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PARTISAN REVIEW
Yehoshua's own modesty, for me is: What constitutes the moral in liter–
ature for Yehoshua?
It
is a question that I cannot answer with certainty.
But I have the strong suspicion that the key phrase is "the expansion of
our sympathies." Yehoshua's sympathetic imagination includes the
immoral and the criminal. Though he poses the mora l against the psy–
chological, which can undermine moral discriminations, his own
approach to the moral element in literature has, at least in my reading
of him, a strong psychological bias. Yehoshua's cunning and sometimes
brilliant readings are only a prelude to a discussion of the moral element
in literature, which this volume does not provide.
Eugene Goodheart
The Politics of Leftist Reality
EXPERIMENTS AGAINST REALITY: THE FATE OF CULTURE IN THE POST–
MODERN AGE. By Roger Kimball. Ivan R. Dee.
$28.50.
HUMANITIES PROFESSORS HATE ROGER KIMBALL, and why shouldn't
they? Ever since the publication of
Tenured Radicals
ten years ago, Kim–
ball has derided the boorish moralism and pretentious radicalism of
multiculturalists, feminists, cultural-studies theorists, deconstructionists,
and Marxists, as well as museum curators, educators, and a host of pro–
fessional diversity-mongers. In his monthly bully pulpit in
The New Cri–
terion,
from which the materials of
Experiments Against Reality
are
taken, Kimball sets their sentiments-for the Other, for race and gender
relativism, for pop-cultural politics-against his values-erudition, clar–
ity, high culture-with consistent results. Their era of liberation, the six–
ties, is his pandemonium. In Kimball's hands, professors and
administrators appear barely competent, blithely se lf-satisfied, and naive
or cynical about their own coercions. He mocks their demigods: "One
imagines that Nietzsche would have loathed such poseurs as Jacques
Derrida and Michel Foucault (to name only two). Such bad taste! Such
bad writing!" He scorns their judgment: "In one memorable effusion,
Mr. Hightower [a MOMA director] publicly delivered himself of the
opinion that 'I happen to think that everybody is an artist.'" Kimball's
gloss :
"It
is not often given to us to encounter fatuousness so deliciously
blank and unadorned." He laments their influence: "Deconstructive
themes and presuppositions have increasingly become part of the general
