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who is praised nor him who praises." Evidently a third person is also ruled
out of account-the reader-for Enzensberger goes on to insist, in a manner
so characteristic of intellectuals influenced by the Hegelian-Marxist tradi–
tion, that the true explanation for our dislike of Becher's eulogy resides in
the fact that "the language of poetry refuses its services to anyone who uses
it to immortalize the names of those exercising power. The reason for this
refusal lies in poetry itself, not outside it. "
Facets of this approach, of course, are admirable, most notably the
rejection of the crude and hitherto prevalent Marxist search for the political
value of a work of art in its "objective" portrait of society (Lukacs), its overt
celebration of the Party, etc. (Zhdanov), or its author's attitude toward the
Berlin Wall or the Great Wall of Mao. Like Mayakovsky, Tretyakov, Breton,
and Brecht before him, Enzensberger is both Marxist and modernist. Unfor–
tunately, so great is the pressure within the Continental Left never to let
one's pants drop and be caught floundering, bare-buttocked and erect, in
the bourgeois whorehouse of personal taste, that Enzensberger feels con–
strained
to
counter Lukacs, etc. with an "objectivity" no less rigorous than
their own.
Now I admire Enzensberger's talents (he is also a gifted linguist), and
I salute that part of rum, a most considerable part, that penetrates the
rhetoric and postures of his fellow-rebels, laying bare the democratic sham
of the Cuban Communist Party as clear-sightedly as he earlier exposed the
democratic sham of Germany's great coalition. He is a writer who is not
afraid to be found alone, even at the cost of being ostracized by all the clans
and cliques who support their identities with the flying buttresses of the
hour. I have nevertheless found his essays, which span a wide variety of
subjects, from the meaning of treason to the" media industry, " the avant–
garde, and political ecology, difficult to enjoy. They lack warmth, vitality,
and contact with everyday life, even though such qualities are recognized
by Enzensberger in passages he quotes by other authors such as Jan Myrdal
and Susan Sontag.
Part of the trouble, I suspect, lies in his periodic capitulation to the
very habits of mind he rightly distrusts. The monster manipulating the
machine keeps reappearing even when Enzensberger is at pains to stress that
the monster
is
the machine; and while valuably pointing out that the Left
would do well to scrutinize the manipulation of the media manifest in every
actual social system, Cuba no less than the United States, he is irresistibly
drawn by the soft chocolates of anticapitalist reductionism: "the ruling
class," "the revolution," and, of course, "the system." How seriously
should one take a commentator who declares the problem of violence and
illegality to be, simply, superfluous for those "who make the revolution,"
