618
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
now triumphantly established, is, in Bellow's own words, "disaffected,
subversive, radical." What seems to irritate him even more is that, as
befits an Age of Criticism, it is an atmosphere of ideas. The most curious
element in Bellow's speech is his intense animus not just toward certain
positions, but toward ideas in general. Thus he accuses critics of doing
little more than converting the modern classics "into other forms of dis–
course, translating imagination into opinion, or art into cognitions." He
argues that the "dehumanization of art" which Ortega described "may
in part be a result of the pressure they put upon it for meanings." Behind
these charges lies the conventional label of parasitism-which no critic
would wish wholly to deny- but bearing a strange new emphasis: criti–
cism is not simply a secondary activity but, by virtue of being cognitive
and discursive, a completely inauthentic one.
If
Bellow spares us the
standard broadside against the "Shakespeare industry" or the "Joyce
industry" it is only because his target is not some deviation from the
critical norm but criticism itself. His attack is not limited to
PMLA
and
the flood of warmed-over dissertations that pours from the university
presses; it is directed more against the quarterlies and the New York
"literati." He concedes that the "meanings" they seek in literature may
be more than academic jargon, that they may even be "manufactur–
ing 'intellectual history,'" but such is the ambience of his speech
that by the end " 'intellectual history,'" even without the inverted com–
mas, takes on as much a pejorative connotation as the ersatz "manufac–
turing." "Historicist" critics, Bellow concludes, "labor to create van–
guard conditions" willfully, by decision, after "reading books of cultural
history.... But genius is always, without strain, avant-garde." How
true. And yet how pernicious an equation: that which is reflective, ar–
rived at by conscious choice, is prima facie not genuine. Yet how many
literary movements, from Romanticism to Surrealism to the
nouveau
roman,
have been self-conscious in just such a "historicist" way.
The ironies of Bellow's position are inanifold and, on the whole,
appalling. What novelist writing today, what novelist since Thomas Mann
has been more intimately involved with ideas and with cultural and
intellectual history than Bellow (the most live part of whose last novel
was a series of polemical outbursts much like the present speech)? Nor
can we easily account for the vast personal bitterness that seems to lie
behind both the tone of the speech and its shadowy
ad hominem
refer–
ences. Keats, who was subjected to some of the most snobbish, un–
generous and uncomprehending reviews ever written, showed far less
resentment than Bellow does. Yet Bellow's novels have always been
favorites of the critics-sometimes beyond their proper merits-especially
