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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? | 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|''Ibid''|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|''Ibid''|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.” | 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|''Ibid''|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|''Ibid''|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|''Ibid''|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. | ||
The Well-Tempered Critic, which is not wrought in the massive architectural manner of Professor Frye’s earlier work, is too urbane to be tautological. Its urbanity expresses a fine subtlety of mind in the final chapter of the book, and the subtlety itself disguises a somewhat chilly view of literature. Professor Frye acknowledges the distinction between the classic and romantic tempers in criticism, and proceeds to discover the correlatives of each. The classic temper, he informs us, is aesthetic, the romantic is psychological; the former views art as artifact, the latter as expression; the one derives from Aristotle, the other from Longinus. I do not quarrel with these distinctions, particularly when categorical distinctions make the very basis of the geometric edifices Professor Frye likes to erect. “The first step to take here," he argues, “is to realize that just as a poem implies a distinction between the poet as man and the poet as verbal craftsman, so the response to a poem implies a corresponding distinction in the critic.” [16] For both Northrop Frye and | ''The Well-Tempered Critic'', which is not wrought in the massive architectural manner of Professor Frye’s earlier work, is too urbane to be tautological. Its urbanity expresses a fine subtlety of mind in the final chapter of the book, and the subtlety itself disguises a somewhat chilly view of literature. Professor Frye acknowledges the distinction between the classic and romantic tempers in criticism, and proceeds to discover the correlatives of each. The classic temper, he informs us, is aesthetic, the romantic is psychological; the former views art as artifact, the latter as expression; the one derives from Aristotle, the other from Longinus. I do not quarrel with these distinctions, particularly when categorical distinctions make the very basis of the geometric edifices Professor Frye likes to erect. “The first step to take here," he argues, “is to realize that just as a poem implies a distinction between the poet as man and the poet as verbal craftsman, so the response to a poem implies a corresponding distinction in the critic.” [16] For both Northrop Frye and René Wellek, we see, the critical act rests on the separation of certain human faculties from the continuum of felt life. There are few critics willing to speak professionally for the ancient female principle, acceptance and fusion, and the enveloping wholeness of things, few willing to speak for the fourfold vision of Blake. Yet carried far enough, distinctions become the source of the mind’s alienation, the Cartesian madness of the West. 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|''Ibid''|p=342}} 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=123}} 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 m painting and music." Must we then dismiss such works as faddish freaks, of more interest to literary gossip than literary history? | 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 m painting and music." Must we then dismiss such works as faddish freaks, of more interest to literary gossip than literary history? | ||