THE RIGHT BOOKS

According to Robert Alter, who is a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, “literature, even as it fosters innovation, is an essentially conservative institution. In contrast to the evolution of technology, in which each subsequent stage makes previous stages obsolete . . . each stage of literature incorporates the previous stages, the impulse of literary creation being constantly self-recapitulative.” What is more: “Literary fashion, generic constraints, cultural assumptions, manifestly change from era to era, but literary tradition constitutes itself as a trans- historical human community.” No wonder, then, that literature is under attack—and has been for twenty years—-by an assortment of “critical” schools whose primary interest is to demonstrate that the presumed object of their attentions doesn’t exist at all, and never has. To the serious writer of the present day, it must seem more and more as if the world is divided into two broad classes: those who can’t read, and those who can but don’t wish to. Although the situation calls into question the identity of the audience to which Alter’s book is addressed, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (Simon & Schuster, $18.95) is probably more than a pleasurable exercise in futility. If it is true that, as has been recently suggested, the best writers have historically been political conservatives, perhaps to that extent they have been, and remain, historical pessimists as well.

A salient characteristic of the Left is its impatience with and, at times, its denial of the givens of human existence as they are expressed in politics—and in art. Thus it is scarcely surprising that, as Alter remarks, “The very notion that literature is severed from reality because it is composed of conventions, both linguistic and literary, is an unexamined dogma of both Structuralist and post-Structuralist thought.” Literature, in this view, is a bourgeois artifact created out of a bourgeois idea of reality and at a double remove from the world as it is actually constituted. It is also, by extension, a form of bourgeois propaganda, indistinguishable finally from a newspaper editorial or a speech by Richard Nixon; and therefore it can—and should —be read as one reads the daily newspaper, including the advertising copy inside it. For the ideological mind, this has become so fixed and pervasive a feature of modern intellectual life that what Alter calls “the high fun of literary reading which does not allow us to settle on stable ground that offers a single unambiguous perspective, like the political slant of newspaper headlines,” is unappreciated; in fact, it is totally alien. As nature abhors a vacuum, so ideology abhors the paradox and ambiguity, the combination of the centripetal and the centrifugal, that creates “the lovely tension between structure and openness [that] is one of the distinctive, abiding pleasures of the experience of reading imaginative literature.” The ideologue, in other words, abhors a poet. Only a man like Daniel Ortega could have written a line like, “The victory belongs to love.”

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According to Robert Alter, who is a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, “literature, even as it fosters innovation, is an essentially conservative institution. In contrast to the evolution of technology, in which each subsequent stage makes previous stages obsolete . . . each stage of literature incorporates the previous stages, the impulse of literary creation being constantly self-recapitulative.” What is more: “Literary fashion, generic constraints, cultural assumptions, manifestly change from era to era, but literary tradition constitutes itself as a trans- historical human community.” No wonder, then, that literature is under attack—and has been for twenty years—-by an assortment of “critical” schools whose primary interest is to demonstrate that the presumed object of their attentions doesn’t exist at all, and never has. To the serious writer of the present day, it must seem more and more as if the world is divided into two broad classes: those who can’t read, and those who can but don’t wish to. Although the situation calls into question the identity of the audience to which Alter’s book is addressed, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (Simon & Schuster, $18.95) is probably more than a pleasurable exercise in futility. If it is true that, as has been recently suggested, the best writers have historically been political conservatives, perhaps to that extent they have been, and remain, historical pessimists as well.

A salient characteristic of the Left is its impatience with and, at times, its denial of the givens of human existence as they are expressed in politics—and in art. Thus it is scarcely surprising that, as Alter remarks, “The very notion that literature is severed from reality because it is composed of conventions, both linguistic and literary, is an unexamined dogma of both Structuralist and post-Structuralist thought.” Literature, in this view, is a bourgeois artifact created out of a bourgeois idea of reality and at a double remove from the world as it is actually constituted. It is also, by extension, a form of bourgeois propaganda, indistinguishable finally from a newspaper editorial or a speech by Richard Nixon; and therefore it can—and should —be read as one reads the daily newspaper, including the advertising copy inside it. For the ideological mind, this has become so fixed and pervasive a feature of modern intellectual life that what Alter calls “the high fun of literary reading which does not allow us to settle on stable ground that offers a single unambiguous perspective, like the political slant of newspaper headlines,” is unappreciated; in fact, it is totally alien. As nature abhors a vacuum, so ideology abhors the paradox and ambiguity, the combination of the centripetal and the centrifugal, that creates “the lovely tension between structure and openness [that] is one of the distinctive, abiding pleasures of the experience of reading imaginative literature.” The ideologue, in other words, abhors a poet. Only a man like Daniel Ortega could have written a line like, “The victory belongs to love.”