Beyond History and Lit

CYNICS COULD DISMISS a hefty proportion of literary criticism and philosophy as the creative artist's struggle--in vain, of course--to justify his adherence to the arts over the pressing issues of politics. The attempt to legitimize art, in a world increasingly skewed towards the political, the economic and the scientific, has assumed some strange configurations. There is the essentially Marxist-inspired vision of poetry as the picture of life after the Revolution; the poet, as Party servant, illustrates prophecies, bringing the dreamers' vision alive for the toiling workers. The same impulse can be detected in the Emersonian vision of the poet as the "head" atop the shoulders of the state's "body," standing apart and philosophizing, essential to society in his very aloofness from its obvious daily functions. Other formulations are less accessible, less convinced, less convincing--and more frustrating, finally, for the humanist who still struggles to believe that a passion for literature or music can be its own justification.

It's tempting to throw Jay Cantor's collection of essays. The Space Between: Literature and Politics, into the same category, to classify this faintly off putting, heavily scholastic series of musings on literature and politics as the author's answer to nagging self-doubt. And, the book does carry a heavy tinge of "all-these-Yeats-and Williams-quotations-are just-as-important-as your-rallies," irritating because it should not have to be stated.

But Cantor demands thoughtful response. In "Eccentric Propositions," the book's short introduction, he posits that art is itself "the process by which value was created, revolutions made." From numerous philosophers Cantor develops the idea not that art is more important than politics, but that they are the same thing: "Politics, work, all human culture is symbol formation, is poetry." Though Cantor begins, like so many theorists, with the need to apologize for the arts, his conclusion is fresh and rings true:

"I had begun by looking for a way to read and to write

politically, to learn from art, to change myself by it. But

what I found was not so much a new idea of art so much

as a new conception of politics; the problem disap-

peared in its solution. The political is itself irrational,

artistic there are only poems and the further poems

that are comments on them."

THIS IDENTIFICATION of political action with the creative impulse is the book's strongest point. While Cantor sticks to it, his writing stays clear and provocative--in his contention that Years, through his poetry, forged the Irish Easter rebellions into a "moment" of history; in his analysis of Joyce's efforts to submerge Ulysses entirely in its own language, "testing" characters in the equivalent of cultural revolutions; in his vision of the poet as legislator and the legislator as unsung poet. In the last essay of the book. "Gesturing with Materials," he sees in revolutionary political movements an analogue to the "action painting" of Jackson Pollock and his ilk, who record their moments of artistry not as aesthetic phenomena but as something, anything, "never before seen."

Some of the passion bubbling unevenly in Cantor's style must stem from his experiences at Harvard in the late 1960's, when students occupied buildings and protests kindled campuses the country over. His reaction to the riots and counter-riots of his undergraduate years carries through to the related phenomenon of terrorism--exemplified, for Cantor, by the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. He applies the Nietzchean construct of a "theater of sacrifice," a drama enacted by a small group of performers for the edification--or manipulation--of a mass audience. A related essay on Hamlet expands the idea of "history as dumbshow," the struggle for power and kingship functioning like a mechanism without motives which keeps fortune's wheel spinning out tragedy after tragedy.

But perhaps because of emotional proximity, the work's logic falters and cracks when it grapples with these, the blackest manifestations of literature and politics alike. Applied to the Symbionese Liberation Army's treatment of Patty Hearst or the ravages of the Black Panthers. Cantor's literary formulations hesitate and recede. He fumbles off into over-intellectuality and self-conscious Hegelizing.

This is a time of great anxiety for those of us whose

world is dying, coming to an end--and that. I think, is

all of us. For the ego, like the unconscious, is collective;

the death of our society, of the social ego, is the dissolu-

tion and "death" of every individual also.

AND THE FURTHER the essays wander into this sort of nihilistic agonizing, the weaker they become. One pitfall of utter pessimism is that, properly approached, it appears all-encompassing--everything connects, from genocide to boredom to Samuel Beckett's Endgame and Godot. Cantor's penchant for citing his predecessors aggravates the problem. He quotes Norman O. Brown on Hegel in reference to Beckett's plays to bolster his own assertion, not explained further, that "time is negativity"; he quotes Frederic Jameson on Ernst Block on Marxism. Two comments on Beckett are separated by the sentence, "Krazy Kat hopes that someday Ignatz Mouse will love her (him); much ingenuity must be used in reinterpreting the meaning of the brick that conks her on the head." It all has something to do with nihilism, clearly, but neither literature nor politics, let alone their interrelation, seems to benefit from the addition.

Disappointingly, from here Cantor never does quite get back to his original point. His reflections on pessimism and nihilism--including 22 "broken notes" on Beckett that read like parody of a precocious diary--bring him to the literary theory sometimes called "narrative-men," which holds that one's escape from meaninglessness is to consider oneself the narrative voice in a story that is one's life. The point, though provocative, sheds little light on political actions; likewise, the chapters evoking the despair in the face of 60s turmoil, fail to integrate literature convincingly and remain just another 60s dirge.

One wonders whether Cantor succeeded in persuading himself during the desperately political 60s and the painfully apolitical 70s, that it was no crime to be committed to writing for writing alone. Few of his essays end fully resolved; most leave troubling questions, and toward the close of one he admits. "I asked myself questions at the beginning of this essay that I now see I won't--oddly enough--be able to answer." His inability to back up his vision of a unified system of "imaginative moments" matters less, in the end, than the further musings such visions provoke. Literature has suffered enough at the hands of adherents to more "relevant" fields.