Word: cantors
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...