Doobie’s Reviews > The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture > Status Update

“Mass culture is the screen through which we see reality and the mirror in which we see ourselves. Its ultimate tendency is even to supersede reality….Now it is precisely this—the experience of an alienation from reality—which is the characteristic experience of our age. The modern intellectual, and especially the creative writer, thus faces the necessity of describing and clarifying an experience which has itself deprived him of the vocabulary he requires to deal with it.”

“The use of irony for purposes of ‘affirmation’ is usually a device for stating banalities indirectly and tentatively and thus concealing their lack of real content; it is a technique of falsification.” (10)

“But the novel as an art form rests on particularity: the particular becomes universal without losing its particularity—that is the wonder.” (15)

“Mr. Trilling, lacking an aesthetically effective relationship to experience, is forced to translate experience into ideas, embodying these ideas in his characters and giving his plot the form of an intellectual discussion reinforced by events. He thus becomes personally involved with his characters in a way that the true novelist never is…the true novelist tried only to make his characters and their behavior ‘convincing,’ which is something entirely different.” (17-18)