IN the previous pages we have seen two games being played, a public and a private one. In the public literature game the facts of language are mobilized to mime anything in the universe except the private depths of the speaker. In the private game, the facts of language are mobilized to mime nothing in the universe but, ultimately, the private depths of the speaker.
The public game is played (by the Greek rules) out of belief that private depths are ineffable and, at any rate, of less importance than social roles. In its purest form, Aristotle's criticism, there is the implicit belief that the personal idiosyncrasies of a great creator will reveal the bare rules of the game he is playing, and are to be imitated by all those who wish to play the game after him. The creator employing the facts of language in a public language game played between him and his readers or hearers, reveals everything but himself. The only ‘self’ that emerges is the public self of a game player. However, since this game is the noblest game of all, that of revealing the binding significances of human life, the role of game player is not a trivial one.
This desire to reveal all else but the ineffable (and perhaps trivial) depths of the personality is not the modern game. The modern, private game, played by the Romans first, and later by the Romantics and Post-Romantics, uses even the most objective rules in an attempt to portray the artist. Joyce, the modern master of this branch of the literary game, and Mahler, the modern master in this advanced stage of the musical game, have drawn portraits of themselves as system collectors; their materials are the systems of others. Has Joyce written novels, or ‘novels’? Has Mahler written symphonies, or ‘symphonies’? This development is the final form of the Romantic attempt to portray the individual, a development in a paradoxical but logical direction.
In playing both of these stylistic games, however, human beings are constantly reforming and transforming the world, inner and outer. In the long run, the what is created by the how. The results of this process are literature and society. Whether the world is grateful for having been ‘produced’ we will probably never know, but human beings cannot endure not producing the world. A juggler, using immense skill to construct a wheel of objects in the air, is an image of the human being at his typical work; if the skill or will, the how falters, the what disintegrates, and chaos is immediate and irretrievable. By sustaining the world, through public and private games of style, the human being forms a subsistent reality, a standing-wave of being.