User:Mango Masala/sandbox: Difference between revisions

It may be argued, for instance, that many of the attitudes 1 have described are not so novel as I make them out to be. Richards' emotive theories, Burke's concept of action, Leavis’ cultural vitalism, Trilling’s depth-view of manners and imagination, Blackmur’s metaphors of silence in literature, and above all, Herbert Read’s sympathy for the anarchic spirit, certainly open the way to the speculations of younger critics. The latter, however, still distinguish themselves by a certain quality of passion, a generosity toward the perversities of spirit, and a sense of crisis in man’s fate. Two recent books of criticism, R. W. B. Lewis’ ''The American Adam'' and Leslie Fiedler's ''Love and Death at the American Novel'', seem quite disparate in tone and method; yet both, I think, stand in this respect closer to Lawrence’s seminal work, ''Studies in Classic American Literature'', than to Matthiessen’s ''American Renaissance''.

I speak, of course, hyperbolically. Perhaps I can make the point clearer, and sharpen thereby the distinction between two generations of critics, by referring to two eminent theoreticians of literature. Both Rene Wellek and Northrop Frye are men of vast erudition; both have shaped the course of literary studies in America. This, I think, is entirely as it should be; the timely authority of such works as Wellek and Warren’s ''Theory of Literature'' or Frye’s ''Anatomy of Criticism'' deserves nothing less. Yet at the risk of seeming ungracious, it is to their later, and perhaps lesser, works that I wish to refer. After all, the question still remains: what lies beyond formalist theory?

In ''Concepts of Criticism'', Professor Wellek shows himself to be somewhat out of love with the directions of contemporary criticism. “It seems to me that in spite of the basic truth of the insight of organicism, the unity of content and form, we have arrived today at something like a deadend,” he states.{{sfn|Wellek|1963|p=65}} His dissatisfaction, however, is of short duration. Professor Wellek sees the way out in the doctrine of “structuralism," evolved by the Prague Linguistic Circle-alas, now defunct! “Such a concept of the literary work of art avoids two pitfalls,” Professor Wellek hopes, “the extreme of organicism which leads to a lumpish totality in which discrimination becomes impossible, and the opposite danger of atomistic fragmentation.”{{sfn|Wellek|1963|p=68}} The way out, as it turns out, comes very close to the ancient ideal of the golden mean. This is judicious. But is it really judiciousness which prompts him in two later chapters, “Philosophy and Post- war American Criticism” and “Main Trends of Twentieth-Century Criticism,” to deride all recent criticism? The brilliant and inventive concern with American literature in the last two decades is deplored as an example of “romantic historicism,” and mythic and existential criticism are condemned as an instance of “the irrationalistic philosophies of Europe” adapted to the pragmatic temper of the United States."{{sfn|Wellek|1963|p=333 ff}} Professor Wellek sadly concludes: “Only those who adhere to either the German idealist tradition, in the Kantian or Coleridgean version, or those who rediscover Aristotle, still keep a grasp on the nature of art and recognize the necessity of an aesthetic and the ideal of a study of literature as literature.”{{sfn|Wellek|1963|p=342}} Having defined literature in formalist terms, it is no wonder that Professor Wellek ''still'' believes formalist theory to be the most rewarding view of literature. Thus is the rigor of tautology achieved.

Again, Professor Frye views criticism not as the experience of literature but, more discretely, as an area of knowledge. This leads him to the hard-boiled conclusion, so repugnant to visionary educators, that “the values we want the student to acquire from us cannot be taught: only knowledge of literature can be taught.”{{sfn|Frye|1963|p=136}} Can knowledge be dissociated from value, and criticism forego its aspiration to wisdom? Apparently so. “The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one’s beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet,” he continues.{{sfn|Frye|1963|p=140}} Ordered to be quiet! Who listens, then, and who speaks instead ? The imagination never demanded such frozen void, nor do the supreme fictions of the mind reject the earth they transmute. We have seen criticism gaze long enough on the world with the quiet eyes of Apollo. Shall we ever see it partake again of the sacred flesh of Dionysus?

I do not wish to suggest that the Dionysiac vision is bound to penetrate literary criticism the world over. I do sense, however, a movement in contemporary letters which must force us to revise our tenets or else accept the charge of theoretical isolationism in America. It is doubtful, fur instance, that the plays of Beckett or Genet or Artaud, the novels of William Burroughs, Maurice Blanchot, or Alain Robbe-Grillet, the later stories of Salinger, the poetry of Charles Olson, Blaise Cendrars, or Dylan Thomas—and I cite these names quite at random----can be illuminated brightly by the critical terms of Professors Wellek and Frye. Nathalie Sarraute's latest book, ''The Golden Fruits'', and Marc Saporta’s “shuffle novel,” ''Number 1'', deny the conventional idea of structure. The first is a novel about a novel which cancels itself in the very act of reading; the second is a stratagem which accepts the principle of chance as an integral part of the literary experience. As for Burroughs’ ''The Soft Machine'', it applies—to what extent, no one will know—the “cut up method of Brion Gysin,” a method which combines collage and montage. If these works possess a form, it is probably a “non-telic" form of the kind recently reflected in painting and music."{{sfn|Meyer|1963|p=169-186}} Must we then dismiss such works as faddish freaks, of more interest to literary gossip than literary history?

In France, where criticism has been long associated with the spirit of lucidity, critics take a different stand. A quick look at some of their statements may persuade us that their view of literature is not too far from the view I have proposed. The common theme of Claude Mauriac’s ''The New Literature'' is stated thus: “After the silence of Rimbaud, the blank page of Mallarme, the inarticulate cry of Artaud, a literature finally dissolves in alliteration with Joyce. The author of ''Finnegans Wake'' in fact creates out of whole cloth words full of so many diverse overtones that they are eclipsed by them. For Beckett, on the contrary, words all say the same thing."{{sfn|Mauriac|1959|p=12}} The theme of Roland Barthes' ''Le Degré Zéro de L‘Ecriture'' is similar: the avatar of the new literature is absence. Barthes writes: “dans ces écritures neutres, appelées ici ‘le degré zéro de l’ecr’iture,' on peut facilement discerner le mouvement même d’une négation, comme si la Littérature, tendant depuis un siècle à transmuer sa surface dans une forme sans hérédité, ne trouvait plus de pureté que dans l’absence de tout signe, proposant en fin l’accomplissement de ce rêve orphéen: un écrivain sans Littérature."{{sfn|Barthes|1959|p=12}} Likewise, for Maurice Blanchot literature is moving toward “l’ére saris parole.” This movement may lead to a form of writing that is incessant sound; or it may lead, as Blanchot states in Le Livre à Venir, quite in the other direction: “la littérature va vers elle-même, vers son essence qui est la disparition.”{{sfn|Blanchot|1959|p=237}} Both directions, we can surmise, end in the dissolution of significant form, the abdication of language. Is this silence at the heart of modern literature the definition of outrage, a subjective correlative of our terror? Or is the monstrous language of action, which Bachelard {{sfn|Bachelard|1963|p=154}} believes to be pointing, beyond Lautréamontism, toward “une réintegration de l'humain dans la vie ardente...,” a closer correlative of that terror? We can only observe that from Sade and Lautréamont to Kafka and Beckett, the twin dark streams of poetry, the poetry of action and the poetry of silence, have been flowing toward some unknown sea wherein some figure of apocalypse, man or beast, still lies submerged.

Criticism is no country for old men of any age. Criticism, which was born to behold literature, must still do so and look beyond itself. Tack and rigor may attend all our words, but our words, but our words will avail nothing if man prevails not. What lies beyond criticism? D.H. Lawrence knew. This is what he says in his ''Apocalypse'': “O lovely green dragon of the new day, the undawned day, come come in touch, and release us from the horrid grip of the evil-smelling old Logos! Come in silence, and say nothing. Come in touch, in soft new touch like a spring-time, and say nothing.”{{sfn|Lawrence|1931|pp. 233 ff}}

* {{cite book |last=Adams |first=Robert Martin |date=1962 |title=Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce's Ulysses |location=New York |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Camus|first=Albert |date=1961 |title=Resistance, Rebellion, and Death |location=New York |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Durrell |first=Lawrence and Alfred Perles |date=1961 |title=Art and Outrage: A Correspondence about Henry Miller |location=New York |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Frye|first=Northrop |date=1963 |title=The Well-Tempered Critic|location=Bloomington |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Krieger |first=Murray |date=1960 |title=The Tragic Vision |location=New York |page=|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lawrence |first=D.H. |date=1931 |title= Apocalypse |location=Florence |page= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lewis|first=R.W.B. |date=1959 |title=The Picaresque Saint|location=Philadelphia and New York|page= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mauriac|first=Claude |date=1959 |title=The New Literature |page=|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Miller |first=Henry |date=1939 |title=The Cosmological Eye |location=Norfork |page= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Ong|first=Walter J. |date=1962 |title=The Barbarian Within |location=New York |page= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Sartre|first=Jean-Paul |date=1948 |title=Situations II |location=Paris |page= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Wellek |first=René |date=1963 |title=Concepts of Criticism |url= |location=New Haven|page=|isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}