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PARTISAN IliVIEW
more artful than a ten-minute telephone conversation. Literature may
"communicate" (a redundancy, even a tautology), but its enduring force,
well past the routine of facile sending and receiving, is in the consumma–
tion, as James tells us, of life, interest, importance. Leviathan rises to kick
away the pebble ofjournalism.
Yet the pebble, it seems, is mightier than leviathan. The ten-minute
article is
here,
and it has, by and large, displaced the essay. The essay is
gradual and patient. The article is quick, restless, and brief. The essay re–
flects on its predecessors, and spirals organically out of a context, like a
green twig from a living branch. The article rushes on, amnesiac, despis–
ing the meditative, reveling in gossip and polemics, a courtier of the mo–
ment. Essays, like articles, can distort and lie, but because essays are under
the eye of history, it is a little harder to swindle the reader. Articles swin–
dle almost by nature, because superficiality is a swindle. Pessimists suppose
that none of this is any longer reversible. That the literary essay survives in
this or that academic periodical, or in a handful of tiny quarterlies, is
scarcely to the point. It has left the common culture.
Some doubt whether there
is
a common culture now at all, whether
it is right to imagine that "the West" retains any resonance of worthy
meaning; or even that it should. To claim commonality is, paradoxically,
to be written off as elitist. Politically, through exploration, exploitation,
and contempt, the West has spread elitism and exclusion; but it has also
spread an idea of democratic inclusiveness so powerful - all of humanity is
made in the image of the One Creator - that it serves to knock the poli–
tics of contempt off its feet all over the world. The round earth, like an
hourglass, is turned upside down these days, spilling variegated popula–
tions-in-motion into static homogeneous populations , south into north,
east into west; the village mentality, with its comfortable reliance on the
familiar, is eroded by the polychrome and polyglot. America, vessel of
migrations, began it. Grumbling, Europe catches up. While the kaleido–
scope rattles and spins, and tribe assaults tribe, no one can predict how all
this will shake itself out; but the village mentality is certainly dead. The jet
plane cooked its goose.
Between the last paragraph and this one, I took a quick trip to Paris.
This is not the sort of thing a hermitlike scribbler usually does; generally it
is a little daunting for me to walk the three short blocks to Main Street.
But the rareness of such a plummeting from one society into another,
perhaps because one's attention become preternaturally heightened,
somehow illumines the notion of commonality. I crossed an ocean in an
