Double Agent: The Critic and Society.

DOUBLE AGENT

The Critic and Society

Morris Dickstein

Oxford University Press, $23,220 pp.

Morris Dickstein's new book goes straight to the issue of "whether a meaningful criticism is still possible, or whether the professionalization of criticism has turned it simply into an academic 'field' where the criticism of criticism now has its own comfortable niche." By "meaningful criticism," Dickstein means just that distillation of society's mute commotion into thoughts and phrases that make intelligent conversation possible.

Dickstein's "double agent"the title is from a book of the same name by R.P. Blackmur---operates in the "the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet," in Lionel Trilling's phrase. Dickstein has assembled brief, thoughtful portraits of critics who worked in both realms and wrote prose whose public clarity was a strategy of political and literary engagement. A sensitive, learned, and accomplished critic himself, Dickstein is a first-class guide to the history of public criticism in this century, from Matthew Arnold up through Van Wyck Brooks and Mencken, Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley, Orwell, Trilling and, finally, the Partisan Review crowd. The book's finest section is an imaginary dialogue at the end, in which a poststructuralist theorist locks horns with a more traditional belles-lettrist. If it had been more carefully composed, this sophisticated survey might have led the way to a general intensification of pleasurable thinking and writing. Dickstein might have been the Erasmus of a renaissance in literary journalism.

Refreshingly, Dickstein doesn't take sides; maddeningly, however, he doesn't seem to have a point of view. He defends the poststructuralists' preoccupation with social and political issues by showing how the greatest criticism has always mixed literature with society and politics, and then he criticizes them for writing in a jargonized, inaccessible language that earlier critics would have found futile and self-defeating. That is balanced and coolheaded, but what Dickstein doesn't grapple with is how the poststructuralists' language follows from their reductionist intellectual premises. There is a difference between R.P. Blackmur writing that poetry "adds to the available stock of reality" and the poststructuralist critic Edward Said praising William Butler Yeats for giving "us a major international achievement in cultural decolonization." Whether it is a difference in literary receptiveness, methodology, or IQ, Dickstein should, for the sake of a "meaningful criticism," have made some attempt at discrimination.

Unfortunately, Dickstein tends to qualify a point until it is rarefied beyond comprehension. "Even in its most reasoned recoil from politics," he writes in a typical sentence, "The Liberal Imagination was Trilling's most political book." The mind begins to glaze over at being told that Phitip Rahv's style was "ponderous but adroit." There are no real contradictions here, of course, but there is nothing being said either. It is rational skepticism as a reflex not a sensibility, a skepticism that is at once precious and baroque. I share Dickstein's admiration for Lionel Trilling, still a sort of lighthouse in the modern conceptual gloom, but Trilling had a tendency to present his ideas with a ginger solemnity as if they had come over on the Mayflower. I wonder what even he would have made of Dickstein's super-civility in remarking that Trilling's own "gift for inclusive and suggestive formulations... anticipates the skepticism of the deconstructionists." Such delicate sidestepping always ends in a faux-pas.

Double Agent is finally almost as much a symptom of the scarcity of a public criticism as a comment on it. Haphazardly thrown together, marred by repetitions and disconnections, it seems, for all its bright apercus, an easy two cents hastily tossed into the final round of the cultural fray. Once we impart terms and definitions to things that used to enrich us because they were natural and unformulated we inter them in stone. A public call for a public criticism, replete with examples of the way it used to be done, is as good as a death knell for public criticism. What Dickstein really wants to see is more intelligence and imagination. He should exercise his own instead of cautiously whispering "more intelligence! more imagination!"