PARTISAN REVIEW
391
this concern with the links between the past and the present. The
three best and most typical pieces, on Pornography, on Silence and
on Vietnam, are essentially reexaminations of accepted ideas about
art and politics. In all three - as in the other essays too - the point
of view from which the accepted rules and definitions are revised is
the malleable sense of literature and society that shapes writing and
thinking today. But the language is the accepted language of criticism;
and the assumption throughout is that the way to understand the
current rejections of the past is through the continuities of criticism,
and history. This has been the traditional role of criticism. And
if
at times her tone is apocalyptic and oracular, there are precedents
in
the essays of Ortega y Gasset, and the manifestos of the Futurists
and the Surrealists.
Yet it is this self-assured and condensed style that offends most
academic critics, this mode of assertion and speculation that disdains
an orderly argument, that repeats old ideas with the same verve with
which it explores new ones, that bypasses contemporary American
criticism as though
it
didn't exist. Hence some of her criticism is
thought to be homemade and half-baked by academicians brought
up to be orderly. My own feeling, however, is that while rigorous
analysis
will
reveal many such failings, it doesn't do justice to one of
the few bold and original minds to be found among the younger
critics. And anyway, the so-called order of most academic criticism
comes from playing it safe. The usual run of criticism is devoted to
the application and refinement of some accepted views of literature
and society. When the going assumptions change, the kind of criticism
that appears in most of the literary magazines suddenly shifts to new
subjects and new methods, as it applies itself to illustrating the latest
apprQach. Hence the succession of modes, each with its little army
of critics - and campfollowers - in the last few decades: social
criticism, myth criticism, symbolic criticism, textual criticism, meta–
phoric criticism, linguistic criticism. And the striking thing is the
extent to which most critics work with borrowed and unconscious
assumptions. Susan Sontag's shortcomings, on the contrary, are usual–
ly of her own making. Thus it can be said that the essay on Silence
never really overcomes the ambiguities of the term, and it confuses
the deflation of the human claims of art talked about by Ortega
and exemplified in earlier abstract and experimental painting and
writing with the deflation of
art
itself, in pop, rock, ephemeral
