Cultural Connections

...It is . . . impersonal and abstract rather than existential, language-oriented rather than people-oriented"—all qualities the author finds in art as well, specifically in the experimental fiction of Barthelme, Coover, Barth, Gass, and Wurlitzer...

...Along with a vivid description of "the continuous Socratic performance" of Paul Goodman?so impressive it was scary"—we have the picture of the bright young man vainly trying to interest Goodman in the clever things he was saying, not realizing until years later that Goodman was "driven by sexual hungers and humiliations...

...I found them also troubling at times, as I can demonstrate, perhaps too simply, by saying that Dickstein persuades me to reread Mailer's American Dream, a book I detested...

...I too had a mother, who would mightily have disapproved of my being there . . . but for the first time I knew that poetry meant more to me than faith or ritual...

...The author of Matthew Arnold and The Liberal Imagination seemed simply to be pointing to the possible abuses of the tradition of cultural criticism he himself had helped establish, rather than seriously questioning it...

...He is here looking back at history...

...Dickstein's assurance is based on two "loosely Hegelian" hypotheses: "that each phase of culture is coherent and full of meaning, that it can be read like a text, and . . . that it's precisely our texts—novels, poems, songs, polemics, autobiographies—than can shed light on the larger Text...

...Dickstein discovered that he was a liberal rather than a radical in '68, when he worked on a faculty committee for a peaceful solution to the student occupation of Columbia buildings...

...Moreover, Dickstein uses "culture" in a far more relaxed way than most historians...

...The "Weatherman" stage is characterized by "detachment from experience, sometimes to the point of a disintegration of a sense of reality...

...Nowhere is this more evident than in the disparaging tone of his description of the usefulness and attractiveness of the idea: The assumption that all human expressions and artifacts are both "indicative and causative...

...Although Trilling "never joined the ranks of backlash intellectuals in the '60s," his later career was characterized for Dickstein by a "Hamlet-like" withdrawal from politics and contemporary literature...

...And after the celebration of "authenticating subjectivity" throughout Gates of Eden it comes as no surprise to the reader when Dickstein, responding to his mentor's rejection in Sincerity and Authenticity of "the quest for self-definition apart from the norms of the culture," declares: "Trilling must have surprised even himself...

...Like generations of Jews before me, I had always been oriented toward books and ideas, but Orthodox Judaism had built a fence of Law around the Book and had put strict limits on the play of concepts...

...The tone is hectoring, the language from the '60s, yet the urgency of this admonition suggests what Dickstein shares, "in his fashion," with Arnold and Trilling...

...nonetheless, his own urgent sense of re-latedness becomes almost an identification of politics and art...

...But it would not have occurred to him before the '60s, he tells us, to combine personal reminiscence with literary criticism, cultural history and political analysis...

...He watched the utopian-ism and "anarchic" spontaneity of the early- and mdd-'60s give way to a "Leninist vanguard" and saw with dismay the "self-destruotive outlines of the Weatherman faction...

...The character of the '50s was conditioned for him above all by this background and by attending a university with strong ties to New York's intellectual life...

...In his generally respectful treatment of the person who was the largest intellectual influence in his life, Dickstein comes closest to implying that it is he who most faithfully carries on a tradition its leader abandoned...

...it had, as Trilling said, "an adversary . . . actually subversive intention...

...He puts the case with great confidence: "The culture of an age is a unified thing, whatever its different strands and contradictions...

...However, another working principle—that formal changes "tell us everything about the artist's unconscious assumptions" and reflect (or anticipate) larger social meanings—leads to a very different kind of cultural history than the old sociologies of literature as a documentary record of its time...

...of giving the reader a ground and vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produced him...

...The following passage is a fair sample of the quick, fresh connections Dickstein makes and, simultaneously, of the slight shifts in metaphor that suggest a "mystique" of culture...

...Dickstein, too, resorts to the subjective: His use of his memory of "the way it felt," is one of the four major strands in Gates of Eden...

...Rojack is not Mailer, but Mailer's ambiguous self-portrait as an archetype of the age...

...One that he singled out was the susceptibility to judgments based on esthetic preferences, on mere tastes and lifestyles...

...These passions are no doubt vivifying: they have the semblance of heroism...

...He admits that he, too, found the novel a failure on his first reading...

...no one needed to be reminded of "the dessi-cation of spirit" resulting from their exclusion...

...These premises, of course, are not new...

...It was a heady atmosphere of big ideas, great books, and long perspectives...

...Apart from associating The Liberal Imagination (interestingly enough) with his father, a union man with whom he shared a fascination for politics (including "the crass electoral kind"), Dickstein's account of Trilling is very impersonal...

...Although the violent stage passed quickly, he believes that what he calls the "Weatherman" phase has continued up to the present day...

...It is sensibility, manners, experience, mood...

...His choice of the name of this small fringe group for a larger cultural movement is puzzling and, I think, characteristic of his fondness for the arresting metaphor...

...Trilling's concern that liberalism drifted toward "a denial of the emotions, a restraint upon human variousness and possibility" prepared Dickstein for the "new consciousness" that began to emerge in the late '50s...

...He entered Columbia in 1957 with "glib intellectual gifts, a cheery and studious disposition, a good deal of emotional immaturity...

...At the same time, he granted it was surely liberating to take into account "impulse and will and desire...

...This is the implicit unity of mood or moral temper...

...Touch it anywhere and it can reveal its secrets...

...by which, for instance, the style of confrontation is the politics of the '60's is closely related to the style of self-assertion in the poetry and sexuality of the period, which in turn is related to the unexpected impulse of the journalist, in covering these . . . developments, to do his own thing in an authenticating subjective way...

...Yet the lasting impression of the essay—and others found in the 1965 collection called, significantly, Beyond Culture—is of Trilling's growing concern that "our commitment to the idea of culture" denied the intellect's "ancient potency...

...In telling young writers what they "must" do, he warns, "The artist who is not part of the solution may become part of the problem...

...But when he turns to the end of the decade and carries some of the implications he uncovers up to the present, his readings become predictions...

...Against his sound criticisms of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, for example, we can set his memory of the repressed student thrilling to their promise of sexual apocalypse...

...He finds, in addition, a structural development of Shakespearian and Wordsworthian themes that explains much of what once seemed contradictory...

...Writers & Writing CU LTU RAL CONNECTIONS BY RUTH MATHEWSON The noisy "Two Cultures" debate on science and literature between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis in 1959 drew from Lionel Trilling a characteristically trenchant essay...

...More than merely the "semblance" of heroism—perhaps chutzpah, a word the author uses in praise of Heller, comes closer—is to be found in his mettlesome demand for "variousness and possibility...

...Both men were inadequate to their confrontation, he said, because they "set too much store by the idea of culture as a category of thought...

...Why call a vanguard movement after a slogan that forecloses the need for it...

...Like many before me, I had passed through a gateway into secular society...

...The secular culture became like a new religion, with its sacred texts and oral traditions...

...My first two years were blotted out by culture shock, brought on by massive exposure to Western literature and thought...

...Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (Basic, 300 pp., $11.95), yet he accepts them as a kind of challenge, not only assuming but insisting that all human expressions are in fact "indicative or causative of the whole of cultural life...

...Each of his variants is understandable in context, but the reader occasionally becomes uneasy with so much ectoplasm from the Zeitgeist...

...He admires the Barthelme of City Life and the formal experiments of others, but on the whole finds their work lacking in feeling—even in some instances, "catatonic"—and cut off from experience...

...All, Dickstein says, "remained true to the implications of his work, in their fashion...

...I find this plausible, but I wonder if such academic hindsight does not contradict Dickstein's own notions of immediacy...

...Dickstein sees that the novel, begun in '53 and published in '61, anticipates the "moral nausea of the Vietnam war," even the flight of deserters to neutral Sweden...

...Modern literature in particular raised questions...

...Taken from Dylan's lyric, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," it was in any case a curious name for the radicals themselves to adopt...

...The view that writers can "foreshadow and incarnate" the culture of an age takes on increasing importance as the book develops, and the discussions of fiction are strikingly provocative...

...On the other hand, Dickstein's reading of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (a novel I greatly admired) widens my appreciation considerably...

...we can test his analyses against our own understanding of the period...

...He calls it an expression of the "dark underside of a too-purely Apollonian Kennedy vision of power without pride or penalty...

...For Dickstein culture becomes sometimes process underlying consciousness, sometimes consciousness itself and sometimes unconsciousness...

...He bypasses all considerations of the semantic confusions implicit in the term, announcing instead his decision to "exploit the ambiguities of that slippery word . . . which we apply both to the narrower realm of art and thought and, in the anthropological sense, to the tissue of assumptions and mores of a whole society...

...He knows "there is no easy correspondence between art and society...

...It is interesting to learn from Raymond Williams' Culture and Society that the word first encountered hostility as an artificial or "sauerkraut" term when Matthew Arnold was thought by some critics to make it mean whatever suited him...

...And, indeed, his immediate purpose was to show that what he called "the cultural mode of thought . . . like any other mode of thought, had its peculiar dangers...

...and a quiet, ferocious competitiveness...

...he would not have realized that the critic, by "bringing his own idiosyncratic humanity into the picture . . . could deal more freely with the complex humanity of the material...

...Morris Dickstein was born in 1940 to immigrant Orthodox Jewish parents...

...Far less restrained is his description of himself in the incidental autobiographical glimpses he provides throughout the book...

...Dickstein responded powerfully to a treatment of books that brought them directly to bear on experience...

...He characteristically links his feelings that night to the implications of the moment for the entire culture: Ginsberg, he says, "foreshadowed and then incarnated the culture of the '60s...

...If Morris Dickstein, who decided to become a critic when he read The Liberal Imagination as Trilling's student 20 years ago, had been less influenced by his mentor's earlier teaching, he might have been daunted by those words...

...Now Dickstein employs it, not only to report on today's cultural weather, but to forecast tomorrow's...

...He tells, too, of going to the Lower East Side in '58 to hear Allen Ginsberg read his poem "Kaddish" in a loft above the Catholic Worker offices?alienated Jews and radical Catholics coming together on a Sabbath eve to hear a heretical Kaddish for a Communist Jewish mother...

...In general, Dickstein asserts that the early '60s works of Heller, Pynchon and Vonnegut were deeply political, "not only because their Kafkaesque anxieties so fully expressed the sensibility of those who grew up with the War and cold war, the CIA and the bomb, but because their half-mythic appropriation of large chunks of contemporary reality spoke to our political imagination as no propagandist literature could...

...Other critics have pointed out that Heller was only ostensibly writing "about" World War II...

...I shall go so far in doing this as to describe the actual circumstances in which the experience took place...

...They are tentatively offered, it is true—he finds himself "hopelessly confused"—yet his simultaneous concern for the health of the art and the health of the polity leads him, I think, into shaky formulations about the relation of the two...

...The Liberal Imagination had a great impact on Dickstein (and paradoxically led him later to diverge from his teacher) because it joined literature and politics, "fostered a more complex ideological consciousness based on literature and imagination...

...Almost anything works if we turn it right and press it hard...

...As a critic who was "neither Left nor Right—though in some ways to the left of the Left," with ties to both conservatism and "a truly humane radicalism" such as the revisionist Marxism of the early Lukacs and the Frankfort School, Trilling left an ambiguous legacy, and it has been received by followers so diverse as New Leftists, "rarified '50s aesthetes" and National Review writers...

...I simply hadn't turned him oh...

...To understand the kinds of social forces impelling manners, morals and politics, he says, one must have a "feel for what Trilling calls 'a culture's hum and buzz of implication': 'a dim mental region of intention' that underlies a culture and shapes its character at a given historical moment...

...He does not quote them in his book...

...of the whole of cultural life . . . proposes to us those intensities of moralized feeling which seem appropriate to our sense that all that is good in life is at stake in every cultural action...

...Trilling's manner, albeit sui generis in its restraint, was nevertheless exemplary of a previous era: "It happens that my present awareness of this theme is involved in a personal experience, and I am impelled to speak of it not abstractly but with the husks of experience clinging untidily to it...

...There is no special key...