User:Mango Masala/sandbox: Difference between revisions

There are many answers to this question, though all are equally provisional, for in this as in other literary matters, tact not theory comes to our aid. We can begin, however, by making two observations. First, serious literature offers great resistance to political expediency; other forms of propaganda are far more effective. The basic affinity of modern literature particularly is with vision and outrage. By vision, I mean neither doctrine nor even revelation, but simply a concrete projection of the imagination into the conduct of life. Henry Miller has such an idea in mind when he says: “The role which the artist plays in society is to revive the primitive, anarchic instincts which have been sacrificed for the illusion of living in comfort”; or when he says again: “I do not call poets those who make verses, rhymed or unrhymed. I call that man poet who is capable of profoundly altering the world.”{{sfn|Miller|1939|p=156, 38 ff}} Both these statements reveal the artist’s conception of himself as visionary actor; both attest to his hope that prophecy may find its incarnation, beyond language, in action. Emboldened by such statements—and they are by no means restricted to Miller—the critic may feel justified in participating in the action that the work initiates. This is to say that the critic becomes himself part of the devious process by which a writer’s vision penetrates culture. The character of this devious process is closer to the character of pedagogy than of social reform. This leads me to the second observation. Since the process is indeed devious, subject to all the ambiguities of modern culture, the critic cannot really maintain a purely pragmatic, a purely political view of literature. This is salutary for the activist critic who finds in the visionary or subversive power of literature an inner check on his propensity for dogma, his penchant for expediency. This critical ideal is not nearly as pretentious as it may sound, nor does it always require the critic to make his home in the midst of chaos. It may require him, however, to heed certain ''thematic'' questions which were once considered beneath notice. A number of critical works of the last decade reflect this emergent concern. In ''The Tragic Vision'', for instance, Murray Krieger pertinently asks, “But how, if we limit ourselves to technical literary definitions, can we find for the tragic any meaning beyond that of Aristotle? The answer is, by moving from formalistic aesthetics to what I would term 'thematics.'” Krieger’s analysis of that term cannot be summarized easily, but the implications of his method are stated succinctly enough. He concludes thus: “All of which is perhaps to say only that a literary theory must be adequate to the literary experiences for which it is to account and that we trust our way of experiencing literature only as it is adequate to the life out there, which cries for a way of being organized literarily that will yet leave it preserved intact.”{{sfn|Krieger|1960|p=2, 244}}  If the insistence on “the life out there” does not necessarily force the critic into a study of “thematics,” it does persuade him to dwell on precisely those formal matters that invoke the larger aspects of reality and may even engage religious thought. Thus the essays of James E. Miller, Jr., Karl Shapiro, and Bernice Slote, in ''Start With the Sun'', explore the relation of Dionysian poetry to cosmic consciousness, mystery, and apocalypse. Miss Slote ends taking her cue from a noble phrase of Lawrence, “Perhaps then we may be absolved from the poetry of mirrors.{{sfn|Miller|Shapiro|Slote|1960|p=238}}  Parallel explorations of fiction lead R.W.B. Lewis, in his fine study, ''The Picaresque Saint'', to distinguish between the generation of Proust, Joyce, and Mann, in whose world the aesthetic experience was supreme, and the generation of Silone, Faulkner, Camus, and Greene, in whose world “the chief experience has been the discovery of what it means to be a human being and to be alive.” Lewis continues: “Criticism, examining this world, is drawn to the more radically human considerations of life and death, and of the aspiring, sinful nature of man.”{{sfn|Lewis|1959|p=9}}

I could not persist in suggesting the theoretical implications of postwar criticism without falling into the trap which I have myself described. We do not always need a theoretical argument to bring forth a new critical attitude; we only need good critics. But perhaps we need, more than anything else, to regard literature in a more oblique fashion, regard it even in the slanting light of its own absurdity. We might then see that the theoretical solemnity of modern criticism ignore the self-destructive element of literature, its need for self-annulment. What Camus said of his own work applies, in various ways, to all literature: the act of creation is akin to chance and disorder, to which it comes through diversity, and it constantly meets with futility. "Creating or not creating changes nothing, " Camus writes. "The absurd creator does not prize his work. He could repudiate it." And again: "The absurd work illustration the intelligence that works up appearances and covers with images what has no reason. If the world were clear, art would not exist." [13] Perhaps the function of literature, after all, is not to clarify that world but to help create a world in which literature becomes superfluous. And perhaps the function of criticism, as I shall argue later, is to attain to the difficult wisdom of perceiving how literature is finally, and only finally, inconsequential.