Contraries: Essays

Literary criticism, the most ingenious form storytelling can take.

What is it, for all its rituals of language, its sacred codes, its systematic reflections upon reflections, but the protracted effort to define and accommodate the powerful emotions stirred by works of art? Criticism speaks, as Northrop Frye has observed, and all the arts are silent. But the reverberations of that silence—!

The critic is a pilgrim, an acolyte, a translator; a gnostic intermediary fueled by the need to bring metaphors from one system to another. He analyzes, traces, compares, elucidates, composes "arguments" . . . in the hope of dealing, in intellectually negotiable terms, with the troubled nature of our relationship to art.

That it is a troubled relationship seems to me incontestable. We are stimulated to emotional response not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it. (To "identify with"—a commonplace pietism—means simply "to have no further thoughts about.") The "Contraries" of which Blake speaks in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are in fact the very energies of Blakean "Delight"—the Eternal Delight that rests in motion, in strife, in passion, in revolutionary violence. Energy, as Blake says, is the only life.

The seven essays in this volume, written over a period of approximately twenty years, and intermittently revised, were originally stimulated by feelings of opposition and, in two or three cases, a deep and passionate revulsion. That one is stirred, excited, baffled, and even upset by a work of the magnitude of King Lear goes without saying; that one might also be angered by it, annoyed, vexed, offended, and even depressed—and even, during a solid month's immersion in its ambiguous poetry, made insomniac—is perhaps less readily admitted. "Classics," after all, are works most people no longer question in primitive emotional terms.

The English and Scottish "traditional" ballads, which I first studied in my early twenties, struck me initially as too simple for literary criticism—for the modernist New Criticism fashionable at that time, with its elegant apparatus for "dissecting" opacity in poetry suitably opaque. Ulysses, which I first attempted at the age of sixteen, struck me, for all its wonders of language (which leap off the page, even to the uninstructed eye ) as too willfully complex, too self-indulgent, a monument of egotism—my mistake, but not mine alone. D. H. Lawrence was shrill and hectoring and "obvious"; and embarrassing too, in his insistence upon the primacy of the "blood"—for what, after all, is the "blood"? Oscar Wilde offended with his cute paradoxes, his cloying epigrams, his worked-over prose; Dostoyevsky, though clearly a master, was so flagrantly and smugly and ( it seemed ) spitefully Christian . . . a bias that deformed the great novels. These initial responses, this sort of immediate opposition, had at least the advantage for me of provoking me to thought: for a quarrel with others, in Yeats's famous but still useful definition, may lead to rhetoric: but "rhetoric" itself may lead to something more valuable.

Why must Cordelia die, one asks, why must Conrad murder Martin Decoud—the man so much like himself! It has never been a fashionable critical technique, to my knowledge, to fantasize structures for works of art other than those they contain; but the practicing writer knows how eerily fluid these structures are, at the very outset of a work—how open to improvisation, audacity, hope—before the artist's secret life—drama, the private mythology working itself out through his imagination, intervenes in the guise of aesthetic necessity. So the question Why is asked, Why this and not that, impulsive questions, bold, quixotic, Why this fate and not that? —fueled by the spirit of contrariety that lies at the heart of all passionate commitment.

J.C.O.
Princeton, N.J.
October 1980