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PARTISAN REVIEW
dealings with the political and social future, with, that is to say, the
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quality that life is to have.
This leads me to the accusation which Mr. Barrett directs at Mr.
Chase and which he might as well have directed at me, that of mixing
up life and literature.
There are, to be sure, certain situations in criticism, and no doubt
in action, in which it is important to insist on the distinction between
life and literature. But to maintain their perfect separation as a general
principle is surely the prime error of-that I should ever use the word
to Mr. Barrett!-academicism.
Mr. Barrett asks : " ... Is a philosophy to be arrived at from life
or from literature?" What a question! Mr. Barrett, who knows far
more about philosophy than I do, has sat too long in the Enlightenment
-his eyes dazzle, he has come to believe in
tabulae rasae
and if not in
Noble Savages then at least in Illiterate Philosophers. The answer to his
question is: why, from both life and literature, and inescapably, because
literature is one of the cultural agents that form the attitudes, even the
categories, by which at least some part of life is apprehended.
Since Mr. Barrett has done what it is always personally embarrassing
to do, declared his conception of the relation of literature to life, I'll take
heart and declare mine and say that I think that literature in its relation
to life is polemical. On this occasion I'll risk leaving out all the neces–
sary innumerable modifications of this statement-I'll let it stand that,
after I've comprehended all the (quite dull) distinctions that are usually
made between aesthetics and morality, I can't think of literature or any
art without supposing that it has an axe to grind, that it is arguing or
urging or bullying or tempting or seducing me into certain ways of being
which have inevitable reference to ways of acting. That is, for me–
and despite what he says I believe for Mr. Barrett too-a work of lit–
erature, or of any art, has ultimately a moral and even a political
relevance.
If
it be objected that this assimilation of art to life is exactly what
Stalinist culture has done, I answer that it is not the assimilation that is
in error but Stalinism's small view of life, its insufficient notion of art, its
inadequate idea of what the connection is between life and art. And to
this I would add the profound
ill-will
of Stalinism toward both life
and art.
Feeling as I do, then, I'm not at all astonished at Mr. Chase's
willingness to consider the question, whatever the answer, "Was Iago a
'progressive'?" (Mr. Barrett's counter-question of whether or not Des–
demona bought her clothes at BergdorfI Goodman has, as a matter of
