STATE OF CRITICISM
71
ROGER SHATIUCK: Well, we've had three very pungent general state–
ments and the convention now is to allow the members of the panel
here to say something, and then members of the audience.
RICHARD GILMAN: I'd like to make a couple of comments, especially
about what Elizabeth Fox-Genovese said about my talk. First, a
general one is that
I
should have hoped, and I'm not suggesting that
it didn ' t happen, that if conferences of this kind are
to
have any value
at all, they will not have value if they establish positions, defend
positions, and so forth.
C.
Day Lewis once said that sometimes it is
better to be shown
to
be wrong than to be right. Now
I
think that's
important. By wrong and right here, what
I
mean to say is that all
that can be established at any time is that this is likely or that is
likely. There are no wrongs or rights and no eternal truths in these
subjects.
I
don't think
I
was doing one of the things Betsy implied
that
I
was doing, which was to talk about the impossibility or the
inappropriateness of criticism to popular culture.
I
think
I
was
talking about the impossibility or difficulty that
I
saw for criticism
of a traditional kind
to deal with popular culture.
I
think
I
left it
open that another kind of treatment of these things may come about
if we call it something else.
I
think
I
left enough of an implication
that criticism, as we have known it, may very well be superseded,
may very well have played out its part.
PETER BROOKS: There seems to be an agreement among the speakers
that popular culture is ephemeral, or transitory.
I
couldn't disagree
with that more. You can't use ephemerality as a criterion.
RICHARD GILMAN:
I
was talking about ephemeral things in the mind.
Ephemeral in an intellectual realm, or in a psychological realm.
George Bernard Shaw once said, talking about the popular London
theater, that he went to the theater and found himself bludgeoned
into all sorts of emotions, but that after he left it took him only two
blocks of walking
to
shake off those feelings, and then he was left in
the state he was in before.
I
think the point Shaw was making, and
one of the points
I
was making, was that the effects of certain kinds
of popular culture, popular literature, popular movies, and so forth,
are ephemeral. They do not last. They do not remain in the
consciousness. It 's my contention that certain articles of what we call
popular culture do not live in the memory.
DANIEL AARON: It seems to me that one possible meeting ground of
popular culture and high art would be the memory of this popular
culture on the minds of artists and writers who, as children, were
subjected to these books at a time when their minds were very plastic.
