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proximity1: Chapter 4 of this brilliant work of literary criticism (In Search of Heresy), published in 1956, is in effect an insightful review of The Lonely Crowd,. For citations of it, see the LT entry for In Search of Heresy, (http://www.librarything.com/work/5949721)… (més)
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For my wife Leslie
Primeres paraules
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(1) (Introduction)
The Greek etymon for heresy is hairesis, which means a taking or choice. In English the word has come to mean an opinion or doctrine at variance with the orthodox or accepted.
(2) (Essay One: The Situation of the American Writer)
Those of us who are now thirty or slightly older have already outlived the literary movement in which we grew up--the movement that came to fruition in the twenties, while we were still too young to participate in it, but that seemed destined for a time in the late forties to be given new vitality and purpose by writers our own age who were then coming out of the war. (p. 11)
Citacions
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(3) I suppose that we do not need to speculate very long over the point that what for the ancient world carried the connotation of choice, the application of will to morals, has become for us a violation of law, incriminating will and morals alike. That is simply apt to happen in history when will loses supremacy as an instrument of moral choice: law replaces will; legality replaces choice; both replace morals. But it is true that we think in and act from symbols of language, and perhaps equally true that a symbol dies out in language when the act it symbolizes dies out in life. If heresy has lost the older connotation of choice, it may wel be because the the possibility of heresy as a choice has receded from us. At any rate, I assume--and it is the assumption underlying most of the essays in this book--that some such recession has taken place and that we have suffered the effects in nearly all the arenas in which some purpose beyond that of blind survival is required for the successful conduct of life. I do not know how to make this real to those who have not already discovered it for themselves or who prefer to remain oblivious of what they have discovered.... Alfred North Whitehead gave one of the simplest illustrations when he observed that the modern housewife, unable to buy cloth in a particular shade of blue and obliged to content herself with whatever shade happens to to be mass-produced, is experiencing at the most immediate level the effects both of enforced democratization of taste and of infringement upon the democratic right of free choice, the two together consituting one of the deranging paradoxes of life in the modern world. ... American democracy can scarcely be said any longer to constitute a dogma (a fact which has crippled our best efforts to propagandize it abroad), nor can its conformism be called an ideological position (a fact which has not at all crippled the worst efforts of some of us to confer upon it the dignity of one). It is a feature of our democracy that it has no dogma to enforce, but neither does it enforce its conformism. It does not need to because it produces conformism by leaving open to the mass of people no alternative to conformism and, therefore, by removing from them the possibility of choice. This, I suspect, is at the heart of that paralysis of will, that derangement of the sense of future, which appears to be so prevalent today, especially among younger Americans. Our democracy in its current form gives them neither a dogma which might provide a basis for heretical action nor an opportunity to discover and choose a politics or faith or way of life which would represent a heresy of democracy. That is simply the shade of blue which our political mass-production does not supply. ( from the Introduction: p. 1, 2, 3, & 4)
(4) In the case of the American intellectual, this condition asserts itself as a threat to morale and action alike, for it has traditionally been the intellectual's task--assigned and condoned by no one but himself--to monitor the culture of his time, to exercise within it his right of free choice, and upon it the reprimanding influence of his dissent. But standing between him and the performance of this task today are certain obstacles sufficiently distinct from those facing the culture in general as to be called particularly his own. The American intellectual has first of all suffered the loss in recent years of the older sustaining ideologies and platforms of dissent: he became disaffected long ago with the revolutionary ideal of communism, which afforded him an angle of critical vision into politics during the thirties, and he has outgrown the naïveté which once enabled him to shout down on the head of American materialsim from one of the posts of romantic disaffiliation like that of the Artist in Exile. One can in fact say that he has been uprooted or evicted from just about all the positions which formerly justified and ennobled the isolation of his role and which held out some respectable alternative to the state of being merely cooperative and pleasant required by mass society. ( from the Introduction: p. 4 & 5)
(5) In fact the situation with which they were now confronted was such as to invalidate entirely the system of accession to (NE: "literary") power and prominence, the very possibility of reputation in the old sense, which had been the feature of the decades just past and on which, in the excitement of the immediate post-war years, they had come to pin their hopes. The modern literary movement had, in those years, lost nearly all its potency as a reproductive and energizing force and had been slowly absorbed into the universities, where its massive indignations had cooled down to small fastidious tics experienced by graduate students in the damp undercaves of libraries, and where its great seminal ideas had been frozen and crystallized into churchly authoritarian dogma. (The Situation of the American Writer p. 17)
(6) ... Literature now was a corporate body, official, institutionalized, and closed: the appearance of a new writer , the creation of a new work outside the canon was not only irrelevant but irreverent, at best a willful and rather nasty breach of etiquette, at worst very nearly an act of heresy. (The Situation of the American Writer p. 17)
(7) There was something suspect and vulgar now about a writer who worked up his own materials or who retained more than a speculative interest in the experience of his own time. To the literary men of the academy he seemed to inhabit some distastefully fetid underworld of subintellectual intrigue, a kind of retarded bohemian cellar, where the cold, clear light of (Van Wyck) Brooks and (Robert Penn) Warren never penetrated. But the independent writer had what was, from the academic point of view, the still more crippling defect of being unable or unwilling to keep abreast of the current developments in his field. he thought of himself, for example, as belonging to the avant-garde and as carrying forward a tradition of free creative inquiry into the spirit of the age; while the truth was that his entire conception of the avante-garde--the conception of a community of intransigent, revolutionary talents--had long since been outmoded by the rise of a new academic avant-garde conceived in the name of orhtodoxy and dedicated to the principle that all writers are created equal provided they conform to the rules of the canon. (The Situation of the American Writer p. 18)
(8) It seemed suddenly that all the old categories and relationships which had formerly guided and comforted one in one's thinking about the production of books had gone into the discard or had, like so many of one's old assumptions, simply ceased after the war to correspond to reality--if, indeed, there can be said to have been a reality after the war. It scarcely mattered, for example, that books had at one time been the results of the painful and loving efforts of men to communicate something which they conceived to be worthwhile, that they had been meant to say something, and by their saying to satisfy a very real and existing human need. Books now were simply disposable items containing a two or three-hour supply of psychic maintenance; when they were used up, they could be thrown away like Kleenex. There was no longer any question of their satisfying a need, nor was it necessary any longer that they should. For a public accustomed from childhood to buying at the dictates of every passing acquisitive reflex, it was enough that books were offered for sale, that they were simply there to be bought. (The Situation of the American Writer p. 24)
(9) The impact of David Riesman's work over the past several years has been such that any general discussion of his ideas must at this time appear superfluous. (p. 110)
In the Autumn , 1954, issues of Partisan Review and Dissent Elizabeth Hardwick and Norman Mailer, reviewing Riesman's latest book, Individualism Reconsidered together charge him with a variety of offenses ranging from opportunism through conservatism to complacent optimism about the changing character of our culture. Mailer’s discussion, which I take to be the most penetrating we have yet had of Riesman’s whole “case,” turns on the excellent point that what Riesman has given us is essentially a fiction rather than a sociological analysis of American culture, a creative image whose value must be judged not by its truth to Reality—if such exists—but as in a novel by the quality of the mind, and the depth of the life, behind it. ( Gray new world, p. 111, 112)
(10) The Lonely Crowd presents us with a dramatic image of ourselves which we can respond to and learn from, just as we can learn from the image of ourselves thrown back by the caricaturing fun-house mirror of a first-rate novel of manners. It does not matter that the image is not "true" and does not do us justice. Neither are statistics and graphs "true," and certainly they never do us justice. What matters is that the image has its own justice and that its very distortion may reflect tendencies in us which in twenty or thirty years will become the truth.
In this sense, I believe The Lonely Crowd to be one of the most important literary expressions the present age in America has had, a book to rank in its implications for Western culture with The Revolt of the Masses and Democracy in America. It is a book, furthermore, which, because it is backed by a creative consciousness of high order, opens for us in a new way the old question of the relationship between literature and society, between the novelist and those portions of his material which we may take to be environmentally given, yet which from novelist to novelist are never seen to be precisely the same. I should like to argue that, in addition to its relevance to us all, The Lonely Crowd is a book which no novelist at the present time can safely ignore or wholly escape, for it may be read as a record of the disappearance from our culture of the social forms which have traditionally afforded the novel its dramatic materials. ( Gray new world, p. 112, 113)
(11) This change which, if Riesman is correct, has resulted in the rise of a new “other-directed” personality type, must cause us drastically to revise our conception of drama, just as it must drive the novel either to extinction or to the discovery of new dramatic effects. With the disappearance of “inner-directed” man the illusion generated by ideals also disappears, along with the dramatic action taken in the name of ideals, and drama of the traditional kind becomes impossible. What the new “other-directed” man apparently requires is the approval of others, usually of the others in what Riesman calls his “peer-group.” But the difficulty from the standpoint of drama is that the need for approval does not express itself in the form of an ideal nor represent a basis for dramatic action. It is not a drive compelling the individual toward the realization of selfhood. It seems, in fact, to have no ideological basis whatever, but is simply the result of a vague, generalized feeling of anxiety. The need to please others does have, however, a very real though largely unrecognized practical basis. In a society in which, as Riesman shows, “inner-directed” traits are no longer required by industry and, therefore, no longer serve as criteria for the judgment of individual worth, a person’s agreeableness or niceness becomes one of the main criteria by which he can be judged; his “personality” becomes his distinguishing or salable commodity. But “personality” in such a society does not mean a set of traits which particularize or set off an individual from others. The requirement that he be approved of by everyone forces the individual, on the contrary, to suppress his particularizing traits—if he has any—on the ground that someone, anyone, might not like them, with the result that “personality” becomes, for him, innocuousness and anonymity. What we are therefore faced with in Riesman’s gray new world is a situation in which the drives have disappeared which might have caused the individual to act dramatically and, at the same time, a situation in which dramatic action is seen as a threat to the one kind of satisfaction the society still considers worthwhile. (Gray new world p. 115, 116)
(12) But the question we must ask, the question the novel always asks, is to what end are these new struggles for status directed, by what philosophy or ideal of life are they motivated, and what use does the individual make of this status when he finally gets it? If he does nothing with it but retreat into it and go to sleep, if its gain or loss costs him nothing or changes him in no way, then the novel too must retreat or simply be left to contemplate the depths of its own vacuity. ( Gray new world p. 122)