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FRONTIERS OF CRITICISM
LES SANDALES o'EMPEDOCLE: ESSAI SURLES LIMITES DE LA LITTERATURE.
By Claude-Edmonde Magny. Neuchatel, Switzerland: Editions de
la Baconniere,
1945.
I
N DEFINING the limits of literary criticism, Mlle. Magny begins by re–
jecting the "fiction" of the objective, universal point of view assumed
by whoever hands down an aesthetic judgment. She then goes on to
cast suspicion on aesthetic judgments in general: they lack probative
foundation and in any case have led to more error than truth. Mlle.
Magny misunderstands Kant profoundly and thus fails to realize that
whether or not a reader expressly delivers himself of an aesthetic judg–
ment, he automatically makes one, conscious or unconscious, whenever
he consumes a piece of literature for pleasure. The critic in particular
is
required to make himself aware of such judgments and speak of them
aloud: it is part of his task and at the same time one of his credentials.
Her method, Mlle. Magny asserts, coincides with the "limits" of
criticism. The most criticism can do is extract and translate into abstract
terms what the literary artist has embodied in situations, personages,
metaphors, rhythms, word order, tense, punctuation, etc. The aesthetic
test boils down to a determination of the internal coherence of what is
thus extracted and of the appropriateness of the artistic means
to
the
abstract content. In order, however, to arrive at this determination it is
self-evidently necessary for Mlle. Magny to assume as objective and
universal a point of view as she can and to strip herself as much as pos–
sible of her biographical or psychological particularities. Thus she is
forced to return to the position she tried in the beginning to abandon.
But it remains that for her the principal activity of literary criticism
is hermeneutic, interpretative; its role is that of a midwife- maieutic.
Mlle. Magny finds content inextricably associated with such formal details
as tense and punctuation, and offers evidence for this in some remark–
able perceptions that are enough in themselves to make her book worth
reading. Yet she makes the mistake of assuming, in practice if not in
theory, that the formal factors in a work of art remain exclusively formal
until their meaning or intention penetrates our clear consciousness; they
stay separate from content as long as their relation to it is not capable
of being exhibited conceptually. I should like to point out, however, that
every work of art has an unconscious or pre-conscious effect, and this
effect also constitutes part of its content.
Fallacies similar to this are responsible for the occasional superfi–
ciality of Mlle. Magny's critical method. That method may serve bril–
liantly to pry out Charles Morgan's or Sartre's or Kafka's "metaphysic,"
