A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (review)

As a critic, Morris Dickstein engages with the intersection of the social and the literary, regarding the position of the critic as mediating between the worlds of the reader and the author. Dickstein, like Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, sees the critic as responding to what Trilling called in another context "the vigorous and the actual."¹ In his 1992 book Double Agent: The Critic and Society, Dickstein argues for critics to move away from both the overprofessionalized, overacademized, overjargonized theory of the French school, and the (new) historicist turn that would threaten to overtake the study of literature in the service of a political agenda. Instead, criticism should be "a social activity, however solitary in origin. Vibrating with human meaning, radiating will and desire, good criticism is an intervention in the world that seeks subtly to change the world, starting with the mind of the reader, the auditor, the spectator".² Writing about literature should serve as an engagement with the world, and Dickstein envisions the critic—and the author—as being in the world, not simply a man of letters but a man of ideas (and it is generally, almost exclusively, man). The more recent Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945–1970 (2002) continues Dickstein's interventions into the relationship between interior and exterior worlds, the personal and private, the public and social. This sweeping overview of postwar American literature asserts that these writers were responding to their society. They expose the subversive and anxious undercurrents of the postwar world, exemplifying, for Dickstein, his own concern with the tensions between inner and outer lives. The ways writers wrestle with these tensions, and how we read them, are our own response to modernity and the world it has shaped.

These tensions and this response are the threads that more or less connect the essays in Dickstein's new collection. He notes in the preface that most of the pieces were commissioned and first written in the 1980s and 1990s, with some appearing more recently: reviews, keynotes, and introductions to collections and new editions. The problems of A Mirror in the Roadway are the problems that generally plague collections of this sort; it serves as a repository for a writer's ephemera over several decades, and after a while one feels that the same ground is being retrodden. What holds such a book together is the critic's voice and touch as a reader, and, fortunately, Dickstein is an insightful critic and an eloquent writer. This is a book to be dipped into when one needs, not necessarily a fresh idea, but a good way of putting what one has perhaps already observed oneself (to paraphrase Pope).

A Mirror in the Roadway is conceived of as a book for the common reader, and as such is written with common sense, like criticism written by those most admired by Dickstein: Kazin and Trilling, as well as Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy. He acknowledges that such readers are in jeopardy, threatened by academic theorists. This book is meant as a salvo not for one camp or another in the wearying culture wars, but as a statement of the importance of literature to our lives. Dickstein writes in the preface: "I've tried to show . . . that the imagination can indeed create something new, but always stitched together from pieces of the real world, a process familiar to most readers and playgoers but seriously troubling to advanced theorists. On this point, like Dr. Johnson, I rejoice to concur with the common reader" (xiii).

To accomplish this task, Dickstein begins with a series of essays on American realism, the first of four sections in the book. He means to trace the connections between realism and modernism; rather than reading modernism as a radical shift away from realism, he sees it as another form of realism, an idea he works through in the second section. Thus, the realist novel provides, in...