The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (review)

188 the minnesota review film. It is the starting-point for work on a revolutionary cinema. But it is not that revolutionary dnema itself. (91) It is very much a part of WoUen's task to argue that critical investigation (eventuaUy) leads to political comitment. Readings and Writings is a process study—one which leads from dated and tentative methodologies into an insistent thesis regarding the singular political importance of the avant garde and the necessity to estabUsh a language and an audience for its practice and study. Unfortunately WoUen's interest in language and practice gets him into trouble. By the end of the second section and the new-journalistic "Mexico /Women/Art," WoUen informaUzes his style, perhaps in an attempt to match form to content. It is likely that this is behind his dedsion to include, as part three of his four part study, four (truly bad) "avant garde" fiction pieces. It is clear enough that WoUen invests a great deal in the importance of the avange garde, and this section of the book is his response in kind, but we are far better for sedng his fUm than wading through these four short stories. It is not only that the stories are stUted and that they read Uke cheap imitations of Calvino's cosmicomics, but WoUen does a real disservice to his own critical work by displaying an inabiUty "to practice what he preaches." Surely his critical work evidences an ability to distinguish between sdence fiction and the avant garde, but these stories do not testify to such an ability. The final section of Readings and Writings harkens back to the first "Cinema and Technology: a Historical Overview" parodies a recent trend in film studies. It is a glib piece made doubly interesting given the fact that WoUen presented it at the University ofWisconsin , the very purveyors of the historiographie fad the essay satirizes. Wollen then returns to the twenties in order to re-examine the Soviet formalists (Vertov and Eisenstein in particular ) and then moves on to André Bazin, who remains central to WoUen's own diverse critical interests. For many the concluding chapter (the only new piece in the entire coUection) will be disappointing. Presented in an informal outUne style it (unfortunately) only briefly discusses the imporatnce of Tel Quel to post-1968 film studies, significantly the period covered in Readingsand Writings. And forthose who would want WoUen to finally contextualize the essays in any spedfic way, they too will find the concluding chapter wanting and the entire text little more than a coUection of familiar (old) essays. But given WoUen's overall strategy, a definitive conclusion would be inappropriate, and this is very much to his credit. By refusing to pin things down for us, WoUen is farsighted. Clearly this is what he has learned in his critical wanderings. In challenging the absolute or definitive nature of each of the several methods he has "used" and the critics and film makers he has celebrated (since 1968) WoUen is self-consdous, perhaps even self-effacing but always insightful and always consdous, of just how tender the ground is beneath his feet. For example, when he points out that the avant garde continues to be threatened by "marginahzation" and "fragmentation" he is heady enough to realize that such "problems" are part of the character and function of any counter dnema, any oppositional form. And if an attempt at a counter-form doesnt work, or isnt absolute, no matter. Consistent with the strategy of Readings and Writings, and jouissance is in the getting there and then in not staying there for very long. JON LEWIS Thomas Disch. TAe Businessman: A Tale of Terror. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. 292 pp. $14.50 (cloth). The shorthand which comes most easUy to mind as a way of introdudng Tom Disch to readers who have not yet heard of him is drawn from the jargon of literary pseudo-history: Disch, it is tempting to say, is a charter member of that generation of writers who, in the Sixties and early Seventies, by dint of the vision and quality of thdr writings, transcended reviews 189 the mass-cult limitations of their sci...