KINGSLEY WIDMER
551
literary education, train in a true vocation, focus the most intelligent
and perceptive discourse, produce much real creative writing, avoid the
usual academic debasements, or, evidently, even create an audience for
art and intelligence (we seem to have more would-be writers than
actual serious readers), it has its place in the Waste Culture.
Those, unlike you and me, engaged in culture as secondary or
peripheral activity may well be symptomatic. They pursue not pure
wastefulness, leisure-that takes much courage-but compensation for
rather mean and wasted lives in role-playing, diversion, fantasy solace.
In this society, there is a distinctive wastefulness which goes with
artistic effort. Most aspiring writers and artists and thinkers fail ,
intrinsicall y as well as in yearned-for roles. The failed athlete at least
gets some exercise, and usually some companionable activity. The
simpler craftsman either gets an object of some utility or can hardly
avoid soon recognizing his inability to make it. Not so with the failed
novelist or poet or painter or thinker, caught in this culture with
insufficient reality tests and places, and usually knowing that recogni–
tion and other forms of success are mostly a hustle. Such wastefulness
of human aspiration and effort, however lonely and frustrating and
unjust and pathetic, yet provides much of our definition of cultural
roles. And, I suspect, some of its sad wasting has turned back on itself,
reenforcing Waste Culture.
The defiant separation of artistic modernism from much of society
provided certain critical powers and an oppositional richness. Yet
finally, as its legatees, we must view much of it as involuted romantic
self-wasting and narcissism. Is our art still "spilt religion"? Apparently
so, but not in a very adequate way, for we may suppose that religion
provides rather more communion and community than our cultural
activities with their human wastefulness. The current aggrandizements
and fakeries and involuted debris provide poor surrogates for a better
life, and not least so when dubiously mediated by educational bureauc–
racies and exploitative marketing into even more emphatic wastage.
One of the surviving values of modernism, I suggest in high
admiration, is rage. Political rage, surely, as a role call of the great
modernists' politics makes clear, but, perhaps more importantly for us,
they carried a rage <if;ainst culture itself. Has that rage against the
inadequacy of culture led to yet more emphasis on waste in post–
modernism? Undoubtedly. But most of those cultivated in the modern–
ist heritages would find abhorrent any attempts to negate the Waste
Culture in terms of some communal purposes-certainly one of the
lessons of the sixties. In our time it has only been barbaric political
