122
PARTISAN REVIEW
poetic elevation arrives that seems
to
hring light. Mr. O'Brien was able
to
take things he was in the middle of, and make them be about himself,
but at the same time achieve light by making us recognize something
about the condition of human life in a political situation that reverber–
ates all the way into one's personal life, including one's marriage. But we
have
to
think about something that was introduced in the first talk,
which is that the image, the light cast upon the wall in the film, if you
will, and the light that
come~
at you from the television, and so much
of what we find ourselves in the middle of today, is the competition of
images for the crown. (t's almost like there is always a Miss America of
images. Who will win this time around? They ;1I"e all there lined up in
their bathing suits, they all do their routine, they all tell us their story,
they all get their song, and then the judges have ro say, this year's Miss
America-the image-will be X. Now, what ( would ask you three gen–
tlemen is this: it seems
to
l11e that so much of where we arc now is con–
nected to the emergence of the individual through the democratic
system, which makes, as talk television shows prove, everybody feel that
whatever he or she is ohsessed with is as important as what anyone else
is obsessed with. There is an enormous break from the classical past
when somebody can say, "Docs the President think he is the only one
who's ever had an affair with a young woman? ('II come on television
and ( will tell you, ( have had affairs with fifty young women, and they
are all in my family. And they will all come on and talk about me. Some
of them wi II sa y, ( wish ( could ma rry the ma n." There will be conster–
nation in the audience, and everybody will turn off the TV saying,
"However screwed up ( am, ( am now sure that ( am not the most
screwed-up person in America." Now, what I am after is this: how do
you all think the poetic moment of light will arrive when the writer has
to fight off the kind of narcissism in which the you-you, the writer–
begins
to
block the possible light that comes out of the words, and the
reader turns away from your work, finally, disgusted not only with what
you wrote, but with the idea of writing, and with you, the individual
who has done it. This, ( think is the experience many people have when
they read something like
DlItell.
They may have thought Reagan was a
bad guy when they started reading the book. But by the time they get
to
the end, they think Morris is a much worse person than Reagan,
because of the sheer
narcissi~tic
audacity of this guy
to
impose himself
as he has on an important historical moment. ( hope this isn't too con–
voluted, but I wanted
to
find out how you three extraordinarily brilliant
men might respond.
