98
PARTISAN REVIEW
isolation of one .or another aspect of the object, the reference of this
aspect to an already completed scientific or quasi-scientific structure
of logic (philosophical, psychological or political), and the evaluation
of the whole object in terms of the latter. (Thus, Andre Malraux's
latest novel is reduced to a political phenomenon, analyzed in terms
of Marxist political philosophy, and rejected by the critic as being
inconsistent with this philosophy.) The apparent effort is to replace
the original concrete a:sthetic structure by an altogether abstract
structure of thought. But, as a matter of fact, the a:sthetic structure has
not been affected at all. It retains its original imponderable character.
An adequate or comprehensive method of literary interpretation
would have to begin with the recognition of this imponderable charac–
ter of the aspects involved in any whole literary organism. For a work
of literature, which is the constatation of the organic processes of the
imagination, is capable of being grasped only in terms of its own inner
pattern of movement-in terms like expansion and contraction, ten–
sion and rest, conflict and resolution. Where but from literature itseH
can we hope to derive an appropriate mode for such an analysis?
From the study of the important works of the literary past there
emerges a pattern of development of such distffictness and regularity
that we are compelled to accept it as a
norm
for all the rest. This norm
is the pattern described by the successive stages in the dialectic struggle
between matter and form represented in its most vivid and concen–
trated human terms in the classic myth. To employ this pattern of
development as a method for criticism is of course actually to establish
an analogy between what is ideal, the abstract formal process, and
what is real, the particular work in question. Insofar as it is an
analogical method it bears a resemblance to the so-called method of
four-fold interpretation, of the medieval schoohnen, with their reading
of works on the separate levels of the literal, the allegorical, the moral,
and the anagogical. But the important difference is that while the
analogy established by the schoolmen was always with a
particular
myth of the past the analogy here is simply with the -general formal
structure of the myth.
Is such a method an Absolute, as Mr. Burnham complains? The
answer must be that as a method it is an absolute exactly to the extent
that the scientific method is an absolute. It is one of the modes of
cognition, and as such must be accepted as valid within the field of
its application. One cannot disagree with Mr. Burnham that the
legitimacy of a method is to be tested by its results.
There is the
point of view always from which no mode of human perception can
lay safe claims to being an Absolute. And all that is maintained here
is that the "mythical" is the most relevant approach to literature be-
