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PARTISAN REVIEW
The losses that we have incurred - not only in the freedom to call things
by their right names, but in the way the language itself has been debased
to serve coercive political purposes - have certainly been immense. Yet it
is still possible to speak the truth if one is will ing to take the flak. And
speak we must, for nothing less than the intellectual and political
achievements of our democratic society and a recognition of their spe–
cific roots in our Western cultural traditions are at stake in this struggle
against f:llsehood.
As far as education, culture, and the arts are co ncerned, this battle
must be waged on several fronts simultaneously. There must , first of all,
be no temporizing about the task of identifYing and deriding the lies and
distortions that are now routinely invoked to misrepresent, misinterpret,
and otherwise discredit the greatest of our intellectual and artistic ac–
complishments past and present, in the name of a po litically sanctioned
alternative "canon." The trashing of those accomplishments as the work
of "dead white European males" must be called to criti cal account at
every opportunity, and so must the promotion of newly sanctified medi–
ocrities and nonentities simply because they meet the requisite criteria of
race and gender. As Lionel Trilling once wrote about his criticism of
Stalinism, with which the political correctness movement has so much in
common, the unmaskers must themselves be unmasked - which in today's
political climate entails fairly steady work.
Then, too, the war against some allegedly fixed and allegedly op–
pressive canon must be exposed as the political fraud that it is. The so–
called canon, in art as well as in literature, has always been in flu x. The
revisions and modifications that have regularly occurred from generation
to generation were not effected by political fiat - not, anyway, in
democratic societies. They resulted from the creative thought of our
leading artists and writers and the critical debate their work engendered.
Eliot's elevation of the Metaphysical poets, Yeats 's affinity for Blake,
Picasso's appropriation of African sculpture, Matisse's use of Islamic
design - these issued from profound artistic endeavors that effectively
altered our understanding of the traditions upon which the life of art in
our culture is based. Every great artist redefines the tradition in which he
works. Even the classics are subjected to the tests of redefinition, and
their power to survive such periodic tests through the ages is what makes
them classics. To dismiss this rich process of revaluation as some kind of
ongoing conspiracy on the part of white European males to secure their
"hegemony" is, besides being intellectually contemptible, nothing but
crass racial and sexual politics, and should be labeled as such.
Political attacks on literature and the arts from the
PC
brigades have
to be met with the kind of political response that will effectively defend
our accomplishments and our traditions from being politically trashed.
