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Evidence of the new mood is various though one senses behind it the enduring search for wholeness and vitality in the literary response. One senses, too, the paradoxical desire to appropriate literature to the dream life of men, and then again to implicate it in the widest sphere of their daily actions. Is not the secret task, for poet and critic alike, to participate in that magic process whereby the word is turned into flesh? | Evidence of the new mood is various though one senses behind it the enduring search for wholeness and vitality in the literary response. One senses, too, the paradoxical desire to appropriate literature to the dream life of men, and then again to implicate it in the widest sphere of their daily actions. Is not the secret task, for poet and critic alike, to participate in that magic process whereby the word is turned into flesh? | ||
The critic therefore feels the need for commitment; he wants to testify. And what is to prevent him? The encounter with as authentic work of art is a bruising experience, full of strange knowledge and hidden pleasure, of the kind we usually spend a life-time resisting. The critic knows that he himself is on trial, and that the act of literary criticism is above all an act of self-judgement. Since his business is to speak of literature, speech in his case must ultimately take the form of self-revelation. But the need for self-revelation is not only a private or existential need. It is also a social function of the critic. “Is art always an outrage - must it by its very nature be an outrage? Durrell asks | The critic therefore feels the need for commitment; he wants to testify. And what is to prevent him? The encounter with as authentic work of art is a bruising experience, full of strange knowledge and hidden pleasure, of the kind we usually spend a life-time resisting. The critic knows that he himself is on trial, and that the act of literary criticism is above all an act of self-judgement. Since his business is to speak of literature, speech in his case must ultimately take the form of self-revelation. But the need for self-revelation is not only a private or existential need. It is also a social function of the critic. “Is art always an outrage - must it by its very nature be an outrage?" Durrell asks.{{sfn|Durrell|Perles|1961|p=9}} The question haunts the critic even more than it does the oafish censors of our time. For should the critic insist on his dubious right to privacy or detachment, his deepest knowledge of literature would remain locked, a private outrage, an inner wound. Yet literature, we know, acts through language; it is a communal call, there where words and experience are one, as it is solitary subversion, where words begin to fail. In the act of testimony, therefore, the critic admits the relevance of the buried power of literature; her offers himself to the harsh task of mediating between society and vision, culture and anarchy. Only thus can he give to outrage wider reference, give it a meaning beyond itself. There is the risk of course, that such mediation may rob both culture and outrage of their particular force. Yet from that loss a new life in history may be gained, a new consciousness of self and society may be born. This is precisely the gain, implicit in the discomforts of critical commitment, which Lionel Trilling, in his otherwise subtle essay, “On the Modern Element in Modern Literature,” seems to ignore.[3] | ||
Commitment, however, is but a single impulse of the new critical attitude; it simply prepares the ground for dialogue. Another impulse may be defined as the refusal wholly to objectify the work of literature. The art work, of course, has been long considered as an object , an object for dissection or knowledge, idolatry or classification. Yet the encounter between critic and work is neither entirely objective nor purely aesthetic; it may be a “dialogue” of the kind Martin Buber has proposed. In Buber's sense, the work of art resists identification with insensible It; for the work demands answer and response, and it requires a meeting. Is it then so perverse to ask the critic, whether he subscribes to Buber’s theology or not, that he “turn toward” the work and confess with Buber, “in each instance a word demanding an answer has happened to me” ?[4] Nothing is mystical in this statement, nothing inimical to the spirit of poetry. The statement, in fact, points to some rather mundane questions which Walter J. Ong, theologian of another faith, happily raises. In his original essay, “The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn,” Father Ong states: “Creative activity is often...powered by the drive to accomplish, in terms of the production of an object of art, an adjustment or readjustment in certain obscure relationships with other persons." What does this mean? Quite obviously, it means that behind every work of art lurks and strains a human being; Quite obviously, perhaps, it means that the voice of the human creator, raging heart and feet of clay, is not entirely silenced in his art. The jinnee cannot be exorcised from the urn it inhabits, however shapely the latter may prove; the artifact still comes to life with voices unknown. And indeed this is what we, as readers, require. Once again, Father Ong sees the point clearly: “as a matter of full, serious, protracted contemplation and love, it is unbearable for a man or woman to be faced with anything less than a person. . . .”[5]. This is precisely what critics, compelled by the difficult reciprocities of love, may now want to face: not an object but a presence mediated cunningly, incomprehensibly, by language. Such a presence is not simply human. It is the presence, moving and participating in reality, which Owen Barfield, in Saving the Appearances, has shown us to lie at the heart of the symbolic process. In facing such a presence, critics may hope to recover the primal connection with a universe mediated increasingly by abstractions. But they may also hope to recover something more modest: a spontaneity of judgment which reaches outward, reaches beyond itself. Holden Caulfield, we recall, was moved to call on an author whose work he had much enjoyed. In such naiveté there may be a parable for critics as well as an occasion for derision. | Commitment, however, is but a single impulse of the new critical attitude; it simply prepares the ground for dialogue. Another impulse may be defined as the refusal wholly to objectify the work of literature. The art work, of course, has been long considered as an object , an object for dissection or knowledge, idolatry or classification. Yet the encounter between critic and work is neither entirely objective nor purely aesthetic; it may be a “dialogue” of the kind Martin Buber has proposed. In Buber's sense, the work of art resists identification with insensible It; for the work demands answer and response, and it requires a meeting. Is it then so perverse to ask the critic, whether he subscribes to Buber’s theology or not, that he “turn toward” the work and confess with Buber, “in each instance a word demanding an answer has happened to me” ?[4] Nothing is mystical in this statement, nothing inimical to the spirit of poetry. The statement, in fact, points to some rather mundane questions which Walter J. Ong, theologian of another faith, happily raises. In his original essay, “The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn,” Father Ong states: “Creative activity is often...powered by the drive to accomplish, in terms of the production of an object of art, an adjustment or readjustment in certain obscure relationships with other persons." What does this mean? Quite obviously, it means that behind every work of art lurks and strains a human being; Quite obviously, perhaps, it means that the voice of the human creator, raging heart and feet of clay, is not entirely silenced in his art. The jinnee cannot be exorcised from the urn it inhabits, however shapely the latter may prove; the artifact still comes to life with voices unknown. And indeed this is what we, as readers, require. Once again, Father Ong sees the point clearly: “as a matter of full, serious, protracted contemplation and love, it is unbearable for a man or woman to be faced with anything less than a person. . . .”[5]. This is precisely what critics, compelled by the difficult reciprocities of love, may now want to face: not an object but a presence mediated cunningly, incomprehensibly, by language. Such a presence is not simply human. It is the presence, moving and participating in reality, which Owen Barfield, in Saving the Appearances, has shown us to lie at the heart of the symbolic process. In facing such a presence, critics may hope to recover the primal connection with a universe mediated increasingly by abstractions. But they may also hope to recover something more modest: a spontaneity of judgment which reaches outward, reaches beyond itself. Holden Caulfield, we recall, was moved to call on an author whose work he had much enjoyed. In such naiveté there may be a parable for critics as well as an occasion for derision. | ||