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PARTISAN REVIEW
the postwar aestheticism of the New Criticism. By the
1950S,
the idea of
literature as hermetically dedicated and anointed was once again solidly
enthroned, complete with Eliot as pope and Pound as high priest -until
a second political wave, in the late sixties and into the seventies, knocked
out notions of temples and priestly artists once and for all, and replaced
them with a howl.
It
is a long time since we fretted over mass culture.
It
is a long time since Dwight Macdonald sneered at middlebrows. It is a
long time since Lionel Trilling thought writing for money cheapened lit–
erary aspiration. (Henry James didn't think that.) Modernism as a credo
seems faded and old-fashioned, if not obsolete, and what we once called
the "avant-garde" is now either fakery or comedy. The Village, where
Auden and Marianne Moore once lived and wrote and walked abroad,
is a sort of performance arena nowadays, where the memory of a mem–
ory grows fainter and fainter, and where even nostalgia has forgotten
exactly what it is supposed to be nostalgic about. Once, in the middle
eighties, visiting Yale, I happened into the college cafeteria and came on
a young English instructor with his graduate students, all consCien–
tiously and unironically deconstructing a hamburger ad.
In short, distinction-making, even distinction-discerning, is largely
dead. Literary excitement is in the hands of Oprah. "High-art literary tra–
dition" brings on snickers. The difference between high and low is valued
by few and blurred by most. Writers shouldn't be mistaken for priests, it
goes without saying; but neither should movie-script manufacturers be
mistaken for writers. Readers are not the same as audiences, and the
structure of a novel is not the same as the structure of a hamburger adver–
tisement. "Hierarchy," to be sure, is an off-putting word, invoking high
and low; and "high" smacks of snobbery and anti-egalitarianism . But
hierarchy also points to the recognition of distinctions, and, incontrovert–
ibly, the life of intellect is perforce hierarchical: it insists that one thing is
not the same as another thing. A novel concerned with English country–
house romances is not the same as a tract on slavery in Antigua. A depart–
ment of English is not the same as a Marxist tutorial. A rap CD is not the
same as academic scholarship. A suicide bomber who blows up a pizzeria
crowded with baby carriages is not the same as a nation-builder.
Fifty years ago, a salient issue was the bugaboo of "conformism." It's
true that in
1952
men in their universal gray fedoras had the look of a
field of dandelions gone to seed. It's true that McCarthyism suppressed
free opinion and stimulated fear. But both the fedoras and the unruly sen–
ator have long been dispatched to their respective graveyards, and if we
are to worry about conformism, now is the hour. What does conformism
mean if not one side, one argument, one solution? And no one is more
