620
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
conclusion of
Herzog-yet
indicates an imaginative return to "rooted
norms." Few of us will fail to respond to the observed truth in Bellow's ac–
count of the intellectuals' relation to literature: "they talk about it; they
treasure it; they make careers of it; they become an elite through it; they
adorn themselves with it; they make discourse of it. It is their material,
their capital." Nor should we be insensitive to the moral vulnerability of
combining radical and subversive ideas with a comfortable middle-class
existence. Yet unless we share Bellow's animus against discourse, we need
not condemn such a combination as mere hypocrisy. Thought and action
have not so simple a relation that the one is valueless unless conjoined
directly with the other. Ideas can have a life of their own, and affect
practice in unexpectedly mediate ways.
Bellow's position would be more attractive if he actually were
asking the intellectuals to live out their radical ideas, to emulate the
Russian intelligentsia rather than the German. Instead he seems to
demand that they give them up, that they come to accept "rooted
norms" as he has come to accept the middlebrow public that has at last,
deservedly or not, embraced
him
for its own. (It is symbolically ap–
propriate that he should present his attack to the readers of the
Times
Book Review,
upon whose latent-and perhaps "healthy"?-prejudices
against both modern literature and academic criticism he implicitly
relies. )
It is in this acceptance that Bellow's speech is most deficient, especial–
ly in the impoverished sense of the function of criticism to which it leads.
Bellow means to shock, and the scandal is complete if we recall those
famous formulas of Arnold in "The Function of Criticism at the Present
Time": "disinterestedness," "the free play of the mind," "to learn and
propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." From this
to what Bellow calls "redescription" is a long, long fall, but for all the
exegetical hackwork that passes for thought today the fall I think is
largely Bellow's own. Arnold readily agreed that "the critical power is of
lower rank than the creative," but he could imagine a fruitful interac–
tion between the two, because he endowed both with functions that were
at once creative and truly critical, that involved changing the world. He
would immediately have seen the
non sequitur,
as well as the default of
criticism, in Bellow's assertion that "we now have a growing class of
intellectuals or near-intellectuals. There are millions of college graduates."
In spite of being a respectable academic and school inspector, Arnold was
a witty and implacable critic of the quality of life of the Victorian
middle-class. In that great essay, as a recent observer has remarked, "it is
