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current scene from the point of view of some ideal esthetics of law and
order. It is the good old times of aging moralists, that, like most
nostalgic versions of history, never existed.
If
one were
to
look for the
seeds of our contemporary sensibility, one would immediately find
oneself in the middle of the nineteenth century and gradually work
oneself back at least to the Renaissance. But an even more important
question posed by Bell's argument is the source of what he conceives to
be our cultural decline. Here Bell's failure to distinguish between the
commercial and popular culture on one side and the serious culture on
the other makes him an unwitting ally of those who find it profitable
to blur the distinctions. It is no secret that the commercial culture has
been exploiting the more chic aspects of modernism to feed the
growing cultural market, but despite Bell's lengthy denunciations of
the pop scene he plays down the role of the media in creating a taste for
novelty. And it is also no secret that some of the seemingly serious
strains in the arts today have been affected by the seductions of the
marketplace-more in fiction and painting, less in poetry. Nevertheless
a good deal of fiction and poetry has resisted these pressures, sometimes
to the point of becoming too internalized and esoteric. And Bell's
blindness to the efforts of a wide range of talent sounds like the age-old
disapproval by an older, conservative generation of a new scene. Thus,
when Bell disposes of the nihilism and formlessness of current
fiction-by which he apparently means writers like Pynchon, Heller,
Barthelme-one gets no sense of the power of these novelists, or of the
fact that for the most part they do not try to satisfy the popular demand
for easy and sensational solutions. And it is not, as Bell implies,
because of a love of disorder, that their work reflects the organized
absurdities of modern life.
In the end, what does all this talk about moral and cultural chaos
mean. Bell has a long disquisition on the transformation of needs into
wants in a capitalist economy, presumably leading to the creation of a
consumer culture. But it does not seem to have occurred to Bell that it is
the consumer society and not the modern tradition that is responsible
for the boom in pop and chic. And it is hard to escape the conclusion
that one is dealing in this book not with the contradictions of
capitalism, but with Bell's own contradictions.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
