Morris Dickstein's Double Agent: The Critic & Society

...One can admire the generosity of Dickstein's concluding "Dialogue on Criticism Today" without believing that it significantly advances a debate that has become all too familiar in recent years...

...Laing (when few others had heard of them), only to turn against them in the next decade, when their sensibility became, in his view, a new and dangerous orthodoxy...

...Dickstein rehearses several developments much discussed in the pages of American and British magazines...

...We have noted, for example, that deconstruction's emphasis on "misreading" and "inner contraction" can look very much like the emphasis displayed in classic 1930s essays by close readers like R.P...

...A willingness to think against complacent assumptions...

...But Dickstein usefully reminds us that alternative perspectives have been steadily advanced, and not merely by neoconservative critics sneering and sniping from the sidelines...

...And yes, new critics like John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Empson, and Blackmur were, back in the thirties and forties, said now and then to entertain an idea...

...Arnold's goal was not to create a timeless canon, a perfect society, or an absolute set of values, but to find whatever was needful for a given age...

...Younger writers like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., academics raised in the protocols and assumptions of advanced literary theory, are assiduously making themselves into effective public critics on the model of the very figures Dickstein admires...

...In the same way we can argue that, though trash is more and more often taken for art, a great many voices have been raised to wonder why...

...There are idiots in tenured positions at American universities who—as Dickstein has it—argue that "just because texts [cannot] be tied to a single stable meaning—who ever thought they could?— . . . no sign truly [corresponds] to anything outside itself...

...Dickstein is least instructive when he resigns himself to ostensible facts of life that are apt before long to seem anything but conclusive...

...Though he offers little fresh information on these writers, he evokes the sensibility at work in their prose and persuades us that moral seriousness is no obstacle to aesthetic sensitivity, that an interest in the social implications of art need not result in aesthetic judgments reflecting a politically correct party line...

...Where Dickstein fails is in his balanced effort to yield ground to his antagonists without often acknowledging the implications entailed in particular concessions...

...Dickstein himself cites the inspiriting work of Gates and other erstwhile theorists, from Stephen Greenblatt to Gerald Graff...

...Comparable charges are leveled against other critics like Northrop Frye...

...The fact that art is frequently bought and discussed as a commodity does not mean that the paintings of Matisse cannot be debated and compared much in the way that an Arnoldian criticism would recommend...

...Many subscribe to the notion that works of art, like everything else, are produced by "society" rather than by individuals...

...Dickstein is also disappointing when he repeats misleading and superficial accounts of critical schools nowadays scorned by most literary academics...

...In such passages Dickstein usefully corrects present misconceptions...

...Dickstein helps us to regard the academic scene with some sense of the tempering forces at work even in the more radical precincts of the university...

...That is unfortunate...

...But of course the matter is not so simple...

...If Dickstein's complaint has principally to do with the apparent unwillingness of literary intellectuals to take on a wide range of cultural issues, to incur political risks, and to cultivate a general readership, then he may well conclude that Gates, Edward Said, and others have lately begun to turn things around...

...This is no easy job...

...Dickstein is much better on figures he admires, figures like Trilling, Philip Rahv, and Alfred Kazin...

...Not surprisingly, young literary theorists have for some time trumpeted their radical break with the "old criticism" and pretended that they belonged to the first generation in literary history to challenge the legitimacy of the Western canon and the authority of their critical elders...

...Complexity...

...Current participants in the so-called canon debate conveniently forget that Arnold and his successors were not complacent spokesmen for a dominant orthodoxy...

...Just so, as Dickstein also writes, "Trilling was drawn to apocalyptic figures like Norman 0. Brown and R.D...

...Sure, he allows, today's classroom teachers are almost as committed to close reading as professors were a half century ago when the "new criticism" was all the rage...

...Some even contend that the past is itself a fiction and that one version of the past is inevitably as valid as any other...

...Wellintentioned scholars like Dickstein may do what they will to challenge the authority of fashionable doctrines like deconstruction, but—so it is generally felt—the assumptions and values of public criticism are impossible to resurrect...

...Some writers who figure centrally in the story Dickstein wishes to tell are not mentioned at all...

...Dickstein's is a useful and timely book that makes a persuasive case for particular critics while failing to do justice either to other figures or to important implications of the very issues he treats...

...There is reason to applaud Dickstein's emphasis on the relation of critics to the larger world, but one must wonder why he has virtually nothing to say of Marxist criticism or of the relation between politics and sensibility in the work of writers he likes, from Orwell to Howe...

...Dickstein's case for a public criticism at once practical and audacious is badly compromised by his spotty and unreliable treatment of much of the relevant material...

...It is bracing to read him on Jacques Derrida's disdain for plain evidence, but one misses any effort to account for the control Derrida has exercised over American literary academics...

...Throughout, Dickstein insists that he is arguing on behalf of the public critic, and one sees perfectly why he so admires Trilling and Wilson and Orwell and others who fit that description...

...We may not like it, Dickstein contends, but we must relinquish all confidence in a "scale of value...

...The vehemence with which such notions have often been espoused has sometimes made it seem that they had succeeded utterly in banishing from the academy all other views...

...Dickstein also demonstrates that critics like Arnold and Trilling were particularly impressive not in espousing timeless values but in identifying what was timely and essential to the lives of their contemporaries...

...He knows full well that many younger critics in the academy honor some of the abstract imperatives associated with Arnoldian and humanistic criticism...

...Anyone thinking to address contemporary literature or ideas in the spirit of Matthew Arnold or T.S...

...And though the commodities market largely determines which works will be widely noticed, the small literary quarterlies, alternative galleries, and provincial museums are around to ensure that the scene remain more diverse than market forces would otherwise allow...

...In fact, Dickstein's effort to recall us to the virtues of clarity, elegance, breadth, and value judgment comes at a crucial moment...

...Anyone who keeps up with the book wars will agree that, in the American university at least, writing for a general audience is usually regarded as a sign of mediocre ambition and a shallow, journalistic intelligence...

...Or we have noted that the "new" historicism can come on very much in the manner of the "demystifying" criticism associated with Marxist literary analysis, reducing literature to ideology and context in the same philistine ways...

...But it is also clear that genuine art continues to be made, that many artists go about their business in almost total disregard of the literary and art markets, and that critical value judgments continue to matter to people who read the culture pages of the New York Times, the New Republic and other influential publications...

...Such imperatives are as widely approved today as they were forty years ago when Lionel Trilling called for variousness, difficulty, and complexity...

...He gets at the nature, intent, and consequence of the liberal criticism automatically disparaged by many in the American university today...

...One can be grateful to Dickstein for his spirited defense of literary journalism without feeling that he has adequately engaged real distinctions, as between the review and the essay, the report and the assessment...

...L his new book, Morris Dickstein proposes to make a fresh case for a creature he calls the public critic...

...Though the designation instantly calls to mind the achievements of George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, we have been reminded all too often of late that the time of the public critic has passed...

...Dickstein has written a lively, impassioned, and provocative work, but it is by no means the "landmark study" hailed on the dustjacket of his book...

...This nonsense has misled a great many people and encouraged many students to suppose that they had no reason to find out what ostensibly credulous naïfs like Arnold and Trilling actually wrote...

...Arnold's criticism," Dickstein writes, was "always corrective, diagnostic— attuned to his acute sense of the moment and the audience...

...Blackmur and William Empson...

...more, they "usually betrayed a surprisingly mechanical notion of form...

...It is important that Dickstein point out, as others have done before him, that for writers like Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan art in itself seems not to matter, but one wonders why no reference is made to particular works by any of these writers, or by their numerous epigoni...

...But there are also cutting-edge theorists like the new historicist Lynn Hunt who acknowledge "that the goal of objective truth is crucial for the historian, though it's elusive and unattainable...

...At one point, for example, he insists that we cannot "hold on to the crumbling cultural hierarchy of highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow that was dear to our own Age of Criticism...

...Leading academic critics today typically consider themselves professionals writing for an audience of their academic peers...

...Blackmur is respectfully dismissed for essays written decades after the criticism that affected everyone's reading of poetry...

...Eliot is apt to seem lamentably out of touch with current moods and expectations...

...But in making his case for public criticism Dickstein suggests that it is necessarily distinct from what he calls "technical" criticism, leaving us to wonder why a rigorous treatment of formal matters should be excluded from the work he wishes to promote...

...But these "new critics," says Dickstein, "tried to sever the practice of criticism from theory and ideas...

...Now it is clear that, in postmodern culture, art has become a commodity and trash is often taken for art...

...Many literary academics regard theory as decidedly more interesting and important than imaginative literature...

...But some of the leading deconstructionists and new historicists have understood, or suspected, their derivation from earlier critics, and though they have not always been candid about the facts of the matter, their strategies of concealment have not always prevented us from noting those facts...

...One can't help feeling that a more sustained struggle with selected passages of Blackmur's essays on modernist 264 • DISSENT Books poetry would have led Dickstein to regard his own formulations on new criticism as shallow and untenable...

...Others argue that it is not only impossible to determine what an author intended but futile to think at all of authors, or intentions, or judgments based upon ascribed intention...

...Evidence itself, in this view, is no more than a strategy for controlling one's audience...

...Why not...

...The trouble is that the best of the critics, like Empson, Blackmur, and Frye, are not guilty as charged, and that in any case their best writing is never engaged...

...Frye is treated as the author of a late and wholly uncharacteristic book...

...Just so, Dickstein invokes concepts like "community" and "relevance" without working through their implications or clarifying their relation to his central argument...

...Though many academics cling to the pretense that they have discovered entirely novel ways to talk about literature and ideas, the evidence indicates a good deal more continuity and development than you'd guess from the propaganda issued in the name of the radical newness...

...Dickstein signals to us in various ways that he has followed carefully the shifts and turns in criticism, but he makes assertions—say, that the leading feminist critics do not much differ from one another in their assumptions and practices—that he neither supports nor pursues...

...Because, he says, "Both the money culture and the media culture have been universal levelers, turning art into a commodity and trash into art—an effect which has exhilarated some artists...

...In some respects, Dickstein is waging a battle that has been in progress for some time, and it is not too much to assert that the battle is going better than he knows...

...For every article on the social determinants of fiction and the hermeneutics of suspicion there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of articles and reviews on the merits and cultural implications of this Norman Mailer novel or that Spike Lee film...

...Resistance to the illusion of a perfectly objective knowledge...

...This is not to say that unusual and alarming things have not occurred in the literary academy in the last SPRING • 1993 • 263 Books two decades...