CRITICISM AS CONSUMPTION

...307 pp., $4), drawn for the most part from Commentary and Partisan Review, which purport to give us a "new aproach to American culture...

...There are, of course, individual pieces of great merit...

...otherwise, like most scrapbooks, they are likely to be shapeless, arbitrary, and dated...

...And, at least in the case of the former, the deterioration in the prestige of art was abetted by the "masters" themselves turning out their most insignificant works...

...among them, Lionel Trilling's well-known article on the Kinsey Report, Robert Warshow's "The Liberal Conscience in 'The Crucible'", Anatole Broyard's "A Portrait of the Hipster," and Harvey Swados' excellent analysis of "Popular Taste and 'The Caine Mutiny' " (to which all commentary on Mar-jorie Morningstar has been a protracted footnote...

...But taken together the essays in The Scene Before You have a claus-tral, stale air...

...that essay is unique, I believe, in its effort to carry the Cold War into the realm of sexuality, and its claims for the American Woman are of a piece with the problem Barrett describes...

...And here again history disposed of the matter, for in this period of Cold War no talents of a commanding order came forward to speak to us with the authority of the older generations—the generations of Eliot and Hemingway, Picasso and Matisse...

...He has assembled in The Scene Before You a scrapbook of his personal enthusiasms, and while enthusiasm and even passion are indispensable qualities in an editor, they scarcely exhaust the range of his obligations...

...and I think it tells us something about the current intellectual situation that this should be so, if only because the unity and style of these essays derive from the audience to which they are addressed and not from the materials which are ostensibly discussed in them...

...It is the Cold War itself, with its ideological defense of American institutions, which has finally congealed this development of the intellectual into a consumer of distasteful culture, this novel predicament in which criticism no longer refines and judges culture but, on the contrary, packages it for an elite market...

...What they actually give us is approaches on many subjects— movies, the theater, television, comic strips, detective stories, painting, literature, sex, politics, rhetoric, and so on—twenty-four essays in all, by some of the most talented intellectuals on the current scene...

...Like many other modes of consumption, this criticism already looks dated...

...It may seem farcical, I know, to suggest that our sense of politics has been relaxed in a period which has seen the swift politicalization of life in so many public and private forms, yet that is just the point: because we have been unable to contain politics as something separate from other modes of experience, we have lost our sense of it as an entity, as an organism with a beginning, middle, and end...

...the fact of homosexuality as he describes it is a matter of common, public knowledge...

...Only one last obstacle to its complete domination remained: the values of high art in its discrete, unpolitical, and uncorrupted forms...

...In less brilliant performances this dated-ness betrays what is simply a lack of critical content...

...and thus our minds have followed on the invitation of history—have followed history itself, in fact—in diffusing this political sense over the whole cultural terrain...

...But more important than the content of this critical method is the extent to which its practice is the means by which intellectuals have become consumers of a culture which is in many ways anathema to their taste and traditions...

...they do require thought...

...At the same time, this period— which has also been the period of the Cold War—has witnessed the establishment of so-called popular culture in the lives of American intellectuals with an unforeseen vigor and finality...

...what no one has yet measured is its insidious impact on our cultural values, the extent to which these "innocents" have set the standards of our recent literature, theater, art, and architectural decor...

...Contrary to appearances, collections of this sort cannot simply be tossed together out of one's favorite reading...

...They tend to leave the reader with a vivid image of the atmosphere in which they were conceived, but with only a confused impression of the culture which they are intended to illuminate...

...Even so good a piece as William Barrett's "New Innocents Abroad" is no longer quite relevant to the present...

...Another editor, too, might have found it worthwhile to publish Elizabeth Hardwick's essay, "The American Woman as Show-Queen," as an appendix to Barrett's...

...The politicalization of culture, the decline of art—these are the terms of the predicament which has produced this "new approach" to American culture which Brossard seeks to document...

...That predicament, moving in on the American intellectual since the end of World War II like some pincers movement of the Zeitgeist, has consisted of a radical relaxation in our sense of art on the one hand and the sense of politics on the other...

...An essay like Milton Klonsky's "Greenwich Village: Decline and Fall" strikes one as so much nostalgia and false poetry in the face of the Village today which has, already in a sense, fallen, and what has taken its place is not discussed in this book...

...essays on politics, comics, the Negro, or detective fiction which address themselves to images no longer with us...

...If out of this shapelessness a decisive point can be found in The Scene Before You, it has less to do with the editor's intentions than with the predicament to which he has been a ready party...

...Yet the effect is not an exhilarating one...

...For the most part this approach consists of a substratum of unexamined Freudian and Marxian assumptions on which has been overlaid bits of fashionable philosophy and sociology...

...Add to this deterioration the bureaucratization of "the contemporary" in the universities and it should not surprise us that the values of high art have been insufficient to stem the onslaught of popular culture on American intellectual life...

...The first cause of this confusion is Brossard's job of editing, which strikes me as hasty and lazy-minded...