The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews

Contents

Introduction

ESSAYS

Imaginary Cities : America
"At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her" : Images of Women in Yeats, Lawrence, Faulkner
The Magnanimity of Wuthering Heights
Charles Dodgson's Golden Hours
John Updike's American Comedies
Notes on Failure

REVIEWS

The Interior Castle : The Art of Jean Stafford's Short Fiction
Before God Was Love : The Short Stories of Paul Bowles
Colette's Purgatory
Geza Scath's Garden : The Contours of Surrealism
The "Mysticism" of Simone Weil
Legendary Jung
Anne Sexton : Self-Portrait in Poetry and Letters
Sacred and Profane Iris Murdoch
Flannery O'Connor : A Self-Portrait in Letters

Notes to Essays

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1983, p290
• Publishers Weekly, March 11, 1983, p73
• Booklist, April 15, 1983, p1070-1071
• Library Journal, April 15, 1983, p825
• National Review, April 29, 1983, p505
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 29, 1983, p2, 5
• Washington Post Book World, July 3, 1983, p9

Introduction

The motives for criticism are even more puzzling than the motives for art. The systematic reflection upon another's creativity; the exploration of the subtleties of a work that lie, in a sense, mute within it; the dialogue with an invisible and perhaps skeptical audience asserting that a work is more resourceful, more astonishing than a casual reading can suggest—all contribute to the critical impulse.

Criticism speaks, as Northrop Frye has observed—and all the arts are silent. Their expression is only of themselves and never for themselves.

Medusa, that terrible image-bearing goddess of Greek mythology, could not be encountered directly by the hero Perseus, for her power was such that she turned all who gazed upon her into stone. (The "Gorgon" Medusa, formerly a beautiful woman, had been transformed into a winged monster with glaring eyes, tusklike teeth, claws, and—most famously—serpents in place of hair.) Only through indirection, by means of a polished shield, could she be approached in order to be slain. One cannot resist reading the tale as a cautionary parable: the inchoate and undetermined event, the act without structure, without the necessary confinement of the human imagination, is simply too brutal—because too inhuman—to be borne. Perseus, aided by Athene, conquers the barbaric in nature (in his own nature?) by means of reflection. The demonic Medusa is successfully subdued by the godly strategy of restraint, confinement, indirection—in short, by a kind of art; an artfulness that substitutes intellectual caution for the brashness of primitive instinct. So art labors to give meaning to a profusion of meanings; its structures—inevitably "exclusive"—provide a way of seeing with the mind's eye. The journalist's or the historian's hope of gathering in all truths is surrendered in the interest of exploring a single truth. The restraint of art—its subjectivity, its stubborn faith in its own music, an angle of vision, an overriding emotion, an obsession—is its power.

Criticism is, then, the art of reflection upon reflection. It is a distinctly and wonderfully civilized venture: the unhurried, systematic, discursive commentary upon another's vision. Its impulses are to synthesize, to abbreviate, to exclaim over origins, analogues, hidden meanings. Like gems turned slowly in the hand, diffracting light in new and startling patterns, all serious works of art yield a multiplicity of meanings. The critic's reflective activity is altogether natural— which is to say "instinctive" and "real"—but this is a naturalness that finds its most comfortable expression in the scrutiny of the artist's interpretation of an image. Not Medusa herself, with her galaxy of possible meanings, but the highly polished shield in which she is framed: the art of the shield, in fact; the stratagems of Perseus who is human, and consequently the real object of our fascinated interest. If the greatest works of art sometimes strike us as austere and timeless, self-contained and self-referential, with their own private music, as befits sacred things, criticism is always an entirely human dialogue, a conversation directed toward an audience. It is a conversation between equals, on a subject of acknowledged superiority. Which is why, for many of us, reading it and writing it are such extraordinarily rewarding activities. There is a profoundly satisfying beauty in the very gesture of acquiescence to another's vision—the communal acknowledgment of the greatness and abiding worth of certain works of art. These are, of course, our "sacred things."

Auden has said, "The value of a profane thing lies in what it usefully does, the value of a sacred thing lies in what it is." Of course the "sacred thing" may also have a function but that is not its primary role. If art is sacred it is quite reasonable to assume that criticism is profane: it exists not in and for itself; it justifies itself as a service. The artist participates in a sacred rite, the critic in a profane rite. Yet are the two inevitably opposed? Must they be adversaries? There is a chilling truth to Nietzsche's characteristically terse observation that praise is more obtrusive than blame, but both praise and blame are perhaps beside the point in a systematic and reflective criticism. The secular nature of the critical enterprise, its willingness to be secondary, in the service of, profane in Auden's sense of the word, gives it a freedom not always available to the artist himself.

Yet there is a tradition of criticism as warfare, defensive or otherwise. The rationalist and combative approach, in which works of art are on trial, to be judged by the critic, insists upon the critics's strength and the artist's passivity. The one represents reason (in its most sinister guise it is presented as "common sense"), the other represents passion, disorder, instability, even madness. Nearly all critics are conservative if only because they cannot presume to judge art by its own standards if those standards are new: even the most well-intentioned critic carries about with him, unacknowledged, his ideas of what a novel or a short story or a play or a poem should be, based upon works he has studied. His instinct is to preserve the past because it is his past; he has a great deal invested in it. The artist, by contrast, really must follow his instinct into areas not yet mined by others—he cannot even console himself (unless he is Joyce or Stendhal or Flaubert, with a prodigious faith in his own genius) that criticism will someday "catch up" with his innovations. What appears as disorder, instability, and frequent madness to the critic is in fact the creative activity itself: it seeks to blossom in inhospitable climates, break free of its confining species, celebrate the individual and the idiosyncratic, even at the cost of official—that is, "critical"—censure. So it is commonplace to read of the dismaying critical receptions given great works of art, and it is never surprising to discover, in perusing the past, that the best-received works, the really successful works, are often by people whose names have long been forgotten.

The history of the critic's distrust of art is hardly felicitous, but it is certainly instructive if one wants to arrive at an understanding of the tacit conservatism of most critics. Consider Plato's Ion, for instance, which dramatizes Socrates's surprising hostility toward poets. Why did he so distrust the poetic impulse? Was he not a poet himself? Or was it precisely the poet in himself he feared? Nietzsche has spoken contemptuously of the "Greek superficiality" that sought to supplant an older tragic vision, substituting the bloodless play of logic for the full expression of the emotions, and nowhere is this curious and aggressive hostility more forcefully expressed than in certain of Plato's dialogues. It seems difficult for us to believe, judging Plato by our contemporary standards, as if he were a contemporary, that he really believed the poetic impulse was divine, for instance, and only divine, and that the poet himself had nothing to do with shaping his art. Yet Socrates speaks clearly: ". . . God takes the mind out of the poets, and uses them as his servants, and so also those who chant oracles, and divine seers; because he wishes us to know that not those we hear, who have no mind in them, are those who say such precious things, but God himself is the speaker, and through them he shows his meaning to us.... These beautiful poems are not human, not made by man, but divine and made by God; and the poets are nothing but the gods' interpreters, possessed each by whatever god it may be." Nothing but! The murderous sophism, the fallacious logic, that denies individuality to the poet precisely because he is a poet, and not (for instance) a blacksmith who follows his predecessors in his trade. One could write a lengthy study of the victimization of both the Poet and Woman, presumed by their judges to embody an impersonal and even supernatural value that nevertheless makes them unfit for most worldly activities, including that of judging. To be nothing but possessed by the divine is close to being nothing, in human terms, at all. And the divine may shade horribly into the demonic if the presiding judges decide to revise their judgments.

For despite Socrates's talk of "beauty" and "divinity" we know that the ideal state—the legendary Republic—will not tolerate the presence of poets. Which is to say, in terms of that society, the presence of freethinking individuals, finally ungovernable by external coercion. Of course they must be exiled, under threat of death. Of course they will be killed. From a certain perspective it appears that the sacred rite in which the poet participates is nothing less than the rite of an ineffable freedom of the imagination—in itself paradigmatic of the highest of human experiences.

The ideal criticism, then, aspires to the art of "disinterested" conversation ("disinterested" in Matthew Arnold's sense of the word), a conversation between equals, systematic, unhurried, "profane," reflective. It must take the artist's freedom seriously—it must resist its own conservative and reductive instincts. If only criticism speaks, and all the arts are silent, it is necessary that it speak with both sympathy and rigor; it cannot take its reflective responsibilities lightly.