PETER SHAW
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But Lentricchia seems not to have abandoned the view singled out
by Richard Rorty: that American society is "unreasonable" (that is,
unacceptable). Hart himself observes that
"Modernist Quartet
has a
tendency not to look squarely at 'the cultural of capitalism' but to
accept it as a large abstraction.... " "Capitalism" here means mass
production, sameness, the cash nexus, the commodification of all things.
In
other words, the historical tapestry turns out to be woven out of
the drearily dull colors of Marxist orthodoxy.
Lentricchia believes in "cultural degradation under capitalism" and
"manipulation of laborers into mindless mechanisms of repetition."
Writers are just another kind of worker. He describes writer-workers as
susceptible in their writing to mass methods of book circulation. These
methods turn them into "faceless productive agents." Thereby, as Hart
observes, "the attenuated lyric of 1900 becomes an example of a mass–
produced and mass-consumed commodity." Lentricchia remains a collec–
tivist, and as such is too concerned with denouncing the evils of
"commodity capitalism" to allow for the possibility that individual writ–
ers or readers can rise above economic contingencies.
Lentricchia's pseudo-reform actually consists in a slight reworking of
pages he wrote in the 1980s. He has adapted these to suit his tentative,
disingenuous intellectual retreat of the 1990s and pruned away some of
the Marxist jargon. Where in 1989 Wallace Stevens's "bifurcated career .
. . perfectly realized the hegemonic aims of his capitalist socialization,"
the same dual career as businessman and poet now seems to have been
"the perfect realization of the contradictory values of his society."
Implication has replaced accusation: one set of the culture's values -
those of business - are now only indirectly denigrated.
Also pruned away are the more strenuous radical sentiments of the
1980s. Lentricchia no longer criticizes Stevens's comfortable woman in
her peignoir at the beginning of the poem, "Sunday Morning," in vul–
gar Marxist terms. He is now content to vaguely stigmatize her as "a
comfortable woman of class," where previously her fine "bought things"
inspired his resentment over their having been produced "by laborers
who do not ... sit about on Sunday morning in their smoking jackets
and peignoirs."
Lentricchia's shifts of emphases would be indications of a genuinely
altered outlook if he gave any hint of repudiating the assumptions of his
earlier version. But since he does not, his cosmetic changes amount to
no more than devices for repositioning himself as one of the literary–
critical moderates of the 1990s. The radical politics that once drove his
criticism now dances easily along with his new moderation.
