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novel we seem in danger of melting together in the same undifferentiat–
ed mass, and even Robbe-Grillet himself has betrayed (as one would
have thought) the craft premises of his fiction by praising this kind of
invitation to communal subjectivism. But the interesting thing is that
confession should be by its very nature an alienating form: we cannot–
certainly do not wish to - identify with someone who insists on laying
himself before us. On the contrary, we find our universalness in the art
which offers us - which has the rituals to offer us - privacy. However
universal, the
e~perience
of, say, Macbeth is an intimate and a private
experience: the experience of Mailer is a degradingly public one from
which we do right to recoil.
Norman Birnbaum
Aesthetics and politics are separate realms of existence - sep–
arate, but connected. The mediating structures are many: modes of sen–
sibility, structures of sentiment, depictions of the moral order (or disorder)
of the world. Mediation, further, may work by negation. Art is fascinating
precisely in the light of its distance from other realms, its inversion of
their constraints. Different forms of art have different sorts of political
reference. The political significance of a novel is more easily appre–
hended than that of an abstract painting, of a play more intuitively
than of a string quartet. The direct reproduction of reality must of
course confront politics - but the confrontation may well terminate in
adaptation, accommodation or capitulation. An art with a political
theme is not necessarily radical- even if there are situations in which
a depiction of life in terms other than its routine and surface aspects
constitutes radicalism.
Radical intention, however, does not guarantee aesthetic achieve–
ment. I have been struck, in reading American fiction emerging from
the political movement of the past decade, by its general lack of
aesthetic quality. Technically, some of the newer novelists are poor
cousins of Dos Passos. The inner lives of their protagonists seem to be
fiat, torture comes from without, from what the social scientists term
"role conflict." The term itself expresses an abominable foreshortening
of perspective, comprehensible in academic disciplines which hawk
standardized perceptions - but inexcusable in art. The description of
society as a system of external constraints, of conventions as barriers
to social fulfillment, is so pervasive that the subject disappears.
If
I
have correctly understood contemporary French aesthetics, an enormous
preoccupation with the subject - as unknown territory - dominates
refiection. In New York, then, an objective world terrifying in its
facticity; in Paris, a subjective one infinite in its structures. Our writers
attempt to encompass politics, the French ones to move beyond it.
The situation is practically its own parody. The terrible pressures of
the social order, which make of some American writing a kind of asocial-
