196
PARTISAN REVIEW
I wonder whether, if Mr. Ortega of Nicaragua had addressed the
group, anyone would have walked out. I hope not." Notwithstand–
ing the difference in literary merit between Grass's
The Tin Drum
and
Koch's
Mayor,
one would have to say that his Honor clearly took the
debate on points.
Meanwhile, "The still sad music of humanity,! Nor harsh nor
grating, though of ample
powerl
To chasten and subdue," was try–
ing to make itself heard as the battle lines hardened. Increasingly,
language itself seemed to be at issue. "When Mr. Shultz spoke and
we didn't," Doctorow said on Monday afternoon, "language was
overturned."
It
was easier to follow the logic of Robert Hughes, the
Australian-born art critic, who warned against speaking of "some
monolithic abstraction called The State." To fail to acknowledge dif–
ferences among states was foolish, he contended; and to apply, as
Rosario Murillo did, the word "genocide" to America's Nicaraguan
policy was to debase the language. The spontaneous ovation accorded
Amos Oz's memorable speech tipped one off to the audience's resis–
tance to any political stampede. Oz questioned the smugly sanctimo–
nious impulse so evident during the proceedings. He conjured up
the spectacle of demonstrators in Vienna advocating the cause of
guinea pigs, then added that the same righteous folk might well be
capable of shooting hostages for the sake of the animals. "Let us not
ascribe a demonic imagination to the state and a redeeming imagi–
nation to ourselves," he concluded.
One grew more and more to prize those speakers, like Oz, who
tried to frame the discussion in terms transcending partisan political
lines. Mailer proposed the idea of historical states "as embodiments
of a creative vision" - a potentially fruitful idea that no one seemed
very eager to pursue. Saul Bellow, offering a short history of "aliena–
tion," presented a nuanced view of what the founders of democracy
- "the state of nature philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries" - did or did not promise for future generations, and
whether and to what extent their promises were kept. John Updike
spun out a charming conceit that at first hearing seemed somewhat
frivolous but upon inspection struck one as more than merely clever.
The blue mailboxes of an average American street, which Updike
lavishly extolled, suggested an obligation happily met, the democratic
assurance of the tribal need of "interconnection." But they also sug–
gested the desired limits of governmental involvement in the writer's
life. This became clear when Updike quietly made known his hetero–
dox view that governmental subsidy of the arts may not be a benevo-
