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PART I SA N REVIEW
judge the form of a work of art unless we see how that form is re–
lated to its function. We can feel that a story is successful, and make
a good many pertinent observations in comparing it with other stories,
following critically and empirically the path that the writer follows,
partly consciously, partly intuitively, in the experimental mastery of
his art. But we cannot very fully or profoundly explain a story's
success without knowing actually what it is that a story does.
Although imaginative literature is often informative, this is not
its distinguishing characteristic, and a simple story like Red Riding
Hood does not, in any sense, lead its hearers to a knowledge of rela–
tionships. Its symbols evoke responses which are essentially condi–
tioned reflexes, and a knowledge on the child's part of the relationship
of stimulus to response is neither the cause nor the result of
his
being
moved by the story, nor will a statement describing any such relation–
ship affect very much its operations, any more than a psychiatrist's
pointing out, early in an analysis, the probable cause of a phobia,
do much to lessen its intensity.
A story of this kind gains its effect by awakening reflexively, with
symbols of a particular kind, unconscious impulses. And any descrip–
tion or definition of the artistic experience which fails to take into
account these significant references to an inner reality will necessarily
seem limited or mysterious, especially since it must also recognize that
the most significant references in art are not to an external reality
beyond the bounds of the individual work of art. Such limitations are
found even in the formulations of Deweyans and philosophical natur–
ali<sts who might be expected to be most sympathetic to a functional
and psychologic interpretation of art.
In "A Natural History of the Aesthetic Transaction" which
Eliseo Vivas contributed to the symposium,
Naturalism and the Hu–
man Spirit,
he differentiated art from morals, science, and religion,
wherein we think of causes and consequences, and wherein the object
of the experience is, so to speak, "a moment connected with a wider
complex of moments in a transitive chain that goes on indefinitely."
The aesthetic experience, on the contrary, is "an experience of rapt
attention which involves the intransitive apprehension of an object's
immanent meanings in their full presentational immediacy." Rapt
attention there certainly is, when a story is well told, and we know
a good deal about the means by which that state of raptness is created,
but what are these immanent meanings and how do they draw to
themselves the emotions they arouse? In this "intransitive" situation,
since movement cannot go beyond the bounds of the self-contained
and self-sufficient work of art, it must necessarily go down. Through
