Copyright © Jacob Hortman
This transcription was made from a physical copy of the book Dead Reckonings in Fiction by Dorothy Brewster and Angus Burrell
Dead reckoning is not the best way to navigate. But it is the only way left when the day is dark and the stars are obliterated or the horizon is blurred. And it may be that sailing thus without sights, you find yourself, when you check up, near enough a true position to be assured that you have not been going altogether in the wrong direction. And so in literary criticism if there is a method which in any degree approaches the accuracy of the sextant bringing to earth the constant sun, we are unfamiliar with it.
Perhaps we have not made the port the passengers would have us make; but we have somehow dragged into a harbor. To those friends whose advice and suggestions have been gratefully recieved, whose "day's work" has been considered in our final computations–our warmest thanks.
The critic's business is to help the public.
... To put the public in the way of esthetic pleasure, that is the end for which critics exist, and to that end all means are good.
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It would be a simple matter to get started on a book of criticism, if one had an axe to grind. Theories we enjoy, and expect to play with. But our position is distressingly simple. We like certain novels and stories, and wish to talk about them; and we are halted at the threshold by wondering why we like them, and why anyone should care to listen to our talk about them.
Perhaps it would be best to adopt a theory. There are, of course, a variety conveniently at hand. We might classify fiction according to genre and ordain a hierarchy of values. If we define the genre of the Short Story, we shall find ourselves excluding genre to include
At one time we agreed enthusiastically with The Red Lily the "best"?
Then there is the slogan: "The adventures of the soul among masterpieces." Perhaps. But what are masterpieces, and for that matter, what is the soul?
And there is research work into the life of an author, the tracing of his sources, the ordering of his work into periods and establishing dates. Literary geology. There is also literary sociology, the study of social and political backgrounds, "One cannot really enjoy Pelle the Conqueror or Germinal without a survey of the modern Labor Movement." Someone mutters–"if that is the price!" And what of the social and political background of ThaÏs?
Rather than set up shop with this shelf-worn stock, we prefer to keep our doors closed.
Then, what of the newer theories?
We turned, as it happened, to The Mind in the Making, pp 66-77.)
We get caught in social and economic traps. We find ourselves in surroundings that at best frustrate some of our most interesting possibilities, and at worst are likely to be ideally unsuited to us. We do what we can to alter our environment so that our impeded impulses may have freer play. But under the best conditions, declares
The application of this theory is delightfully various. Applied to the artist it reveals the source of his inspiration in his frustrated impulses. The history of the novel furnishes many examples of the effort of criticism to relate the artist to his work. Early critics so entangled Jane Eyre: because Anne Severn and the Fieldings: they accuse her of seeking literary expression for her balked desires, because she has been virtuous and unadventurous in her personal life. Would authors whose pages are passionless and pure wish the opposite inference to be drawn about their lives?
There are many incidental advantages in psycho-analyzing the artist. When The Father, he is releasing himself first of all–or trying to–from his own fixation on his mother. If we are told that he had the Oedipus complex we understand how his relations with women are marked either by intense love or intense hatred. This hatred finds expression in the play when the husband throws a lighted lamp at his wife. Working vicariously, this art-form releases inhibited souls who have longed to throw lighted lamps at their wives and haven't dared. Most people of course are profoundly uneasy–people who don't wish to believe in the truth of the characterization of the woman. And to them it is very consoling to have it disclosed that
To the one hundred per cent American, it is a satisfaction to have
Consider the literature of a whole period as evidence of the need of "escape." Sometimes such literature is characterized by a common preoccupation with certain themes and emotions, and informed with a common spirit–unhappy, or rebellious, or disillusioned, or sentimental, or swaggeringly optimistic. By studying these indications, we may discover what is hampering free human development in that nation and generation. Take Russian fiction before the Revolution. For many decades almost the only escape for the sensitive and gifted man was in imaginitive activity, in artistic creation. The roads to overt activity were barred, or led to Siberia. So dammed-up impulses broke through into the channel of literary expression. If the War and Peace.
A recent book on the short storyShort-Story Writing, an art or a Trade?Du Barry in Europe should be rechristened to read Passion for American exhibition? Is there any reason why Admirable Chrichton should become Male and Female as a photo-play? Is there any reason for such title as Sex, The Restless Sex, His Wedded Wife, The First Night, The She Woman, The Leopard Woman, Wedded Husbands, Why Wives Go Wrong, Forbidden Fruit, The Primrose Path, What Happened to Rosa, Why Change Your Wife, The Woman Untamed, etc. It surely does not require an erudite psycho-analyst to find the reason for this avalanche of suggestiveness. . . . Strong elemental forces long suppressed erupt in irrepressible, if furitive curiosity."
If psycho-analyzing the artist is pathological criticism, psycho-analyzing the literary tastes of a people is sociological criticism. Trying to account for our own special tastes in art might be regarded as the autobiographical branch of sociological criticism–a clinical procedure, shocking to the delicacy of most.
Let us examine this squueamishness. We read novels, listen to music, look at paintings, attend the theatre–all to escape from ourselves into somebody else's day-dreams, and to find in imagination the satisfaction denied us by the circumstances of our lives; for we all have potentialities that our environment never calls to play. In some way these balked impulses must find expression. If we analyze our tastes and relate them to the facts of our experience, we can guess at our "major psychic frustrations." Some books we shrink from, just as some "cases"–and as most people (except very introspective types)–shrink from the pyscho-analyst. and such books, quite as much as those we like, may reveal what is wrong with us. All this is immensely interesting, we may feel; but the less said about it to others, the better. It is as dangerously revealing as telling our dreams.
Yet isn't this just what the critic does, when he airs his likes and dislikes in public? So far, it has only been artists, alive and dead, who have been ushered into the clinic for diagnosis or dissection. But the turn of the critics is coming–perhaps at the hands of the artists. Even book-reviewing, usually regarded as a safe occupation, has for us become invested with terrors, since we heard a novelist, with a cool competence, lay bare the hidden complex of a reviewer of her book. The only hope for the naÏve critic of the future is a painstaking rationalization of his tastes and standards, subtle enough to multiply the difficulties of the revengeful artist in search of complexes.
In this matter of standards, the "escape" theory leaves the critic at a loss. It leads The New Republic, 12 April, 1922.Dial. "Why quarrel over the forms into which we cast our heart's desire?" Why talk of standards? Why should we care whose work identifies us to posterityÏ
In the sentence just quoted appear the words "good or bad." But what, on this theory, is good and bad? Standards are implied, but where is the foundation upon which they could be erected? Perhaps they are moral standards.
But before we examine the claims of the moralists that good or bad in literature is judged by the effects on behavior, we should like to relieve ourselves by recommending that they adopt the escape theory.
The moralists have claimed that art has an effect upon activity; that the reader will act upon upon the suggestions of his readings.
Yet if the moralists are not satisfied with these answers–and they wouldn't be–we may concede to them a point. To the adventurous, vicarious experience may be the starting-point of personal experience. One may go to literature seeking, consciously or unconsciously, not merely escapes but solutions. "This is a dangerous book," said a girl, of one of
There may be such subtle interaction between literature and life that it is almost impossible to resolve them into seperate elements. The more one becomes involved with both literature and with life, the more puzzling, intricate, and fascinating such interrelationships become. For one returns to the actual universe after a temporary escape–to actual experience after the holiday of vicarious experience. And the chances are one has not been bored. Perhaps the moment of escape is sufficient to itself, a "consummatory experience." At this point Art): "There are moments in life that are ends to which the whole history of humanity would not be an extravagant means. Of such are the moments of esthetic ecstasy." He names it ecstasy;
One comes back, then, with an increased capacity for experience. In that sense the moralists are right, in claiming that reading influences action. How we live becomes a test of the value of the art that has afforded us a healing release. Does it lead us out into wider and richer, more vivid and fruitful experience? Does it furnish both release and intensification? The kind of intensification
At this point we find ourselves about to ask a rhetorical question. Do the cosmetic musical comedy, the dime novel, the sentimental movie–which all furnish escapes–intensify the capacity for experience? And somebody will be sure to answer: "They do for me." There we are again, with no basis for critical discrimination, just when we thought we had discovered one. But try another example. We enjoy the detective story of the passing moment. We also enjoy The Brothers Karamazov, and both in a sense offer an escape from the monotony of a respectable life. They give us murders and mystery, suspense, false clues, pursuit, excitement. And afterwards? The detective story may lead us to take a kind of intellectual interest in the motives and clues and hypotheses of the current murder case, and to speculate on how much more skilfully we could have covered up our trail, if we had done the deed. And The Brothers Karamazov? Never, after the experience of reading that, can crime appear a mere puzzle of clues, a mere pursuit and capture, an outward thing. It has become linked up with some of the profoundest speculations upon the problem of evil, the mysteries of heredity, and the degree of human responsibility. Because
So we venture, by this test, to place The Brothers Karamazov further up in the artistic hierarchy than the The Ambassadors over Babbitt, for The Red Lily over Cytherea, for The Brothers Karamazov contains the detective story. One is a part and a very small part of a great whole of human experience, to which the Mass in D much more nearly approximates. Its range is larger; it includes the range of the lesser thing, and reaches out into remoter spheres of experience. It is in a real sense quantitatively larger; and "to the democrat who believes in majorities, this is an argument which must surely prove convincing."On the Margin, p. 74.
Out of all this discussion, we can extract two questions for the critic to ask of a piece of fiction: does it create the illusion that enables us to escape? and does it intensify our capacity for more sensitive experience? Both are questions that in the present state of our knowledge and psychology–individual and social–the critic can safely answer only for himself. But if he has escaped through a certain door, he can put up a sign–This way out! "Primarily," says Since Cézanne.
Critics are really nothing more than connoisseurs in pleasure, quoting