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art-and the seemingly greater emphasis on the nonrational compo–
nent of art was connected with the reaction against the classical
sensibility of T.S. Eliot and the New Critics. One has only to read
critics like Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman to recognize that the
current revival of romanticism is not the raucous political pheno–
menon Bell makes it out to be. Finally, a careful reader will note that
after criticizing the culture of the sixties for not being political, he
reverses himself when he says the "hallmark of the sixties was a
political and cultural radicalism."
A few more random examples of a method that can lead only to a
kind of high-minded confusion. Bell appears to misunderstand Susan
Sontag's strictures against interpretation, taking them to mean a
condemnation of criticism, instead of a condemnation of the kind of
criticism that translated works into the fashionable modes of intellec–
tual consumption. Similarly, Bell mistakes environmental sculpture,
which tries to close the gap between art and architecture, for something
he calls "eclipse of distance," which according to Bell, is a sign of
esthetic decline because it narrows the distance between a work and its
audience. Here, again, Bell writes as though literary history did not
exist, as though, for example, Greek poems or plays, or medieval
morality plays, were not closer to their audiences than those today are.
And Bell speaks of the formlessness of contemporary fiction, as though
it were simply a rendezvous with chaos, and not a different idea of
form, an idea of form based on the unity of experience rather than the
chronology of narrative, which, incidentally, was not a universal but
was grounded in the conventions of the story-tell er and in older
notions of reality and causality in human relations. The break between
modern fiction and that of the nineteenth century is not in the idea of
the self, or violence, or sexual freedom-in any of Bell's nihilist or
liberating categories-but in the shift to a more complex view of
reality, a shift, that is, from a linear naturalism to a vertical structure of
experience. Reality is no longer thought to be something simply
observable and logical, something out there waiting to be imitated by
art; it is now conceived to be a construction which conveys the sense
not the look of existence.
But Bell's thesis raises even larger questions about the relation of
art and culture to the society. As I have said, he suggests throughout
that the disease of modernism destroyed some healthy body of tradi–
tional culture, but nowhere is that mythically normal culture defined
or located. The truth is, as I have suggested, that such a past exists only
in the retroactive fantasies of conservative critics who condemn the
