by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
When it is transposed to a cultural setting, this psychology—in earlier times it would have been called a moral psychology—provokes a series of disputes over “complexity” in literature. Certain older critics find much recent writing distasteful and tiresome because it fails to reach or grasp for that complexity which they regard as intrinsic to the human enterprise. More indulgent critics, not always younger, find the same kind of writing forceful, healthy, untangled. At first this seems a mere problem in taste, a pardonable difference between those who like their poems and novels knotty and those who like them smooth; but soon it becomes clear that this clash arises from a meeting of incompatible world outlooks. For if the psychology of unobstructed need is taken as a sufficient guide to life, it all but eliminates any place for complexity—or, rather, the need for complexity comes to be seen as a mode of false consciousness, an evasion of true feelings, a psychic bureaucratism in which to trap the pure and the strong. If good sex signifies good feeling; good feeling, good being; good being, good action; and good action, a healthy polity, then we have come the long way round, past the Reichian way or the Lawrentian way, to an Emersonian romanticism minus Emerson’s complicatedness of vision. The world snaps back into a system of burgeoning potentialities, waiting for free spirits to attach themselves to the richness of natural object and symbol—except that now the orgasmic blackout is to replace the Oversoul as the current through which pure transcendent energies will flow.
9
We are confronting, then, a new phase in our culture, which in motive and spring represents a wish to shake off the bleeding heritage of modernism and reinstate one of those periods of the collective naif which seem endemic to American experience. The new sensibility is impatient with ideas. It is impatient with literary structures of complexity and coherence, only yesterday the catchwords of our criticism. It wants instead works of literature—though literature may be the wrong word—that will be as absolute as the sun, as unarguable as orgasm, and as delicious as a lollipop. It schemes to throw off the weight of nuance and ambiguity, legacies of high consciousness and tired blood. It is weary of the habit of reflection, the making of distinctions, the squareness of dialectic, the tarnished gold of inherited wisdom. It cares nothing for the haunted memories of old Jews. It has no taste for the ethical nail-biting of those writers of the left who suffered defeat and could never again accept the narcotic of certainty. It is sick of those magnifications of irony that Mann gave us, sick of those visions of entrapment to which Kafka led us, sick of those shufflings of daily horror and grace that Joyce left us. It breathes contempt for rationality, impatience with mind, and a hostility to the artifices and decorums of high culture. It despises liberal values, liberal cautions, liberal virtues. It is bored with the past: for the past is a fink.
Where Marx and Freud were diggers of intellect, mining deeper and deeper into society and the psyche, and forever determined to strengthen the dominion of reason, today the favored direction of search is not inward but sideways, an “expansion of consciousness” through the kick of drugs. The new sensibility is drawn to images of sickness, but not, as with the modernist masters, out of dialectical canniness or religious blasphemy; it takes their denials literally and does not even know the complex desperations that led them to deny. It seeks to charge itself into dazzling sentience through chemicals and the rhetoric of violence. It gropes for sensations: the innocence of blue, the ejaculations of red. It ordains life’s simplicity. It chooses surfaces as against relationships, the skim of texture rather than the weaving of pattern. Haunted by boredom, it transforms art into a sequence of shocks which, steadily magnified, yield fewer and fewer thrills, so that simply to maintain a modest frisson requires mounting exertions. It proposes an art as disposable as a paper dress, to which one need give nothing but a flicker of notice. Especially in the theater it resurrects tattered heresies, trying to collapse aesthetic distance in behalf of touch and frenzy. (But if illusion is now worn out, what remains but staging the realities of rape, fellatio, and murder?) Cutting itself off from a knowledge of what happened before the moment of its birth, it repeats with a delighted innocence much of what did in fact happen: expressionist drama reduced to skit, agitprop tumbled to farce, Melvillean anguish slackened to black humor. It devalues the word, which is soaked up with too much past history, and favors monochromatic cartoons, companionate grunts, and glimpses of the ineffable in popular ditties. It has humor, but not much wit. Of the tragic it knows next to nothing. Where Dostoevsky made nihilism seem sinister by painting it in jolly colors, the new American sensibility does something no other culture could have aspired to: it makes nihilism seem casual, good-natured, even innocent. No longer burdened by the idea of the problematic, it arms itself with the paraphernalia of postindustrial technique and crash-dives into a Typee of neoprimitivism.
Its high priests are Norman Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and Marshall McLuhan,7* all writers with a deeply conservative bias: all committed to a stasis of the given: the stasis of unmoving instinct, the stasis of unmovable society, the stasis of endlessly moving technology. Classics of the latest thing, these three figures lend the new sensibility an aura of profundity. Their prestige can be employed to suggest an organic link between cultural modernism and the new sensibility, though in reality their relation to modernism is no more than biographical.
Perhaps because it is new, some of the new style has its charms—mainly along the margins of social life, in dress, music, and slang. In that it captures the yearnings of a younger generation, the new style has more than charm: a vibration of moral desire, a desire for goodness of heart. Still, we had better not deceive ourselves. Some of those shiny-cheeked darlings adorned with flowers and tokens of love can also be campus enragés screaming “Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, This Is a Stickup” (a slogan that does not strike one as a notable improvement over “Workers of the World, Unite”).
That finally there should appear an impulse to shake off the burdens and entanglements of modernism need come as no surprise. After all the virtuosos of torment and enigma we have known, it would be fine to have a period in Western culture devoted to relaxed pleasures and surface hedonism. But so far this does not seem possible. What strikes one about a great deal of the new writing and theater is its grindingly ideological tone, even if now the claim is for an ideology of pleasure. And what strikes one even more is the air of pulsing ressentiment which pervades this work, an often unearned and seemingly inexplicable hostility. If one went by the cues of a critic like Susan Sontag, one might suppose that the ethical torments of Kamenetz Podolsk and the moral repressiveness of Salem, Massachusetts, had finally been put to rest, in favor of creamy delights in texture, color, and sensation. But nothing of the sort is true, at least not yet; it is only advertised.
Keen on tactics, the spokesmen for the new sensibility proclaim it to be still another turn in the endless gyrations of modernism, still another revolt in the permanent revolution of twentieth-century sensibility. This approach is very shrewd, since it can disarm in advance those older New York (and other) critics who still respond with enthusiasm to modernism. But several objections or qualifications need to be registered:
Modernism, by its very nature, is uncompromisingly a minority culture, creating and defining itself through opposition to a dominant culture. Today, however, nothing of the sort is true. Floodlights glaring and tills overflowing, the new sensibility is a success from the very start. The middle-class public, eager for thrills and humiliations, welcomes it; so do the mass media, always on the alert for exploitable sensations; and naturally there appear intellectuals with handy theories. The new sensibility is both embodied and celebrated in the actions of Mailer, whose condition as a swinger in America is not quite comparable with that of Joyce in Trieste or Kafka in Prague or Lawrence anywhere; it is reinforced with critical exegesis by Susan Sontag, a publicist able to make brilliant quilts from grandmother’s patches. And on a far lower level, it has even found its Smerdyakov in LeRoi
Jones, that parodist of apocalypse who rallies enlightened Jewish audiences with calls for Jewish blood. Whatever one may think of this situation, it is surely very different from the classical picture of a besieged modernism.
By now the search for the “new,” often reduced to a trivializing of form and matter, has become the predictable old. To suppose that we keep moving from cultural breakthrough to breakthrough requires a collective wish to forget what happened yesterday and even the day before: ignorance always being a great spur to claims for originality. Alienation has been transformed from a serious revolutionary concept into a motif of mass culture, and the content of modernism into the decor of kitsch. As Harold Rosenberg has pungently remarked:
The sentiment of the diminution of personality is an historical hypothesis upon which writers have constructed a set of literary conventions by this time richly equipped with theatrical machinery and symbolic allusions. . . . The individual’s emptiness and inability to act have become an irrefrangible cliché, untiringly supported by an immense, voluntary phalanx of latecomers to modernism. In this manifestation, the notion of the void has lost its critical edge and is thoroughly reactionary.
The effort to assimilate new cultural styles to the modernist tradition brushes aside problems of value, quality, judgment. It rests upon a philistine version of the theory of progress in the arts: all must keep changing, and change signifies a realization of progress. Yet even if an illicit filiation can be shown, there is a vast difference in accomplishment between the modernism of some decades ago and what we have now. The great literary modernists put at the center of their work a confrontation and struggle with the demons of nihilism; the literary swingers of the sixties, facing a nihilist violation, cheerfully remove the threat by what Fielding once called “a timely compliance.” Just as in the verse of Swinburne echoes of Romanticism sag through the stanzas, so in much current writing there is indeed a continuity with modernism, but a continuity of grotesque and parody, through the doubles of fashion.
Still, it would be foolish to deny that in this Kulturkampf, the New York intellectuals are at a severe disadvantage. Some have simply gone over to the other camp. A critic like Susan Sontag employs the dialectical skills and accumulated knowledge of intellectual life in order to bless the new sensibility as a dispensation of pleasure, beyond the grubby reach of interpretation and thereby, it would seem, beyond the tight voice of judgment. That her theories are skillfully rebuilt versions of aesthetic notions long familiar and discarded; that in her own critical writing she interprets like mad and casts an image anything but hedonistic, relaxed, or sensuous—none of this need bother her admirers, for a highly literate spokesman is very sustaining to those who have discarded or not acquired intellectual literacy. Second only to Sontag in trumpeting the new sensibility is Leslie Fiedler, a critic with an amiable weakness for thrusting himself at the head of parades marching into sight.8*
But for those New York (or any other) writers not quite enchanted with the current scene there are serious difficulties.
They cannot be quite sure. Having fought in the later battles for modernism, they must acknowledge to themselves the possibility that, now grown older, they have lost their capacity to appreciate innovation. Why, they ask themselves with some irony, should “their” cultural revolution have been the last one, or the last good one? From the publicists of the new sensibility they hear the very slogans, catchwords, and stirring appeals which a few decades ago they were hurling against such diehards as Van Wyck Brooks and Bernard de Voto. And given the notorious difficulties in making judgments about contemporary works of art, how can they be certain that Kafka is a master of despair and Burroughs a symptom of disintegration, Pollock a pioneer of innovation and Warhol a triviality of pop? The capacity for self-doubt, the habit of self-irony which is the reward of decades of experience, renders them susceptible to the simplistic cries of the new.
Well, the answer is that there can be no certainty: we should neither want nor need it. One must speak out of one’s taste and conviction, and let history make whatever judgments it will care to. But this is not an easy stand to take, for it means that after all these years one may have to face intellectual isolation, and there are moments when it must seem as if the best course is to be promiscuously “receptive,” swinging along with a grin of resignation.
10
In the face of this challenge, surely the most serious of the last twenty-five years, the New York intellectuals have not been able to mount a coherent response, certainly not a judgment sufficiently inclusive and severe. There have been a few efforts, some intellectual polemics by Lionel Abel and literary pieces by Philip Rahv; but no more. Yet if ever there was a moment when our culture needed an austere and sharp criticism—the one talent the New York writers supposedly find it death to hide—it is today. One could imagine a journal with the standards, if not the parochialism, of Scrutiny. One could imagine a journal like Partisan Review stripping the pretensions of the current scene with the vigor it showed in opposing the Popular Front and neoconservative cultures. But these are fantasies. In its often accomplished pages Partisan Review betrays a hopeless clash between its editors’ capacity to apply serious standards and their yearnings to embrace the moment. Predictably, the result leaves everyone dissatisfied.
One example of the failure of the New York writers to engage in criticism is their relation to Mailer. He is not an easy man to come to grips with, for he is “our genius,” probably the only one, and in more than a merely personal way he is a man of enormous charm. Yet Mailer has been the central and certainly most dramatic presence in the new sensibility, even if in reflective moments he makes clear his ability to brush aside its incantations.9* Mailer as thaumaturgist of orgasm; as metaphysician of the gut; as psychic herb-doctor; as advance man for literary violence;10* as dialectician of unreason; and above all, as a novelist who has laid waste his own formidable talent—these masks of brilliant, nutty restlessness, these papery dikes against squalls of boredom—all require sharp analysis and criticism. Were Mailer to read these lines he would surely grin and exclaim that, whatever else, his books have suffered plenty of denunciation. My point, however, is not that he has failed to receive adverse reviews, including some from such New York critics as Norman Podhoretz, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Philip Rahv; perhaps he has even had too many adverse reviews, given the scope and brightness of his talent. My point is that the New York writers have failed to confront Mailer seriously as an intellectual spokesman, and instead have found it easier to regard him as a hostage to the temper of our times. What has not been forthcoming is a recognition, surely a painful one, that in his major public roles he has come to represent values in deep opposition to liberal humaneness and rational discourse. That the New York critics have refused him this confrontation is both a disservice to Mailer and a sign that, whatever it may once have been, the New York intellectual community no longer exists as a significant force.
An equally telling sign is the recent growth in popularity and influence of the New York Review of Books. Emerging at least in part from the New York intellectual milieu, this journal has steadily moved away from the styles and premises with which it began. Its early dependence on those New York writers who lent their names to it and helped establish it seems all but over. The Jewish imprint has been blotted out; the New York Review, for all its sharp attacks on current political policies, is thoroughly at home in the worlds of American culture, publishing, and society. It features a strong Anglophile slant in its literary pieces, perhaps in accord with the New Statesman formula of blending leftish (and at one time, fellow-traveling) politics with Bloomsbury culture. More precisely, what the New York Review has managed to achieve—I find it quite fascinating as a portent of things to come—is a link between campus “leftism” and East Side stylishness, the worlds of Tom Hayden and George Plimpton. Opposition to Communist politics and ideology is frequently presented in the pages of the New York Review as if it were an obsolete, indeed a pathetic,
hangover from a discredited past or, worse yet, a dark sign of the CIA. A snappish and crude anti-Americanism has swept over much of its political writing—and to avoid misunderstanding, let me say that by this I do not mean anything so necessary as attacks on the ghastly Vietnam War or on our failures in the cities. And in the hands of writers like Andrew Kopkind (author of the immortal phrase “morality . . . starts at the barrel of a gun”), liberal values and norms are treated with something very close to contempt.
Though itself too sophisticated to indulge in the more preposterous New Left notions, such as “liberal fascism” and “confrontationism,” the New York Review has done the New Left the considerable service of providing it with a link of intellectual respectability to the academic world. In the materials it has published by Kopkind, Hayden, Rahv, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Jason Epstein, and others, one finds not an acceptance of the fashionable talk about “revolution” which has become a sport on the American campus, but a kind of rhetorical violence, a verbal “radicalism,” which gives moral and intellectual encouragement to precisely such fashionable (self-defeating) talk.