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PARTISAN REVIEW
intellectuals no longer look on their own country as a cultural desert
from which they must flee to more hospitable climes.
At the same time, the conquests of American arts and letters
are the work of people who were all expatriates at one time or
another, and who, in their creative work at least, united in one
continuous, unending protest against the dominant values of Amer–
ican life. This does not mean that they "rejected" America in any
social and political sense, but rather that they took American ideals
a good deal more seriously than those who found nothing to criticize
or protest against. So we have this paradox: the major reason for
abandoning a negative attitude toward "America and its institutions"
is itself a product and an expression of this negative attitude. What
does this reveal? Largely, I think, that what American artists and
intellectuals now accept is the reality of their own achievement,
and whatever changes have occurred in American life as a result
of their own impact on it. But these changes,
if
they are not
illusory, affect at best only a minuscule area of American life; and
I do not think they have led to any large-scale acceptance of the
dominant values of American society taken as a whole.
2. The problem of mass culture is by no means a new one,
nor is it peculiarly American.
In
Sein und Zeit,
on which Ortega y
Gasset certainly drew for his conception of the mass-man, Martin
Heidegger saw the authentic meaning of man's being distorted
be–
cause it was interpreted through the category of the
Man,
the
"they"-the category of mass culture; and he incorporated this
category into the fixed ontological structure of human experience.
However, it has long been recognized that the special conditions
of American culture made the problem particularly acute. Stendhal,
in the third preface to
Lucien Leuwen,
remarked that "the author
would be in despair at living in New York. He prefers to pay court
to M. Guizot rather than to his shoemaker." Not being a historical
determinist, I see no reason why the American artist and intellectual
must
adapt himself to mass culture and pay court to his shoemaker
(or his banker, if he has any money); though I should wish him
not to throw up any unnecessary barriers to being read by both
if
the shoemaker, as sometimes happens, is an old Italian anarchist
with a fondness for Carducci and Leopardi, or the banker a graduate
of the Harvard Business School who once sat in on a course by
F. O. Matthiessen.
