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 Perhaps I have spoken long enough of certain interests of postwar criticism, though I feel I have spoken of them only tangentially. If one were to search for the theoretical basis of these interests—a task which I must leave to more philosophical critics one might be inclined to develop a view of literature that does not put the idea of form as its center. By this I do not simply mean a redefinition of the concept of form so that it may account, say, for the plays of Beckett or the novels of Burroughs. I would plead for a more radical view. From Kant to Cassirer, from Coleridge to Croce and down to the New Critics, the idea of organic form has been a touchstone of value and a cornerstone of theory in literary study. We assume, and indeed we believe, that the imagination incarnates itself only as an aesthetic order, and that such an order is available to the analytic mind. We believe more: that aesthetic order defines the deepest pleasures of literature and conveys its enduring attractions. I am not at all secure in these beliefs. Indeed, I am willing to take the devil's part and entertain the notion that “structure” is not always present or explicable in literary works; and that where it reveals itself, it is not always worth the attention we give it. Such works as Hamlet and Don Quixote not diminished by the discovery that their form, whatever it may be, is less organic than we expect the form of great works to be. Even that supreme artifact of our century, that total structure of symbols, puns, and cross-references, that city of words full of secret alleys and connecting catacombs, even Joyce's ''Ulysses'', may prove to the keen, fresh eye of a critic more of a labyrinth, dead ends and ways without issue, than Dublin itself which encloses the nightmare of history. This is precisely what Robert Martin Adams concludes in his fascinating study, ''Surface and Symbol''. Adams inspects minutely the wealth of details in the novel, and finds that many of them serve to blur or confuse rather than to sustain patterns: "The close reading of ''Ulysses'' thus reveals that the meaningless is deeply interwoven with the meaningful in the texture of the novel...It is a book and an antibook, a work of art particularly receptive to accident. It builds to acute and poignant states of consciousness, yet its larger ambition seems to be to put aside consciousness as a painful burden."{{sfn|Adams|1962|p=245, 253}}Nothing catastrophic to the future of criticism is presaged by this statement. Quite the contrary: criticism may derive new vitality from some attention to the unstructured and even random element in literature. For is not form, after all, best conceived as a mode of awareness, a function of cognition, a question, that is, of epistemology rather than ontology? Its objective reality is qualified by the overpowering reality of human ''need''. In the end, we perceive what we need to perceive, and our sense of pattern as of relation is conditioned by our deeper sense of relevance. This is why the aesthetic of the future will have to reckon with Freud, Nietzsche, and even Kierkegaard, who have given us, more than Marx himself, compelling economies of human needs.{{efn|In recent criticism, certain works have already begun to reflect this particular concern. Besides the works by R. W.  . Lewis and Murray Krieger already cited, one might mention Geoffrey Hartman, ''The Unmediated Vision'' (New Haven, 1954), Ihab Hassan, ''Radical Innocence'' (Princeton, 1961), Frederick J. Hoffman, ''The Mortal No'' (Princeton, 1964), and Arturo B. Fallico, ''Art and Existentialism'' (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962).}}
-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 illustrates the intelligence that works up appearances and covers with images what has no reason. If the world were clear, art would not exist."{{sfn|Camus|1959|p=72 ff}} 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.{{efn|These heretical statements are developed more fully in my essay "The Dismemberment of Orpheus," '''American Scholar''', XXXII.}}{{sfn|Hassan|1963|p=463-484}}
+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 illustrates the intelligence that works up appearances and covers with images what has no reason. If the world were clear, art would not exist."{{sfn|Camus|1959|p=72 ff}} 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.{{efn|These heretical statements are developed more fully in my essay "The Dismemberment of Orpheus," ''American Scholar'', XXXII.}}{{sfn|Hassan|1963|p=463-484}}
 The foregoing remarks limn certain trends in postwar criticism; they are not intended to define a school or movement. Still, I feel it wise to anticipate some objections before concluding this mock survey.
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 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 m painting and music."{{sfn|Meyer|p=169-186}} 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."{{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." 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." 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 littérature va vers elle-meme, vers son essence qui est la disparition.” 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 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 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.