PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM
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they have not only drawn on a very uncommon erudition but, on the
whole, they have refused to be caught on the horns of any of the pseudo–
dilemmas that are as nearly all-over-the-place today as they have always
been.
The book takes a wide circuit. It is what its title indicates, a
serious attempt to sketch the general outlines of a literary theory such
as, the authors justly point out, should be basic for any self-respecting
body of literary criticism and literary history. The questions they ask
are therefore of a genuinely theoretical and fundamental sort. What,
philosophically speaking, is a literary work? What kind of existence may
it be said to have? What is its ontological status? Does such a work
have an absolutely unique existence, or can it be related to other works
without losing its true identity? Does it have any genuine analogies with
individual works in the other arts?-and in general are there real analo–
gies between literature and music, literature and the plastic arts? Can
individual literary works be referred to categories-types or genres–
that have a validity of their own for criticism and history?
Is
a history
of literature, indeed, possible-a history of literature that is not merely
a belletristic substitute for intellectual and social history? Are there real
and important connections between literature and philosophy, literature
and "ideas" generally? Are there real and important connections be–
tween literature and social history? What, if any, is the bearing on
literary theory and practice of the knowledges of the social sciences,
especially psychology?
These are some of the questions the authors ask; within the limits
of a short review it is hardly possible to do more than hint at the
character their answers take. At their best, and with some lapses, these
answers successfully avoid the antithetical pitfalls of Realism and
Nominalism, of purism and reductionism, of absolute idealism .:md a
viciously relativistic positivism. As over against these false simplifications
-all of which are in lively existence among us-they defend what they
call, usefully I think, Perspectivism, or more exactly, in phrases they bor–
row from other writers, "perspective realism" or "objective relativism."
It is a principle, I should say, wholly consistent with the best thought
of a period that,
at
its best, has put aside both the old absolutes of
transcendentalism and the old materialistic relativities, and substituted for
them such concepts as
field, configuration, organism, event,
and
process.
In the right sense, it is surely a humanistic-naturalistic principle.
It is used, at any rate, by these authors to describe a work of litera–
ture as neither, on the one hand, a timeless, placeless essence, nor, on the
other, a mere sum
of
successive individual readings, but as "a structure
