58
PARTISAN REVIEW
Responding to the need for amusement, goss ip, and cheap melo–
drama, this huge and ubiquitous production of books works also, not
surprisingly, against higher culture, despite the efforts many writers and
publishers are still making to resist the overwhelming commercial pres–
sure. This quite often goes hand in hand with a change in cultural jour–
nalism. We see in newspapers how brutal simplification of the
traditional literary aesthetic arises, how literary analysis is replaced by
restrictive ideological or socia l-politica l criteria. We are told again and
again by more or less improvised reviewers, and by the mass media, that
the literary work is simply a transcription of daily reality, a sort of
roman
(7
clef,
in which the guilty party, the author of COllrse, has codi–
fied his sins, his misbehavior, and frustrations.
It
seems useless
to
repeat, even
to
ourselves, that never was a good
piece of literary writing a simple report on reality; the reviewers keep
doing their job, a kind of detective search for the hidden criminal-the
author-engaged in publicly uncovering his mischief, in order
to
put him
on the literal and not on the literary trial. This is certainly a way, and a
very popular one, unfortunately, of lowering the standards of writing
and reading fiction, of producing and debating art. We sometimes have
the feeling that nothing anymore is perceptible in the public arena if it is
not scandalous, and nothing is scandalous enough to be memorable.
J
apologize that I have
to
state such banalities after the very interest–
ing session of this morning. Banality may be useful, however,
to
empha–
size some main questions we are dealing w ith in our daily environment.
I still hope that what I said is rather an exaggeration by an exiled
writer, and that the real picture of the current American culture is actu–
ally more balanced and moderate. Some years ago, I taught a course at
Bard called "Danube: A Literary Journey," which included slIch writers
as Kafka, lonesco, Danilo Kis, and so on . I was surprised not
to
have as
many candidates for this class as for other classes, and I discussed the
issue with some colleagues. One of them tried
to
wake me up
to
reality:
"Your mistake is in the title: Danube-who knows anything about
Danube? You should have called this class 'Kafka Killed His Father'."
Another colleague added, "No, I think you should have called it 'Kafka
A/so
Killed His Father'." Even after this experience I didn't yet dare
to
go to such an extreme. I am just now teaching a class called "Kafka and
His Neighbors," which includes Schulz, Musil, lonesco, Joseph Roth,
and others, and I have many students. So, there is still hope.
Because we arc at a writers' gathering, I think we should concentrate
on the literary approach
to
the topic of our conference. In literature,
every real writer invents his own rules, and then he, or his successors,
