gender (as cultural) does not hold up, that the very idea of sex is culturally produced as well, and that gender must be thought of as something that is
performed
(rather than embodied) by individuals. Masculinity, for instance, is something that has to be fought for, defended, proven, and put into practice time and again: when talking to friends, when building a career, when competing out on the sports field.

BOOK: Leonard Cohen and Philosophy
11.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Exiles by Elliot Krieger
Boiling Point by Watts, Mia
The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black
Thigh High by Edwards, Bonnie
Riccardo by Elle Raven, Aimie Jennison
Broken Storm Part One by May C. West
Galactic Battle by Zac Harrison