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PARTISAN REVIEW
that people can read it blind, like braille. " It is possible, in the current
reign of conceptualism and ideological rage, that literature itself is out
of date. In the best universities criticism has been replaced by literary
theory, which is convenient when you consider how little students read
for pleasure. In lesser places it has been replaced by sawdust for the
intellect like black studies, women's studies, and that chain of fraudu–
lent liberations that clanks its way through every convention of the
Modern Language Association: the novel of androgyny in New South
Wales.
It
is hard for the children of oppression to think of art as
engaging faculties subtler than anger. Black writing often seems
drowned in the urgency of struggle, and since there is little interest
outside the once liberal community, which now is evaporating, it is not
surprising that most black authors have never published a second
book.
It
is hard to be a Jew , said Sholem Aleichem; it is peculiarly hard
to be a Jewish writer. The enemies of the Jewish writer are predomi–
nant in his own household, demanding
to
know why Isaac Bashevis
Singer writes about sex, Norman Mailer about violence, Saul Bellow
about himself. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that
Jews from Eastern Europe, which used
to
mean orthodoxy, felt free
to
flout the commandment against engraving images. Though there seem
to be legions of Jewish novelists today, the so-called Jewish novel, the
novel of emancipation from the commandments, the bourgeoisifica–
tion of the immigrants ' children, is visibly over. The real subject that
haunts the Jew cannot be treated in literature, for a civilization capable
of accepting the murder of a million Jewish children is still the only
civilization we know.
The creative element ungraspable by criticism, the element that
makes for independent beauty, for the touch of life in itself, the psychic
moment, the particular scene that brings the wonder of our existence
home to us-that is not easy to find in the literature of an always
beleaguered people, precarious, isolated and unloved. What the Israeli
novelist Amos Oz complains of is true for more than Jews-''I'm not
terribly happy with the Jewish-American novelists .... Too wise, their
characters always exchange punchlines instead of talking to each other,
their books are just clever sociology. They don 't have the echo of the
universe, you don't see the stars in their writing."
One reason for this weakness among black writers is the exaggera–
tion of powerlessness, the discursiveness that as in the case of so
talented but floundering a writer as James Baldwin shows itself in the
projection of sexual tangles onto a political cause-the latest cause year
