Letters to the Editor
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Clive James and Cant (and I don't mean Kant)
Clive James has become the flavour-of-the-new-millennium by providing the kind of anti-theory, anti-academic cant which contemporary journalists such as Allen Barra lap up like warm milk. James's basic position is that all one needs to understand complicated works (textual or otherwise) and the cultures that produce them is common sense (which of course automatically precludes anyone of French extraction)and good taste, an approach that he calls "humanism," and one which appeals distinctly to pundits and columnists who have neither the time nor the inclination to do the grunt work required to check out whether James's one-liner put-downs are accurate or not. The idea that Chesterton is somehow as significant as Sartre is too nonsensical to be anything except a joke.
Barra's celebration of this Borscht-belt approach to so-called post-modernism scarcely does justice to the ideas behind the mockery, but still, one has to admit that James is absolutely the man for the times. His snappy patter is precisely calibrated for the attention-deficit disorder that drives our current public discourse, but I don't think Sartre has much to worry about. People will be taking him seriously long after the name "Clive James" evokes the response "who?", and long after future readers encountering columns celebrating him as "the greatest living critic" of the early twenty-first century will only wonder briefly what in the world that could mean. But then they'll note that George W. Bush was given two presidential terms during exactly the same period, and it will all make sense to them.