86
PA-RTISAN REVIEW
"quality" of his material, can we demand that he attempt to "organize"
the reader's response in the direction of a certain kind of action? I
do
not
think it is possible for the author to control completely the responses of
the reader except in forms of writing so insular, so limited in reference
that almost no associations can develop in the reader's mind irrelevant to
the purpose of the work. This is true of many mystery stories, adventures,
fantasies, tales of science and experiments with trick plots. I do not
mean that as phenomena they lack social significance, but that once you
are launched in the reading of one, your response is pretty well anticipated,
and as a social attitude very insignificant.
Very similar in effect is the literature of pathos. Eastman speaks
of the fact that Lenin "wept at Sarah Bernhardt's acting of the Lady
of the Camelias." I think a person could be a good Marxist and still find
his eyes misting at certain scenes in the movie of
David Copperfield
or
Little Women.
But this is precisely, as H. W. Garrod once pointed out,
because it is such bad art. You weep at
East LJ>nne,
he said, but not at
Lear.
The meaningless and anguished death of a lovely woman throws
out its little beam of sympathy like the filament in a vacuum tube, and
for a similar reason. But as soon as a death becomes significant, as soon
as there is tragedy, the response is very different; attitude is affected, and
action.
Consider, for instance, the deaths in
j}!f
an's Fate
by Malraux. I thin[
that is a greater book than
Little ff/omen;
I do not think it inhibits action
·although it does increase consciousness; I do not think it could have been
written of the partisans of Chiang Kai-shek. And in this judgment one
is not merely approving propaganda for the right side. Indeed,
Man's Fate
has all the qualitative appreciation of "sheer" experience that Eastman
demands, but the novel does prepare the reader for action because it
increases in him the consciousness of the values and necessities that Malraux
has felt in the struggle he describes. The effect might be compared to the
flow of water from the upper level into canal lock, lifting a steamer so that
it can continue on its way.
But what of a writer like Proust, whose social attitude is passive,
whose social standards are of the
haute bourgeoisie,
and who is interested
only in the resthetic quality of his experience? I wonder if it is an honest
account of our experience in reading him to say that his only or even chief
virtue is his describing social decay. This invokes unnecessarily, I think,
what Eastman calls the Educative Sanction. Proust himself says that
art "is the revelation-impossible by direct and conscious means--of the
qualitative difference in the way the world appears to us, differences which,
but for art, would remain the eternal secret of each of us." Art is much
more than that, but to the extent that we are able to put ourselves ima·
ginatively into Proust's world-and that will become increasingly more
difficult-we respond to his observations with a mingled surprise and re–
cognition that extends more or less permanently our boundaries of percep–
tion in all kinds of experience. And since the Marxist is not guilty of
Eastman's dichotomy, since he knows that the individual consciousness is
an integral part of the historic process, the work of Proust does not seem
unrelated to the preparation for action.
But
I.
A.
Richards and others have said that the artist strives so to
