345
PARTISAN REVIEW
Doris Lessing's communication in this issue is one of the
few public statements about the Rushdie affair that is independent
and balanced-one that separates the issues of literary criticism
from the methods of censorship. I myself think that
The Satanic
Verses
is not Rushdie's best book. It is lush, overwritten , speciously
lyrical, too long, and ultimately boring. That most writers did not
separate the faults of the book from the cause of intellectual free–
dom may be because there has been a dearth of new causes
lately, and people starved for a cause seem to have rushed into
this one without making the proper distinctions. Diana Trilling, I
should add, is also one of the few writers who kept the two issues
apart
*
*
*
Barbara Herrnstein Smith's credentials would appear to be
impeccable . She is a member of the famed English department at
Duke University, and she is a past president of the Modern
'I
Language Association. In addition, her recent book,
Contingencies
(
of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory,
has been ap–
proved by such public figures as Frank Kermode, Pierre
Bourdieu, Catherine Stimpson, and Michael Walzer, though I
suspect they liked her philosophical speculations rather than her
literary theories. In any case, my own reading of Smith is more
critical: in some sense her view of literature comes close, in my
opinion, to a
reductio ad absurdum
of deconstructionist theory.
Smith's book is essentially a disquisition on the idea of rela–
tivity, which she claims applies to the judgment of literary
works. And in discussing the nature of what she calls "the con–
tingencies of value," she argues that judgment involves the
"value" of a literary work. (Her philosophic analysis of the
meaning of value I shall leave to philosophers, though I should
note that her entire argument is questionable . For though we
know that many judgments and values are not absolute, this does
not mean that they are endlessly variable and relative, as Smith
seems to believe.)
