Conjuring Up Spirits

...Freud may have passed into history, transported by the owl of Minerva to his permanent resting place in the pantheon of critical thinkers...

...they are employed only be psychohistorians, a small band of believers that is scorned by most members of the historical profession, though its works are often popular with the public...

...Recently Erich Heller, the distinguished literary critic, called Freud's "the most overrated works of the epoch...

...limitation of population with its spawn of demands for quotas by nations and ethnic groups within nations...

...The leftish poets of the thirties--Auden, Spender, MacNeice--all retreated from the revolutionary poetics of Eliot and Pound, working instead in traditional forms: the ballad, the sonnet, and blank verse...

...But we must have mixed feelings about Freud and Freudian languge, for it was Freud whom Lionel Trilling, the best cultural critic of the age, continually invoked in his battles with the reigning spirits of the fifties and sixties...

...Looking at Dickstein's book, in which a literary critic utters clich6 after clich~ when he ventures into the world of politics and culture, one finds oneself agreeing with Trilling that we "may one day have to question whether in our culture the study of literature is any longer a suitable means for developing and refining the intelligence...

...Continually pressing literature to see how it served as a "criticism of life," the New York intellectuals at times left litera...

...Searching for the spirit of an age has become a popular activity, one practiced by journalists, sociologists, and the intellectual maverick we call the cultural critic...

...Since Freud himself, after all, spent a good deal of time reducing all that's made to dark thoughts in a dark room (to appropriate some words of Andrew Marvell's), it is understandable that others might also think that they could dismiss aspects of Western culture, thereby freeing themselves from its burden...

...Played by the Zeitgeist Philharmonic, Dickstein's composition is carefully worked out...

...One who doubts that lodgment of discretionary power in state and local authorities encourages a wider participation in government by the citizenry, or questions the virtue accredited to participatory involvement, still must acknowledge that the closer the connection of people to the officialdom that rules them the greater the chance that they will learn who is entitled to confidence, who ought to be watched, and how to safeguard one's interests in the face of officials who cannot be trusted...

...Thus he casually damns some leading intellectual journals for being "instruments of the cold war," incoherently argues that the political psychodramas of the sixties "proved once again that the personal is political," and moralistically laments over what he calls "the soul-destroying madness of the Vietnam war...

...Rallying to defend Western culture when indignant epigones all around him were screeching for release, Trilling compels our respect though his language suffers from portentousness...

...Allowing that massive use is made of such instruments there remains still pressing need to get a massive stock of business out of Washington and its regional headquarters and into state capitols, city halls, and county courthouses...

...Congress and President were relieved of immense burdens when they unloaded the recurring revision of import taxes onto a Tariff Commission...

...On a boat made of "loosely Hegelian" principles, Dickstein sails unwarily into the seas of the fifties and the sixties, casting his nets wide, picking up whatever he notices...

...What do these phrases that come tripping off his typewriter mean ? Whose soul was destroyed...

...He tries, that is, "to develop analogies between social change and changes in the forms [emphasis Dickstein's] of the arts...

...Moreover, presuming to speak of someone else's motives leaves the person defenseless, the accuser implying that he knows more about what "really" motivates the accused than the accused does himsels Dickstein notwithstanding, one hopes that most intellectuals-whatever infections they suffered from in the sixties--have been cured of such suspicions...

...The past, as the speaker in Eliot's "Gerontion" would have it, was a maze of "cunning passages" and "contrived corridors," whereas the present was whirling out of control...

...he was questioning Freud's encompassing, unfalsifiable Weltanschauung, especially Freud's "trust in the medically 'scientific' character of the discipline...

...In the scope of theiJ interests, in their use of the essa} form, and in their preoccupatio~ with moral rather than aesthetic questions, the New York intel...

...Though a successful and generally respected enterprise, cultural criticism was on many points vulnerable to attack...

...lectuals were very much the descendants of the nineteenthcentury cultural critics...

...In short, the art of cultural criticism is a not quite respectable trade...

...Thus ambivalence prevails, but a peculiarly glib kind of ambivalence...

...In order to make such a statement, one would--presumably--have spent some time reading works of sys tematic thought...

...yet what else is Dickstein himself doing--the Dickstein who tells us in this book that he is a father, a teacher, a writer of books, a worker in the vineyards of literary and cultural criticism--but enacting some of the roles and work habits that we call, for lack of a better word, bourgeois...

...Morris Dickstein, a cultural critic in his mid-thirties, recently acknowledged Trilling's effect upon him, saying that "it was reading Trilling's The Liberal Imagination at the end of my sophomore year of college that most crystallized my desire to become a critic and writer...

...Not only are the words "unconscious" and "rationalization" rarely heard any more, but Freud himself is rarely enlisted to buttress someone's argument...

...therefore they are partial to "repressive" measures...

...Its investigation centers around the activities of a "mystery woman" who has been "going through the ranks like a lawnmower in knickers," compromising 119 Members--including five of the six on the Committee...

...the intrusion of biological engineering into cell structures and genes...

...The humor of the play, such as it is, consists largely in elaborating the metaphor of the title...

...We want to know, moreover, about an age's defining spirit--a spirit, it is assumed, that informed all its parts, making the age unique...

...Irving Howe, who continues to call himself a socialist, said recently that "'Vulgar Marxism,' with its quick reduction of ideas to ideology and its glib ascription of ideology to interest, has become the mental habit of lazy and halfeducated people throughout the world...

...Today many Americans are wary of those who prophesy greenings, whether economic or psychological...

...missing the world of daily existence, a world that remained intensely absorbing to the New York writers...

...When everyone was busy pointing his finger at the right, Orwell called attention to the equally smelly orthodoxy of the left...

...We want to know about the manners, morals, and mores of an age, which usually manages after a decade to metamorphose suddenly into another age...

...Travesties, which played two lengthy runs in the nation's capital after premiering in New York in 1975...

...When we look at the social or economic structure, we want to know whose interests are being served...

...And the way we were means the way we were culturally, taking culture in its broadest possible sense...

...For all his wrestling with the spirit of the age, Trilling was enthralled to Freud--he lacked an intellectual scaffold that would have enabled him to stand outside the age, peering in...

...As such, they had little or nothing to say to an age when things were falling apart...

...Small wonder that the plays it subsidizes are hits...

...the mid-winter spring of the late fifties, which was " a fertile period, a seedbed of ideas...

...And one does detect a certain impatience, irritation, and boredom with the cant of Marxists or Freudians...

...One could argue, in fact, that those who are touched with "reformist zeal" are often suspicious of experimental literature...

...which suggests merely that the United States government has successfully institutionalized the entrepreneurial spirit of David Merrick...

...If Trilling's work to some degree suffers from his reliance upon the age's dominant figure, what can we say of lesser figures, of the numerous simplifiers who unfailingly came up with formulas for packaging the fifties and the sixties ? Cultural criticism, its detractors would say, is inevitably a half-baked activity, one that lacks the rigor of intellectual history or the density of social history...

...Rarely was the term used to describe those on the left who worshipped Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, etc...

...What does the word "madness" mean here...

...pard's plays testifies to an elevated sensibility...

...and many are also wary of those who have solutions for problems, having little faith in either the mathematical models designed by technocrats or the recipes for tranquility purveyed by gurus...

...The play concerns a Select Committee of Parliament, assembled to report on moral standards in the House of Commons...

...From Hazlitt to Wilde, the English cultural critics were less interested in discovering the logic of the historical process than in divining the malaise of their age--a span of time that was altogether less capacious than the "stages" of their French, German, and Italian counterparts...

...claims against the federal government onto a claims court...

...But the master was no longer the apostle of subversiveness...

...Addicted to arbitrary notions of an age's duration, cultural critics often have a weakness for flaccid generalities, especially when 14 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 they come in the guise of antitheses...

...To the major modernist writers it made no sense to speculate about the spirit of the age--except, perhaps, in apocalyptic terms...

...it also smacks of disingenuousness, for as Trilling said, " i t is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence...

...And though the} were nourished on the great modernist writers, they werc distinctly uncomfortable with both the modernists' politics anc what might be called their aesthetic hauteur...

...But before it is hastily inferred that Stoppard's Potomac triumphs provide further evidence that Washington is slowly supplanting New York as the cultural capital of the country, a few caveats are in order...

...miss such conjurings as slipshod historical exercises, lacking sound argument and solid historical knowledge, as gaudy feats rather than masterly performances...

...Moreover, if Washington is supplanting anything, it is not New York, but rather New Haven and Philadelphia, which have traditionally provided trial audiences for Broadway-bound shows...

...No doubt most a~guments---especially those advanced with moral intensity--should be approached with a tolerable degree of skepticism, but the instant suspicion that Dickstein applauds--a su.~7,icion that often is wedded to a vulgar Marxism or vulgar Freudianism--has a corrosive effect on all intelligent discourse...

...These seasons are recollected in tranquility during the autumnal seventies, with Dickstein trying to weigh the gains against the losses, trying to see where we are--or, more accurately, where he 'is, since the closing chapter of the book is heavily autobiographical...

...Yet how useful, on the other hand, is the notion of an age that lasts exactly a decade...

...remains a child of the fifties...

...This species flourished during the fifties and sixties, serving up schematic, ahistorical game plans for solving personal or political problems, and including among its members Walt Rostow, the author of The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, and Charles Reich, the author of The Greening of America...

...His influence, moreover, crossed generations...

...the operation of the Tennessee Valley empire onto a public corporation...

...Yet if all things are perforce part of an organic whOle, then nothing can be marshalled to dis12 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 prove the notion of an age's uniformity...

...Instead, Dickstein composes a glib Symphony of Two Decades, with four movements that succeed each other in smooth fashion: the wintry fifties, when a "cold war consensus" made most of us shiver in conformity...

...The remark comes from Dickstein's latest book, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, in which he tries to do exactly what he says Trilling did: "...restore to the literary mind some of the social and historical awareness it was rapidly losing...

...Pair of briefs...

...There is good reason to question a genre--if we can call it that--which, like sociology, is often weak as history, and, like the daily editorial, is often couched in the exhortative mode...

...Believing in these laws, many Western intellectuals convinced themselves that the Soviet Union, despite its show trials and labor camps, was on the right historical track, having attained a higher stage of development than the capitalist West...

...Even more disquieting is the suggestion that appreciating StopRobert Asahina is managing editor of The Public Interest and film critic for The New Leader...

...Hegel assumed that we can only begin to understand an age when it is nearing its close...

...The English variety also came under attack, but for different reasons...

...As the comedy unfolds, t~e lady in question turns out to be none other than the Committee's clerk, the aptly and unsubtly named Maddie Gotobed...

...Yet the damage done by Freudian language still remains...

...History sometimes intruded upon these elegant exercises in unravelling, but only as a sheepish guest--humbly apologetic for taking up anyone's time at the critical party...

...Though "ego," "id," and "superego" no longer add luster to the vocabulary of the semieducated, the insidious movement of certain terms from politics to psychoanalysis and back to politics is still going on...

...Has it come to that, Dickstein implies, The Master himself defending bourgeois values...

...Beyond that, our enchantment with the values of uniform condition under the law has blinded us to the values of proximity to the sources of the law we live under...

...It's a brief case...

...In a spasm of civic pride, a Washington drama critic recently commended the local theater-goers for exhibiting somewhat more refinement than their New York counterparts...

...The failure, though, is instructive, for it sheds light on the difficulties of cultural criticism in general and marks the distance cultural criticism has travelled from its nineteenthcentury forebears...

...And these questions, moreover, are often unfashionable ones...

...Thus do the terms of cultural discourse progress...

...Fifteen years later, though, when Trilling saw that the posture of subversiveness had become an approved cultural mode with its own social and economic rewards, he still called upon Freud...

...But Dickstein's failure to reconcile aesthetic currents with cultural upheavals is less important, finally, than his failure as a cultural critic...

...If spirit is one danger zone in the spirit of the age, then age is another, making the notion of a Zeitgeist a veritable mine-field of intellectual difficulties...

...The English The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 11 essayists were, above all, moralists who sniffed the Zeitgeist and tried to come up with prescriptions for dispelling its ranker odors...

...and, finally, "the darkening green" of the late sixties, a long hot summer of a bad war and bad rock music...

...An offspring 9f the Romantic era, cultural criticism flourished during the nineteenth century, engaging some of the major minds of European intellectual history...

...Cops, FBI agents, and the like are "repressed...

...Calling attention to someone's unconscious needs or class interests--almost always, of course, with malign intent--shifts the discussion away from the topic at hand to the motives of those doing the talking...

...In the fifties, when he was struggling with the problem of total cultural domination, Trilling argued that the work of Freud--like literature in general--served subversive purposes, enabling the self to resist the onslaughts of culture...

...he was now the preserver of the Western tradition--Old Testament prophet, Greek tragedian, and Roman Stoic all rolled into one, someone who respected "the essential immitigability of the human condition," someone whose patrician ethical posture "cannot fail to outrage the egalitarian hedonism which is the educated middle class' characteristic mode of moral judgment...

...In fact, the nationwide repertory theater movement, which has been stimulated by large grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, has degenerated in the last few years into a farm system for Broadway producers...

...Dickstein pretends to be dismayed, if not shocked, at Trilling's defense of bourgeois values...

...and Dirty Linen~NewFound-Land, which opened last fall at the West End Theatre ' in Washington, and then played to packed houses at the Kennedy Center before arriving on Broadway at the beginning of the year...

...He is intelligent enough to realize that it would look foolish to embrace one age and reject another...

...In that sense, Samuel Johnson may be said to have been the first cultural critic, for when his Whig friends championed the cause of the colonists Johnson pointed out that these defenders of liberty did not seem particularly concerned about the liberty of their slaves...

...When the voice of reason speaks," he says, "we're inclined to ask what unconscious needs are at work...

...II The dean of the New York intellectuals, Lionel Trilling seemed the most old-fashioned of them all, his prose style consciously modeled, it appeared, after Arnold's...

...Though they usually found their academic home in Englisl: departments, these writers were ill at ease in the chaste, ahistori...

...One does not expect Dickstein to resolve these temporal difficulties, but if he is going to work with principles that are loosely Hegelian, he should at least worry out loud about the difference between Hegel's notion of an age and his own...

...Thus t h e folk-rock of the early sixties gave way to the acid-rock of the late sixties...

...This, I think, ought to be an exceptional devolution of authority...

...One wishes the same thing would happen to Marx, and that to be called a Marxist or Freudian will be the same thing as being called a Thomist or Spinozan...

...Yet in summoning Freud as a witness for the prosecution, is not Trilling calling upon someone who in many ways abetted the crime...

...ture altogether, writing essays on both the Kinsey report and American intellectual history, on both the Cold War and the American labor movement...

...But it was not until the twentieth century that the notion of historical inevitability implied in such laws of development was subject to scathing criticism, especially by Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin...

...All of past experience tells us that the range of public interests which the national government must look after inevitably increases as scientific knowledge and know-how expand...

...IVe learn, for example, that "Dylan went electric at almost the very moment that Lyndon Johnson began bombing North Vietnam...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 13 III Summing up the case for the sixties, Dickstein says that the age taught us to be mentally on our guard, taught us to look behind, as it were, any arguments that are being advanced...

...He could not have known that complexity would come to mean that one's "personality" straddled two decades, that one was both a "liberated" sixties man and a "repressed" fifties man...

...Henry James once said that it was " a complex fate to be an American...

...Based as it was on the notion that history consisted of vast stages, with one stage "organically" developing into another, the Continental variety was criticized in the nineteenth century by Mill himself...

...Dickstein's analysis is paltry, for the phrase "bourgeois values" teeters on the edge of non-meaning...

...In addition, the Kennedy Center productions of Travesties and Dirty Linen/NewFound-Landwere underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities (as part of the Center's Bicentennial Humanities Program, no less...

...Gates of Eden is marred by the writer's complacency as well as his glibness, two characteristics that are readily apparent in the way Dickstein continually reaches for a Time-style phrase to summarize--or, rather, to dismiss--complex problems...

...the spring of the Kennedy Era, when the innovative impulse "surged" in both fiction and politics...

...Cultural criticism came in two varieties...

...Though many admitted that the Soviet Union was not a good place in which to live, they argued that at least it stood for the future...

...But even the redoubtable John Leonard once proclaimed that "there isn't a better, furinier, more interesting English-language playwright loose in the world than Tom Stoppard...

...To begin with, box-office guccess more often indicates a lack of sophistication than the reverse...

...A noble goal, but one which Dickstein falls far short of attaining...

...In doing so, Heller was not questioning Freud's importance...

...Perhaps the most complacent thing in the book is Dickstein's attack on Lionel Trilling for betraying modernism and authenticity and rushing "to admire and defend bourgeois values...

...The crisis is not limited to the fact that Washington has more business in its charge than it can spread a proper attention over...

...Though in The Liberal Imagination, written in the forties, Trilling celebrated literature as "the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty," by the mid-sixties he came to realize that many persons in the literary world had a very attenuated sense of what went on in the world outside literature, a world they made sense of with a few formulaic phrases...

...Johnson was a Tory, Orwell was a socialist: We value the best cultural critics less for their angle of attack than for their courage in attacking--the courage, that is, to do battle with the reigning spirits of the age...

...Repressive," a word that had served as a description of a particular kind of act committed by those in authority--e.g, repressing (or quelling) a riot--has come to stand for the supposed mental condition of those who possess the authority to do so, even if they never exercise it...

...Nevertheless, one must admit that of laziness and half-education there seems to be no end, for in the academic world a vestigial Marxism still prevails, taking the form of an unexamined belief in the evil of private, profitmaking ventures as well as a mystical faith in the goodness of all activities labelled public and non-profit--a faith that is puzzling, since academics regard bureaucrats, those souls entrusted with administering such public programs, with condescension and contempt...

...exploration and occupancy of space...

...in an age drenched with art and filled with those praising its virtues, Trilling doubted the importance of art...

...Mill himself called the "spirit of the age" a novel expression, adding that it was not "to be met with in any work exceeding fifty years in antiquity...

...The old moguls of the Great White Way may be giving ground to the new Medicis on the Potomac, but hard cash and box-office draw are still the rules of the game...

...As La Rochefoucauld, a master dissector of man's motives, warned: "It is easier to know mankind in general than any particular man...

...With his banal antinomies and the easy way in which he pronounces upon the spirit of the fifties and the sixties, Dickstein is the kind of critic Trilling became mqst worried about during the last ten years of his life, a critic for whom the issues of politics are, more often than not, a mask for the issues of culture--a critic who is, it appears, ignorant of "the contemporary intellectual disciplines which address themselves to the affairs of daily life...

...For literature, as for Freud," Trilling said, "the test of the culture is always the individual self, not the other way around...

...These supposedly scientific laws were also tarnished by the miseries of twentieth-century history itself, for they became part of the official creed of one of the most tyrannous regimes in history...

...in England it was usually a more modest-and less philosophical--affair...

...The agony of the Vietnam war raised--and still raises--hard questions which cannot be skirted by a bravura of despair...

...The notion of liberation also has been, so to speak, Freudianized, turning what previously had been a political demand--the extension of civil liberties to those who had never been allowed them-into a quasi-spiritual plea, one that cannot be accommodated by any political action...

...At his best the cultural critic raises questions rather than provides answers, questions that rarely are considered by writers nestled in particular disciplines...

...The New York intellectuals were the one exception to this state of affairs--a loose group of writers and critics whose literary center in the late forties, fifties, and early sixties was the Partisan Review...

...The quotation is from Trilling's "Mind in the Modern World," an essay in which he regrets that contemporary cultural critics, unlike their nineteenth-century forebears, know next to nothing about the political or economic world...

...Can anyone doubt that such problems increasingly will tax the Congressmen for every moment of time they can possibly give them...

...Perhaps because they came to literature by way of socialist politics, perhaps because--living, for the most part, in New York--they breathed an air made intellectually richer by the presence of many distinguished German refugees (Hannah Arendt for one), these writers usually tried to wrestle with the spirit of the age, making connections between literature and the general culture, while never losing touch with history and politics...

...Contemplating these decades, we can indulge in nostalgia or in quick generational comparisons: the way we were, or the way our parents were...

...Perhaps because it has attained such popularity, becoming the stock-in-trade of Sunday supplements and weekly magazines, cultural criticism often is regarded with suspicion by historians and literary critics, who disStephen Miller is with the National Endowment for the Humanities...

...But the orchestra that plays this piece is a small one, composed mainly of novelists, with a section of journalists, a trio of philosophical gurus (Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul Goodman), and a small group of rock musicians...

...Motive-hunting is, for most people, a fascinating game, but it is also an unending one, for it is well-nigh impossible to discover the motives of particular persons...

...cal atmosphere of academic English studies...

...By the late fifties, however, the true nature of the Soviet Union had penetrated the minds of even its most benighted apologists, and for this and other reasons the Continental brand of cultural criticism has fallen upon hard times...

...Where some measure of uniformity in policies and administration is essential, it may be desirable to encumber the assignment with specification of standards which must be observed and limits within which state and local policies must be confined, and to attach a pronouncement that when intolerable departures from federal requirements occur officers of the national government will enter the appropriate state offices to provide supervision or supplant the local administration...

...On the Continent it usually took the form of grandiose philosophical excursions into the past and the future...

...Political foment and formal literary change rarely go hand in hand, however, and one imagines that Borges and Nabokov--to name two of the most influential experimental writers of the late fifties and early sixties--would most certainly take exception to Dickstein's remark that experimental fiction was "subtly related to the new feelings of social malaise and reformist zeal...

...Mainly, the goal should be to sever the connection, to take business away from Washington lock, stock, and barrel...

...In the fifties liberals had a field day labelling everyone from center to right as sufferin~g from such "authoritarian personalities," to use a phrase made popular by a famous sociological study...

...There is good reason to question a genre that descends from "Signs of the Times," in which Carlyle rants against what he calls the "Mechanical Age" and complains that "wonder, indeed, is, on all hands, dying out...

...For the millions of students who puzzled out the intricacies of Keats' odes, there were perhaps only a few thousand who looked at the speculations of a Hazlitt, an Arnold, a Ruskin...

...Mobilization, conservation, and distribution of energy...

...Dickstein suffers from an afflictionthat is common among cultural critics: a tendency to swallow all too easily the notion that there is a reigning spirit to an age...

...Since Dirty Linen~New-Found-Land premiered in Washington shortly after the Wayne Hays/Elizabeth Ray revelations, local theater-goers may be forgiven somewhat for their susceptibility to such highjinks...

...Verbal and sight gags abound, never rising much above the most obvious sorts of slips, Freudian and otherwise...

...From the perspective of the seventies, the work both of the neo-Freudians of the fifties and the radical Freudians of the sixties appears inadequate and naive...

...Though egalitarian hedonism was not, of course, what Freud had intended, his simplistic ways of categorizing human conduct encouraged others to think that solutions to perennial human problems were in the offing...

...Some kinds of public business can be given a national administration without making more than trivial inroads on the time and thought of the elected officials...

...If the notion of ideology continues to hold sway among many academics, Freudian explanations seem to have gone out of favor...

...How useful, one wonders, is the notion of an age that spans such a vast period of time...

...But that aspect of his latest success was strictly fortuitous, according to Stoppard: "I never set out to write a The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 15...

...What is it about Stoppard's plays that both attracts crowds and delights intellectuals...

...It was not always so...

...What he took as a measure of his hometown's sophistication was the enthusiastic reception given Tom Stoppard's last three plays: Jumpers, which opened its American season at the Kennedy Center in 1974, and enjoyed a record engagement before moving to Broadway...

...Because he wants to be a cultural critic Dickstein often does violence to literature, trying to make cultural capital out of literary forms...

...In his essay, "The Meaning of a Literary Idea," Lionel Trilling argued that "we as readers know that we demand of our literature some of the virtues which define a successful work of systematic thought...

...Though they understood that literature could not be reduced to intellectual history or simply be ransacked by someone looking for the spirit of the age, they were impatient with the notion that ideas in literature always deliquesced into textures of irony and ambiguity--that ideas, therefore, should be regarded as a thing apart from literature...

...Writing in the early years of the nineteenth century, Hegel assumed that the age in which he lived was a twilight era, signifying the end of the Germanic-Christian "stage" of European history, which had lasted approximately 1,000 years...

...But if his style struck some as mannered and anachronistic, the content of his essays revealed a mind wrestling with the spirit of the age...

...In the fifties and the early sixties, the academic study of literature centered on isolated "creative" texts, which were dissected for their several kinds of irony and their seven types of ambiguity...

...Other business that now heads for the White House or crowds onto legislative calendars can be shunted away by assigning it to quasi-autonomous authorities equipped with the sensory apparatus that assures response to a wide range of public interests...

...One hopes, then, that both the pseudo-scientific and the countercultural jargon of the sixties are on the wane...

...For the major modernist writers the metaphor that best served to describe the movement of recent history was the one Henry Adams adapted from nineteenth-century physics: The modern world was suffering from entropic disorder...

...The national crisis lies in good part in the fact that we are stretching the values of uniformity to the point where they become counterproductive...

...One hears very little talk about the neo-Freudian notion of adjustment, and one finds it hard to believe that the celebrated phrases of such radical Freudians as Marcuse and Brown--phrases like "one-dimensional man" and "polymorphously perverse"--evoked so much discussion...

...Dickstein's cultural boat stays afloat because it is held together by a watertight premise...

...and it is clea~ from their essays that the Ne~ York intellectuals did just that ranging between ideas in literaurc and ideas in general, subtitlin~ their books "Essays on Literaturc and Society," and "On Literature and Culture...

...The tactic, according to Dickstein, is justifiable because "the culture of an age is a unified thing, whatever its different strands and apparent contradictions...

...Though cultural criticism often suffers from such moralistic posturing, it is precisely the attention paid to questions of value that makes the cultural critic distinctive and, I would add, necessary-makes him different from the historian, who rightly sees such concerns as unprofessional...

...When Marxian or Freudian unmaskers enter the scene, rational debate usually collapses...

...One hopes that the species Burckhardt, in a prophetic phrase, called the terrible simplifiers, is vanishing...

...Yet we are, it seems, fascinated by the history that borders upon the present, for we devour material about the recent past: the twenties, the thirties, the fifties, the sixties...

...Like many who are comfortably ensconced in what Trilling called the "adversary culture," Dickstein is playing at being anti-bourgeois, one of the most commonplace and profitable games of our time...

...Robert Asahina Inanities: The Plays of Tom Stoppard Today's best English-language playwright really doesn't have much to say--for all the skiU in saying it...

...As far as Dirty Linen~New-Found-Land is concerned, there can be no doubt about the influence of the music hall...

...We learn, for example, that in the mid-sixties "Dylan went electric at almost the very moment that Lyndon Johnson began bombing North Vietnam and escalating the war in the south...

...Though its origins can be traced to the mid-eighteenth century, it did not come of age until the second decade of the nineteenth when, within a period of ten years, England and Germany saw the publication of Carlyle's essay, "Signs of the Times" (1829), Mill's essay and Hazlitt's book, both entitled The Spirit of the Age (1831 and 1824, respectively), and the notes from Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history (1832...

...As he said in a famous sentence: "The owl of Minerva begins its flight at dusk...

...It is always tempting, of course, for both audiences and critics to inflate the worth of their own opinions, and this kind of self-serving judgment typically works to the advantage of playwrights with pretensions...

...Americans, we have been told, are not especially interested in history...

...With the coming of World War I, it seemed to many that history had, in a sense, exploded--leaving only fragments that lacked a larger meaning...

...A similar workout could be done on the notion of oppression...

...No such worrying occurs...

...According to Irvin~ Howe, "literary modernism often had a way of cavalierly dis...

...The nineteenth-century cultural critics were dismissed, therefore, as innocents who, whatever their reservations about their ,times, still spoke to a unified culture and still believed in the possibility of progress...

...Dickstein's is a mind nourished almost exclusively on literature, one that shows only the slightest awareness of seminal works in other fields, and yet he wants to be more than a literary critic, wants to seize the spirit of the age and squeeze it into an apprehensible ball...

...Dickstein's Minerva, it seems, is a distinctly modern creature, programmed to take off every ten years...

...Though he founded no school and had no disciples, he was an influential figure, someone to whom such different writers as Irving Kristol and Irving Howe have paid homage...

...Stephen Miller Conjuring Up Spirits Morris Dickstein 's Gates of Eden reduces cultural criticism to clichd...

...To give Dickstein his due, he does admit that "part of me...

...Maddie is eventually relieved of most of her clothing, which then tends to pop up in the most expectably unexpected places, giving rise to exchanges like the following: "What is that...

...Can anyone fail to see ahead a towering importance for directing and regulating action by the national government of the United States, even if it sheds itself of every vestige of authority that lesser governments can pick up and carry...

...What are they doing in there...

...Stoppard's oeuvre has been characterized as "music hall with brains...

...Why is this man laughing...

...There were exceptions--an Edmund Wilson and an important "school" that I shall come to--but in the academic world, where by the early fifties most literary critics had found a home, cultural criticism was considered unsound and the nineteenth-century essayists were consigned to minor-league status...