The Blanche du Bois Effect - part 2

Historical and cultural development are obviously complex phenomena, far beyond my layman’s ken. Nevertheless, I feel it incumbent upon me to assay the historian's awesome task and venture some possibly interrelated reasons for this current state of the somewhat lowered estimate of the humanities in the public mind:

1. Increasing mechanization and materialization in the West as a result of the Industrial Revolution. This dovetails neatly with American pragmatism.   America rose to prominence as an Industrial powerhouse in the 19^th century for its fearless conquering spirit and single-minded attention to mass-production. The American Protestant outlook favored none of the Catholic metaphysical, spiritualist mumbo jumbo; hard work paid off not by spiritual uplift but money in the bank.   Nominal Christians, we nevertheless distrust too much religious enthusiasm.   God rewards sensible minded folk who keep their enthusiasm a private affair and spend their hours in the sphere of human toil and material gain.

2. The success of empiricism and its concomitant materialist assumptions vis-à-vis the acquisition of knowledge. There can be little doubt that modern science is unthinkable without an essentially empiricist framework. None of the modern luxuries and freedoms would be possible without the rigor of testing hypotheses against data collected and sorted, analyzed and categorized.   We see this tendency influencing education reform nowadays with its focus on outcomes assessment, based on a business model which values that which works above all else.   Knowledge today is not sought from spiritual advisors but from empirical testing.   Not a day goes by when some study or other is not trumpeted in the press infallibly suggesting the truth as we have known it is flawed, incomplete, or flat out wrong.

3. The victory of the worldly over the spiritual as our inheritance from Renaissance individualism. Even those unwilling to divorce themselves from religious values would be hard pressed to put their faith entirely above when it comes to the settling of practical affairs. Today’s most valued professions are those of a worldly, physical nature: law, business, medicine, science. We have little to no room for the poet, the seer, the shaman healer in today‘s mechanistic-materialistic milieu.

4. Capitalism as the engine propelling forward the science & technology mill.   Marxism as a sociopolitical experiment has largely failed; there remains today no true challenger to the capitalist ethos. Mankind is engaged in a never-ending quest for material gain---more wealth, more power, more fame.   While the capitalist mindset provides the physical basics, it offers little sustenance for the heart, soul, or mind.

5. It should go without saying that our enslavement to technology is concomitant with the cult of the “new”--this manifests itself in not just material gain but also the new in a metaphorical sense--new fame (celebrities), new age (youth), new social customs (fads).  The capitalist machine thrives on convincing the consumer that what is needed to make life complete is something bigger and better than what came before when the truth is, as many studies have borne out, happiness levels off after a certain degree of material attainment.  What is needed is not more of the same but a new way of looking at the world around one.

6. Perhaps a result of the above materialist focus has been the death of the liberal education and the old medieval trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic as subjects useful in themselves went out well in the early days of the 20^th century.   Today I doubt even the Catholic schools teach them.   The materialist questions their practical relevance and easily dispenses with that which does not proffer immediate and quantifiable material gain.   School teachers in the 1960s tossed out grammar on the evidence of a few studies indicating (not conclusively, it must be said) it had little to no impact on writing remediation.  And logic nowadays is the otiose domain of the mathematicians and philosophers leaving specious rhetoric, that wily manipulator, as the sole province of the humanist.     

7. It must be admitted to a large extent that recent ridiculous excesses in the humanities have brought upon the field its own demise: specifically, political correctness and otiose critical theory. There was a time in the 90s when one couldn’t open a newspaper without some uproar over date rape debated, ethnic sensitivities offended, or multicultural hoopla paraded for all to see. The victim mentality, buffeted by moral and philosophic relativism favored by so much modern poststructuralist theory, replaced the old verities propounded by, to use the once fashionable jargon of the English depts., the Anglo, heterosexist, phallocentric old guard. The devotion of English depts. (formerly custodians of sensible and hardheaded moral authority) to obtuse, recondite French theorists, where erstwhile truth was fiction, perspective mere perception, was essentially at odds with clear-headed Anglo-American values.  In the end, it proved to be a grave misstep.  Science did not build its reputation by ignoring or dismissing the past but by building upon it and only discarding antiquated notions when they became barriers to understanding or when incapable of withstanding the scrutiny of empirical observation.  The combination of impenetrable, jargon-riddled prose and relativist (a)moralism was a recipe for disaster (most devastatingly realized in the Sokol Affair), convincing many that if they had doubts about the relevance of humanism before, recent events had all but confirmed them.   The prestige of the humanities has never recovered since.

It would be simplistic to put this in terms of the Stanley Kowalski hardheaded mindset triumphing over the Blanche du Boises of the world. The physicists and those of their ilk are not by necessity dull, insensitive brutes; similarly, not all humanists are silly airheads who mistake rhetorical excess for profound complexity.   But the comparison does yield a certain blunt veracity. The war waged, the victor emerged triumphant, dwarfing his poor, enfeebled humanistic relation in stature and public trust.

Stanley: Oh, you're the, a teacher, aren't you?
Blanche:  Yes.
Stnaley:  What do you teach?
Blanche: English.
Stanley: Oh, I never was a very good Engish student.

The Blanche du Bois Effect and the Utility of a Liberal Education - part 1

"A cultivated woman, a woman of intelligence and breeding, can enrich a man’s life--immeasurably! I have those things to offer, and time doesn’t take them away. Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession. But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart--and I have all of those things--aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years! How strange that I should be called a destitute woman! When I have all of these treasures locked in my heart. I think of myself as a very, very rich woman.” -- Blanche Du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Every time I am asked what my college major was, a hesitation comes over me. I know what is coming. In making a pronouncement of English literature as my primary undergraduate field of study, I feel as though I am making a confession of some minor character flaw or mental defect. Like Blanche I feign a noble superiority, allowing my interrogator a slyly subtle glimpse to the wide-eyed panic beneath.  Thou dost protest too much.  The inquisitor invariably looks at me either quizzically as if to suggest why would someone want to major in that? of what practical use is it? do you want to be a high school English teacher? Or there are those whose physiognomy comes closer to suggesting some mild repugnance as if repressing an urge to flee to the far side of the room to avoid the humanistic contagion I have unceremoniously infected the air about me with. And then there are the worst lot--those whose smug self-assurance seems to imply you’re one of those “words people” without the slightest facility in numbers and complete disregard for hard facts, who rely on duplicitous rhetoric rather than real knowledge--that’s where the power is, you know. Verbal arcana are all fine and dandy but not really splitting the atom, are they? Not a cure for cancer. In short, you are counted among those charming but useless savants whose linguistic fancies constitute a world of their own without so much as a passing relationship to the world of cold, hard physical matter.

Blanche: I don’t want realism! I want magic! 
Mitch: Magic?
Blanche: Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be punished for it!--Don’t turn the light on! 

This state of affairs amounts to what I like to term the Blanche du Bois effect. Williams' most famous heroine and her numerous purple flourishes have become to my mind emblematic of a sort of identification of those who delve into humanistic pursuits as somehow ridiculously refined and pointlessly cultured in a world sadly lacking in either, entertaining in a quasi-improper sort of way but also a bit mad and in the end useless, impotent purveyors of rhetoric sans reason, sensibility in search of sense--or at least so it would appear, at least to the not inconsiderable number of Stanley Kowalskis in the world.  (In the same way, Marlon Brando's Method masterpiece of rough, brutish masculinity represented a challenge [and eventual cinematic successor] to the old guard acting represented by Vivien Leigh's tremulous, stylized, and deeply feminine British theatricality.)

Those of us foolish enough to put spirit and heart ahead of status and material goods are relegated to a quasi-court jester position within the pantheon of intellectual endeavor. We are the shy and euphemistically “sensitive,” “artistic” souls, for unless one can lay claim to inheriting the gifts of a latter day Shakespeare or Proust, the artist/wordsmith is about as sensible a vocation as counting the warp and woof of clouds in the sky.

Il Trovatore: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

Il Trovatore gets no respect. It has become associated with a particular brand of operatic excess that eschews sense in favor of purely musical delights. This is the opera, after all, that the Marx Brothers memorably lampooned in A Night at the Opera. However, while the excesses of Trovatore cannot be ignored, I would venture to argue that the opera encapsulates what makes opera sui generis as an art form--that the sum of the various arts contributing to it--music, text, theater--is much more than their individual parts would seem to suggest.

First the ridiculous:

The chief complaint against Trovatore seems to revolve around its admittedly complicated plot straining credulity.  It is filled with melodramatic coincidences, mistaken identities, and gypsy curses: the noble Count di Luna and the rebel Manrico are sworn enemies both in love with the fair Leonora, torn between love and duty, but a secret known only to Manrico’s gypsy mother Azucena ties them together leading to tragic consequences for all, etc.

Perhaps Azucena’s fatal error seems the most farfetched of all.

Furthermore, some of the cultural values and gender stereotypes represented in Trovatore strike a modern audience as, to put it charitably, antiquated. The whole Spanish milieu of proud nobles and their ancient codes of honor can seem no more than macho posing, and poor Leonora, the fair damsel, is caught in the middle of this tug-of-war.

In musico-dramatic terms, the opera is far from polished and almost carelessly put together at certain points. The ending of the opera in which Manrico is carted off and executed as Azucena blurts out to the shocked Di Luna that he has just assassinated his own brother takes place in a mere seven seconds or so. Verdi sometimes sacrificed dramatic development at the altar of swift pacing (the same happens as late as Otello after Desdemona is murdered--I’ve always felt the resolution goes by too quickly).

And while possessed of a rough vitality, the orchestral fabric Verdi chose to clothe his plot contrivances in has been described, not unfairly, as one giant strumming guitar. Trovatore is far from the subtle scene painting seen in some of Verdi's later masterworks like Simon Boccanegra, Don Carlo, and Otello, and it lacks the intimate psychology of La Traviata, amazingly written concurrently with its rougher, bolder counterpart.

The sublime:

But despite the above, there is much to recommend in this opera. Verdi was one of the great melodists of opera. He held fast to Rossini's dictum that opera required nothing less than voice, voice, and more voice. Caruso allegedly commented that Trovatore required nothing less than the four greatest singers in the world to pull it off. To be sure, Verdi's melodic outpouring in Trovatore was unstinting, embodying all the ecstatic longing and pain and joy of love. We most surely see this in Leonora's soaring arias with their sweeping, arching phrases and delicate pianissimi. It is not for nothing that “D'amor sull'ali rosee” is the supreme test of a Verdian soprano.



The villainous Count Di Luna's “Il Balen” also presents opportunities for the baritone to show a soft, sweet yearning hitherto unseen in this staunch figure.



As a contrast, we have Manrico's “Di quella pira”--the quintessence of masculine bravado and impetuous tenor barnstorming. And, of course, the rousing Anvil Chorus, perhaps the prototypical opera chorus, that seems to originate in our collective unconscious.

More substantially, however, Verdi weds his melodic gifts with supreme musical dramatization--la parola scenica. This is what ranks him among the great opera composers, in my view. Azucena's “Condotta ell'era in ceppi” is a classic example.



In this tortured gypsy's narrative, what seemed implausible and even risible from the outset and which serves as the dramatic motor of much of the plot is transmuted by Verdi's genius into something powerful and raw. Azucena seems almost numbly deliberate at first, then, as wispy strings reprise “Stride la vampa,” she slowly unravels, accelerating inevitably toward the terrible revelation in a powerful explosion of grief and terror before subsiding back into numb oblivion and obsessive revenge-plotting which mark her throughout the opera. We are witness to nothing less than the disintegration of identity amid an implacable grief. In this passage, Verdi renders Azucena as an object of Aristotelian pity and terror--a truly tragic, obsessed figure. Her potent suffering transcends the material, as our rational objections to the plot fall away into niggling insignificance. This narrative elevates Trovatore, placing it among the great operas and goes a long way toward explaining why, despite its flamboyant excesses and plot convolutions, it endures to this day.

The Proust Reader's Dilemma - Part 3

And yet if the snob is blessed with any sense of self-aware irony, he must realize his is a tenuous position and that American values of extroverted egalitarianism benefit him as much as anyone else. Moreover, in his more candid moments, he surely must admit futility as one inevitable result of all such cultural excursions, glittering and transporting though they may be, given their essentially narrow appeal and application. To be an American snob is a conundrum indeed.

On the one hand, many, no doubt, embark upon their Proustian voyage for nothing less than enlightenment, for insight into the foibles of humanity and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of art. At its best, art transports us; one feels etherealized, elevated above all this base matter: vita brevis, ars longa. True art asks (and perhaps provides an answer) to the essential question of what is the point? Of life? Love? Death? Of Art itself?  But these are impractical questions best answered by those in ivory towers, our stern American forebears would tell us. Or better answered in the guise of tried and true Christian ideology than in the quicksilver, inconstant inspiration and insight provided by art. But in our modern world without God where religion is demoted to a quaint child’s fiction, how does one sustain hope? For Proust, the answer was that art itself made its own meaning--hardly new. He sought answers in an art that halted the inevitable decay of time, of time’s consignment of the young and beautiful to the grave of oblivion, that which froze what was extraordinary in a moment imbued with the breath of eternal life.

And yet the very pragmatic question remains of what exactly is one to do with all this Olympian refinement, after all? Spend hours in some beatific trance proferred by the hard, gemlike flame of experience, as Pater counseled? Few have the time nowadays or the diligence for such vocations; furthermore, American emphasis on the practical and prosaic ensures a guilty conscience to be the end result. Why read Proust when one can achieve? Improve others’ dejected lot? Make real changes to the plight of our fellow man?

Perhaps one should make a distinction between those who come to art for insight and those who come to it for an appearance of insight--i.e., the snob. One can further distinguish between the out snob and the closeted snob, the second of whom suffers pangs of guilt over his snobbish occupations and confesses his aspirations in tentative lurches toward embarrassed self-revelation. He is timid about admitting his love of Proust, the opera, the poetry of John Donne--of wanting to know those worlds with their subtle machinations and refined etiquette so far removed from our less rigidly classist American one. One risks being seen as too fey, too fruity, insufficiently masculine and rugged, inappropriate refinements given the crass crudity of the world surrounding us.

In his pivotal treatise on the plight of the snob, Joseph Epstein notes that the snob is essentially an impotent, insecure bystander in the American cultural circus ruled by extroverts and not aesthetes, who can do nothing to console their nagging sense of inferior status, and can only blend in with the callow crowd. They must allay their anxious frustration with their Proustian, Jamesian, or Miltonic sorties, by furtive evenings at the opera, skittish afternoons in sterile art galleries. Like Proust, they may be compensating for some perceived defect or attempting to legitimize their own humble origins through exposure to and appreciation of all this high toned culture. Others of his stamp understand intrinsically but to the uninitiated few such endeavors are confessed shamefacedly, if at all. In the end, his is a marginal role in society--the high priest of art and culture to a culture more and more deaf to his direst mumblings, a voice too dim, too obscure to be heard above the shrill pop culture din.

Groucho Marx allegedly said he would never join a club that would accept him as a member; the guilt-ridden, begrudging snob is similarly paradoxically self-annihilating. Only the best for him but if the best is vouchsafed to him, was it really the best after all?  He would desire others to view him so, all the while fastidiously harboring his doubts.

The Proust Reader's Dilemma - Part 2

Reading Proust is in some ways the best of social compensations for a variety of reasons.

1. Exclusivity. Few read him nowadays, although many claim to (perhaps not all 3000-pages but at least Swann’s Way). His name still very much carries cachet in all the swank circles. We all long to belong to the best of clubs, but since few of us are granted admission, we can at least belong to the clubs that they who dare to reject us could never get into, can reinvent the game on our own terms, rejecting their shallow lot as beneath our older, wiser selves (or so we'd like to believe).

2. Mt. Everest of a Climb. Yes, 3000 pages of painstaking analysis and the subtlest of commentaries. And a panoply of characters, high and low, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, representing a slice of fin-de-siecle France and a moment perched on the cusp of the modern. To complete all 3000 or so pages of this literary marathon and keep this endlessly rich cast of characters straight is an accomplishment to which few can lay claim.

3. Those sentences. There’s something immensely gratifying about reading a sentence that goes on for three or more pages, keeping track of syntactic sinews tortured beyond easy recognition, and resisting the lure of prepositional phrase decoys seeking to mire one in a befuddled barrage of pronouns with no clear antecedents, of modifiers delicately floating about unanchored to anything as rudimentary as, say, mere sentence structure, of signifiers in a free floating association sans signifieds. (The alleged longest sentence of all is devoted to Proust’s vivisection of the homosexual.) Proust teases out his analysis in small syntactic miracles, balancing acts of forestalled commentary, of subjects dissociated from verbs, gently unfolding, sensitive to every nuance, bringing to light objects half-obscured in shadow. To follow all this, keeping the main thread of meaning unbroken, is no small feat, and the very stuff of which proud self-satisfaction is made.

4. A largely accepted Great Work of Art that is on some level just a gossipy tour of the demimonde and the underside of all that glamorous, social climbing fatuity. All Proust’s philosophizing and aesthetic musing and painstaking teasing out of the subtlest of will o’the wisps deepens the shallow into the valley of the profound while lifting his work into the realm of the magnificent. One feels glory reflected. If I cannot be great myself, I can at least bask in the glory of those select few imbued with the light of inspiration and genius.

5. Somewhat waning Francophilia. Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, to be an elitist snob was almost synonymous with declaring one’s love for everything French. I’m not sure if that still pertains any longer. Signs of French insecurity of their waning status are surely evident—Anglicisms have been outlawed from the French dictionary (or so I have heard), enrollment in French language courses has declined (or so I have read) while other languages (Mandarin and, Heaven forbid, Spanish!) have ascended. But status-symbols of the old guard die hard, so perhaps French cultural cachet will once again assert its dominance, and we will all be reopening our Sartre while sipping our Dom Perignon and sampling our crepes coquettes.

6. Controversial subject matter. Any work so bold as to deal with the taboo endows its audience with a sort of reflected broadmindedness, a willingness to free oneself from the constrictions of the social and political hegemony of one's immediate, myopic environs and the follies of the past itself and fully embrace modern enlightenment. To wit, Proust’s work must lay some sort of post-Symposium claim to being one of the first modern great works of art ever to seriously and plainly broach the topic of what used to be quaintly termed uranism.  His analysis is, of course, painstaking and all-inclusive, as is his wont--perhaps too much so to truly render the narrator himself entirely innocent of suspicion. Straight men simply would not know so much about the infinite variety and psychological underpinnings of such an abhorrent topic in the 19^th century worldview. Only they of the initiate would be privy to such knowledge, it would seem, or would have considered it in such depth. (Of course, the narrator’s views [and Proust’s, by extension] on the homosexual were nothing to write home about--he thought it a malady, a curse to which none but the children of Israel had experienced anything similar.  Modern ethos instructs us to view this as self-loathing, closeted laceration.) In a broader sense, this focus on the homosexual functions as a sort of check on all the aesthetic philosophizing and preoccupation with the minutiae of rank and title in the novel, giving it an anchor in the realm of the real, albeit one to which few everyday readers would have any firsthand knowledge and perhaps limiting its appeal to all but an elite enlightened few.

These are all compelling reasons to embark upon the Proustian odyssey. But ambivalence persists. The snob must assert his superiority to his less-enlightened peers, even if only in the impervious sanctity of his sequestered, closeted world, which, true snob that he is, he sees as a bulwark against the crashing wave of modern philisitinism, and anti-intellectual American extroversion. His is a modern echo of the glorious boasts of yore, for in reading Proust do we not dare to read the reading that "with no middle flight aims to soar"?

The Proust Reader's Dilemma - Part 1

Telling someone you have read/are reading/plan to read Proust is somewhat fraught with difficulty, a tinge of anxiety accompanying one’s pronouncement, the fear a direct result of what might seem tantamount to announcing nothing less than social climbing ambitions. One is never sure if it should be proclaimed loud and proud or confessed light and slight. The fear of suggesting, inadvertently or not, one’s superiority to one’s non-Proust reading, more earthly-bound, Oprah‘s book club-loving peers can be difficult to keep at bay.

The Proust reader faces a dilemma: while it seems fair to assume that most appreciate the value of American egalitarianism, sometimes the lure of art, of complexity, of subtle probing, and, yes, a bit of cultural chauvinism (inextricable from all this, I think) prove too great a lure to resist. Alas, these are not American values--they are European generally and French particularly. One fears being judged insufficiently American; it was, after all, not too long ago in the political scene that American chauvinism beat its brawny chest in truculent challenge toward everything French. There are some grounds for American distrust of too much Francophilia, and much of it can be located squarely within Proust himself. The man was a huge snob, after all. The primary motivating factor, I venture to say, in his 3000-page tome was far from modest: to write something for the ages that would lift him up to the empyrean into the august ranks of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and company. And as a European to whom social rank is a given, Proust would have no difficulty acquiescing (eyes blinking coquettishly, as if to say, “Yes, of course, and your point?“) to charges of rank snobbery and base social climbing—a brand of effete decadence all but unthinkable to an American.

Things are obviously complicated by the social, ethnic, and even biological. Proust, half-Jewish and homosexual, like so many before and after him, sought social respectability in a society that despised him on both counts. Such well-earned respect would be an almost ritual cleansing of the declassé origins from which he emerged, like taking the basest of metals and alchemically transmuting it to the most precious of precious stones.

But we Americans cannot display such naked ambition; our art must at some point speak to the masses. We suffer guilt over attempting to distinguish ourselves in almost any way but the material—we are a nation of immigrants, after all, most of us coming from the humblest of backgrounds (and I am certainly no different from others in that respect). This attempt to distinguish ourselves can manifest itself in even as apparently innocuous a way as reading Proust. 


But mainstream culture dictates we are to like sports not books, and certainly not those of effete aesthetes expiring on the fumes of their own rarefied ruminations. We are to enjoy mainstream movies and mainstream fare, not Truffaut, truffles, or anything smacking too much of the esoteric. We are to be fascinated by the daily gossip mill surrounding Lindsay, Paris, and Kim; we are to celebrate the athletic prowess of Kobe and Tiger, even as we tsk-tsk dishonestly at their sexual and politically-incorrect escapades (while secretly envying their superhuman status). We are not to enjoy the life of the mind for its own sake. Such things are foreign to the essentially practical American sensibility, and, in their worst excesses, reflect nothing less than European decadence and debility, spiritual malaise and moral laxity. We are taught in school that everyone is the same in the eyes of the law (those of us with experience in the real world soon learn to question such platitudes). To boldly attempt to stand out from one's non-Proust reading peers is un-American and base: Pride goeth before a fall, our Puritan forebears would have warned. Such notions are those to which others from less enlightened lands still resolutely cling to—an established social pecking order, old guard notions and faith in names, blood lines, and pedigrees.

But here we have emancipation from the old European models. We have separation of church and state; we have a free market economy and the good old American ambition that goes along with it. If the model for European hierarchy is a castle on a hill surrounded by villagers below, the American identity would appear to be a department store of types—a mere elevator ride up to something higher and better above. The message would seem to be if you can’t make it here, it’s really no one’s fault but your own. We reject social stratification and embrace upward mobility; we dispute Christian essentialism and advocate the blank slate; we enshrine pop divas and devalue Shakespeare as a dead, white male for a dead, white male elitist Euroculture foreign to our shores. Social problems can be resolved, lives can be changed, lots can be bettered, as our pop psychologists advise; if they cannot, we just weren‘t trying hard enough. The past can be discounted or, better yet, forgotten entirely. American optimism trumps Old World cynicism, it is proclaimed in almost Pentecostal chants.

Now, none of this ambivalence toward status symbols and our place in the social hierarchy in an ostensibly egalitarian society prevents anyone from wanting to get into the best schools, land the best, highest-paying jobs, live in the most palatial of mansions, etc.--basically, to service the inner consumer-whore of our wildest youth-besotted dreams. Those who attain such heights may suffer the ill effects of lingering humanity, and attempt to assuage their guilt through philanthropy and good works. But those of us for whom such heights of material ecstasy seem remote and unattainable require other compensation, even if forced into the literary closet, as it were. Enter Proust.

First Post - A Response to A Journal of the Arts' "Pauline Kael Revision"

I just happened to be searching the net looking for a quote I had read many moons ago by Pauline Kael and came across the following in a blog called A Journal of the Arts.
 
http://k09aw02.blogspot.com/2010/02/pauline-kael-revision.html

The post is entitled "Pauline Kael Revision: A Criticism of Kael's Criticism."  It's basically a refutation of many things Kael and her approach to criticism stood for.  I tried to post my response but was blocked or something, so I decided to post it here and voilá - instant blog. 

I think the writer is way off the mark here.  Let me enumerate for my patient readers. 

The author states:  "Her taste was for lowbrow art, her writing is anything but academic, and her opinions often differed drastically from much of the critical world."

Kael's taste was not necessarily in favor of "lowbrow art"--she appreciated high art as well (Ray, Bunuel, Renoir, etc.), just not all the snobbish sanctity that so often went along with it (insert name of trendy French director here) as well as how some used it to legitimize their liberal views and castigate anyone else's.  As for the second two points, yes, thank heavens.  Her direct, bold approach and feverish intensity hooked me early on, so unlike the sometimes stuffy, distant academic prose I slogged through through in my undergraduate years.  In fact, I venture to say she single-handedly kept my interest in letters alive during those years, in really connecting on a human level with a readership without condescending or underestimating their intelligence--she expected you to keep up with her lightning quick joyride through the annals of film and her subtle analysis of Godard, Truffaut, Peckinpah, et al.  Her iconoclastic opinions could be refreshing too--she was loathe to accept received wisdom and stood out for her willingness to champion the underdog and eviscerate the sacred cow.  Harsh terms, but as much as it is an art form, with all that that sloppily used term implies, criticism is frequently a blood sport.

Piu:  "Kael's vulgar, repetitive vocabulary does not bother me: the "whore" and the "trash" and the "horny" do not phase my teenage mind in the current era of violence and profanities."

Vulgar? Repetitive?  I can only say that someone who has neither read deeply nor understood la Kael (or whose "teenage mind" has not had the good fortune to experience much beyond the safe nest of home) could ever draw that underanalyzed conclusion from her work.  If she was vulgar (her response to her editor who wanted to withdraw one of her reviews on the basis of his friendship with the filmmaker in question: "Tough s--t."), it was refreshing in an era when genteel snobbery ruled.  At her height, Kael's prose was an exciting brio, a dizzying display of wit, style, encyclopedic knowledge, and shrewd observation.  It is true that in her later years her work appeared to decline somewhat--depleted of adjectives, seen it all before, running out of new ways of describing old cinematic tricks.  Easily forgiven given the awesome display of erudition and intellectual generosity so often on display in the bulk of her corpus.
  
Avvanti:  "Pauline Kael's snobbish and conceited attitude toward her audience is repulsive."

Another gross misreading.  Not so much snobbery (a reverse snobbery, it would appear, given the writer's above insistence that Kael was only interested in the lowbrow), I would say, but impatience with conventional attitudes toward art in general and filmmaking in particular.  Exasperated, yes, impatient, certainly, but snobbish?  Anyone who appreciates the inspired juvenile lunacy of National Lampoon's Animal House is surely no snob.

Allora:  "And although no one can contest Kael's love for film, she uses this admiration as a justification to speak as the most knowledgeable person in regards to movies. She writes, "But, oh, God, why isn't it better? Why isn't there the daring and the exaltation that our senses fairly cry out for?" speaking on behalf of all audience members and their senses, as if her opinion is that of a constant truth."

I don't think Kael ever purported to be speaking for everyone, only those who looked to the movies to inspire, move, and restore faith in human potential.  If she did exhibit a certain hubris at times, it was certainly well deserved--her memory of film is vast and impressive; in fact, I would venture to say she was the most knowledgeable person around in regard to movies, at least as far as a public readership goes.  I don't see anything amiss with asking or even demanding that filmmakers excite and challenge and not cater to audience wish fulfillment, to the easy path to success; she championed artistry in an industry which rewarded commercial success and regarded big moneymakers as de facto Best Pictures (and, yes, Oscar, I'm looking at you here).  Has the writer never felt the despairing isolation which comes from realizing that despite one's brains and talent the world might very well pass you by with nary so much as a glance while others of lesser gifts flourish?  

E dopo:  "In the opening paragraph, Kael admonishes educated audiences who enjoy foreign or experimental films, accusing them of using film for the wrong purpose. According to Kael, movies are intended for an escape "from the tensions of their complex lives and work," rather than for an appreciation of "movies as an art. This rule is extremely frustrating, begging the question of what right Pauline Kael has to decide what functions films should or shouldn't have, or how the public should perceive them."

Citing above Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Kael's review of which, perchance, I read only the night before, oddly enough), the author reveals her gift for misunderstanding.  Kael never said movies were intended as an escape from the tensions of life; she said educated people used art movies in an escapist way not really so far removed from how less educated types used popular films.  There is really not much difference between a popular filmgoer who goes to movies to have his worldview reassured, to see the same tired old middle class stereotypes and clichés of the valor of war, the timelessness of romantic love, and the indestructibility of American gumption acted out and that of a leftist liberal who expects to see in his foreign and arthouse films stale tropes of sinister corporate America, the seductive glamor of alternative lifestyles, and the sanctity of same sex households upheld.  Kael was actually in favor of a cinema which reflected life's complexities without laying on any clichés or sanctimony or liberal stereotypes.  It wasn't "a rule" either--Kael was not this type of writer.  She didn't codify anything--she disliked writers of this stamp (e.g., Kracauer and Sarris).  This type of rulemaking tends to close one off from the spontaneity of good filmmaking, which is what I think she loved most.  Re: the opinionmaking point, Kael refuted serious schools of criticism on the basic (I think inarguable) premise that at some point all taste is subjective, based on one's preferences and biases.  Any attempt to objectify it is fundamentally misguided. 

Incidentally, the quote I was looking for was something Kael said about not wanting to stand with elitist types but with the vulgarians instead.  It wasn't exactly that, I found out:  "There's no way I could make the case that National Lampoon's Animal House is a better movie than (Warren Beatty's) Heaven Can Wait, yet on some sort of emotional-aesthetic level I prefer it. One returns you to the slobbiness of infancy, the other to the security of childhood, and I'd rather stand with the slobs."  I believe this is from Reeling, but I'm not sure.  Funny how things change in memory.