PARTISAN REVIEW
light. The detailed analysis of works of art is as much needed as any–
thing in the field of criticism, but we distrust the tendency to make
it the only permissible kind of criticism-as we also distrust critics
who seem so incapable of independent and fresh insights into the ways
in which their subject matter is related to the rest of human activity.
Here we feel the breath of provincialism, not to say academicism.
Of course literature would benefit from an equally close exam–
ination of prose fiction. But the latter presents much greater difficulties
to the analysis of form. The poem can be viewed-and only too often
is-as a congeries of details that the critic can attack seriatim, but
even the most obtuse of the "new" critics would hesitate to analyze
a novel that way. Especially since we have not yet even established
satisfactorily what form is in fiction. (Form being just as indispens–
able to the success of the novel as it is to that of other kinds of art,
how then do the novels of such supposedly clumsy writers as Balzac,
Dickens or Dostoyevsky solve the problem of form-for, given their
success in the reading, we must grant that they do solve that prob–
lem?) What, I believe, has made the answer to this question so
difficult is the fact that we are still subject, like Flaubert and James,
to the illusion that the precepts Aristotle derived for the drama from
Aeschylus and Sophocles, and which are exemplified in French classi–
cal dramaturgy, govern all literary forms. But economy and unity of
action in the narrative are something other than what they are in the
drama. It must have been the unconscious realization of this difference
-and the inability at the same time to determine exactly what it
was-that led Proust and Joyce to borrow, as if in desperation, so
many of their "structural" principles from music. And even then
they did not escape from drama, for what they borrowed from most
was the Wagnerian opera, that
Gesamtkunstwerk,
that work of "total
art."
As
a person the writer ought indeed to involve himself in the strug–
gle against Stalinism to the "point of commitment." Why should we
ask less of him than of any other adult interested in the survival of the
common decencies and authentic culture? However, he is under no
moral--or aesthetic--obligation whatsoever to involve himself in
this struggle as a writer. That he is interested in the struggle as a
person does not mean that he is necessarily interested in
it
qua
writer.
878
