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PARTISAN REVIEW
living by truth and shaming the devil, they live by spin and flatter the
people. Wall Street scarcely needed contemporary philosophy to be told
that the test of knowledge lies not in pure truth but in successful conse–
quences. Nor did Madison Avenue have to wait for Foucault and Der–
rida to be told there is no reality but only contrived representations.
Perhaps the greatest gulf that separates the then and now of Ameri–
can intellectual life is that between modernism and postmodernism. For
many of the
Partisan Review
contributors, literary heroes were Arnold,
Eliot, Joyce, Mann, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and other European novelists.
Except for Henry James, American writers were generally neglected,
even after Alfred Kazin's wonderful book
On Native Grounds.
In
his
memoirs, Irving Howe wonders why in all the discussions in which he
participated the name Perry Miller-perhaps America's greatest intel–
lectual historian of literature and philosophy-never came up.
It's often observed that there's a paradox within the early
Partisan
Review,
because it was radical politically, yet admired conservative
authors-some even reactionary ones, like Ezra Pound. But these figures
were appreciated for their modernist temper, their tense outlook on life
that felt the loss of truth but would not let it go, their sensibility toward
ambiguity and irony in a world whose center could no longer hold, their
feeling that the self had been fragmented and history had lost all direction,
leaving the writer to face a human condition of doubt and anxiety. Such
writers were capable of living with conflict and contradiction rather than
striving for easy resolutions, unable to believe but too honest to settle for
a life where truth would be ridiculed rather than respected .
In
the late for–
ties and early fifties, Hannah Arendt and others introduced European
existentialism to
Partisan Review.
American intellectuals now felt that to
accept the burden of bearing oneself is to know the meaning of anxiety.
When we turn to postmodernism, however, there is no genuine anxi–
ety or any authentic self to bear its burden. Such emotions and ideas
. should be seen for what they are, false constructions that await their
deconstruction. There is nothing to dread but dread itself.
The
Partisan Review
symposium appreciated that American intellec–
tuals had begun to return to native grounds and had turned away from
Europe as a beacon. The "Port Huron Statement" also urged young stu–
dents to look to American traditions in order to revive radicalism. This
orientation turned out to be short lived.
In
the seventies American aca–
demics fixed their gaze on Paris, with side glances at Germany and Italy,
and by the eighties the Academic Left would bring so many European
ideas to the classrooms and journals that one might think of university
professors as hustling import dealers. Why this reorientation?
