PARTISAN REVIEW
them is to examine the art of writing without prejudice. What is
writing? Why does one write? For whom? The fact is, it seems that
nobody has ever asked himself these questions.
No, we do not want to "engage" painting, sculpture, and music
"too," or at least not in the same way. And why would we want to?
When a writer of past centuries expressed an opinion about his craft,
was he immediately a.Sked to apply it to the other arts? But today it's
the thing to do to "talk painting" in the argot of the musician or
the literary man and to "talk literature" in the argot of the painter,
as
if
at bottom there were only one
art
which expressed itself indif–
ferently in one or the other of these languages, like the Spinozistic
substance which each of its attributes adequately reflects.
Doubtless, one could find at the origin of every artistic calling
a certain undifferentiated choice which circumstances, education, and
contact with the world particularized only later. Besides, there is no
doubt that the arts of a 'period mutually influence each other and are
conditioned by the same social factors. But those who want to expose
the absurdity of a literary theory by showing that it is inapplicable
to music must first prove that the arts are parallel.
Now, there is no such parallelism. Here, as everywhere, it is not
only the form which differentiates, but the matter as well. And it is
one thing to work with color and sound, and another to express one's
self by means of words. Notes, colors, and forms are not signs. They
refer to nothing exterior to themselves. To be sure,
it
is quite impos–
sible to reduce them strictly to themselves and the idea of a pure
sound, for example, is an abstraction.
As
Merleau-Ponty has pointed
out
in
The Phenomenology of Perception,
there
is
no quality of sen–
sation so bare that it is not penetrated with signification. But the dim
little meaning which dwells within it, a light joy, a timid sadness,
remains immanent or trembles about it like a heat mist; it
is
color
or sound. Who can distinguish the green apple from its tart gaiety?
And aren't we already saying too much in naming "the tart gaiety of
the green apple?" There is green, there is red, and that is all. They
are things, they exist by themselves.
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