When the U.S. government denies Khrushchev access to Disneyland, the Soviet leader turns to Carl White, knowing of his betrayal of the nation in the game show Dotto. "Understand this astonishing fact," White writes, "the Soviet KGB was smuggling my yankee-doodle father into Disneyland. It was a scene no whit different from what one saw at the East German border, only refracted by a new order." But Carl plots to use his reputation as a traitor to strike a blow for patriotism by proving America's superiority to Khrushchev. He does so by taking him to Disneyland's Tomorrowland. As the narrator explains, though, "Dad couldn't possibly understand the puzzle locked in the fact that Tomorrowland would remain as it was for decade after decade. It was thus an always already dusty tomorrow he sought."
Khrushchev and Nixon understood the power of an artful reality, White notes. In his essays he reminds us that Hitler did too, calling to mind those who were chased out of Fascist Germany: avant-garde artists and theorists like Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Benjamin, Fromm, Lowenthal, and Marcuse. And yet, as White points out, instead of getting a literature that is cognizant of this, too often what we get is "the will-to-ignorance parading as the Sublime."
In essays like "The War against Theory," "Jameson out of Touch?" and "Writing the Life Postmodern," he takes to task writers such as Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels who insist that the '"whole enterprise of critical theory is misguided and should be abandoned.'" But to provide a sense of how broad this resentment among intellectuals for ideas can be, White directs our attention to the Associated Writing Programs (AWP), the university association of fiction and poetry writing programs. One would think that the university would be a hotbed of literary radicalism and experimentation (even putting aside for the moment the inextricable link between literary complexity and sociological or political complexity - how do you define 'Sex,' Mr. Clinton?). But in fact, as White neatly presents it, those who venture into AWP land, a.k.a. the annual convention, come back with horror stories of aesthetic conservatism, punctuated by moments such as when Jack Gilbert stood and announced, "THEORY! has destroyed a generation of writers and poets, and led them away from their true calling: to illuminate the human heart."
It can't be said, as in many branches of history (another conservative narrative cousin) that organs such as AWP ignore the post-structuralist revolution that has swept through the humanities, "indifferent to the challenges posed by theory, doing what comes 'naturally.'" Rather, they put up a fierce rearguard action, despite the fact that what pluralism its membership exhibits, as White points out, is at least partially a result of "feminists, multiculturalists, gay rights activists, postmodernists, neo-Marxists." Which is to say, as does White, that in literature, Theory's victories have been political, not aesthetic. But why? One answer lies in commercial publishers "keeping faith with their accountants only." Or as White tells it:
