PARTISAN REVIEW
opportunity to reach them, what
his
relations with them are to be.
The authors of the seventeenth century had a definite function
because they addressed themselves to an enlightened, strictly limited,
and active public which exerted a permanent control over them.
Unknown by the people, their job was to reflect back its own image
to the elite which supported them.
•
But there are many ways of reflecting an image: certain por–
traits are in themselves really contestations; this is because they have
been made from without and without passion by a painter who
refuses any complicity with his model. However, in order for a writer
merely to conceive the idea of drawing a portrait-contestation of his
real reader, he must have become conscious of a contradiction be–
tween himself and his public, that is, he must come to his readers
from without
and must consider them with astonishment, or he must
feel the astonished regard of unfamiliar minds (ethnic minorities,
oppressed classes, etc.) weighing upon the little society which he
forms with them. But in the seventeenth century, since the potential
public did not exist, since the artist accepted without criticism the
ideology of the elite, he made himself an accomplice of his public.
No unfamiliar stare came to trouble him in his games. Neither the
prose writer nor even the poet was damned. They did not have to
decide with each work what the meaning and value of literature
were, since its meaning and value were fixed by tradition. Well inte–
grated in a hierarchical society, they knew neither the pride nor the
anguish of being "different," in short, they were
classical.
In effect, classicism exists when a society has taken on a rela–
tively stable form and when it has been permeated with the myth
of its perpetuity, that is, when it confounds the present with the
eternal and historicity with traditionalism, when the hierarchy of
•
classes is such that the potential public never extends beyond the real
public, and when each reader is for the writer a qualified critic and
censor, when the power of the religious and political ideology is so
strong and the interdictions so rigorous that in no case is there any
question of discovering new countries of the mind, but only of putting
into shape the
commonplaces
adopted by the elite in such a way that
reading-which, as we have seen, is the concrete relation between the
writer and
his
public-is a ceremony of
recognition
analogous to the
bow of salutation, that is, the ceremonious affirmation that author
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