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The Overwhelming Question
| Article
# : |
14988 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1988 |
3,075 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
Gregory Wolfe is the founder and coeditor of Image: A Journal
of the Arts and Religion, and a frequent contributor to The
World & I. |
In a special issue of the New Criterion dedicated to surveying the arts in America since World War II, the journal's literary editor, Bruce Bawer, contributed an essay on the novel entitled "Diminishing Fictions." As the title indicates, Bawer believes that contemporary American novelists have retreated from the broad and open territory of the human heart into little hermetically sealed empires of art. The most vivid part of the vigorously argued essay is a critique of the new literary minimalism. The minimalists are known for their flat descriptions of the lives of punishingly ordinary, obscure people. Much of this description, according to Bawer, consists of catalogs of the brand names of products used in the home, along with the names of the television shows and ads that drone on in the background--punctuated by the insipid staccato dialogue of nearly moronic characters.
Like most critics of the American literary establishment, however, Bawer is better at marshaling empirical evidence than at diagnosing the root causes of our cultural malaise. Neoconservative critics of the arts rightly point to a crucial loss of confidence among artists, affecting the scope and form of their art, but his crisis of confidence is understood primarily in political terms, as a rejection of bourgeois democracy by disaffected radicals. There are two crippling problems with this kind of argument. First, by confining themselves largely to the political plane, the neoconservatives leave themselves open to the charge that their positions are also politically motivated--that they are, in fact, the toadies of the capitalists. The pages of the New Criterion and Nation (to pick a couple of obvious antagonists) are filled with this circular type of
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