California and Other States of Grace
Howard, Jane
a charity that surpasses our capacity to claim it." To this day she finds no fault with such ideas, nor with the early lesson that "the desire to know, love, and serve God should be our first...
...They contracted, that disease from reading and misreading modern and postmodern literature...
...The old New Criti- cism, structuralism, post-structuralism, art-eroticization, and even the student- centered approach to Freshman English, all come under attack for surrendering the critical powers of literacy and litera- ture just at the time when they are most needed to effect real social and cultural reform...
...The coun- tervailing thesis for which Graft argues is that our unreflective, "naive" concept of the real world is backed by various "un- refusable facts," which we had better acknowledge for our own cultural good...
...Her mother, who once curled wigs in a Shir- ley Temple doll factory, consults an as- trologer...
...A tippling uncle "ate dog food out "We should all have one person who of squash trophies and didn't give a good knows how to bless us despite the evi- Goddam where [he ] would be tomorrow dence," she writes...
...Her other grand- credit, cherishes unlovely eccentrici- mother, the wealthy one, was different...
...Michael Hanches" TiHE COMEDIAN Robin Williams has a record album out (which I haven't heard) called Reality . . . What a Con- cept...
...the bandleader Miller's name was not spelled "Glen...
...We look Catholic,' said my father...
...loaded to the gills" is too much of a cli'ch6...
...But she seems to have it in her to probe her subjects a little more deeply than she here attempts to do...
...One couldn't help hope that it would happen to you" is not a sentence worthy of the English department of the Dominican Convent, much less Manhattanville...
...To this day she finds no fault with such ideas, nor with the early lesson that "the desire to know, love, and serve God should be our first concern...
...For all her interest in theology Phyllis Theroux is closer in spirit and style to Jean Kerr than to Simone Well, which is fine...
...The word "critical" in...
...Freud, too, is mentioned twice only, and Horace not at all, but it is hard not to read this book as a dispatch from some Manichaean literary contest between the pleasure principle and the reality princiCommonweal: 508...
...What redeems this book is its author's conviction that families.can keep a sense of themselves even when their headquarters are sold and their elders gone, even in case something downtown occurred to in the face of deracination and divorce...
...ties like these along with more charming she "didn't like to be without whipped traits and keeps close track of her cream or an exit, and she often hired a kinsmen however randomly fate may taxi which she kept running outside, just fling them...
...the con- suming (in both senses) egoism of mod- em private life has found its own equiva- lent to laissez faire in fais ce que voud- ras...
...But it is the treason of the academic clerks that causes him the most concern and that finally dominates this book...
...and so corporate capitalism and pri- vate egoism foster each other in grotes- que symbiosis...
...Wil- liams's album title samples and no doubt parodies.that idiom...
...A subordinate cause for concern is the sappy techno-therapeutic idiom that marks the modern vernacular of both popular speech and mass culture...
...That title captures both the thesis and the antithesis of Gerald Graff's new book...
...May tribes like hers increase...
...and although Matthew Arnold is mentioned only twice, he would not have written a very different book...
...The modern capitalist state is mindlessly agnostic regarding all serious questions of value and ideology...
...We don't need to hear quite so much about how she wanted to be Margaret O'Brien, or how she ate so many ice cream cones she had to shop at Macy's Chubette department...
...Grandmother was morning...
...Phyllis Theroux, to her that person to me...
...She doesn't write pretentiously...
...What's wrong isn't that she slides over her failed marriage, which presumably might be a later" book's focus, but that she dwells overlong and overcutely on some of the details of her adolescence...
...According to Graft, most academic approaches to language have conspired to deprive literature of its power to work upon the world...
...I don't quite know what it is...
...her cousin Tim Gallwey's book The Inner Game of Tennis must hai, e pleased her mother, whose wish for all her dear ones is that they might some- how, in time, "go national...
...Di-vorced, as Theroux now is herself, her parents"don't have a marriage anymore, but they have something...
...this sense occurs dozens of times inLit-erature Against Itself...
...They do this by denying the referential and propositional powers of language, or the extra-literary reality of the world, or both...
...She and her siblings and parents con- verted to Catholicism en masse, "partly due to a certain inexorability that both my parents felt about making such a choice...
...Ironi- cally, all these movements (or eddyings) are decadent academic epiphenomena of the romantic and modernist .traditions, which at their most truly creative always did manage to engage the real world in a "critical" way...
...Her editor should also have been more fastidious...
...High energy" isn't an adjective...
...there- fore Graft makes an effort to set the liter- ary record straight by surveying what is really implied by the world-views of Joyce, Borges, Barthelme and others...
...Her father, who used to earn his living "selling puffed raisins and dried apricots to loony bins up and down the state," celebrated his sixtieth birthday by buying a Honda motor scooter...
...I The dulce versus the utile LITERATURE AEAINST ITSELF: LITERARY IDEAS IN MODERN SOCIETY Gerald Graft University of Chicago, $15, 260 pp...
...According to Graff, this empty idiom, along with various other symptoms of our times, can be largely blamed on the epistemological disease now epidemic among professors of the humanities...
...We might as well be Catholic.' " The ex- tended family had a bent anyway for mysticism...
...But all the recently in- fluential movements in literary theory have abandoned the intellectual ap-paratus that is needed to recognize, let alone remedy, this state of affairs...
...The antithesis, which Professor Graft finds to be the blame of much of contemporary culture, is the post-Kantian proposition that reality is only a mental' or linguistic concept...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 16
