DAPHNE MERKIN
659
textual ideology but as a matter of readers and writers.) Even without
further exposure,
r
knew I was not interested in "learning" how to read
with the aid of this pious template that was being clamped down on a
subtle and highly individualistic literature, squeezing the juice out of it.
There were other experiences: In another seminar, led by a dubious
but
all courant
Britisher, I read
SI
Z by Roland Barthes and so entered
into the lost horizon of deconstruction ism. Although I found Barthes's
writing entertaining and provocative, I immediately found myself won–
dering how it offered a deeper elucidation than other, more traditional
approaches. (The truth be told, I found myself musing on the pity of it
that Barthes wasn't born into a Talmudic family, where his close, irony–
filled readings could be applied to less flimsy narratives.) I glimpsed the
future - a future filled with dense semiotic murmurings, clogged with
atonal words like "marginali zed" and "valorized" - and I ran.
I ran, as it happened, straight into the arms of book publishing,
which was itself about to be taken over by a fit of political correctness.
(The furor caused by the publication of Kingsley Amis's misogynist novel,
Jake'S Thing,
was just one example.) But since book publishing is a bot–
tom-line enterprise where the academy is not, PCism is more a matter of
cocktail-party patter than anything else. If a book looks like it'll sell, in
other words, it makes not a whit of different whether it's by John
Kenneth Galbraith or Rush Limbaugh. (Of course, it cou ld be argued
that, a few egregious instances of campus censorship of First Amendment
rights aside, the triumph of political correctness is, in the end, largely a
cocktail-party triumph: a mode of social discourse which ensures that the
espouser of its views - however visibly privileged - is taken to be a
thoughtful, well-meaning creature, fully attuned to the baneful ways of
the democratic society he or she inhabits.)
To sum it up as I see it: Political correctness is a form of specious
moral one-upmanship, an unholy stew composed of some leftovers from
the egalitarian sixties mixed together with an expedient, yuppie-style ap–
proach to age-old questions of probity. It posits a false evening-out of
the human topography, as though everyone cou ld be pulled back to the
starting gate where some referee would be there to see that no one had
a head start. The bitter truth is that of course there are head starts in real
life, just as the bittersweet truth is that privilege isn't always privilege
(being born into money and status doesn't ensure happiness, much less
success). I find myself thinking often these days of a deeply cynical adage
that used to be quoted to me with great relish by my publisher, Bill
Jovanovich, a self-made, politically uncorrect man if there ever was one:
Life's a bitch. And then you die.
It strikes me as a more useful aphorism -
in its toughness, if nothing else - than what I construe to be the politi-
