User:Mango Masala/sandbox: Difference between revisions

''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.”{{sfn|Frye|1963|p=123}} 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=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|''Ibid''|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 m painting and music." 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." The theme of Roland Barthes' Le Degre Zero Ie L‘Ecriture is similar: the avatar of the new literature is absence. Barthes writes: “dans ces écritures neutres, appelees ici ‘le degre zéro de l’ecr’iture,' on peut facilement discerner le mouvement meme d’une negation, comme si la Litterature, tendant depuis un siccle a transmuer sa surface dans une forme sans heredite, ne trouvait plus de purete que dans l’absence de tout signe, proposant en fin l’accomplissement de ce reve orphéen: un ecrivain sans Litterature."[19] 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 a Venir, quite in the other direction: “la litterature va vers elle-meme, vers son essence qui est la disparition.” [20] 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 [21] believes to be pointing, beyond Lautréamontism, toward “une reintegration de l'humain dans la vie ardente...,” a closer correlative of that terror? We can only observe that from Sade and Lautreamont 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.