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PARTISAN REVIEW
a few years before the Second World War, was called
Commerce.
The ti–
tle, if I am not mistaken, came from Valery. I imagine he was alluding,
with a certain arrogance, to the exchange of extremely rare spiritual and
aesthetic goods among a very select group of demanding connoisseurs.
An idea characteristic of Valery, and likewise one that betrays an artisan's
view of intellectual and literary commerce. The transformation of the
"commerce" of half a century ago into today's editorial industry has
been yet another victory of the mass market over former practices.
The links in the assembly line of the literary market: the author
produces consumer items (books) that the publisher manufactures and
distributes to consumers (readers). A ceaseless assembly line that continu–
ally provides new products which by their very nature can never entirely
satisfy the consumer's hunger. An invention of modern capitalism, remi–
niscent of Tantalus: more, ever more - and never enough. Charles
Fourier believed that in the state of true civilization, which he called
Harmony, a limited number of long-lasting objects of incomparable
quality would be produced. But in our societies, every effort is made to
produce the greatest number of objects of mediocre quality, short dura–
tion, and rapid consumption. I do not deny the advantages of a market
economy. In the developed nations, it is the cause of an abundance
without precedent in history (even though this abundance is very often
misleading and superfluous: creating false needs and failing to address cer–
tain essential ones) . But I note that as production and consumption in–
crease, so does waste. The mountain of books accumulating in libraries
and bookstores raises a worrisome question: What to do with the sur–
plus?
The poetic tradition, as I have already said, is the result of the in–
tersection of two axes, one spatial and the other temporal. The spatial is
the diversity of publics in continual intercommunication; the temporal is
the continuity through generations of poets and readers. Intercommuni–
cation enriches the tradition by bringing to it new blood and new eyes.
Karl Marx kept company with Dante, and Stendhal with Byron, because
people of different groups - some of them lovers of philosophy or the
economic sciences, others of the novel or of history - communicated
with one another. The custom still exists, but it is dying out. One of my
most pleasant literary memories is of an evening gathering in the home of
the physicist Steven Weinberg, during which the conversation shifted
spontaneously from elementary particles to the poetry of Donne and
Marvell. This plurality of readers of different disciplines, brought together
by similar tastes and values, is what is meant by a tradition. It does not
matter that within that tradition opinions vary or are even opposite: we
all read Goethe, but each of us reads him with different eyes.
In a past that is still recent, tradition was nourished by the Greco-
