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then go on to make what seemed to me a generalized indictment of
the New York intellectual simply because Gore Vidal writes in praise
of buggery and so on.
HOWE: The point is, if we existed, we'd be no good.
KRAMER: It's what is known as a paradox.
DICKSTEIN: Let me mention one or two other paradoxes. Sometimes I
get confused by paradoxes. We have what seems to be a paradox of an
argument which I agree with, which is that the culture of modernism
has become an established culture-that it's been in great demand in
the media or at least it's had influence on the media, it's been in
demand in the universities, and what puzzles me is not so much what
Hilton Kramer said. It was the tone of irony. Would it be better if all
of these intellectuals had remained an alienated class?
If
journalism
and the universities had continued to behave toward the intellectuals
as they did in the 1930s and 1940s and kept them an isolated class,
more or less without jobs and without any influence on the culture?
It was hard for me to pinpoint the reasons for the ironic tone. Hilton
Kramer did acknowledge that there has been some value in the
assimilation of the intellectuals in the criticism of the arts, but aside
from Irving Howe's description of some of the odder kinds of
mergers of journalism and intellect, some of the kinds of caricatures
we see of the New York intellectual style in the world of journalism,
which I perfectly agree with, I couldn't see why this was a lamentable
thing, unless it was simply to point out that the so called avant-garde
or the avant-garde stance of modernism was no longer the case.
Well, it's obvious that when a culture is diffused, when a culture does
achieve a kind of unexpected triumph, that the concept of the avant–
garde no longer has any of the same kind of significance that it had
before. But I don 't see why we have to cling to the concept of the
avant-garde or why the concept of the avant-garde is any longer
meaningful ....
KRAMER: Well, could I just address myself to that, because I would like
to pinpoint the exact issue that
Mr.
Dickstein is questioning about
and it's in this sentence of my paper where I speak of the foremost
pleasure of this term "New York intellectual " being the illusion that
it affords those who are in charge of our cu itural life to still harbor
the illusion that they function as rebels against it.
It
is not that I
necessarily wish that everyone was still alienated, although one does
have a certain nostalgia for it, and certain values followed from it
that are not readily accessible among the assimi lated; but whether
one yearns for that alienation or not, the one thing one has a right to
