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PARTISAN REVIEW
tool of image-enhancement. Levine's documented assertions may give some
pause to those presently defending the immutable sanctity of the "canon."
The presentation is not without its problems, however. Chief among
these is Levine's refusal to draw what has to be a crucial distinction - that
between "culture" and "entertainment." The images we get ofworking men
and women stomping and catcalling through a performance of, for example,
Othello,
do not give us a sense of culture spreading its beams across lines of
class. They suggest, rather, that the play is being brought down to the level
of the farcing and banana juggling that follow it. We have to ask, pressing the
relativist's case, whether culture might not inhere less in the artifact than in
the uses it is put to. If
Othello
did not impinge meaningfully on the inwardness
of its viewers - it may not have - then what did it do? But then, the question
itself, assuming Arnoldian criteria of meaning and inwardness, takes an elitist
vantage. Levine needs to bring these kinds ofdistinctions into the light.
We might also question the validity of building an argument about high
and low culture primarily on the reception of Shakespeare's plays. Shake–
speare must be seen as something of a special case; he clearly wrote to offer
something to viewers of every level of class and education. The broad ap–
peal of his plays, in other words, says more about the plays than the tastes of
the populace at large. We are left wondering whether the stratification of
early nineteenth century American society was not a bit more pronounced
than Levine allows.
A final frustration - to me the major one - is that Levine has appended
to
Highbrow/Lowbrow
an epilogue which would draw some connections
between his findings and our contemporary situation. But as he refuses to
grapple with the major issues, the section is sans teeth. Levine tilts only
timidly against the so-called "Bloom thesis," its Platonist assumption that
eternal verities undergird all culture, and that these are embodied in a handful
of sovereign masterpieces. If his findings lead him into the relativist's corner,
then he ought to press his case more explicitly. Stepping back from the elitist–
relativist debate, Levine writes:
If
the debate is to be fruitful it needs to be rooted not merely in the
web of our immediate aesthetic and social predilections but in the
matrix of history, which can allow us to perceive more clearly what
shapes culture has assumed in the American past, which may in turn
allow us to understand better both the possibilities and the effects of
the types of cultural boundaries we embrace.
Coming in the penultimate paragraph of his epilogue, this expression
seems unnecessarily rhetorical and evasive.
But the real weakness of the concluding section lies in its avoidance of
