144
PARTISAN REVIEW
for them in the academy. Perhaps we are fated in this period to be
suspended between the boredom of the failed experimental novel and
the banality of the pleasing and easy narrative, embroidered with a
few modernist devices. Only a few writers of fiction today seem to fill
this space: one thinks, for example, of Bellow, Roth, and Brodkey,
who are novelists of ideas and not simply storytellers. Brodsky makes
the comparison with the West when he says,
There must be some lesson for other literatures in the plight of
Russian prose in this century, for it's still a bit more forgivable
for Russian writers to operate the way they do, with Platonov
dead, than for their counterparts in this country to court banali–
ties, with Beckett alive.
The comparison on this level, between the two cultures, is striking.
But Beckett's is not a good example of advanced Western writing, for
while his novels may be original, they are not very interesting. Only
his plays remind one of earlier modernist writers in the reality of their
stylized unreality. And Brodsky's citing of Grass, who is a boring nov–
elist, as one of the writers of the West who occupies a decent "middle
ground" is also very questionable.
In addition to the main ideas in these essays, there are a number
of bold remarks that are worth quoting because they exhibit Brodsky's
lack of hesitation in flaunting conventional thinking. For instance:
In essence, all existing art is already a cliche: precisely because it
already exists.
And:
The tragic achievement of Auden as a poet was precisely that he
had dehydrated his verse of any form of deception, be it a rheto–
rician's or a bardic one. This sort of thing alienated me not only
from faculty members, but also from one's fellows in the field, for
in every one of us sits that red-pimpled youth thirsting for the in–
coherence of elevation.
Also, his view of art and democracy:
At best it will be called subjective or elitist. That would be fair
enough except that we should bear in mind that art is not a dem–
ocratic enterprise, even the art of prose which has an air about it
