Culture and Cant

...So as much as he admires the aesthetic and moral achievements of the modern movement, Trilling feels bound to criticize its political character, its status as an "adversary culture" that seeks "as we can say of any other class with a degree of power...

...Thus Miss Sontag is not so much a spokesman for the party of art as for a faction within that party, striving for power...

...This cultural triumph has been a matter for pride and self-congratulation...

...The Viking Press...

...This is the aesthetic and sensibility of the modern movement, a sensibility whose roots, she occasionally admits, are at least a century old...

...is not so fine as philosophy, for the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth...

...What a work of art does," she writes, "is to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize...

...One may admire Trilling's effort to recognize and criticize the "adversary culture" and yet wish for less vagueness and more example—for a more direct confrontation of the rational intellect with the power and ideology of contemporary art...

...With Against Interpretation she emerges as an important spokesman for the party of art, and it is almost inevitably necessary, given not only Trilling's insights but also the celebrity she has become, that Miss Sontag be regarded as a political as much as an aesthetic or critical figure...

...The titles of these new essay collections convey their sudden sense of urgency...

...Miss Sontag makes her position seem newer than it is by insisting and over-insisting on the poor quality and false motives of interpretative criticism—the kind of moralistic criticism that has accommodated the disorder of modern art to its domestic role among us...

...Her weakness lies in her polemical stance—whatever short-term publicity it gains her—and her strength lies in her critical powers, especially as a critic of films...

...It shaped itself into a minority culture, and then as it waxed strong it took on more and more the inevitable characteristics of an institution...

...Moreover, Miss Sontag has adopted a highly political pose without quite admitting to it...

...speaking for a young aesthetic generation, Susan Sontag takes up a pose of militant resistance...

...This is the view that art does not always tell the truth or the best kind of truth and does not always point out the right way, that it can even generate falsehood and habituate us to it, and that on frequent occasions, it might well be subject, in the interests of autonomy, to the scrutiny of the rational intellect...

...This act of comprehension accompanied by voluptuousness is the only valid end, and sole sufficient justification, of a work of art...

...To the Victorians, who originated the idea, literature could preserve values and order against the disorder of industrial society...

...My sense of this difficulty," he announces in his preface, "leads me to approach a view which will seem disastrous to many readers and which, indeed, rather surprises me...

...Lionel Trilling, spokesman for a mature literary generation, assumes a transcending tone...

...Picasso and Eliot, Duchamp and Brecht, living and dead, they are our grand old men...

...To the moderns, who took it over, literature could restore values by breaking up the stultifying formulas of middle class culture, by creating images of disorder...

...Since she already is so much a celebrity, an object equally of unthinking critical veneration and vituperation, I want to insist that the time has not yet come to vote Miss Sontag either up or down...

...Beyond their affinities as leading figures in the New York literary world, fellow contributors to Partisan Review, and teachers at Columbia, Mr...

...It seems to me she must be understood in this political fashion before her aesthetic strengths are recognized...

...233 pp...

...Trilling and Miss Sontag have little in common except the aesthetic premise they both oppose—the conception of literature as a moral criticism of culture...

...At the present moment it must be thought of as a liberating idea without which our developing ideal of community is bound to defeat itself...

...We have created for ourselves the capacity, almost unique in history, to choose to stand outside our culture, to say to the culture that made us and shaped us, No...

...Borrowing from political sociologists, Trilling describes what is essentially a party of art...

...Yet obviously it is not without its ambiguities, ambiguities which the champions and spokesmen for the successful modern movement are only now beginning to explore...

...What Trilling insists on as an antidote to art—art as class, art as power —is the faculty of reason, the capacity of mind, the power of ideas...

...Her own aesthetic, what she calls the new sensibility, is hardly as new as she sometimes insists...

...This intense conviction of the self apart from culture," he says in his essay on Freud in Beyond Culture, "is, as culture well knows, its noblest and most generous achievement...

...She speaks rather for the film and for certain kinds of theatre and also for the contemporary New York sensibility she made notorious with her essay, reprinted in this volume, "Notes on 'Gamp...

...But a strange thing happened to this sensibility on its road to success and power...

...We have learned, as Trilling says, dutifully and gladly to look into the abyss...

...If in the future she can make herself more generous and free from her own party's political cant, she may yet be one of our great liberating spirits...

...She is at her most political in her effort to denigrate or ignore the poetry and fiction and literary criticism that have exemplified her own aesthetic...

...She speaks for a sensibility, however it is misused, that is one of great importance—a sensibility that understands art not as criticism of life but "as the extension of life . . . the representation of (new) modes of vivacity...

...to aggrandize and perpetuate itself...

...Now the moderns are part of our tradition...

...Reviewed by Robert Sklar HPhe modern movement in the arts, A once a roaring beast, has been tamed and domesticated nearly everywhere among us...

...This gives her book the character at times of an exaggerated polemic, a polemic that distorts and confuses her own aesthetic views, and forces the sympathetic reader to notice how often she herself falls into interpretation and moralizing...

...Trilling's attitude toward this modern sensibility is curiously ambivalent...

...He ends by quoting Keats: "poetry...

...It is precisely that power and ideology that Susan Sontag represents...