Since these different ideological principles can coexist simultaneously (and for
my part, I can, in a certain sense, accept both simultaneously), we have to
conclude that the ideological choice is not the essence of criticism nor ‘truth'
its ultimate test. Criticism is something other than making correct statements
•
a Leo Spitzer was one of the most distinguished practitioners of the stylistic criticism that developed out of Romance philology, especially in pre-Nazi Germany. His work is comparable with that of Erich Auerbach, see above, pp. 315-32). The Italian philosopher, historian, and aesthetician Benedetto Croce is especially associated with an extreme version of the romantic-expressionist theory of art.
b Gustave Lanson (1857-1934) was a French academic literary historian whose Histoire dc la litterature fran^aise (1894) became a standard textbook.
Barthes Criticism as language
in the light of ‘true" principles. It follows *h it the major sin in criticism is not to have an ideology but to keep quiet about it. There is a name for this kind of guilty silence; it is self-deception or bad faith. How can anyone believe that a given work is an object independent of the psyche and personal history of the critic studying it, with regards to which he enjoys a sort of extraterritorial status? It would be a very remarkable thing if the profound relationship that most critics postulate between the author they are dealing with and his works were non-existent in the case of their own works and their own situation in time. It is inconceivable that the creative laws governing the writer should not also be valid for the critic. All criticism must include (although it may do so in the most indirect and discreet way) an implicit comment on itself; all criticism is criticism both of the work under consideration and of the critic; to quote Claudel’s pun, it is knowledge (connaissance) of the other and co-birth (co-naissance) of oneself to the world. Or, to express the same thing in still another way, criticism is not in any sense a table of results or a body of judgments; it is essentially an activity, that is to say a series of intellectual acts inextricably involved with the historical and subjective (the two terms are synonymous) existence of the person who carries them out and has to assume responsibility for them. It is pointless to ask whether or not an activity is ‘true’; the imperatives governing it are quite different.
Whatever the complexities of literary theory, a novelist or a poet is supposed to speak about objects and phenomena which, whether imaginary or not, are external and anterior to language. The world exists and the writer uses language; such is the definition of literature. The object of criticism is very different; it deals not with ‘the world’, but with the linguistic formulations made by others; it is a comment on a comment, a secondary language or metalanguage (as the logicians would say), applied to a primary language (or language-as-object). It follows that critical activity must take two kinds of relationships into account: the relationship between the critical language and the language of the author under consideration and the relationship between the latter (language-as-object) and the world. Criticism is defined by the interaction of these two languages and so bears a close resemblance to another intellectual activity, logic, which is also entirely founded on the distinction between language-as-object and meta-language.
Consequently, if criticism is only a meta-language, its task is not to discover forms of ‘truth’ but forms of ‘validity’. In itself, a language cannot be true or false; it is either valid or non-valid. It is valid when it consists of a coherent system of signs. The rules governing the language of literature are not concerned with the correspondence between that language and reality (whatever the claims made by schools of realism), but only with its being in line with the system of signs that the author has decided on (of course, in this connection great stress must be laid on the term system). It is not the business of criticism to decide whether Proust told ‘the truth’—whether, for instance, Baron de Charlus was really Montesquieu or Fran^oise, Celeste or even, more generally, whether the society Proust describes is an adequate representation of the historical conditions in which the aristocracy was finally eliminated at the end of
Barthes Criticism as language
the nineteenth century—its function is purely to evolve its own language and to make it as coherent and logical, that is as systematic, as possible, so that it can render an account of, or better still ‘integrate' (in the mathematical sense) the greatest possible quantity of Proust's language just as a logical equation tests the validity of a piece of reasoning, without taking sides about the ‘truth' of the arguments used. We might say that the task of criticism (and this is the only guarantee of its universality) is purely formal; it does not consist in ‘discovering' in the work or the author under consideration something ‘hidden' or ‘profound' or ‘secret’ which has so far escaped notice (through what miracle? Are we more perceptive than our predecessors?) but only in fitting together — as a skilled cabinet maker, by a process of ‘intelligent' fumbling, interlocks two parts of a complicated piece of furniture—the language of the day (Existentialism, Marxism, or psycho-analysis) and the language of the author, that is, the formal system of logical rules that he evolved in the conditions of his time. The ‘proof’ of a given form of criticism is not ‘alethiological’ in nature (i.e. is not concerned with the truth), since critical writing, like logical writing, can never be other than tautology; in the last resort, it consists in the delayed statement (but the delay, through being fully accepted, is itself significant) that ‘Racine is Racine', ‘Proust is Proust'. If there is such a thing as a critical proof, it lies not in the ability to discover the work under consideration but, on the contrary, to cover it as completely as possible with one’s own language.
In this respect too, then, criticism is an essentially formal activity, not in the aesthetic, but in the logical sense of the term. It might be said that the only means by which criticism can avoid the self-deception or bad faith referred to earlier is to set itself the moral aim not of deciphering the meaning of the work under consideration, but of reconstituting the rules and compulsions which governed the elaboration of that sense; provided always it is also agreed that a work of literature is a very special semantic system, the aim of which is to put ‘meaning' into the world, but not ‘a meaning’. A work of literature, at least of the kind that is normally considered by the critics (and this itself may be a possible definition of ‘good’ literature), is neither ever quite meaningless (mysterious or ‘inspired’) nor ever quite clear; it is, so to speak, suspended meaning; it offers itself to the reader as a declared system of significance, but as a signified object it eludes his grasp. This kind of dis-appointment or deception (de-capio: un-take) inherent in the meaning explains how it is that a work of literature has such power to ask questions of the world (by undermining the definite meanings that seem to be the apanage of beliefs, ideologies, and common sense) without, however, supplying any answers (no great work is ‘dogmatic’): it also explains how a work can go on being reinterpreted indefinitely, since there is no reason why critics should ever stop discussing Racine or Shakespeare (except through an act of abandonment which would itself be a kind of language). Literature, since it consists at one and the same time of the insistent offering of a meaning and the persistent elusiveness of that meaning, is definitely no more than a language, that is, a system of signs; its being lies not in the message but in the system. This being so, the critic is not called upon to reconstitute the message of the work, but only its system, just as the business of
Barthes Criticism as language
the linguist is not to decipher the meaning of a sentence but to determine the formal structure which permits the transmission of its meaning.
It is precisely through the admission, on the part of criticism, that it is only a language (or, more accurately, a meta-language) that it can, paradoxically yet genuinely, be objective and subjective, historical and existential, totalitarian and liberal. The language that a critic chooses to speak is not a gift from heaven; it is one of the range of languages offered by his situation in time and, objectively, it is the latest stage of a certain historical development of knowledge, ideas, and intellectual passions; it is a necessity. On the other hand, each critic chooses this necessary language, in accordance with a certain existential pattern, as the means of exercising an intellectual function which is his, and his alone, putting into the operation his ‘deepest self, that is, his preferences, pleasures, resistances, and obsessions. In this way the critical work contains within itself a dialogue between two historical situations and two subjectivities, those of the author and those of the critic. But this dialogue shows a complete egotistical bias towards the present; criticism is neither a ‘tribute' to the truth of the past nor to the truth of ‘the other'; it is the ordering of that which is intelligible in our own time.
Susan Sontag (b. 1934) was bom in Arizona, but is especially associated with the New York intellectual and artistic ‘scene’. She published a novel called The Benefactor in 1964, and in the same year became something of a celebrity when her essay ‘Notes on Camp' was published in Partisan Review and, by a familiar process, picked up and exploited by the mass media. ‘Camp' as defined by Miss Sontag was not so much a kind of art as a kind of artistic consumption, which converted conventionally ‘bad’ art (like Batman) into a source of lefined pleasure by ignoring its intentions and relishing its style; but it had affiliations with pop art, happenings, underground movies, and other manifestations of the avant-garde. The 1960s saw a remarkable burgeoning of the avant-garde in America, and Miss Sontag was one of its most subtle and influential apologists, announcing the death of traditional elitist literary culture with all the skill and authority of someone well educated in that culture. ‘Against Interpretation' is in fact less novel than it seems at first sight: the links with the aesthetics of Symbolism are clear. First published in the Evergreen Review in 1964, it was the title essay of her first collection of essays, published in America in 1697. Since then Miss Sontag has published a second collection of essays, Styles of Radical Will (New York, 1969) and a novel, Death Kit (1968).
CROSS references : 20. Paul Valery
33. Leslie Fiedler
34. Alain Robbe-Grillet
48. Roland Barthes
50. Frank Kermode
Against interpretation
Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny— very tiny, content.
Willem de Kooning, a in an interview
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde, in a letter
a American abstract expressionist painter.
#
652
Sontag Against interpretation
The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual (cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.). The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.
It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.
Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an ‘imitation of an imitation’. For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle’s arguments in defence of art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all art is an elaborate trornpe Voeil, and therefore a lie. ButJie does dispute Plato’s idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy, Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.
In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative. But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a ‘realism’ can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory.
The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such—above and beyond given works of art—becomes problematic, in need of defence. And it is the defence of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call ‘form’ is separated off from something we have learned to call ‘content’, and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.
Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favour of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (‘What X is saying is ...’, ‘What X is trying to say is ...’, ‘What X said is ...’ etc., etc.)
Sontag Against interpretation
None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defence. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice.
T is is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
Though the actual developments in many arts may seem to be leading us awayJrom_the_.idea that a work of art is primarily its content, the idea still exerts an extraordinary hegemony. I want to suggest that this is because the idea is now perpetuated in the guise of a certain way of encountering works of art thoroughly ingrained among most people who take any of the arts seriously. What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to intjirpxa them that sustains the fancy that there_is such a thing as the content of a work of art
Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’. By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain ‘rules' of interpretation.
Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the
. „ Z> and so forth ) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is
virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don't you see that X
1S y ~° r ' really means ~ A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?
What situation could prompt this curious project for transforming a text? History gives us the materials for an answer. Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the ‘realistic' view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment. Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness—that of t e seem iness of religious symbols had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to ‘modern' demands. Thus, the Stoics, to accord with their view that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer's epics. What Homer really designated by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the hteral historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and
Sontag Against interpretation
the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul's emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance. Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasings or .rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be ^ onlv makin g.it-intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian ‘spiritual’ interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there.
Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex. For the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety towards the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The ol d s t yle of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it ex eavatesT ^ ^strovsTJit digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is_the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx
and \freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics^, aggre ssive and v< impious theories of interpretation. AU observable phenomena are bracketed, in. Freud’s phrase, as manifest content. Th[s_manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning—the latent content —beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual fives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art)—all are treated as occasions for interpretation. Accord- ^ v ing to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actua lly, they« a have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it. ^
Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a
gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation.
■ — - • ’ - 1 • - • 1 -• r 1. In A
must itself be evaluated, with a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, ' , of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is/ reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stiffing.
yV
IV
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stiffing. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, jnterpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. a The art or science of interpretation, especially of scripture.
Sontag Against interpretation
Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings!. It TsTo tur n the world into this world. (This world'! As if there were any other.)
The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.
V
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.
This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself—albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony—the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an over-co-operative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.
The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy andTts ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psycho-analytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka's fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thraldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being
judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God Another oeuvre
that has attracted interpreters like leeches is that of Samuel Beckett. Beckett's delicate dramas of the withdrawn consciousness—pared down to essentials, cut off, often represented as physically immobilized—are read as a statement about man's alienation from meaning or from God, or as an allegory of psychopathology.
Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Rilke, Lawrence, Gide ... one could go on citing author after author; the list is endless of those around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold. But it should be noted that interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality. Thus, in the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that, in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams’s forceful
Sontag Against interpretation
psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being" a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.
VI
It doesn’t matter whether artists intend, or don’t intend, for their work to be interpreted. Perhaps Tennessee Williams thinks Streetcar is about what Kazan thinks it to be about. It may be that Cocteau in The Blood of a Poet and in Orpheus wanted the elaborate readings which have been given these films, in terms of Freudian symbolism and social critique. But the merit of these works certainly lies elsewhere than in their ‘meanings’. Indeed, it is precisely to the extent that Williams’s plays and Cocteau’s films do suggest these portentous meanings that they are defective, false, contrived, lacking in conviction.
From interviews, it appears that Resnais and Robbe-Grillet consciously designed Last Year at M arienbad to accommodate a multiplicity of equally plausible interpretations. But the temptation to interpret Marienbad should be resisted. What matters in Marienbad is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems of cinematic form.
Again, Ingmar Bergman may have meant the tank rumbling down the empty night street in The Silence as a phallic symbol. But if he did, it was a foolish thought. (‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale,’ said Lawrence.) a Taken as a brute object, as an immediate sensory equivalent for the mysterious abrupt armoured happenings going on inside the hotel, that sequence with the tank is the most striking moment in the film. Those who reach for a Freudian interpretation of the tank are only expressing their lack of response to what is there
on the screen.
It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something
else - --
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes^art into an article for use, for arrangement , into a mental scheme of ca tegories.
VII
Interpretation does not, of course, always prevail. In fact, a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation. To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become (‘merely’) decorative. Or it may become non-art.
The flight from interpretation seems particularly a feature of modern painting. Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation. Pop Art works by the
a Lawrence actually said: ‘Never trust the artist. See p. 123 above.
Sontag Against interpretation
opposite means to the same result; using a content so blatant, so ‘what it is’, it, too, ends by being uninterpretable.
A good deal of modern poetry as well, starting from the great experiments of French poetry (including the movement that is misleadingly called Symbolism) to put silence into poems and to reinstate the magic of the word, has escaped from the rough grip of interpretation. The most recent revolution in contemporary taste in poetry—the revolution that has deposed Eliot and elevated Pound—represents a turning away from content in poetry in the old sense, an impatience with what made modern poetry prey to the zeal of interpreters.
I am speaking mainly of the s ituat i on in America, of course. Interpretation runs rampant here in those arts with a feeble and negligible avant-garde: fiction and the drama. Most American novelists and playwrights are really either journalists or gentlemen sociologists and psychologists. They are writing the literary equivalent of programme music. And so rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnant has been the sense of what might be done with form in fiction and drama that even when the content isn't simply information, news, it is still peculiarly visible, handier, more exposed. To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry and painting and music, don’t reflect any interesting concern with changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation.
But programmatic avant-gardism—which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content—is not the only defence against the infestation of art by interpretations. At least, I hope not. For this would be to commit art to being perpetually on the run. (It also perpetuates the very distinction between form and content which is, ultimately, an illusion.) Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be ... just what it is. Is this possible now? It does happen in films, I believe. This is why cinema is the most alive, the most excit-ing, the most important of all art forms right now. Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it, and still being good. For example, a few of the films of Bergman—though crammed with lame messages about the modern spirit, thereby inviting interpretations—still triumph over the pretentious intentions of their director. In Winter Light and The Silence, the beauty and visual sophistication of the images subvert before our eyes the callow pseudo-intellectuality of the story and some of the dialogue. (The most remarkable instance of this sort of discrepancy is the work of D. W. Griffith.) In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. Many old Hollywood films, like those of Cukor, Walsh, Hawks, and countless other directors, have this liberating anti-symbolic quality, no less than the best work of the new European directors, like Truffaut s Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim, Godard’s Breathless and Vivre Sa Vie, Antonioni’s L’Avventura, and Olmi’s The Fiances .
The fact that films have not been overrun by interpreters is in part due simply to the newness of cinema as an art. It also owes to the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood
-'*5* ■ t'XJ- **»^*-* *.-c.
Sontag Against interpretation
to be part of mass, as opposed to high, c liure, and were left alone by most people with minds. Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyse. For the cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms—the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film.
VIII
What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today? For I am not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question^is how. What would criticism look like ^ that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?
What is needed, first, is more atte ntion, to form in art. If ^excessive stress on /t onUn t ^provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a jvocabul axy a ^fs<Tiptiye, rather than prescripti ve, vocabul ary— for forms . 1 T he b est criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form. On film, drama, and painting respectively, I can think of Erwin Panofsky's essay, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures, Northrop Frye's essay, ‘A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres', Pierre Francastel’s essay, The Destruction of a Plastic Space'. Roland Barthes's book On Racine and his two essays on Robbe-Grillet are examples of formal analysis applied to the work of a single author. (The best essays in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, like ‘T he Sca r of Odysseus',« are also of this type.) An example of formal analysis applied simultaneously to genre and author is Walter Benjamin's essay, ‘The Story Teller: reflections on the works of Nicolai Leskov’.
Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. This seems even harder to do than formal anal ysis. Some of Manny Farber's film criticism, Dorothy Van Ghent's essay, ‘The Dickens World: a view from Todgers’', Randall Jarrell’s essay on Walt Whitman are among the rare examples of what I mean. These are essays whidLieveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking^ about in it.
IX
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism— today. Transparence means e xperien cing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. This is the greatness of, for example, the films of Bresson and Ozu and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.
Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life. a See above, pp. 315-31-
Sontag Against interpretation
Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not_need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought^ or (worse yet) Art into Culture.
Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available, to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odours and the sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours_is a. culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modem life its material plentitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our
capabilities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to h ear more i Jo~7ggrmore.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our taskJs to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art— and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show ( howlt is whattijs^ e.y pn it *Sy-j ather than to shatfTw int it meatts.
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
X
Notes
i. One of the difficulties is that our idea of form is spatial (the Greek metaphors for orm are all derived from notions of space). This is why we have a more ready vocabulary of forms for the spatial than for the temporal arts. The exception among the temporal arts, of course, is the drama; perhaps this is because the drama is a narrative (i.e. temporal) form that extends itself visually and pictorially, upon a stage.... What we don’t have yet is a poetics of the novel any clear notion of the forms of narration. Perhaps film criticism wi e the occasion of a breakthrough here, since films are primarily a visual form, yet they are also a subdivision of literature.
Frank Kermode (b. 1919) is one of the most versatile of modern literary critics. His publications cover a wide range of literature, from Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (1971) to Romantic Image (1957) and Wallace St evens (i960). The Sense of An Ending (1966), described as ‘an attempt to relate the theory of literary fictions to a more general theory of fiction, using the fictions of apocalypse as a model’, took him even farther afield, into theology, medieval history, sociology, philosophy, and even physics. A university teacher who has held chairs at the Universities of Manchester, Bristol, and London (where he is now Lord Northcliffe Professor of English Literature), Frank Kermode is also a prolific reviewer, broadcaster, and literary journalist. He is a brilliant exponent of the occasional literary essay, and his work in this genre has been collected in Puzzles and Epiphanies (1962) and Continuities (1968). A paperback volume Modern Essays (1971) combines essays taken from both these collections with some others.
‘Objects, Jokes and Art’ is a good example of Kermode’s ability to assimilate, connect, and communicate in a crisp, epigrammatic style, information and ideas from a host of different specialisms, literary and non-literary, adding original insights of his own. It is the second of three related essays on the idea of the Modern in the arts. In the first of these, ‘Discrimination of Modernisms’, Kermode proposed a distinction between ‘paleo-modernism’
(i.e. the art of Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso, Eliot, etc., experimental but still continuous with tradition) and ‘neo-modernism’—the anti-art of the contemporary avant-garde which, inspired by Dadaism and Surrealism, attempts a total break with tradition. This second phase is the subject of ‘Objects, Jokes and Art’, which first appeared in Encounter (1966) and is reprinted here from Continuities.
cross references: 33. Leslie Fiedler
34. Alain Robbe-Grillet
35. Georg Lukacs
43. Raymond Williams
49. Susan Sontag
661
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Objects, jokes, and art
Do we have a ‘rage for order’? It has long been thought so, and the arts have long been thought ways of appeasing it. But there is a difference between older and an order; and what looked like the first can become simply th second: the conventional literary epic, or pastoral poetry, or the heroic coupk * 01 history-painting, or sonata form. In the older modernism, order grew mysterious. Following the organicist view of the Romantics, and the sophisticated gloss put on it by the Symbolists, poets treated it as the property of works purged of personality and emotion, new shapes out there and independent, perceptible by an elite which had transcended bourgeois literacy and could operate a logic of imagination divinely void of intellect. Thus the highly original forms of Mallarme and, later, idiot, have only a tenuous relation to moie vulgar notions of form; and in the novel, for instance, the kind of extreme deviation from prevailing norms which had formerly occurred only now and again became a regular feature. The great experimental novels of early modern-i sm Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Musil a , for instance—are all characterized by a kind of formal desperation.
Yet such forms continue to assume that there was an inescapable relationship between art and order. Admittedly, when the forms of the past grew ‘rigid and a bit absurd’ you undertook a new research and produced modern forms. They might indeed be extremely researched, as Wallace Stevens suggests when he says we can t have the old ‘romantic tenements’ and that what will now suffice may be much less palpable: merely, perhaps
a woman dancing, a woman Combing. The poem of the act of the mind—
but the act of the mind is still a form-creating act, and the form it creates provides satisfactions of the rage for order that cannot be had in life not so organized, so that art is different from life at least in this respect. And this view of the matter is still in many ways standard. Its various implications— ‘autonomy’, anti-didacticism, everything that attracts, both for the arts and the criticism that attends them, the epithet ‘formalist’—are, whether we like it or not, still in the minds of most of us when we consider a work of art. The first thing we think about is that this is a poem or a painting, and if it were not we should find another way of speaking than the one we choose. ‘Art is not life and cannot be/A midwife to society ’, as Mr Auden pedagogically explained. It may be somewhat illiberal, even untruthful, and reactionary by its very nature, as Mr Trilling thinks; he is supported in his opinion by the theorist of the
a See note, p. 477 above.
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formal nouveau roman , 1 and also, as we ^ ill see, by the Apollinaire 0 of the New York renaissance, Harold Rosenberg.
The fact that we have inherited the set of aesthetic assumptions I have very roughly sketched above makes it all the more difficult for most of us to understand the new men, who claim to be destroying the barrier between life and art, asserting their indifference to the question Ts this a picture?’ and professing contempt for ideas of order, especially when they can be associated with the art of the past. Nevertheless we shall certainly understand the older modernism better if we come to terms with the newer.
There seems to be much agreement that the new rejection of order and the past is not quite the same thing as older rejections of one’s elders and their assumptions. It is also agreed that this neo-modernist anti-traditionalism and anti-formalism, though anticipated by Apollinaire, begins with Dada^. Whether for the reason that its programme was literally impossible, or because their nihilism lacked ruthlessness, it is undoubtedly true, as Harold Rosenberg has observed, that Dada had many of the characteristics of a new art movement, and that its devotees treated it as such, so in some measure defeating its theoretical anti-art programme. Raoul Haussmann only recently attacked the ‘Neo-Dadaists’ because what they were doing was ignorantly imitative, but also it wasn’t ‘art’. If what we want is to understand anti-art I suppose our best plan is to follow the signs back to Duchamp, whose importance in this context is that he expressly and intelligently sought ways of ‘no longer thinking the thing in question is a picture’.
The point is simply this: whereas such a poem as The Waste Land draws upon a tradition which imposes the necessity of form, though it may have none that can be apprehended without a disciplined act of faith, a new modernism prefers and professes to do without the tradition and the illusion. At this point there begin to proliferate those manifold theoretical difficulties associated with neo-modernist art. They are usually discussed in terms of the visual arts and music, probably because they are palpably even greater in the case of literature. Duchamp could pick something up and sign it, as he did with his ‘readymades’ 0 , and this raises problems, but at least it does not move from ‘the plane of the feasible ’. 2 In poetry one can of course use chunks of economic history and the collage of allusion, but usually for some formal irony, or to get a special effect by juxtaposition; simply to sign a passage ready-made by somebody else is not to change it but to plagiarize it. It would not matter if the borrowed passage were in most ways as commonplace as a mass-produced artefact; it would only be a more obvious case of plagiarism. A legal argument about a
« Guillaume Apollinaire (1890-1918), poet and publicist of the avant-garde in Paris in the first two decades of this century.
b Dadaism was a nihilistic artistic movement, international in character, which originated in Zurich in 1916. It was dedicated to defying all traditional notions of form, meaning and taste in the arts. The sound of the word ‘Dada' was intended to suggest these attitudes. ‘Happenings' and random poetry were among the innovations sponsored by the Dadaists.
c The ready-mades of the artist Marcel Duchamp were manufactured objects, such as a hat-rack or a ceramic urinal, which he converted into ‘works of art’ by selecting, signing, and exhibiting them.
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Duchamp ready-made might be interesting, but one would not expect a plaus-i le defence in a case on literary ready-mades. The closest poetry can get is to cultivate impersonality and objectivity—Williams's wheel-barrow and Robbe-Grillet's out-there coffee-pot* The things made are not wheel-barrows and coffee-pots; but similar theoretical assumptions are involved.
Duchamp used to speak of ‘Dada blankness'—a way of making or naming things which has no relation to humanity or nature, no ‘responsibility'; ‘alien objects of the outer world,' as Lawrence D. Steefel puts it, ‘are reduced to instruments of the artist's transcendence to them .' 3 Blankness and indifference, like the impersonality' of Eliot, become, from one angle, a kind of egoism, indeed dehumanisation has always been, from this angle, the apotheosis of the cultc du moi [cult of myself]. Dada, at its most apocalyptic, had it both ways, and proclaimed that after the present phase of quasi-Oriental ‘indifference' there was to follow an era of purged personality, ‘the cleanliness of the individual' (according to [Tristan] Tzara). The extreme and, on the face of it, paradoxical individualism of, say, Eliot, Lewis, and Pound, is the parallel case.
There is, in short, a family resemblance between the modernisms. ‘Indifference and the abrogation of ‘responsibility' are the wilder cousins of the more iterary impersonality and ‘objectivity’. The palaeo-modernist 6 conspiracy which made a cult of occult forms is not unrelated to the extremist denial that there are any. These are the self-reconciling opposites of modernism.
Duchamp, like some of the older poets, is a man whose intelligence has been edicated to anti-intellectualist ends. The paradoxical pursuit of randomness in the arts—a consequence of doctrinaire anti-formalism—is now carried on with every resource of ingenuity by very intelligent men. To early modernists the subjection of personality and the attack on false orders were one and the same process; the logicians of neo-modernism have not only accepted the position but developed it into an attack on order, perhaps not successfully, but with energy. Viewed in this light, the new theory bristles with paradoxes as, for instance, in [Robert] Rauschenbergs remark: ‘I consider myself successful only when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense.’
The theoretical situation is in detail puzzling, but it must be admitted that in its practical and personal manifestations it is often pleasing, and indeed funny. For this reason Calvin Tomkins's book, which is not only a set of ‘profiles' but an intelligent presentation of ideas, is as amusing as it is informative . 4 His four subjects are Duchamp, Cage, Tinguely, and Rauschenberg. They are all, as he says, very different—Duchamp more detached, Tinguely more destructive, Cage more programmatic, and Rauschenberg more anti-art than the others—but they have many interests in common. For instance, all of them say that art is much less interesting than life , and not generica-lly different from it. All seek impersonality (though strong personalities are vividly present in their work) and therefore experiment with chance. All accept that art is characteristically impermanent, being made up of things with transcendence. And all rejoice to work
a See above, pp. 469-70. b Sec introductory note.
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on the borders of farce. They make random and unpredictable things in a world consisting of random and unpredictable things, an activity that is anyway absurd; the purposeless is pursued with fanatic purpose, and this is farcical in itself. One difference between a Tinguely machine and a Heath Robinson is that Tinguely takes it past the drawing-board stage, but another is that Robinson aimed to amuse, whereas Tinguely, though he doesn’t mind amusing, has no affective purpose at all; and there is a somewhat similar distinction to be drawn between a Hoffnung concert and a Cage recital/*
These propositions and attitudes are characteristic of neo-modernism, and the literary man should learn what he can from them. The view that art is not distinct from life, to which (in Cage’s words) it is ‘inferior in complexity and unpredictability’, is of course ‘anti-formalist’. In the past we have simply been wrong in supposing that order is a differentia of art; hence the new doctrine, propounded by Cage and given an elaborate philosophical defence in Morse Peckham’s recent book, Man's Rage for Chaos, that ‘a work of art is what the perceiver observes in what has been culturally established as a perceiver’s space.
This can be anything ’In Cage’s 4' 33" the pianist sits before a closed piano
for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, and the only sound is what floats in randomly from outside—bird song, buses—or what the spectators make themselves. So long as there is a concert-situation there is a concert, although the content of the concert is random and minimal. This is a logical step forward from Satie’s musical collage, and is perhaps more like Kurt Schwitters simply planting bits of things before the observer in a ‘perceiver’s space’. It pushes the protest against ‘retinal’ art, and its musical equivalent, to the point where it is a protest against the seriousness of palaeo-modernist protest, and where the difference between art and joke is as obscure as that between art and non-art. A point to remember, though, is that the development can be seen as following from palaeo-modernist premises without any violent revolutionary stage.
I myself believe that there is a difference between art and joke, while admitting that it has sometimes been a difficult one to establish; and I would want to call 4' 3" and Tinguely’s famous self-destroying machine (‘Homage to New York’) jokes, if only because however satisfying they may be, they do not seem sufficient in respect of the needs which what is called art has usually sufficed. But this is to use very inadequate criteria; and having supposed vaguely that neo-modernism was heavily dependent on the extension of modernist theory, I was glad to find a philosopher, Arthur Danto, 5 saying this very thing in a sharper way. Danto says the difficulties begin when one forsakes the old mimetic assumptions and says, for example, that a painting of a table is as real as a table. If this seems hard to take when the painting is Post-Impressionist, it becomes easier when the objects painted are strictly inimitable—the numeral 3, for example. Any copy of that simply is the numeral 3. What kind of mistake would you be making if you tried to sleep in Rauschenberg’s famous Bed, which is a bed? You cannot mistake reality for reality. Danto suggests that we use is
a Heath Robinson was a Punch artist who specialized in drawing fanciful machines. Gerald Hoffnung was another Punch cartoonist who delighted in organizing musical events of a humorous nature.
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in two distinct senses. We say a spot of white paint ‘is’ Icarus, and also that t is is a bed . These two usages are presumably both present when we say that
ea is a bed; but if it has paint on it and is in a ‘perceiver’s space’ then the Icarus is is dominant.
Actually for Danto the physical location is less important than a sort of intellectual or theoretical space—call it the atmosphere of intellectual assumptions breathed alike by the artist and the game spectator. To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of art: an artworld.’ But it all comes to the same thing. If Brillo made their boxes out of plywood they would still not be Warhols, and if Andy Warhol made his out of cardboard they would not be Brillo boxes. Provided the ‘space’ and the aesthetic convention were right he could simply sign a real Brillo box ready-made. We know what it is by where it is, and by our being induced to make the necessary theoretical dispositions (or not, as the case may be). As Jasper Johns puts it, ‘What makes an object into art is its introduction into the art context.’ Examination question: what is a signed Warhol Brillo box, found among a stack of Brillo boxes in a supermarket? Assuming, of course, that the customer knows the name, and what Mr Warhol does for a living. Another related question is, ‘What makes an object into a joke?’
The theory so far is, then, that art is whatever you provide when the place in which you provide it is associated with the idea, and contains people who are prepared to accept this and perhaps other assumptions. Mr Peckham would argue that our failure to have noticed this earlier resulted from persistent brainwashing of the kind that stuck us with the notion that we have a ‘rage for order’—that we seek the consolations of form amid natural chaos inhospitable to umans. This in his view is entirely false. We have, on the contrary, a natural rage for chaos, and that is why, truth prevailing, the concept of form is dead. With it, of course, dies the notion that the artist has to do with establishing and controlling a formal order in his work (what Keats in ignorance called information’) and, also, the notion that this order has a high degree of permanence. Of course these notions have at one time or another been challenged before, though perhaps not in their totality. Artists have always known that there was an element of luck in good work (‘grace’, if you like) and that they rarely knew what they meant till they’d seen what they said; and there are milder traces of a doctrine of impermanence in palaeo-modernism, even in poetry, where Stevens articulates it clearly. But once again neo-modernism presses the point, and gives it practical application.
The most notable instance of this seems to be the neo-modernist interest in chance, a long way on from what Pope called ‘a grace beyond the reach of art’. Alt ough indeterminacy has affected literature, it has had more importance so ar in music and painting, and these are the areas of theoretical inquiry. There is obviously room for teleological differences between artists who employ random methods. Duchamp argued that ‘your chance is not the same as my chance, and when he wrote random music insisted on regarding it as personal to himself and also funny. His dislike of order (perhaps as betraying him)
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emerges in his publishing the notes on La Mariee misc a nu par ses celibataires, mctne [The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even'] in random order, so anticipating the cut-up-fold-in [William] Burroughs techniques as he had anticipated the methods of aleatory music. Duchamp, incidentally, for all that he anticipated so many innovations, was always aware of a tradition, which he saw himself at the end of; he is a very sophisticated figure, and his critical superiority over some of his imitators is demonstrated by his immediate dismissal of the idea that there could be any relation at all between indeterminacy in the arts and indeterminacy in physics—this covert bid for prestige promotes nothing but confusion, of which (pace Peckham) there is quite enough already.
The layman who wants to know what Cage is up to has to confront the whole problem of chance. Without being at all solemn, Cage employs his considerable intellectual resources on constantly changing experiments of which the object is to ensure that his art shall be 'purposeless play'. Not for the first time in musical history, harmony (ideologically associated with ideas of order) had to go; it is replaced by ‘duration’, as percussion replaces melody. Music now deals in every kind of natural sound (the extreme naturalism of Cage is attributed by Tomkins to the influence of [Ananda K.] Coomaraswamy) but every other kind of sound too, except what might be made by conventional instruments. The piano has bolts between the strings to make it simply percussive. As to indeterminacy, Cage achieves it by many methods, including the use of the Chinese I Ching, coin-tossing, and yarrow-sticks. In one piece every note required 18 tosses of the coin. 6 He has now found speedier methods, using, like Rossini before him, the imperfections in paper as a suggestion for notes.
On this view of the matter there can be no question of judging a particular work. There are no catastrophes/ he says. But audiences can of course be affected in different ways, and Cage has experienced wildly various reactions from his auditors. Certainly he sometimes makes it seem that aleatory art is, in a manner as yet unexplored, close to humour, as in the view of some tragedy is close to farce. Tomkins quotes Virgil Thomson’s account of a concert given in New York’s Town Hall in 1958, which was
a jolly good row and a good show. What with the same man playing two tubas at once, a trombone player using only his instrument’s mouthpiece, a violinist sawing away across his knees, and the soloist David Tudor crawling around on the floor and thumping the piano from below, for all the world like a 1905 motorist, the Town Hall spectacle, as you can imagine, was one 01 cartoon comedy ... it is doubtful whether any orchestra ever before had so much fun or gave such joyful hilarity to its listeners.
This is very sympathetic, but Cage believes that ‘everything is music’, and if, out of all the possibilities, he often chooses what makes for hilarity, this is evidence that such an assumption tends to confuse art and joke. There is a current of apocalyptism in all neo-modernism, and it is no bad thing that the Last Days should occasionally be good for a giggle, as they are in Beckett and in Tinguely. ‘When seeing a Tinguely mechanism for the first time,’ says Mr Tomkins, ‘most people burst out laughing.’ Peter Selz, the Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, was delighted with the famous
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Homage, which destroyed itself successfully, though not quite in the manner planned by the artist, before a distinguished audience. 'Art hasn't been fun for a long time, he said. Duchamp congratulated Tinguely on being funny, and said that humour was a thing of great dignity.
It is, no doubt, part of the picture that all this would have been less funny had it gone according to plan. The humour is a matter of chance, of 'aleation’. Aleation in the arts, I suggested, pushes into absurdity a theory based on observation, that chance or grace plays a role in composition. In so far as palaeo-modernism pretended to be classical, it played this down; but between it and neo-modernism stands surrealism, and other manifestations of irrationalism. On the new theory, which has a wild logic, you leave everything to chance, and the result will make its mark either as very natural or as providing the material from which the spectators in the right place will make whatever they need for their own satisfaction. Anything random has some kind of an order, for example a bag of marbles emptied on to a table. Or, as Monroe Beardsley puts it in that interesting section of his Aesthetics from which I have already borrowed, they are in an order but not in order'. The difference between aleatory art and the art which appealed to ‘the logic of imagination' (if for a moment we imagine them both as doctrinally pure) is simply this: the first in theory seeks only to pioduce an order (and in this it cannot fail) whereas the palaeo-modernists had not reduced grace to chance, and sought to make order.
So far as I can see this would be disastrous to aleatory art were it absolutely true, because the reason why we speak of ‘an order’ as against ‘order’ is that we diop the article as a sign of our wish to dignify what interests us more. We have discovered, in the process of getting by amid what Cage thinks of as the wonderful complexities of life, that order is more useful than an order: for example, the telephone book would be harder to use if the names were printed haphazardly. In a way, the alphabetical arrangement is perfectly arbitrary, but it happens to be something that the people who compose it and the people who use it agree upon. It might, of course, be said to give a very imperfect impression of the chaos and absurdity of metropolitan life, or life at large, and the consolation of knowing you can find your way about in it is in some ways on some very strict views perhaps somewhat fraudulent. It is not quite 'order', anyway, though it is not merely an order. And this in-between order is what most of us mean when we talk about 'order' in aesthetic contexts. One can avoid a divorce between art and life without going to the extremes recommended by Cage. When Cage grew interested in mushrooms he quickly discovered that some knowledge of their botanical classifications was a necessary modification to the practice of eating them at random . 7 Also, that when somebody arranged a happening in his honour, which required that he should be physically assaulted, he had to say that whereas his view was still that 'anything goes', this was so only on condition that one could manage to be free without being foolish. The implied criteria can only derive from the sort of education which distinguishes between an order and order. Order turns out to be more comfortable and useful.
If onr orientation towards it is not biological, then it is cultural or educational; and the reason why an order posing as order sometimes seems funny is that it
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is always presupposing orderly criteria by which its randomness can be measured; so, having reduced tradition to absurdity, one makes allusions to tradition by which the absurdity can be enjoyed as such. Thus silent music and Void or all-black painting presuppose music which employs conventional sounds and paintings with colour and shapes. They are piquant allusions to what fundamentally interests us more than they do, and they could not exist without it. 8
Aleatory art is accordingly, for all its novelty, an extension of past art, indeed the hypertrophy of one aspect of that art. Virgil Thomson, who has been very sympathetic to Cage, allows that his random music is not really a matter of pure chance but a game of which the rules are established by Cage himself. No matter how much he tries to eliminate his own choices, it is always a Cage-game, and it involves calculation and personal choice. Admirers of William Burroughs' Nova Express admit that the randomness of the composition pays off only when the text looks as if it had been composed straightforwardly, with calculated inspiration. The argument is too obvious to labour. Even Duchamp didn't pick up anything and sign it. What seems clear is that a gross overdevelopment of the aleatory element in art tends to make it appioximate to humour; thus the seventeenth-century conceit, over-extended, became a joke, and Jan Kott can turn King Lear into an absurd farce. The transformation would be impossible without the theory and practice of predecessors. Its nihilism is meaningless without an assumption of the plenitude of the past. Thus neo-modernists tend to make the mistake they often scold other people for, which is to attribute too much importance to the art of the period between the Renaissance and Modernism. By constantly alluding to this as a norm they despise, they are stealthy classicists, as the palaeo-modernists, who constantly alluded to Byzantine and archaic art, were stealthy romantics.
The point that in theory there is nothing very new about the New, that it is in this respect little more than a reverie concerning the more important and self-conscious theoretical developments of an earlier modernism, was made by Harold Rosenberg himself, when he observed that an Oldenburg plastic pie is not so much art, and not so much a pie, as ‘a demonstration model in an unspoken lecture on the history of illusionism', adding that this kind of thing represents the union of many different tendencies in the art of the past half-century. As to why modernism should tend in this way towards pure faice, he cites Marx's observation that farce is the final form of action in a situation which has become untenable. Like Beckett's hero we can't and must go on, so that going on is bound to look absurd, a very old-fashioned thing to be doing in a situation you have shown to be absolutely new. On rather similar grounds he attacks the fashionable ‘aesthetics of impermanence', saying that the time-philosophy involved is evidently wrong, and that ‘art cannot transform the
conditions of its existence’. _ ... f
Such comment amounts to a radical criticism of the theoretical bases ot
extreme neo-modernism, and it prepares one for the impact of one of Rosenberg’s best essays, so far uncollected, which appeared five years ago in Partisan Review under the title ‘Literary Form and Social Hallucination’. When the subject is
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literary, this critic seems to see with great clarity truths which become obscure when the topic is painting. He argues that the form of a literary work militates against its ability to ‘tell the truth'; that part of its function is in fact to ‘tease us out of thought' (an argument employed, though with differences, by Iris Murdoch). From the political point of view this makes form suspect, anti-liberal; tor by inducing us to descend into ‘outlived areas of the psyche’ it takes our eye off the actual demands and complexities of the world, arms us against the tact It could perhaps be said that here the criticism is of Form when it ought to be of forms; that the constant researches of the arts into form have as a principal motive the fear that obsolescent fictions of form will cause them to be untruthful, or at any rate less truthful than they might be. Thus it is in the popular arts, where the question of fidelity to the world as the clerisy under-stands it does not arise, that conventions have the longest life. While the highbrows are pondering the nouveau roman, the great mass of fiction, which satisfies readers who would never dream of asking that it do more than a token amount of truth-telling, continues to use the old stereotypes . 9 It would probably not occur to the readers of such fiction that truth required the abolition of form, and if it did they might think the point too obvious to mention. Fiction, they ow ' * s different from fact because it is made up. Yet it is precisely this point that, as Rosenberg sees, we need to be reminded of. Theoretical contempt for form in the arts is a fraud.
Formlessness is simply another look and a temporary one at that. In time organization begins to show through the most chaotic surface ... the subversion of literary form cannot be established except by literary means, that is, through an effort essentially formal.
This must be true, despite all the recent anti-formalist researches, aleatory, schismatic, and destructive. In neo-, as in palaeo-modernism, research into form is t e true means of discovery, even when form is denied existence. So it ecomes a real question whether it helps to introduce indeterminacy into the researc , even if it is agreed that this is possible to any significant degree (and it is not). With Danto's remarks in mind we can at least ask ourselves whether dependence on an erroneous or distorted theory cannot be in some measure incapacitating. We need not expect a simple answer, since a great deal that is c one in the arts is founded on theoretical positions which are later found to be leaky. We should need to reflect that there is a certain prestige to be had in minorities by professing to concur with what appear to be revolutionary advances in thinking about the arts, so that to find an audience claiming proficiency in a ‘new’ language is at present by no means difficult.
This is not a problem one can discuss now. What one can do is to say of the theoretical bases of neo-modernism, in so far as they show themselves in relation to orm, chance, humour, that they are not ‘revolutionary'. They are marginal evelopments of older modernism. It can be added that disparagement and ni ilist rejection of the past are founded partly on ignorance and partly on a development of the earlier modernist doctrine which spoke of retrieving rather than of abolishing tradition, just as the abolition of form is a programme
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founded on the palaeo-modernist programme to give form a new researched look. A certain extremism is characteristic of both phases. Early modernism tended towards fascism, later modernism towards anarchism. What Cyril Connolly 0 calls the evolution of sensibility is a matter of changing theory, Romantic egotism becoming ‘impersonality’ and this later turning into ‘indifference’. In the same way chance replaces the quasi-fortuitous collocation of images characteristic of earlier modernism. The anti-humanism—if Mr Connolly will allow the expression—the anti-humanism of early modernism (anti-intellectualist, authoritarian, eugenicist) gives way to the anti-humanism (hipsterish, free-sexed, anti-intellectualist) of later modernism. As to the past, history continues to be the means by which we recognize what is new as well as what is not. What subverts form is ‘an effort essentially formal’; and the sense of standing at an end of time, which is so often invoked as an explanation of difference, is in fact evidence of similarity. The earlier humanism went in a good deal for the capitalization of what Mr Rosenburg calls ‘outlived areas of the psyche’, and so does the new modernism. For a ‘movement’ united by a detestation of logic, Modernism has generated an immense amount of theory; this was admittedly much more coherently expressed in the earlier phase. Later it has been scrambled by the babble of smaller voices, and in some aspects has been heavily overdeveloped, as I have tried to show. In both periods there was a natural tendency (inescapable from the Modern at any period and easier to justify half a century back) to exaggerate the differences between what one was doing and what had been done by the old guard, and this has helped to conceal the truth that there has been only one Modernist Revolution, and that it happened a long time ago. So far as I can see there has been little radical change in modernist thinking since then. More muddle, certainly, and almost certainly more jokes, but no revolution, and much less talent.
That is why, on the one hand, one cannot accept Cyril Connolly s assurance that it is virtually all over, and on the other Leslie Fiedler’s claim that we have a new art which reflects a social revolution so radical that he can call it a ‘mutation’ and its proponents ‘The New Mutants’ ( Partisan Review, Autumn 1965). Henceforth, he thinks, literature and criticism will forget their traditional observance of the past, and observe the future instead. Pop fiction demonstrates ‘a growing sense of the irrelevance of the past’ and Pop writers (‘post-Modern-ists’) are catching on. The new subject will be ‘the end of man’ and the transformation of the human life into something else (curious echoes of Mr Connolly, who also thinks of modern writers as post-Modernist in sensibility, and antihumanist). Mr Fiedler explains that he means by humanism the cult of reason, from Socrates to Freud. This is what is being annihilated, and the Berkeley students were protesting against universities as the transmitters and continu-ators of the unwanted rationalist tradition. The protest systematically anti-s everything: a Teach-in is an anti-class, banners inscribed fuck are antilanguage, and so on. Actually a teach-in is only an especially interesting class, because the teachers are volunteers and just as engaged with the subject as you
a This and other references to Cyril Connolly arc to the latter’s The Modern-Movement: 100 key books from England, France and America (1880-1950), (1965).
Kermode Objects, jokes, and art
are. There is the oddity that this class really works as a ‘dialogue’ and goes on
and on. The banners are no more anti-language than collage is anti-painting;
and the absolutely blank banners which succeeded the ‘dirty’ ones were certainly
a very good joke in the new manner, like Rauschenberg erasing a De Kooning, or a Klein Void. 6
Fiedler s observations on the new life-style of his ‘mutants’ are more interest-mg. He ' stresses a post-Humanist contempt for ideology; a post-Humanist sexuality which has discounted masculinity and developed characteristic patterns of omosexua ity, usurpation of female attitudes, polymorphous perversity; and a new range of post-Humanist stimulants (LSD, airplane glue, etc.). This amounts, he argues, to ‘a radical metamorphosis of the Western male’, a real revolt, unlike our ritual contentions with father. These young people have
made the breakthrough into new psychic possibilities, and recognize in Burroughs the laureate of their conquest. 10
Whether this is nonsense, and whether it is dangerous, is not in my brief. I will only say that the whole argument about ‘mutation’ is supererogatory; the phenomena should be explained more economically. If the prole has replaced he shepherd, the savage, and the child as pastoral hero, it isn’t surprising that ose who seek to imitate him should imitate his indifference to ideology and history and sexual orthodoxies. This is not the first recorded instance of liber-tmage among the well-heeled. Drugs and four-letter words are not new, even among poets, even among the young. The display may seem unusually ostenta-!° US ' . ^ i s worth remembering that Fiedler’s prime example derives from
t at highly abnormal institution, the University of California, the unbelievably we en owe organ of the educational aspirations of a state which is not only veiy rich but is famous for the unique predominance of the young in its population. In so far as the protest was ‘pure’ protest, protesting against nothing whatever, it was surely luxurious attitudinizing on a familiar undergraduate model but hypertrophied by sociological causes well within the purview of old-sty e analysis. A thirst for the unique and unprecedented can lead to the exaggeration of triviality or to claims which the record refutes. Thus Fiedler finds in Ken Kesey s (very good) novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest evidence that lor the mutants the schizophrenic has replaced the sage as culture hero, whereas y narrating this madhouse fiction from the point of view of an inmate of limited and varying perceptiveness Kesey is using a now time-honoured tech-nique. bo with his sociological observations. Even the male behaviour to be observed after midnight on 32nd and 43rd Streets hardly needs to be explained in terms of mutation’. To treat such symptoms as unique, as signs that the Last Days are at hand, is to fall headlong into a very naive—and historically very well-known—apocalyptism.
It is the constant presence of more or less subtle varieties of apocalyptism that makes possible the repetitive claims for uniqueness and privilege in modernist theorising about the arts. So far as I can see these claims are unjustified The price to be paid for old-style talk about ‘evolving sensibility’ is new-style talk about ‘mutation’. It is only rarely that one can say there is nothing to worry about, but in this limited respect there appears not to be. Mr
Kermode Objects, jokes, and art
Fiedler professes alarm at the prospect of v :ing a stranded humanist, wandering among unreadable books in a totally new world. But when sensibility has evolved that far there will be no language and no concept of form, so no books. Its possessors will be idiots. However, it will take more than jokes, dice, random shuffling, and smoking pot to achieve this, and in fact very few people seem to be trying. Neo-modernists have examined, in many different ways (many more than I have talked about), various implications in traditional modernism. As a consequence we have, not unusually, some good things, many trivial things, many jokes, much nonsense. Among other things they enable us to see more clearly that certain aspects of earlier modernism really were so revolutionary that we ought not to expect—even with everything so speeded up—to have the pains and pleasures of another comparable movement quite so soon. And by exaggerating and drawing, the neo-modernist does help us to understand rather better what the Modern now is, and has been during this century.
On the whole one has to say that the older modernists understood all this better. Eliot in his last book, tired and unadventurous as it is, said it once again, and said it right: 11
A new kind of writing appears, to be greeted at first with disdain and derision; we hear that the tradition has been flouted, and that chaos has come. After a time it appears that the new way of writing is not destructive but recreative. It is not that we have repudiated the past, as the obstinate enemies —and also the stupidest supporters—of any new movement like to believe; but that we have enlarged our conception of the past; and that in the light of what is new we see the past in a new pattern.
This does not allow for the possibility that chaos and destruction could be introduced into the programme, except by its ‘stupidest supporters'; but it does seem to make sense in terms of a quest for ‘what will suffice'. In the end what Simone Weil called ‘decreation' (easy to confuse with destruction) is the true modernist process in respect of form and the past. Or if it is not we really shall destroy ourselves at some farcical apocalypse.
Notes
i Robbe-Grillet’s collection of essays, Pour t in nouveau roman, published in 1963, has now been translated, together with the short pieces called Instances of the same year, by Barbara Wright (Snapshots & Towards a New Novel, Calder).
Robbe-Grillet comes out strongly for the view that art is gratuitous, and from the revolutionary point of view ‘useless, if not frankly reactionary; the fact that it will be on the good side at the barricades must not be allowed to interfere with our freedom to pursue ‘art for art’s sake'. This book, obviously one of the really important contributions to the theory of the novel, deserves much more discussion than it has yet had in England or the U.S., and the translation is welcome. Incidentally, there is some justice in his claim that it is other people who have theories of the novel; his is an anti-theory, so to speak,
and for all his‘formalism’that is modern enough. .
1 should also mention here Anthony Cronin’s A Question of Modernity (Seeker & Warburg) which is somewhat commonplace in the title essay, and often simply bad-tempered, but as to the matter of art and life there are some fine things, including a brilliant long essay on Ulysses and one about the novel which is full of original ideas.
2 The phrase is Beckett’s. His ‘Three Dialogues with George Duthuit’ (on Tal Coat,
Kermode Objects, jokes, and art
Masson, and Bram von Velde) have just been published, together with the early Proust essay, by John Calder. They are excellent examples of Beckett’s philosophico-farcical manner in the discussion of the arts.
3. The Art of Marcel Duchamp’, Art Journal, xxii, Winter 1962-3.
4. The Bride and the Bachelors (London, Weidenfeld; New York, Viking).
5. The artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, Ixi, 1964, 571.
6. The process is described at length in Cage’s Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961) pp. 60-1. This beautiful and very pleasant book contains material of great interest to anybody concerned with avant-gardism.
7. See Silence, pp. 261-2 for a gastronomic misadventure.
8. The ought concealed in Cage s is is just that this should not be so, because such an interest is a vestige of the false fictions of order that should die with old technologies Thus: ‘let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories in expressions of human sentiments (Silence, p. 10). And the interest of an all-white painting lies in its shadows, the random change of light upon it.
9 - It is obviously in order to meet this situation head-on that Robbe-Grillet makes his fantastic claim to have at last found a novel-form acceptable to the man-in-the-street jo It may be worth pointing out that Burroughs himself is far from thinking that drugs will bring this about. His recent Paris Review interviewer (Fall ’65) asked: ‘The visions of drugs and the visions of art don’t mix?' and he said, ‘Never.... They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates tranquillizers '
11. To Criticise the Critics (London, Faber; New York, Farrar, Straus).
(Note: The names of writers represented in the Reader, are printed in caps and small caps, and the page numbers of the contributions in italics. Subject entries are printed in BLOCK CAPITALS. The titles of poems, plays, novels, etc., will be found under the name of the appropriate author.)
Abrams, M. H., 1-26, 333 Acquinas, St Thomas, 447 Adams, J. Donald, 358 Addison, Joseph, 213, 350, 615 Adler, Alfred, 290 & n.
Aeschylus, 242-3; Agamemnon, 75 Alain-Fournier, 374 Aldington, Richard, 58, 67 Alexander, Franz, 286 Alterton, Margaret, 25m Anderson, Quentin, 535 Anderson, Sherwood, 398 Amis, Kingsley, 588 A.ngus, Ian, 359
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 603 8c n.
Apuleius, 122 Arbuthnot, John, 523 Ariosto, 36, 42n.
ARCHETYPE, 189-201, 426-33, 458-9 Aristophanes, 509
Aristotle, 1-2, 7-8, 9, 11, 17-18, 21, 22, 23m, 24m, 75 & n., 112-13, 230-32, 236, 248, 288-9, 338, 350, 358n., 402, 403, 415, 418, 447, 456, 476, 483, 499, 503. 535, 592, 604, 622, 653
Arnheim, Rudolf, 345
Arnold, Matthew, 78, 79m, 81, 105, 215, 275, 277, 338, 354, 554, 624, 628, 634 Athanasius, 122
Auden, W. H., 28, 58, 253, 305, 360, 436, 462 & n., 488, 634, 636-45, 662 Auerbach, Erich, 315-32, 442, 507, 527, 530, 551, 557 8 . 561-2, 580, 659 Augustine, St, 122, 315, 516; Confessions,
197
Austen. Jane, 86. 140-43- 262-74, 275, 447-9, 628, 633, 641; Emma, 137, 265-6, 268-Q. 272-273; Mansfield Park. 141-2. 270-2: North-anger Abbey, 264, 269-72: Persuasion, 142, 265, 273-4; Pride and Prejudice, 266-8, 541-2
Babbitt, Irving, 230m, 231, 249, 601 8c n. Bachelard, Gaston, 647
Bacon, Francis, 285, 618 Baird, J., 175
Balzac, Flonore de, 53, 247, 315, 471, 483;
Pere Goriot, 467 Barclay, Florence L., 496 Bardi, Giovanni, 29 & n.
Barfield, Owen, 201 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 560 Barres, Maurice, 633
Barthes, Roland, 546, 634m, 646-51, 659
Bartlett, Phyllis, 345
Bartram, William, 110, 196, 340
Barzun, Jacques, 283
Bateson, F. W., 343
Batteux, Charles, 9-10. 14, 18, 24m
Baudelaire, Charles, 19, 278, 342, 430m, 647
Baudouin, Charles, 198-9, 20m.
Beale, Anthony, 122
Beardsley, Monroe C., 22m, 70, 106, 147, 228, 275, 333-58, 497- 646, 667 Beattie, James, 12-13, 22 Beckett, Samuel, 556, 667, 669; Molloy, 480, 484-5, 674
Beljame, Alexander, 226m Belinsky, Vissarian Grigoryevich, 622 8c n. Bellay, Joachim de, 29m Belloc, Hilaire, 196, 20m.
Behn, Aphra, 226m Benda, Julian, 384^.
Benedict, Ruth, 430 Benjamin, Walter, 659 Benn, Gottfried. 480-in., 484-6 Bennett, Arnold, 85-8, 585 Benoit, Pierre, 177 8c n., 179 Bentham. Jeremy, 348 Bentlev, Eric, 630 Beowulf, 445-6 Berden, J. M., 443 Bergson, Henri, 92, 104 Bergman, Ingmar. 657-8 Berlin, Isaiah, 558-9 Berrv, Francis, 530 Bewley, Marius, 630
Bible, the, 133-4, 433, 633; Ecclesiastes, 364-
675
Bible, the— cont.
3 () 5 ; Ezekiel, 437; Genesis, 435; Jonah, 200; Old Testament, 315-32, 654-5; Revelation,
436
Bion, 433, 437 Bishop, Morris, 355 Blackmore, Richard, 553, 561 Blackmur, R. P., 43-4, 625 Blake, William 30, 205, 277, 296, 386, 610, 627; bongs of Innocence & Experience, 34 179 . 183, 421 Blakeney, E. H., 2411.
Blok, Alexander, 250 Boas, George, 562 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 315 Bodkin, Maud, 28, 158, 175, 189-201, 401, 422, 546, 556m Boehme, Jacob, 179 Bonwit, Marianne, 577 Booth. Wayne, 136, 262, 315, 37 ,, 386, 466, 527. 564-79. 565, 580, 593 Boswell, James, 1 Bottrall, Ronald, 631 Bowdler, Thomas, 510 Bowen, Elizabeth, 400, 589 Bowles, Paul, 459-60 Bowring, John, 26m
Bradley, A. C., 119, 158, 290m, 427, 561
Brame, John, 588
Bray, Rene, 24m
Bridges, Roberc, 65, 305, 626
Bronte, Charlotte, 143
Bronte, Emily, 396, 399; Wuthering Heights, 388-90, 584
Brooks, Cleanth, 105-6, 146-7, 227-8; 291-
304. 333 . 353 4 , 4 2 4 n -, 498, 505, 554-5, 562m Brown, E. K., 137
Brown, Norman O., 35, 275, 509-26, 593,
611
Brown, Tom, 218, 225m Browne, Sir Thomas, 446 Brownell, W. C., 230m Browning Robert, 64m, 82, 151, 156; Serenade at the Villa, 309 Buber, Martin, 504 Buffon, Georges Luis, 599 & n.
Bunyan, John, 213, 633 Burke, Fdmund, 277, 351, 603 Burke, Kenneth, 358m, 406, 414, 417, 419 , 557
Burgcrsdijck, Franco, 603-5 Burkhardt, Jacob, 187 Burnet, Thomas, 215 Burns, Robert, 30 8c n., 114, 641 Burroughs, William, 667, 674m; Nova Express, 669
Burton, Richard, 446 Bury, Richard de, 619 Butler, Samuel, 80 & n.
Butor, Michel, 466-7
Byion, Lord, 25m, 95, 114. 151, ,57^, 158, 205, 209, 337m., 358m; Don Juan, 343
Cage, John, 664-5, 667, 668-9, 674m Caldwell, Erskine, 398 Campion, Edmund, 639
Camus, Albert, 466, 502; The Fall, 504-5 Canetti, Elias, 105 Canfield, Dorothy, 351 Cannon, W. A., 352 Cantwell, Sobert, 251
cX; E Th R m 23 S n 20 "' * 3> ” 7 8 ’ 565n -
Carroll, Lewis; Alice books, 641 Cary, Joyce, 588 Casey, John, 70, 305 Cassirer, Ernst, 429 Catullus, 63
Caudwell, Christopher, 202-10, 241, 474 Cavalcanti, Guido, 65 & n.
Cecil, Lord David, 629 Cervantes, Miguel de, 113, 617 Chandler, Raymond, 460 Chapman, George, 208
A 5 ?' 137 ‘ 43 ' 4l8 ' 47°
Chardin, Teilhard de, 497
Chase, Richard, 121, 534
Chase, Stuart, 296, 369
Chaucer. Geoffrey. 6 4 n., 234-6, 246, 357, 449 ;
House of Fame, 498, 500 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 138, 566-7, 571-2, 570: Gusev, 90 Chenier, Andre, 250 Chesterton, G. K., 292
Chretien (or Chrestien) de Troyes, 357, 447 Chomsky, Noam, 545 447
Cicero n-i 2 , 24m, 25m, 530, 615 Cioffi, Frank, 334 CLASSICISM, 79-80, 93-104, 231 Claudel, Paul, 462, 649 Clemen, Wolfgang, 529 CIutton-Brook, Arthur, 81 & n„ 114 Cobbett, William, 633 Cocteau, Jean, 405, 416, 657 Coffin, Charles M., 345 CoJeridge Samuel Taylor, 22-3, 83, 95, 100, 103, 246, 277 293-5, 301, 338 & n.. 349, 351, 417, 4 2 3 , 560, 622, 624-5, 634; Ancient
Kn? ner ’ l89 " 2 l 5 >, L, 2g '\ 342 ; Destiny of ] 93 ; Kubla Khan, 109, 151, 339-
CoJet, Louise, 570 Collins, William, 306, 311 Collier, Jeremy, 212, 220, 225m Co onna. Francisco, 179, 184 Colum, Padriac. 67
Congreve, William. 212, 218-21; Love for love, 215, 223; The Mourning Bride, 212-Way of the World, 215-16 2,9, in-z, 225m
Connolly, Cyril, 671 8r n.
Conrad, Joseph, 86, 89. 145, 391; Heart of Darkness, 397-8, 628: Lord Jim, 542; Nost-, ronw 633 ; Outcast of the Islands, 542
ct ret Sharer, 628; Victorv, 400 t ook, Captain James, 193-4 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 335-6, 345, 667 Copermcuj, 200, 541, 443, 447 Corbiere, Tristan, 67 Corbin, Alice, 67 Corelli, Marie, 496 Corneille, Pierre, 402, 404
676
Cornford, F. M., 401-2 Coulanges, Fustel De, 404 Crabbe, George, 633 Craig, Hardin, 25n.
Crane, R. S., 22n., 23n., 25n., 147, 229-30, 232, 235, 291, 442, 509, 556n., 564, 592-609, 611
Croce, Benedetto, 111, 336 8c n., 3450., 557* 648 8c n.
Cronin, A. J., 461 Cronin, Anthony, 673n.
Crow, Charles R., 543n.
Cumberland, Richard, 560
DADAISM, 448, 663 8c n.
Dali, Salvador, 204 8c n.
Daniel, Arnaut, 64-5
Dante, 33, 60, 64 8c n., 68, 178-9. 183-4, 20m., 250, 315, 342, 410, 451. 633, 659; Divine Comedy, 181, 249, 402 8c n., 567; Inferno, 74 8c n., 75, 189, 195, 432; Paradiso, 437 Danto, Arthur, 665-6, 670 Danton, Georges, Jacques, 250 Darwin, Charles, 94* 290, 447* 45°, 514 Davey, John, 282 Davie, Donald, 530 Day, John, 342 Debussy, Claude, 64
Defoe, Daniel, 114, 140, 399-400, 527, 570;
Moll F landers, 137 8c n., 143, 388-9 De Kooning, Willem, 652, 671 Dell, W. S., 175 Denis, Maurice, 98 Dennis, John, 13, 24m Descartes, Rene, 9, 379, 448, 451, 606 Desmoulins, Camille, 249 Dickens, Charles, 53 8c n., 140, 142, 240, 3 59. 397, 564, 580, 588, 591, 635m, 641; Bleak House, 143-4, 542; David Copperfield, 138-141; Hard Times, 632 Dickinson, Emily, 351 Diderot, Denis; Rameau's Nephew, 276-7 Doblin, Alfred, 479 8c n.
Dobree, Bonamy, 217, 220-21 Donne, John, 291, 306, 344, 423. 449. 554. 626, 628, 641, 661; Anatomy of the World, 616; A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, 340-1; The Canonization, 296-304 Doolittle, Hilda (‘H.D.’), 58, 67 Dos Passos, John, 249, 398, 479 8c n. Dostoievsky, Fyodor, 124, 143, 278, 456, 622m, 641; Brothers Karamazov, 634;
Crime and Punishment, 129-30. 374-5. 456, <;86, 621• House of the Dead, 487; The Possessed, 633 Douglas, Lloyd, 461 Douglas, Norman, 139 Dovle, Conan, 177 Drake, Nathan, 560
Dryden, John, 12-13, 24m, 212-14. 223-4, 224m. 300, 302, 405, 624-6. 634; MacFleck-noe, 626-7; Marriage a la Mode, 220-21; Sir Martin Mar-all, 223; The Spanish Friar, 222-3
Ducasse, Curt, 338, 345m Duchamp, Marcel. 663 8c n., 664, 666-8
Dudek, Louis, 615 Duff, William, 24m Duhamel, Georges, 61 8c n., 62 Du Maurier, George; Trilby, 642 8c n. Durkheim, Emile, 546
Eastman, Arthur M., 158 Edel, Leon, 43 Eliade, Mircea, 614
Eliot, George, 564, 577-8n.; M iddlemarch, 584, 588, 628, 633
Eliot, T. S., 19-20, 22, 28, 57-8, 66, 68, 69-84, 85, 92, 146, 174* 189, 195* 211, 231, 253, 291, 295, 305, 333, 341-4. 354. 388, 422-3, 497-9, 502, 554, 580, 592, 622, 625, 632, 634, 636, 646, 661-2, 664, 673; A Cooking Egg. 449; Cocktail Party, 480-1; Confidential Clerk, 503; Four Quartets, 567; Hollow Men, 479; Prufrock, 344; Waste Land, 279, 342-3, 445, 663 Ellmann, Richard, 28 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 306, 553 EMOTION, 17-20, 30-1, 36, 74-6, 99, 111-14, 345-57, 392-4
Empson, William, 105, 106, 146-57, 291-2, 519, 522, 526m, 556, 563m, 625 Engels, Friedrich, 242-4, 247, 276, 583 EPIC, 11, 18-19, 315-32, 445 Etheredge, George, 223; The Comical Revenge, 212, 216-17; Man of Mode, 217-18, 222, 224m; She Would if She Could, 219, 225m Euclid, 9
Euripides, 248, 414-16
EVALUATION, 110-11, 306-14, 335*6, 383-4, 423-4, 554* 557-62, 623, 626-7, 649
Farrell, James T., 244, 396-7, 400 Faulkner, William, 292, 398-9, 455, 459. 461-462, 478, 484, 508, 656; Sound and the Fury, 480
Fausset, Hugh, I’Anson, 192 8c n.
Fenichel, Otto, 289, 523, 526m Ferenczi, S., 512, 523-4, 525-611.
Fergusson, Francis, 158, 401-20, 546, 556m Fiedler, Leslie, 121-2, 175, 422, 454-65, 489, 652, 661, 671-3
Fielding, Henry, 86, 143, 145, 527, 570, 575; Amelia, 568-9; Joseph Andrews, 537, 568; Jonathan Wild, 568, 575; Tom Jones, 351-352, 568
Fish, Stanley, 334 Fitts, Dudley, 42on.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 240, 565 Fitzgerald, Robert. 420m Flaubert, Gustave. 143, 3 1 5, 397, 514, 564-7. 570-1, 577m, 628, 633, 647; Bouvard and Pecuchet, 572; Madame Bovary, 222-3, 572, 579m; Salammbo, 576; Sentimental Education, 476, 570; Temptation of St Anthony, 576
Flint, F. S., 57, 59 Folliot, Denise, 253
Ford. Madox Ford, (Ford Madox Hueffer).
62, 65, 67, 391, 570 Forman, Maurice Buxton, 25m
677
Forster, E. M., 44, 85, 122, 136-45, 275, 386, 38711., 527, 566, 641-2; Passage to India, 586
Foxcroft, H. C., 214 Francastel, Pierre, 659 France, Anatole, 64, 351 Francis, E. K., 25n.
Fraser, G. S., 58
Frazer, Sir James, 174, 342-3, 401-2, 429 & n., 430, 434
Frechtman, Bernard, 370 Freilgrath, Ferdinand, 240 Freud, Sigmund, 35-42, 109, 174-5, 179-80, 184-5, i88n., 189, 262, 275-90, 404, 446-7, 461, 483, 509-n, 514-16, 518, 520-1, 525-60., 636, 655, 657, 671 Fries, Charles, 530
Frye, Northrop, 70, 175, 189, 421-41, 545-6, 55 i, 554 , 562m, 659
Galsworthy, John, 85-7, 121 Gardner, Charles, 114 Garnett, Edward, 393 Gautier, Theophile, 377 Genet, Jean, 370, 377, 647 Gerard, Alexander, 24m Ghiselin, Brewster, 345m Gibbon, Edward, 445 & n., 613 Gibbs, Jocelyn, 442 Gibbs, J. W. M., 25n.
Gide, Andre, 144, 471, 479, 641, 656; The Counterfeiters, 379 & n.
Gilbert, Allan H., 24m Gilgamesh, 449-50 Giradoux, Jean, 647 Givler, R. C., 358 Glasthorpe, Henry, 561 Godwin, William, 206 & n.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 29, 60, 83, 109, i88n., 198, 242-4, 280, 315, 317-18, 336, 456, 475. 560, 565, 633, 643; Faust, 175, 177-8, 181, 183-4, 187, 340 & n.; Werther,
^ 640; Welheim M eister, 278 Golding, William; Lord of the Flies, 586 Goldmann, Lucien, 647 Gongora, Don Luis de, 639 & n.
Gorky, Maxim, 243-6, 249, 486 Gosson, Stephen, 460 8c n.
Gourmont, Remy de, 67, 83 Grandsen, K. W., 137 Graves, Robert, 109, 146, 625, 641 Gray, Thomas; Elegy, 295 Greenacre, P., 512, 523, 525-60.
Greene, Graham, 586 Gregory, Lady, 27 Grimm, Wilhelm, 459, 461 Guillet, Lucie, 358m
Haggard, Rider, 177, 179, 184
Halifax, Marquess of (George Savile), 213-16
Hammett, Dashiell, 460
Hardinc, D. W., 35, 212, 262-74, 621
Harding, Rosamond E. M., 345m, 621
Hardy, Thomas, 86, 89, 122, 145, 236, 632
Harris, James, 10, 24m
Harrison, Jane Ellen, 401-2, 420m
Hart, Bernard, 59 Harvey, Gabriel, 639 Haussmann, Raoul, 663 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 122, 459; Scarlet Letter, 123 Hayward, John, 69 Hazlitt, William, 23, 554 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 276-7, 353, 476-7. 481, 503. 508, 553, 625 Heidegger, Martin, 372 8c n., 476-7, 481, 485-6
Heine, Heinrich, 242, 244 Hemingway, Ernest, 57, 248, 251, 398-9, 455, 459-6o
Herbert, George; The Sacrifice, 556 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 246 Hermas; The Shepherd of Hernias, 178 8c n., 181, 184
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Hewlett, Maurice, 65-6
Hevl, Bernard, 561
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Hildyard, M. C., 25m
Hobbes, Thomas, 16, 115, 519, 596
Hocking, Silas K., 496
Hoffman, F. T., 35
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 477 8c n.
Hogben, Lancelot, 361, 365 Hocgart, Richard, 454, 488-96, 578m, 580 Holderlin, Friedrich, 643 Homer, 24m, 25m, 72-3, 134, 195, 336, 437, 445. 449. 486, 621, 633, 654; Iliad, 318-19, 482; Odyssey, 315-32, 348-9 Hooker, E. N., 24m
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 502; Sybil’s Leaves, 626
FJorace, 11-13, 2411., 95. 99. 337. 438, 498, 553
Hough, Graham, 122
Housman, A. E., 337 & n., 350, 351
Howard, Richard, 466
Howard, W. G., 24m
Howe, Irving, 59m.
Howells, William Dean, 44 Hudson, William Henry, 86 & n.
Hueffer, Ford Madox (see Ford Madox Ford)
Hugo, Victor, 95-6
Hulme, T. E., 19, 25m, 57*9. 7°, 83, 92-104, 305, 592
Hume, David, 560, 567 Hunt, Leigh, 23
Hurd, Richard, 8-9, 14, 18, 23, 24m Hutchinson, A. S. M., 130 8c n.
Huxley, Aldous, 301, 351, 396, 510-13, 517, 526m; Brave New World, 585 Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 146-7, 189-90, 203, •305
Hynes, Samuel, 203
Jbsen. Henrik. 278, 580; The Wild Duck, 418 IMAGE, IMAGERY (see also METAPHOR). 59. 159-72, 190-201, 429, 432, 438-9
rxll TI ?^’ 17 ‘ l8, 37 ' 8, 93, 104, 301
IMAGISM, 58-60, 499
678
IMITATION, 5-11, 417-18, 553 IMPERSONALITY, 72-6, 107, 185-7, 565. 574-577. 637
Innis, Harold, 617
INTENTION, 55-6, 70, 108, 116-17, 123, 186-187, 284-5, 334-44. 393 Isidore, St., 444 Izzo, Carlo, 535
Jacobi, Joland, 175 Jakobson, Roman, 545, 646, 648 James, Henry, 64, 85, 136, 143m, 212, 240, 251. 305. 39i. 564-5. 576, 628, 633, 639; The Ambassadors, 43-56, 527-44; Golden Bowl, S36; Princess Casamassima, 539; Roderick Hudson, 541 Jammes, Francis, 67 8c n.
Jarrell, Randall, 577, 659 Jaspers, Karl, 504 Jebb, Sir Richard, 419 Jeffares, Norman A., 27 Jefferson, Thomas, 348 Jeffrey, 22-3, 26m Jenkins, Elizabeth, 268 Johnson, Samuel, 1, 14-16, 23, 25m, 123m, 305, 438 8 c n., 446, 450, 544m, 557, 595. 622, 624-5, 628, 634; Rasselas, 633 Johnston, J. K., 86 Jones, Alun Richard, 92 Jones, David; Anathemata, 445 Jones, Ernest, 284-6, 524, 561 Jonson, Ben, 12, 211, 306; Pan's Anniversary, 156
Josipovici, Gabriel, 647 Joyce, James, 57, 66-7, 85, 391, 399. 43on., 479n., 480, 484, 508, 610, 615, 622, 627, 633, 641, 656, 661-2, 673; A Portrait, 388, 394*5. 572, 587-8, 632; Dubliners, 632; Finnegans Wake, 398, 620, 643; Stephen Hero, 395; Ulysses, 89-90, 395-6, 397, 474-5, 477, 572, 587-8, 632
Jung, Carl Gustav, 35, 109, 122, 174-88, 189, 197. 199-200, 290m, 422, 429, 455, 556 Junger, Ernest, 481 Juvenal, 438
Kafka, Franz, 279, 374. 464, 477, 480, 485, 586, 633, 662; The Castle, 487, 656; The Trial, 487, 656 Karnes, Lord, 10, 23, 24m Kant, Immanuel, 3, 21, 375-6 Karpman, B., 512, 525m Kasnkin, I., 248 Kauffman, Stanley, 577m Kautsky, Minna, 242 Kazan, Elia, 656 Keast, W. R., 25m
Keats, John, 20, 95, 99, H3, 151. 207-9, 337m, 349-50, 352, 358m, 426, 565, 577n., 666; Eve of St Agnes, 208, 453^.; Grecian Urn, 208, 302; Hyperion, 210, 450; La Belle Dame Sans M erci, 205 & n., 207; Nightingale, 75, 207 Keble, John, 23, 25m Kenner, Hugh, 58 Ker, W. P., 24m, 83
Kf.rmode, Frank, 241, 253, 442, 454-5, 466, 474, 497, 652, 661-74 Kerr, Alfred, 482 Kesey, Ken, 672 Keynes, Maynard, 85 Kierkegaard, Soren, 481, 564 Kipling, Rudyard, 462, 642 Knight, G. Wilson, 158-173, 386, 401, 427, 572
Knights, L. C., 211-26, 262, 621, 630
Knox, George, 544m
Koeppen, Wolfgang, 480
Koestler, Arthur, 567
Korzybski, Count, 346
Kott, Jean, 669
Kraus, Karl, 637, 643
Krieger, Murray, 422
Krook, Dorothea, 534
La Fayette, Mme de., 471; La Princesse de Cl'eves, 467 & n.
Laforgue, Jules, 67 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 95 Lamb, Charles, 212, 282-3, 496 La Rochefoucauld, Francois, 222 La Rochelle. Drieu, 384 Laski, Harold, 361, 365 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 242 Lauter, Paul, 578m
Lawrence, D. H., 85, 111, 127-35, 139 & n., 174, 204, 351, 386, 392, 396, 399-400, 454-455, 462, 464, 511, 581-2, 625, 631, 633, 641, 656-7; Lady Chatterley, 573-4; Rainbow, 584, 629; Sons and Lovers, 393-4; Women in Love, 574, 628, 634 Lawrence, T. E., 202 Leach, Edmund, 546
Leavis, F. R., 70, 121, 211, 262, 291, 580, 610, 621-35
Leavis, Q. D., 211, 575, 635m
Lee, Irving, 346, 348
Leggett, H. W., 572, 578m
Legman, Gershon. 455
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 350, 612-13. 615
Lemon, Lee T., 200
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 243-5, 247, 250, 252 Leonardo, da Vinci, 283 Lesage, Rene, 53 & n.
Lessing, Gotthold, 9-10. 24m, 553, 622 & n. L£vt-Strauss, Claude, 175, 401, 422, 545-50, 621, 646
Lewis, C. S., 22m, 315, 334, 349, 356, 442-53, 551, 593, 629 Lewis, Sinclair, 386 Lewis, Wyndham, 57, 66-7, 664 Lichtheim, George, 473-4 Lindsay, W. M., 452m Linklater, Eric, 263 L’Isle-Adam, Villiers de, 33 & n.
Locke, John, 16, 214, 603, 618 Lodge, David, 528, 565 Lodge, Thomas, 310 Longinus, 336 & n., 350-2 Lovejoy, A. O., 559, 563m, 600, 6o8n. Lowell, James Russell, 191, 20m.
679
Lowes, John Livingston, 189, 191-2, 20m., 339-40
Lubbock, Percy, 44, 136, 143 Lukacs, Georg, 85, 203, 241, 473-87, 580, 621, 647, 661 Lucretius, 122
Lunacharsky, Anatoli Vasilyevich, 245 Lyly, John, 639n.
Lynch, K. M., 216-18, 224n.
Lytton, Bulwer, 626
Macauley, Thomas, 22, 151, 212, 215 McClure, S. S., 63 & n.
McCullers, Carson, 588 McKeon, Richard, 23m, 592 MacLeish, Archibald, 22, 499 McLuhan, Marshall, 497, 610-20, 621 MacNeice, Louis, 46m.
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 243 Mack, Maynard, 537 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 33 & n.
Magnus, Maurice, 139m Malherbe, Francois, 260 82 n.
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 118, 358m Mallarme, Stephane, 28, 253, 256, 647, 662 Malraux, Andre, 252, 562, 647 Mander, John and Necke, 474 Mandeville, Sir John, 596 Mann, Thomas, 279-80, 352, 486, 656; Bud-dcnbrooks, 484 82 n.; DoJitor F austus, 482, 484; Lotte in Weimar, 474-5; Magic Mountain, 584
Mannheim, Karl, 558 Mantuan, 437 Marie de France, 357 Marlowe, Christopher, 204 Marsh, Narcissus, 605, 607 Marvell, Andrew, 110, 342, 344, 432, 555, 627, 641
Marx, Karl (and MARXISM), 202, 240-52, 276, 348, 508, 580, 636, 655, 669 Maurras, Charles, 93 82 n.
Matthieson, F. O., 44, 342-3 Maugham, W. Somerset; Miss Thompson, 462 82 n.; Theatre, 574 Maupassant, Guy de, 194 Mauriac, Francois, 579m, 647 Mauron, Charles, 647
Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 243 82 n., 250
Mearns, Hughes, 345m
Melville, Herman; Moby Dick, 177, 459, 632
Mencken, H. L., 251
Meredith, George, 91, 151; Evan Harrington,
no
Mctalious, Grace, 561
METAPHOR (see also IMAGE, IMAGERY), 30, 153-5, 287, 296-301, 362 Metastasio (Pietro Trapassi), 62 82 n.
METRE (see RHYTHM)
Milch, Werner, 553
Mill, John Stuart, 18-20, 23, 25m, 278, 348, 547
Miller, Arthur; Death of a Salesman, 456, 463
Miller, Jonathan, 611
Millett, Fred B., 578
Milton, John, 70, 109, 147, 205, 207, 236, 340, 421, 423, 554, 603, 627, 633; Comus, 432, 436; Lycidas, 4^3-41, 561; Paradise Lost, 431, 560-1; The Passion, 439; Samson A gonistes, 639
Mitchell, Margaret, 403 82 n.
MODERNISM, 90, 397-400, 448-9, 474-87, 662-74 Moir^ J., 9
Moliere, Jean Baptiste, 485 Monod, Auguste, 543 Montaigne, 315, 641
Montherlant, Henry de; P asiphae, 484-5 Moore, Harry T., 122, 139 Moravia, Alberto; The Indifferent Ones, 478-9
More, Henry, 451 More, Paul Elmer, 2300., 249 Morley, Edith, 24m Morris, Charles, 10, 358m Morris, William, 156 Morrison, Claudia C., 35 Moschus, 433 Moxon, Joseph, 613 Muller, Herbert J., 3 52 Munro, Harold, 59, 68n.
Murdoch, Iris, 669 Murphy, Arthur, 25m Murray, Gilbert, 401-2, 415, 420m Murray, John Middleton, 78 82 n., 79-80, 353, 510-15, 517-18, 526-7n.
MUSIC. 60, 258. 397-8, 427. 503-4, 638, 664-9 Musil, Robert; The Man Without Qualities, 477 82 n., 479-80, 482-6, 662 Mvers, L. H., 632
MYTH, 41, 183-4. 200, 402-19, 426-7, 429-32, 440, 456, 547-50
Nabokov, Vladimir, 571, 578m Nash, Thomas, 30; Summer’s Last Will & Testament, 154-5 NATURALISM (see REALISM)
Nerval, Gerard de, 33 82 n., 278, 342 NEW CRITICISM, the, 22, 227, 292, 333, 386, 424 82 n., 497, 554-7, 624 Newman, John Henry, 623 Newton, Sir Isaac, 9, 514, 611 Nicolson, Harold, 151
Nietzsche, Friedrich W.. 96, 172m, 184, 187, 276, 402, 4>3-M. 419. 4^3. 510, 514, 526m, 653
North, Christopher, 25m Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 278 NOVEL (as a form or genre), 56, 86-91, 127-135. 138-45. 387-8, 467-72. 584
OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE, 354, 498 82 n.
Ogden, C. G., 105, 346, 350, 361
Ogilvie, John, 24m
Olson, Elder, 147, 592
O’Hara, John, 460
Onc, Walter J., 333, 597-508, 557, 611 Orwfll, George, 241, 359-69, 371; 1984, 586 Orwell, Sonia, 359
680
O’Shaughnessy, Arthur, 31 & n.
Ovid, 416
PAINTING (See Visual Arts)
Panofsky, Erwin, 659 Pascal, Blaise, 513, 612, 641, 647 Passeron, Jean Claude, 489 Passmore, John, 372m Pater, Walter, 113, 337, 624 Paul, St, 326 Paul, Sherman, 241 Paulham, F., 358m Pavese, Caesar, 479 8c n.
Peacock, Thomas, Love, 152 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 557 Peckham, Morse, 665-7 Peguy, Charles, 628 8c n., 630, 633 Perkins, Maxwell, 565 Perse, St John, 644 Petrarch, 64m, 298 Petronius, 315 Philo, 654
Plato, 1, 5, 6-7, 8, 22, 23m, 25m, 101, 231, 337, 81 n., 350, 431, 499. 595 n -, 604, 653 PLOT (and STORY), 50, 88, 387, 417-18, 428-429, 469 Plutarch, 73
Poe, Alexander, 13, 24m, 98-9, 151, 350. 438, 523, 553, 594, 606, 626, 645, 666; Dunciad, 429, 611, 613-20, 626-7; Essay on Man, 295; Unfortunate Lady, 152-3 Poe, Edgar Allan, 21, 122, 278, 459-6o; Fall of the House of Usher, 459 POETRY or VERSE (as distinguished from prose; see PROSE)
POINT OF VIEW (in fiction), 44, 52-4, 143-145, 387-95, 532 4 , 539 , 568-74 Ponge, Francis, 647 Porphyry, 604-5, 607 Porter, Katherine Ann, 399 Portnoy, lulius, 345 m Poulet, G., 647
Pound, Ezra, 28, 57-68, 69-70, 92, 146, 253, 356, 462, 508, 622, 625, 632, 664 Powys, Tohn Cowper, 632 Prall, D. W.. 2-3 Pritchard, lohn Paul, 228 PROSE (as distinguished from Poetrv or verse), 60, 102, 156, 237-8, 260-1, 307, 643-5 Proust, Marcel, 138, 143, 247, 251, 278-9, 31 5, 373, 464, 508, 587, 633, 647, 649-50, 656
Pushkin, A. S„ 243 8c n„ 245
Ouiller-Couch, Arthur, 352 Quintana, R., 510, 517-18, 526m
Rabelais, Francois, 315, 5 » 9 , 617 Racan, Seigneur de, 260 8c n.
Racine, 93. 95 - 35 C 402, 419, 644, 647, 650 Raleigh, Tohn Henry, 535 Ramus, Peter, 497
Ransom, Tohn Crowe, 22, 25m, 70, 106. 147, 227-39, 248m, 291-2, 306, 333. 355 . 424m, 551, 554m, 557, 592-3. 6oin., 625, 646 Rauschenberg, Robert, 664, 672
Read, Herbert, 92
REALISM (and NATURALISM), 87-8, 324-5, 397-8, 466-72, 478-9, 482, 486, 581-91 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 23 RHYTHM (and METRE), 32, 34, 58-9, 61, 63, 66, 255-6, 428-9, 642 Richard, J-P, 647
Richards, I. A., 2, 23m, 70, 105-20, 146-7, 211, 253, 291-2, 296, 305, 333, 338, 346 8c n., 347 , 350 , 352 4 , 358n., 421, 494m, 497-8, 527-8, 592, 625
Richardson, Samuel, 140, 144, 527; Pamela, 456
Richter, Jean Paul, 25m Riding, Laura, 146 Rilke, Rainer, 656
Rimbaud, Arthur, 28, 67, 253, 278, 430m Riviere, Jacques, 525
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 466-72, 564, 652, 657, 659, 661, 664, 673m, 674m Roberts, Michael, 92 Romains, Jules, 66-7
ROMANTICISM, 1, 5, 17-23, 79-8o, 93-104, 150-1, 202-10, 231, 276-7, 310-11, 336-8, Ronsard, Pierre de, 29m Rourke, Constance, 540 Rosenberg, Alfred, 485 8c n.
Rosenberg, Harold, 663, 669-71 Rosenheim, Edward. 6o8-9n.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel; The Woodspurge, 19m.
Rougemont, Denis de, 489 8c n., 492-3 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 94, 206, 277, 373,
484
Ruskin, John, 99-100, 104, 110, 114, i5on., 356
Ryle, Gilbert, 446 8c n.
Rymer, Thomas, 113-14, 634 8c n.
Sagan, Francois. 588
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 554, 622 8c n., 624-5, 648
Saintsbury, George, 336, 351, 634 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, 315 Salinger, J. D., 565, 588 Sand, George, 278 Santayana, George, 2, 350 Sappho, 64
Saroyan, William, 399-400 Sartre, Tean-Paul, 202, 203, 241, 360, 370-85, 466, 502, 505, 566, 636, 647 SATIRF, 266-7, 429. 509-25, 594-609 Saurraute. Nathalie, 466 Saussure. F. De, 545, 646, 64S Savage. D. S., 393 Saxo Grammaticus, 427 8c n.
Savers, Dorothv L.. 74m Srh'ller, Friedrich Von, 277, 315, 317-18. 431 8c n.
Schlegel. August Wilhelm, 553; Lucinde, 278 Srhlegel. Friedrich, 553 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 276, 278. 2S0 Schorer. Mark, 85, 136, 262, 371. 386-400, 527. 565. 570. 573 - 578n.
SCIENCE, 2-3, 61, 111-13, 229, 447, 501-2, 611
681
Sholochov, Mikhail, 583; Quiet Flows the Don, 482 8c n.
Scott, Sir Walter, 22, 141, 342, 447-8, 450;
Bride of Lammermoor, 138 Scrutiny, 211-12, 262, 628, 630 8c n.
Sedley, Sir Charles, 223, 22611.
Selincourt, Ernest de, 2511.
Seneca, 406, 446, 530 Sewell, Elizabeth, 577 Seymour, Beatrice Kean, 263 Seznec, J., 443, 452m Shadwell, Charles Lancelot, 65n.
Shaftsbury, Earl of, 596, 606 Shakespeare, William, 15-16, 23, 25m, 28 & n., 30, 33, 60-1, 209, 235, 243-4, 249. 296, 300, 306, 350, 351, 359, 423, 432, 441, 449, 458, 483. 559 . 570 1 , 578n„ 600, 624, 632, 639, 644, 650, 661; All's Well, 171-2; Anthony & Cleopatra, 159; Coriolanus, 286; Hamlet, 284-6, 290m, 352, 354, 427, 498m, 560-1, 572; Henry IV, 286; Lear, 284, 572, 616, 669; Macbeth, 149-50, 158-73, 355 7 , 628; Merchant of Venice, 572: Much Ado, 638; Othello, 75, 113, 572; Phoenix and the Turtle, 301-2; Romeo and Juliet, 301; Tempest, 125
Shaw, George Bernard, 62 & n., 202, 276, 427;
Devil's Disciple, 478 Shawcross, John, 2511.
Sheean, Vincent, 252
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 19-20, 23, 25m, 95, 106, 151, 204-10, 278, 311, 357, 423, 426, 434, 554, 641, 645 & n.
Sherburn, George, 593
Shipley, Joseph T., 345
Short, W. R., 531
Shumaker, Wayne, 562
Sidney, Sir Philip, 11-12, 12, 24m, 499
Silone, Ignazione, 567
Simon, Claude, 467
Simonides, 10
Sinclair, Upton, 247
Smith, Adam, 24m
Smith, Eliot, 20m.
Smith, G. Gregory, 24m Smith, N. C., 25P..
Smith, Nicol, 2240.
Snow, C. P., 629-30, 631, 634-5 & n.
Snyder, E. D., 351 Socrates, 5-6, 595, 602, 607, 671 Sontag, Susan, 455, 466, 647, 652-60, 661 Sophocles, 209, 248, 249; Oedipus Rex, 402-420 (see also 548-50); Philoctetes, 476 Spears, Monroe C., 636 Spengler, Oswald, 445 Spenser, Fdmund, 236, 342, 436-7, 639, 661 Spillane, Mickey, 458, 460, 576 Spingarn, J. E., 345m Spinoza, Baruch, 97 Spitteler, Carl, 179, 181, 183-4 Spitzer, Leo, 530, 648 8c n.
Spurgeon. Caroline, 158, 427 Stafford, Jean, 399 Stallman, R. D., 592 Starohinski, J., 648 Stauffer, Donald, 25m
Steefel, Lawrence D., 664 Stein, Gertrude, 57 Steinbeck, John, 398
Steiner, George, 212, 474, 546, 611, 621-35 Stendhal, (Henri Beyle), 278, 315, 483; Arm-ance, 374 8c n.; La Chartreuse de Parme, 380 & n.
Stephen, Leslie, 85 Sterne, Lawrence, 90-1 Stevens, Wallace, 306, 661-2, 666 Stevenson, C. L., 346-7 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 461 Stoll, E. E., 334-5, 427, 560 STORY (see Plot)
Strachey, J., 525 Strachey, Lytton, 85 Strindberg, August, 580 Sturrock, John, 467 Sue, Eugene, 242 8c n.
Suhl, Benjamin, 371 Swan, Annie S., 496
Swift, Jonathan, 359, 505-6, 509-26, 544m, 567, 617, 627; Battle of the Books, 613; Cassinus and Peter, 510, 516; Gulliver’s Travels, 510-11, 516-18, 592-609; Lady’s Dressing Room, 510, 516; Strephon and Chloe, 510, 514-15; Tale of a Tub, 511-13 519-23, 613
Swinburne, Algernon, 65, 95, 96, 98, 151, 209, 642
SYMBOLISM (i.e. Symbolist Movement), 28-34 , 397 , 658, 661
Symons, Arthur, 28 & n., 29, 65 Synge, John, 27
Tacitus, 315
Taine, Hippolyte, 246, 648 Tate, Allen, 227, 291, 625, 633 Tawney, R. H.. 622 Tchekov (See Chekhov)
Tennyson, Alfred, 19, 25n., 26m, 34, 151, 209, 343, 423, 554, 624; Tears, Idle Tears, 353-4
Tertullian, 122
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 90, 143, 145, 570, 578n., 594 8c n.; Vanity Fair, 139 Theocritus, 433 5 , 437, 439 Thompson, Denys, 211 Thompson, R. P„ 581 Thompson, Virgil, 667, 669 Thoreau, H. D., 636 Tierk, Ludwig, 278 Tillotson, Geoffrey, 578m Tillotson, Kathleen, 568 Tillyard, E. M. W., 22m, 334, 339, 442 Tinguely, Jean, 665, 667-8 Tolstoy, Alexei, 583
Tolstoy, Leo, 114, 243-4, 299, 251, 632: Ivan * Ilyitsch, 476; Master and Man, 561; War ond Peace, 143-4, 243, 350, 584, 586, 621 Tompkins, Calvin, 664, 667 Tourneur, Cyril. 75 Toynhee, Arnold, 444-5 & n.
TRAGFDY, 7-8, 21, 288-9, 402-19, 429, 452 Traill, H. D., 25m TRANSLATION, 62, 543, 633, 643
682
Trask, Willard R., 315, 530 Traversi, D. A., 630 Trevelyan, G. M., 452m Trilling, Lionel, 35, 275-90, 509, 662 Troeltsch, Ernst, 562 Trollope, Anthony, 565, 574 Trotsky, Leon, 205, 244-7, 250-2 Trowbridge, Hoyt, 24n.
Troy, William, 403-4, 406, 42on.
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich, 245, 622n., 628, 633. 641
Turnell, Martin, 630 Tuve, Rosamund, 555-6, 560 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 251; Huckleberry Finn, 584, 588 Twining, Thomas, 10, 24m Tzara, Tristan, 664
Vailland, Roger, 578 Valentine, C. W., 190, 20m.
Valery, Paul, 28, 253-61, 291, 305, 370-1, 636, 641, 643-4, 652 VALUE (see EVALUATION)
Vanbrugh, Sir John; The Provok’d Wife, 218-19, 225m; The Relapse, 212 Van Ghent, Dorothy, 659 Vedas, the, 197 & n.
Verhaeren, Emile, 197-9 Verlaine, Paul, 28, 253 Very, Tones, 25m
Vico, Giovanni Battista, 245, 287, 557-8 Vida, 13, 553
Vildrac, Messager, 61 8 c n., 62, 67 Virgil, 250, 433-5. 437. 439. 445-6, 449, 451.
452 n.
VISUAL ARTS, 9-10, 67, 96-8, 101, 127-8, 256, 283, 380, 427, 653-4, 663-9
Wagner, Geoffrey, 455, 461 Wagner, Richard, 29; Ring, 175-6, 178-9, 183, 450; Tristan und Isolde, 402, 419, 644 Wain, John, 588 Waley, Arthur, 153 Warhol, Andy, 666
Warren, Austin, 22, 237, 498, 505, 551, 562m Warren, Robert Penn, 227, 291, 555, 557, 562 Warton, Joseph, 350
Watt, Ian, 44. 315. 386, 527-44
Waugh, Evelyn, 349 Weber, Max, 557 Webster, John, 98, 342 Welch, Colin, 578
Wellek, Ren£, 22, 228, 315, 422, 442, 498, 551-63, 621, 623m, 644 Wells, H. G., 85-7, 140, 202, 386, 397, 400; Tono-Bungay, 388, 391-2
W Ity, Eudora, 399 Wertham, Frederic, 455, 461 West, Nathaniel, 398 Westcott, Glenway, 398-9 Westermarck, Edward Alexander, 348-9 Weston, Jessie, 342 Wharton, Edith, 305, 535 Whitehead, A. N., 636 Whitman, Walt, 659; Leaves of Grass, 251; When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, 438-9
Whittaker, Edmund, 611 n., 612
Wicker, Brian, 360 Wilde, Oscar, 645 Wilder, Thornton, 247, 652 Williams, Aubrey, 617-19 Williams, Charles, 442 Williams, Kathleen, 599 Williams, Raymond, 360, 371, 466, 474, 489. 580-91, 661
Williams, Tennessee; Streetcar Named Desire, 656-7
Williams, William Carlos, 67, 398, 664 Wilson, Colin, 629
Wilson, Edmund, 33m, 203,240-52, 474, 624-625, 633-4
Wilson, J. Dover, 290, 560-1 WlMSATT, W. K. TNR., 22n., 70, 106, 147, 228, 275, 292, 333 58 , 497 8 , 593 - 646 Winters, Yvor, 228,305-14,333,354-6,358n. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 622 Wolfe, Thomas, 396, 400, 476 Wolfert, Ira, 398 Wood, Mrs Henry, 496 Wood, James, 105, 350 Wood, Robert, 24m
Woolf, Virginia, 44, 85-91, 122. 136, 315, 386, 397, 581, 587, 629, 641; The Waves, 444. 585
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 25n., 151, 20m. Wordsworth, William, 17-20, 22-3, 25m, 62, 75 8 c n., 20m., 205-10, 277, 292-6, 311, 337m, 338, 350, 438, 449; It is a Beauteous Evening, 292-3, 296; Westminster Bridge, 294-5
Wyatt, Thomas, 443
Wycherley, William, 216; Plain Dealer, 223
Yeats, John Butler, 27, 62, 253 Yeats, W. B., 27-34, 57-8, 65-7, 70, 111, 433, 462, 618, 631, 636, 640-1 Young, Edward, 9, 24m, 337
Zinsser, Hans, 351 Zola, Emile, 40, 247, 580
683
20thcenturyUter00iodg
David Lodge is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. Among his books are Language of Fiction (1966), Graham Greene (1966), Evelyn Waugh (1971) and The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971), and he has also published a number of novels.
SL X *<A O 0 05