Vol. 39 No. 3 1972 - page 401

PARTISAN REVIEW
401
He may of course have been right at the time, for what that is
worth. "The moral charge against Miss Sontag," comments Richard
Gilman, "which is mainly a charge against the kinds of art she is in–
terested in, issues from the same morale such charges always do: ap–
prehension in the face of new consciousness." Gilman's readiness to
champion the new consciousness can mean little to us now. Her pro–
nouncements may have modified the course; she may still be spoken of
in the smoking-room; in a hundred years her contribution to the
Zeit–
geist
may even be studied by scholars. But in the here and now she is
both explicated and ingested: the why and how about her are no longer
questions.
Still more so with
Macbird.
At the time Gilman called it "an ap–
palling thing to have in our midst," degrading protest into a narcissistic
carnival. The general point remains valid, and we can salute Gilman's
sense while we have forgotten the evils it went up against - we have
enough new ones of our own. We hear that Elizabeth Hardwick judged
An American Dream
"an intellectual and literary disaster," but Gilman
could not bring himself to be so easily dismissive.
An effort to see it as something more calls on us to see how catastrophe may
retain its own face yet become, through the matter's particular risks and
significances, a kind of strange triumph, a new, maimed heroism.
I suspect Gilman is really saying that Mailer's catastrophe - like all
such in literature good and bad - is to be escaped into and indulged
in ; but we could not escape into the literature of the past if we felt its
authors were indulging themselves simultaneously in the same way. And
what, incidentally, were the particular risks of this matter? The author
does not run risks in writing but
in
living, as do we all; but the notion
of a communal shared
risk
in literature is typical of our modish dynam–
ism about contemporary art. Live dangerously, boys - see a
film!
Note,
too, the face-saving of
"a kind of
strange triumph" paired with the com–
pulsive genuflection of "a
new,
maimed heroism." Gilman's brave ac–
ceptance merges into Miss Hardwick's dismissal until the eternity in–
voked by Mallarme at the tomb of Poe -
Tel qu'en lui-meme enfin
l'eternitl le change
-
has told its truth about Mailer.' For when Gilman
has eternity at his disposal, when he is writing about Strindberg or Ibsen,
his academic virtues burst into flower and he becomes the master of
his subject as Brooks and Bersani are masters of theirs.
Miss McCarthy's essays on Salinger and Burroughs are fine per–
formances of demolition and placing, but here again the focus of con–
troversy is blurred by too brief a time lag. How right she is about "the
closed circuit" of Salinger, where the medicine cupboard is a character
and the Glass family is "its own best audience" (as Norman Mailer is
ours ). The intellectuals also seemed right in 1880 when they dismissed
Dickens because everything in his novels was "a character." She admits
that
Naked Lunch
is coterie literature for addicts and former addicts.
Oblomov,
when one comes to think about it, was once coterie literature
for Russian rentiers, but it escaped with time into a wider context and
grew in an unexpected direction. Burroughs's "basketful of crabs" may
proliferate in the same way, but if so it will have nothing to do with our
present critical assessment of him.
297...,391,392,393,394,395,396,397,398,399,400 402,403,404,405,406,407,408,409,410,411,...476
Powered by FlippingBook