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.  

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?