DAVID LEHMAN
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the lavish trappings of the affair.
If
the writers present, by the very
fact of their attendance, were celebrating their freedom, wouldn't
their alienation seem more a metaphysical than a political condition?
Clearly discernible, at least to someone with a journalist's skepticism,
was a contradiction at the heart of things. The writer as the apotheo–
sis of alienation - a term no one satisfactorily defined all that week–
was to converge with other equally alienated souls to party it up at
luxurious locales ranging from Gracie Mansion to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. The four dozen foreign all-expenses-paid "guests of
honor" presumably enjoyed their accommodations at the St. Moritz
hotel, but few had trouble making the imaginative leap necessary to
situate themselves, figuratively, on a park bench. This helped pro–
duce some of the more dramatic confrontations at the congress but
also issued in unconscious self-parody. South African writer Breyten
Breytenbach took the tendency to its logical extreme when, at a
Tuesday panel on "Alienation and the State," he spun out a well–
worn conceit in which the writer as dog ("Canine C. Culture") snaps
at his leash, whimpers and barks.
In George Steiner's "fine mind," "the state" conjured up a vari–
ety of philosophical models in a variety of historical contexts. During
the week of January 12th, however, "the state" tended to mean one
state only; it became identified, tacitly or overtly, as the United States
at the present historical moment. Perhaps this was inevitable, given
the absence of a Soviet delegation. (The Kremlin had refused to co–
operate.) And given New York City as the meeting place, where a
"media event" atmosphere could be expected to prevail, perhaps it
was no less inevitable that debate would center on the real or imag–
ined sins of the United States, which stood accused of cultural impe–
rialism here and smug provincialism there, of a big stick policy in
Central America and of callous indifference to poverty at home.
There were, to be sure, attempts at doing an end run around the
classic left-right polarization that ensued. Mailer himself, exemplar
of the imperial imagination that he is, was prepared to construct the
congress's theme on mytho-poetic lines, treating national states as
metaphors for states of mind - which is, after all, what he character–
istically does in his political journalism. "Without depending alto–
gether onJung," he argued in his keynote address, "a case can still be
made that the state is an organism composed of many human beings
striving in concert and in opposition to one another who yet reveal
by the sum of their actions such faculties as expectation, anticipa–
tion, planning, scheming."
