Kultcha and Anarchy

Leslie Fiedler spoke at Harvard last summer on the cultural revolution which supposedly occurred in the last decade, claiming that popular culture and non-verbal media explorations are where the true art is at these days and that Tolstoy himself would have been pleased by the power of contemporary communications to link huge numbers of people to a common "creative" impulse.

Though Fiedler was entertaining, he was, of course being foolish First. Tolstoy's faith in art was based in Christian humanism, in the belief that every man had basic principles which could be appealed to by the sincere and talented artist Fiedler, on the other hand hopes for some mass tribal evolution. And he misread even the processes by which an audience experiences television in order to buttress his argument. Do people care all that deeply about what they see on the tube? If they do aren't they first primed by commercial manipulators who bombard them with verbal publicity? And even if they participate en masse in the creation of a body of cliches, might that not be the most telling criticism of the culture of our age?

Fiedler's presentation (which has also appeared to have some impact in Playboy) was an important one, because it captured the main current of the last decade's apocalyptic cultural hopes. There were so many mass culture possibilities being opened that traditional authorities didn't bother to discriminate the sludge. The middle-class (mainly its sons and daughters) had its acquisitive salad days: bourgeois taste controlled fashion, losing its traditional upward glance because there was no ceiling of standards to aim for--and little moral cohesion behind the theatrical politics.

The social stew has continued to boil, however. Even Fiedler, a once-morally committed and sometimes brilliant writer, announced in lecture the dating of his attitudes: the rest of us can now clearly see them as relevant only to crazed plastic aesthetes and pop anthropologists.

If Fiedler claimed that the undirected turmoil of the New Left is what killed off concurrent cultural progress, it actually appears that there is now a new health afoot both in the arts and politics since the all inclusive youth frenzy panned out (proving itself to be largely a media invention). People have begun to realize that social change requires patience and effectively planned political action. And, as such faddists as Andrew Sarris in film and Susan Sontag in literature hang themselves by the ropes of their own silliness, the realization seems to have been reached that art--even in its simplest form--is difficult, meant to challenge the preconceptions of its appreciators and awaken higher consciousness, and is socially functional only on a moral level (not necessarily political, and too complex in direct experience for the weathervane readings of, say, McLuhan).

This may sound "curmudgeonly" after the gaudy hype of the previous decade. But the acceptance of these notions is exciting because one gets the impression that what is happening now--at long last--is serious.

Even the literary quarterlies, which once welcomed the dust of the library shelf, have been sparked into conflict. What has most heightened the level of debate in that arena is the appearance of the Philip Rahv-edited Modern Occasions. Formed when Rahv split with much of the rest of the staff of Partisan Review (who had begun to take to Godard, Warhol, and analysis of literature from a pop viewpoint) it is "radical in orientation"--it looks to root issues--yet pledges allegiance neither to the New Left nor the Old. It does not advance the idea that a successful political revolution can take place without an enunciation of means and goal and respect for history (unlike Partisan Review). It holds that literature should be judged by the accuracy and power of its distillation of human experience, and the importance of the experience it grapples with; finer arts are approached by their own standards of beauty and seriousness (without any programmatic directives offered). Trotsky seems the magazine's political mentor, Bellow its literary white knight. Lowell poet-in-waiting. Ned Rorem and Hilton Kramer its music and art critics.

Modern Occasions may be faulted for its academicism. Its writers deal in an appropriate fashion only with the highest art and best essays, and do not deign to consider what is best in less-consistent realms of endeavor until it is overvalued by the unthinking others. Aside from that of Charles Thomas Samuels, the film writing Rahv has published has been obtuse: theater is totally absent, television not even acknowledged. Serious literary tricksters (Barth, Gass and Barthelme) who are trying to engage in their own kind of criticism of our language and outworn genres, are barely acknowledged.

The flaw is in no way as serious as claimed by most of the PR rowdies in their current symposium on "Art, Culture and Conservatism." For, if Modern Occasions sometimes carries a just bias against artistic pyrotechnics to a fault, any number of publications--with much larger circulations--are eager to accept Tom O'Horgan or even Richard Brautigan as serious innovators.

The critics published in Modern Occasions have chosen to take on the responsibility of teaching the lessons they learned from lives peppered with intellectual and political combat--devil take the youth who may initially not care. That seriousness, coupled with lucid expression, makes the magazine essential. It may only reach people who style themselves teachers and critics, but they are more necessary to cultural progress than a generation of "counter-culture" once thought.