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PARTISAN REVIEW
wonder why Craft ditched his original title, since he did get around
to an ingenious discussion of
The Importance of Being Earnest,
and what
matter if his reading of Wilde's seminal play could or couldn't be
said to be "prophylactic"?
Broadly, there can be two justifications for the separation of
rhetoric from meaning. The first invokes poetic license, the motive
for metaphor, and would claim for the critical act the properties of a
creative work. Much of the phrasemaking that made its way into my
notebook was governed, I suspect, by this consideration. A rather
less benign explanation for the tendency was put forth, in simple and
direct language, by Stephen Heath of Cambridge University at a
frankly political session on "Literature and Propaganda." Heath
mounted a defense of propaganda. After noting that it is considered
"a bad thing," as opposed to literature, "its antonym," he com–
mented that" it should be easy to reverse this hierarchy," since pro–
paganda is fundamental to "political action." An appropriate
response to this line of reasoning is to leave the room (" a paradigm
of the principle of exit") but not before remarking the speaker's glib
little camouflage act. The loaded word in his proposition is "hierar–
chy," and its usage implies that truth in the realm of art cor–
responds to repressive authoritarianism in the realm of the polity.
Feel the sour taste of that in your mouth as you shut the door gently
behind you.
A political subtext was only latently or ambiguously discernible
in most of the sessions I attended.
If
it came to the fore at
"Democracy and Empire," where
The New Criterion's
Hilton
Kramer squared off with the University of Wisconsin's Herbert
Blau, it's because neither man has the habit of calling a spade an im–
plement for deep digging. Blau blasted American "cultural im–
perialism," railing against "the hegemony of the media" with its
"control of the means of communication and the signifying ap–
paratus." To which Kramer astutely retorted that Blau based his
own information on the very newspapers he derides. The lines were
drawn cleanly, clearly, and with marked civility, given the irrecon–
cilable nature of the espoused positions. Blau: "If half the people on
earth hate us, [it's] for a good reason." Kramer: "There has never
been an American empire, and there isn't an American empire to–
day, in the sense that there's a Soviet empire." Blau was ar–
ticulating what many MLA members seem to hold as an article of
faith; Kramer's presence on the panel was thus by way of giving at
least the illusion of equal time to the neoconservative position.
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