The Mask of a Mandarin Manque

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature...

...Even this is largely true...

...Perhaps one need say no more than that in Tolstoy's case such an attitude resulted in the evaluation of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a better book than Count Leo's own novels War and Peace or Anna Karenina...

...Just as we have seen how the nuclear powers fear the ability of smaller powers to use apparent irresponsibility as a form of blackmail, we can appreciate how modern technology has made states more vulnerable from within than they ever were in the past...

...author, "Who Killed the British Empire...

...In the end, one is led to suspect that the mask of the iconoclast merely conceals the mandarin manque...

...One of the basic paradoxes of this multifarious industry, he observes, is that it "presupposes independent minds, even when it is out to deprive them of their independence...

...So far, well and good...

...He can lose himself only when they themselves become authors-the authors of history...

...Much the same kind of situation has arisen in what Hans Magnus Enzenberger chooses to call "the consciousness industry...

...The book's most successful essay-the one that is truly vivid because for once he is effectively concrete in his statements-is his "Tourists of the Revolution.' This brilliant analysis of that audacious and economical instrument of corruption used by the Communist countries-the delegacija system, the subsidized tour for the fellow traveler-deserves a place beside the essays of Orwell, whom Enzenberger in his shallow arrogance dismisses, and of Dwight Macdonald, whom he would doubtless despise with equal injustice...

...Thus Enzenberger, too, regards the age of the book as brief and doomed-this notwithstanding the vast increase in book sales and library circulation in recent years...

...There is a great deal of talk in the abstract about the goal of poetry and the duties of poets, but he never quotes a line to show what he considers good verse, and very few to show what he thinks is bad...

...Enzenberger protects himself from this kind of absurdity by carefully avoiding discussion of specific works of literature, so that we never know who his electronic-age Harriet Beecher Stowe may be...

...The great powers, he further contends, have been similarly spared by the failure of revolutionaries- lost in outdated Marxist dreams-to perceive the potentialities for popular participation in the dissemination of news and opinion that new communications advances have placed in their hands...

...This fact was fully understood last summer not only by the leaders of the warring parties in Cyprus, but equally by the Turkish and Greek governments, both of whom have quite cynically exploited the desire of both the United States and the Soviet Union to avoid a major confrontation...

...He writes almost entirely in oracular statements, in barbed and sometimes stinging aphorisms...

...In other words, Enzenberger is presenting a post-Orwellian view that denies the feasibility of monolithic control over the media as envisaged in the novel 1984...

...All this is pure fantasy...

...Enzenberger merely perpetuates the Proudhonian, and Tolstoyan, myth that there is an art of the people as opposed to "bourgeois" art...

...By this he means something more than what we generally call "communications" and the "media...

...Like other radical critics whose creativity is dubious or frustrated, Enzenberger is at his best as a reporter on the aberrations of the Left...

...Often he reads like nothing other than McLuhan paraphrased to suit the particular brand of radical chic that obtains in Germany...

...he is derogating the intellectual capacities of the masses whose interest he would promote...

...But when he speaks with stale absurdity of the "exclusive class character" of the book, equating it with the easel painting as a bourgeois luxury, he is not merely reaching for effect...

...But the conclusions he draws from the situation I find both false and disturbing...

...Indeed, as Enzenberger suggests at one point, it can be argued that the French establishment was saved in 1968 mainly because the student rebels did not understand their own strength and romantically seized the Odeon Theatre instead of realistically invading the radio and television stations...

...An Inquest" We have all observed, not without a touch of Schadenfreude, how the strength of the great nuclear powers has proved to be somewhat illusory, since the very danger of atomic war gives a disproportionate nuisance value to small countries in turbulent regions like the Middle East...

...Perhaps this explains his acute perceptions of the hollowness of other critics, particularly of the much-praised Georg Lukacs, whose pedestrian servility he ruthlessly exposes...

...He includes education, the arts to the degree they have a popular appeal, everything that directly or indirectly influences public opinion...

...Ever since Proudhon and Courbet concocted the first theories of the universalization of art more than a century ago, the masses have shown by their indifference that they are quite willing to leave poetry and its equivalents in sound and sight to those who feel it their vocation to pursue them...

...Moreover, the accuracy of that presupposition is ultimately fatal to those who seek to manipulate the human mind through the media: Too many hands are involved for control to be easily centralized, and the new technologies of communication are becoming increasingly available to those who wish to subvert the officially sponsored world view...

...Despite his attacks on Marshall McLuhan, he is really no less destructive of genuine cultural values and no less dominated by an uncritical acceptance of mechanical processes...

...Consequently, as a critic promoting our understanding of literature he is entirely nugatory...

...Yet "Tourists of the Revolution" is the exception that makes one all the more conscious that most of The Consciousness Industry, like most aphoristic writing, consists of gratuitous and pontifical pronouncements...

...In Enzenberger's view, the role of the writer today is to hasten that goal: "The author has to work as the agent of the masses...

...He goes on to propose that through the camera, the tape recorder and other products of technology (which, incidentally, cost much more than paperback books and would therefore seem nearer to the world of bourgeois luxury) every man can now become his own artist...

...It is a kind of resurrection of William Morris' old, never-fulfilled dream that art will become a universal activity, though his fine handcrafts are to be replaced by such monuments to the human mind as wall-newspapers and tape-recorded "happenings...