BOOKS
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pursuit of publicity, it may have been worth the price.
More doubtful is the cost of concessions he felt obliged to make to
extremists in his ranks. Literacy, he declares, "can be the most pervasive
emblem of capitalist commodity functions" - whatever he (and Houston
Baker) meant by literacy. "We write for each other," he says, and "This is
a critical trust.
It
is also a
political
trust." He lets go unreproved those who
use the slur of "cracker," the last racist epithet but for "redneck" permis–
sible in the academy. "Now we must at last don the empowering mask of
blackness," he writes, "and talk
that
talk, the language of black differ–
ence." Only then can we "test the dark secrets of a black discursive uni–
verse ... the black arts of interpretation. " Yes?
But then in his concluding essay Gates pronounces "wrongheaded"
both the "cultural right" and the "cultural left." He is engaged, he assures
us, in "the search for a middle way." He is tired of a "righteous indigna–
tion [that] became routinized, professionalized," and the counterposed
victims and victimizers. Already he can wonder if "success has spoiled
us," and admits it to be "a thing of wonder" that black letters may have
already moved "to the center of the profession ofliterature" and that be–
cause of laws of supply and demand, black scholars in the field "find
themselves pursued by several departments competing to make imagina–
tive job offers." (He should know.) Indeed some of us think the appear–
ance of black writers on required reading lists may soon seem no more
shocking than the appearance of American history and writers on the
Oxford syllabus - which occurred first in the 1920s. Of course that does
not necessarily make black writers Homers or Virgils or Shakespeares or
Miltons, any more than it did the white American writers when Oxford
put them on their lists in the twenties, however loose the "canon."
C. VANN WOODWARD
Radical Disenchantment
THE GRANDEUR AND TWILIGHT OF RADICAL UNIVERSALISM.
By
Agnes Heller
and
Ferenc Feher.
Transaction Publishers. $39.95.
MODERNITY ON ENDLESS TRIAL. By Leszek Kolakowski.
University
ofChicago Press. $24.95.
Few authors have written more illuminating pages in the history of
the twentieth century's literature of disenchantment than Ferenc Feher,
Agnes Heller, and Leszek Kolakowski. Both Heller and Feher, former
