264
PARTISAN REVIEW
Yet this sober, mature message is being drowned out at the mo–
ment by a melancholic nostalgia that does not respond to argument;
it is a mood , something in the air. One began to feel it as early as
1987 , in such books as Alain Finkelkraut's
La
difaite de la pensee
and
Bernard-Henri Levy's
Eloge des intellectuels,
which carried the familiar
refrain - familiar, that is, to American ears - that serious intellectual
and political debate was being drowned out by a barrage of media
images and fast-food culture . (Allan Bloom's book, published simul–
taneously in France as
L 'ame desarmee ,
only confirmed this French
self-denunciation .) The adjective most frequently used by intellec–
tuals today is "media-tized": politics has been
midiatise,
sex has been
midiatise,
even the life of letters has been irreversibly
midiatise
by the
press and by relatively serious television shows like "Apostrophe"
and "Oceaniques." Now, many of these criticisms are true , or, as is
the case when the state of French art is lamented, have been true for
quite some time . But somehow the French are convinced that their
malaise is bound up with the cooling of the old passions, the disap–
pearance of the familiar ideological lines, the arrival of consumer af–
fluence , and the birth of normal, republican, horsetrading politics.
And not just life has lost its savor : one important French liberal even
tried to convince me that French cooking has been ruined under
Mitterrand .
An American coming fresh upon this scene hardly knows how
to respond. He has heard so many of these arguments before - over
"our country, our culture," over "the end of ideology" - that he must
once again struggle to remember the answers .
If
anything, he will
envy the French this moment. However banal the latest French elec–
tions may have seemed , they cannot have approached the level of the
latest American campaigns . However
midiatise
Parisian intellectual
life has become , it still reflects the fact that writers and thinkers are
held in an esteem unimaginable in the States . And to be released
from the old, dreary ideological disputes (even for new dreary ones)
sounds like a utopian fantasy to anyone reared on the intrigues of
American intellectuals and professors . Yet when Franz-Olivier Gies–
bert , editor of the formerly leftist magazine
Le
Nouvel Observateur,
recently left his post to become editor of the daily newspaper of the
right ,
Le Figaro,
this was not taken as a sign of intellectual and
ideological progress on both sides . Instead, it was almost universally
regarded as yet another symptom of the French malaise.
One tries hard not to dramatize what is, after all , an already
melodramatic mood . And one can hardly blame the French for turn-
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