Trousered Apes

Trousered Apes, by Duncan Williams (Arlington, 169 pp., $6.95). Playwright Eugene Ionesco has written that his only images of the world are of evanescence, brutality, vanity, rage, nothingness, hideousness, and hatred. Citing a multitude of such examples from our literature, Professor Duncan Williams argues succinctly and persuasively that the violence and animality which pervade the arts today reflect an onrushing, blood-dimmed tide of brutishness. Too effete to create, too weak to be men, too shallow to escape their “temporal provincialism,” our would-be artists have embraced the egalitarianism of animality, producing “naturalistic” nonart about non-heroes. Williams contends that the amorality and purposelessness of our intellectuals results from their disbelief in God and endangers our ability to survive as a civilization. The distorting yet revealing mirror of art certainly influences culture. Wittingly or not, writers shape lives. Art has descended from aristocratic to proletarian and whereas once excellence was art’s norm, today’s “naturalism” has made excrescence its standard. Not only does such “naturalism” give men bad examples, it gives nature a bum rap.