Some General Ideas & the Novel

Abstract

Granted the great Spanish reactionary thinker Juan Donoso'Cortes was defending the absoluteness of royal decree when he characterized “discussion” as “the universal dissolvent” that “has destroyed your adversaries, and will destroy yourself” and announced, “As to me, I am resolved not to tolerate it.” But since a politics without public deliberation makes the sense of a religion without prayer or a literature deficient in the rhythms of thought, and since he was writing in 1851 (ironically about the same time that Herman Melville was discussing practically everything in Moby Dick), his words have been intruding on my reading the last few weeks. Donoso-Cortes's fame, if he has any, rests in part on Pius IX having borrowed some of his points of view in writing the Syllabus of Errors. Were Vladimir Nabokov, quirky genuis, to compile a syllabus, one error would be the discussion of “general ideas” by literary critics, another the discussion of Big Topics by characters in a novel. Mary McCarthy is resolved not to tolerate the intolerance, pushy mensch that she is, and claims the right “granted to the Jewish novel” and “never conceded to us goys“—that is, “to juggle ideas in full view of the public.”