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From The New International, Vol. XIII No. 7, August 1947, p. 192.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
To the Editors:
James T. Farrell’s criticism of the recent novel Passage from Home by Isaac Rosenfeld involves a stimulating discussion of cultural narcissism. Farrell’s discussion of this phenomenon is extremely illuminating.
However, the writers who exhibit this spectator complex are in themselves only a symptom of literary degeneration. In the first place, they are profoundly disgusted with the market-place. The market-place involves concocting material for the pulps, the slicks or the movie-radio set-up. It means conforming to criteria which no one with any individuality wishes to conform to. The victim of cultural narcissism is one who has striven to divorce himself from the meaningless optimism of the professional day dreamer, from the glamorous tripe of the big-time copywriter. And in so doing he has succeeded only in divorcing himself from any emotional involvement with the characters or the problems he seeks to portray.
James, who also was a spectator, nevertheless was concerned with definite problems. They were not the everyday problems of the price of bread and the question of meeting the rent, but they were valid problems of personal endeavor. James had the gift of observing with amazing accuracy, and depicting in astonishing detail the ways in which people react upon each other. Furthermore, James relegated the role of the spectator to that of a secondary position: his spectator watched, the people he watched were real. Today’s cultural narcissist only succeeds in making the spectator larger than life: he looms so large that he obscures the picture he is trying to portray.
The cultural narcissist is not really concerned with problems, as he is not really concerned with ideas. His retreat from the marketplace is, as Farrell stated, a retreat into himself. He has become a reporter with nothing but himself to report.
The cultural narcissist hasn’t even the emotional involvement of the spectator of a competitive sport. He tends, rather, to view the world as a gigantic insane asylum, and neglects the fact that he, too, is an inmate. He cannot be one of the psychiatrists, for he exhibits in his writing no desire to change anything. He cannot be a warden or attendant, for that is too active a role. He is enmeshed in a situation which is beyond bearing, so he has retreated into an Olympian detachment which enables him to describe the other inmates without feeling sorrow, to regard the psychiatrists with scorn, and to view the attendants as brutal fools. This view of the society in which he lives relieves him of any personal responsibility for the situation in which he finds himself, and enables him to live fairly comfortable in a situation which he otherwise would find intolerable.
The main difficulty with this Olympianism is that it deadens his writing so that his audience is limited to the “literary” who do not care how dull a piece of writing is so long as it is truly literary. It turns his writing into a faded bit of cultural phenomena, which can have only a collector’s interest. Farrell has implied that these cultural narcissists are a result, an end-product rather than a new school of writing, and in this he is correct. They are literary paralytics, stymied by their own obsessive lack of feeling with regard to the people whose problems they seek to portray. They are some of the end-products of capitalism’s decay.
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