BOOKS
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most convenient hours. Only the spectacular festival where people
obligingly mimic themselves can meet expectations. A Walt Disney
Venice, it occurs to me, not too far removed from the real thing, com–
plete with San Marco and the Campanile as well as pigeons, would be
a spectacular success. The real Venice is too crowded, the canals smell
bad, and sanitary conditions leave much to be desired. . .
Boorstin provides a first-rate phenomenology of American mass
culture even though some of it may be overdrawn and there are
occasional lapses into superficiality. He has the historian's sense of the
telling detail, and his grounding in American history prevents him
from succumbing to the fallacy of misplaced contemporaneity which is
so conspicuous in vulgarizers such as Vance Packard. Boorstin knows
that the flight from reality which he describes has some of its roots
in historical experience.
This is clearly an important book. Why then is it finally not a
fuHy satisfying one? I think the main reason is that Boorstin fails to
give us any clues as to the causes of the phenomena he so insistently
sets before our eyes. One finally wants to know why all this happens.
Granted the utter depravity of popular taste, granted the allegedly
widespread inability t<v accept or even recognize reality, what accounts
for it all and what can be done about it? After he has given us on more
than two hundred and fifty pages an anatomy of our modem hell,
Boorstin ends with a page or so of somewhat pathetic exhortations.
We should try to reach outside of our images, he says. We should
listen to the messages from the past, from God, from the world. We
should break through the wall of illusions. "Then we may know where
we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go."
This seems to me a startlingly disappointing conclusion. It fatally re–
sembles the injunction of pre-Freudian psychiatry which tended to en–
join the suffering patient to "pull himself together and face reality."
But what if he could not face reality because it was just too frightening
for him to contemplate? What if the world of pseudo-events which
Boorstin so acutely describes is yet preferred to the "real" reality be–
cause the latter is so threatening and anxiety-provoking that it must
be
shut out? Any psychoanalyst knows nowadays that neurotic symptoms
perform important functions for the patient so that to "analyze them
away" without changing the underlying "reality situation" may indeed
lead to total breakdown. The symptom provides only substitute satis–
faction, true enough. But even substitutes may help to maintain at
least a precarious balance. I am not arguing here, of course, for the
perpetuation of a pseudo-world of illusions, but rather for the idea so
