518
PARTISAN REVIEW
have seen a film by Stephen King. But required reading and a film ver–
sion of a book is not what I mean by a book people know because it is
a book to be known-a book of their time and place. A friend suggested
Stephen King might do the trick, but I'm not sure that I'd risk even him.
Better to play it safe with the likes of Tom Cruise or Madonna. Even
better, retire this cheesy drama altogether and simply admit that the
popular culture that participants in the
1952
symposium worried about
has triumphed beyond their wildest imagination or their deepest fears.
Perhaps it is best at this point to admit that I am skeptical of solemn
talk about popular culture.
It
usually is sociology on the cheap. Still, I
hasten to admit that I am as much a sports fan or TV junkie as the next
person. But I felt that deconstruction was an intellectual bird of passage,
which my with-it colleagues tell me has largely passed, just as I feel about
the dumbed-down questions that Regis Philbin asks on
Who Wants to be
a Millionaire-which
will persist, airing three, four, then five nights a
week, until its ratings dwindle and advertising dollars dry up.
At the same time, however, I remember the pronouncements that a
Saul Bellow character makes about too easily dismissing popular cul–
ture. As Joseph, the brooding, introspective protagonist of
Dangling
Man
(1944),
puts it: "You can't banish the world by decree if it's in you
.... What if you declare you are alienated, you say you reject the Hol–
lywood dream, the soap opera, the cheap thriller? The very denial impli–
cates you." And he goes on to point out that even if you decide that you
want to ignore these things, "The world comes after you." True,
although admitting that popular culture packs an enormous, ubiquitous
punch is not the same thing as the pretentious studies that blur the line
between what deserves serious academic attention and what is best
enjoyed without scholarly footnotes.
In much the same way a retrospective look at the give-and-take of
"Our Country and Our Culture" reveals that many of the participants
were essentially clueless about both, it is equally true that they had very
little sense of what would happen to the culture of books and ideas they
took as a given. In fact, the fruits of capitalism were ripening all around
them, even as they continued to debate about shadings of socialism and
the often magnified differences between Stalin and Trotsky. Indeed, as I
pored over their positions I could not help but be reminded of
The Age
of Innocence
(1920),
Edith Wharton's satiric account of life among the
aristocracy of old New York. Written from a vantage point fifty years
after the novel's
1870S
setting, Wharton combines measures of nostal–
gia (for a stable world of forms and genteel manners) with a clear-eyed
sense of how many hidden costs come with the territory. Her brittle,
