96
PARTISAN REVIEW
Butler Yeats, in a now famous passage, on the difference between "the
literature of the
will
and the literature of the imagination." And the
same reputable authority may be referred to for a treatment of the
precise role played by the "conscious" faculty in the act of creation.
Nor need we ponder the question whether the quality of the experi–
ence that we have before literary works is so like the pleasures to be
derived from other sources that it can safely be covered by such a
word as "enjoyed." For the present purpose the most significant of
these assumptions is the first-that works of literature are "material
objects." For what does
this
amount to saying but that literary works
are identical in kind with all the other objects of the physical universe
-that a play by Shakespeare, for example, is metaphysically not
dif–
ferent from the paper on which it is printed or the boards on which
it is played. The importance of this assumption, of course, is that it
leads immediately to the corrolary that literary works·are capable of
being
known,
like all the other objects of the physical universe,
through one or another of the particular categories of that general
mode of cognition called science. In Mr. Burnham's own terms, liter–
ature "figures," or has its existence, only insofar as it can
be
jammed into one of these categories.
As
to which category is selected
the answer seems to be quite clear: it is determined by the "context."
But this "context" proves to be a rather muddled affair, supplied
partly by historical conditions beyond writer and reader, and partly
by rather undefined psychological traits.
If
this is the case, it is hard
for us to know what category it is that is most to the point. What Mr.
Burnham must mean rather is the simpler word
content,
or the
dominating subject-matter of a work, and that in approaching Zola
we should use a sociological approach, in approaching Lawrence a
psychological approach, and so on.
Now for some reason that I cannot understand Mr. Burnham
ascribes to me what he calls the "anthropological" approach. For
if
anthropology is on the approved list of scientific categories I cannot
see how I could offend by pushing it too far, whicli
IS
probably what
is meant by the charge that I have fallen into the "Platonic fallacy of
hypostatizing a method into an Absolute." How is it possible to push
a good thing too far? And does not Mr. Burnham himself perform a
little hypostatizing when he makes empirical investigation the
onlJ
test of truth of reality, as he does by implication all throughout the
discussion. The trouble must be once again that anthropological is one
of those confusing words with a double reference; it is a label at once
for a method and for the body of discoveries which that method had
made possible. In the sense that I have tried to use some of the
latter
for interpretative purposes it is true that I have profited by the
