658
PARTISAN REVIEW
There is no epiphany in Pedro Juan's stories. His writing never gets
off the ground or out of the dirt; that would give the lie to all these lives .
Rather these fictive lives and this writing are a dark if riotous mirror in
which some ultimate human essence survives. The brief, fleeting open–
ings to the "spiritual"-without any overtone of irony because in this
underworld irony is a civilized tone which is meaningless-are little
windows, portholes, through which a gasp of air is drawn.
Gutierrez's language is brief, with a minimum of qualifiers, stripped
of adjectives and adverbs, a style of dirty nouns and violent transitive
verbs. "A person lives in chapters," he writes. Each chapter-story is a
microdrama, sketched in with a few deft and vivid strokes. The narra–
tive rhythm accelerates to such a tempo that at times it has the staccato
of the telegraphic, to pin down quickly the pathetic transiency of the
street or the bed : "I said to hell with it all, and I wrote some naked sto–
ries. My stories could run bare-assed into the middle of the street, shout–
ing, 'Freedom, freedom, freedom.'" Perhaps this is the last word which
should be left to Pedro Juan.
Alain Arias-Misson
Are We All Post-Culturalists Now?
FADED MOSAIC:
THE
EMERGENCE OF POST-CULTURAL AMERICA.
By
Christopher Clausen. Ivan R. Dee.
$25.00.
AT THE CONCLUSION
of
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture
(2000),
a spirited, mordant defense of the Western tradition, Roger Scru–
ton avers that the ending bars of Gustav Mahler's
Das Lied von der Erde
are "a beautiful proof that Western culture.. .is radically multicultural."
Scruton, one of Britain's foremost conservative intellectuals, would
hardly be expected to have concern for the imperatives of the multicul–
turalist ethos. Elsewhere, in fact, he has denounced the politicization of
university curricula resulting from the ascendancy of multiculturalism in
higher education. As such, his nod to the term displays the great power
it now wields. But perhaps the title of Nathan Glazer's explication of
American multiculturalism sheds the most light on the authority the
movement possesses:
We Are All Multiculturalists Now
(1997).
But are we? And, if so, what does that mean? In
Faded Mosaic: The
Emergence of Post-Cultural America,
Christopher Clausen, an English
