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PARTISAN REVIEW
by the ideal of a cultural unity that he sees embodied in Dante, Sophocles
and Shakespeare. Now Mr. Fergusson agrees that the cultural unity he
admires is "a kind of more-than-individual natural growth"; we do not
know how we can get it, he says, and it is plainly beyond the power of
any single writer to create such a culture. Yet this does not prevent
Mr. Fergusson from measuring the modern theater against a standard
which, by definition, is unattainable for any modern artist. As Mr.
Fergusson explains, he uses this standard "so that we may learn to recog–
nize and appreciate the fragmentary perspectives we do have; collecting
the pieces, keeping the idea alive, in the tentative, fallible and suggestive
light of analogy." Nobody would deny the importance of this task, and
Mr. Fergusson has performed it superbly; certainly it would be unfair
to tax him with not having done more. And still, we cannot help asking–
not particularly of Mr. Fergusson, but of modern criticism in general–
whether the best way to "recognize and appreciate the fragmentary per–
spectives we do have" is continually to emphasize how far they fall short
(and must fall short) of an ideal we do not know how to achieve?
My point is simply that we must make the best of the art we have,
and we are unjust to ourselves if we view it only in this negative focus.
Our cultural life, at present, has reached a stage where we would do well
to heed Nietzsche's warning against "monumental" history, which ideal–
izes and deifies the past; this could easily degenerate, he foresaw, into a
life-destroying fixation whose slogan is: "Let the dead bury the living."
Actually, Mr. Fergusson brings up the possibility of an alternative atti–
tude in his remark that "the centerless diversity of our theater may be
interpreted as wealth." And elsewhere, while commenting that the free–
dom of modern art may have been bought at too high a price, he is
compelled to praise modern art's "freedom to respond, directly, and
without premeditation, to any and every human experience."
If
these
aspects of the modern theater had been kept in the foreground, perhaps
the atmosphere of gloom and helpless pessimism that hangs over Mr.
Fergusson's concluding pages might have been alleviated.
Joseph Frank
THE ENERGY OF PASTERNAK
BORIS PASTERNAK: SELECTED WRITINGS. Direction 9. New Directions.
$1.50.
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890.
His father was a well-known painter, his mother a musician. He published
his earliest poems during the First World War towards the end of the
