164
PARTISAN REVIEW
I do not believe that the "conditioning philosophies" as applied
to
art
really lead anywhere. It
is
obvious that the determination of
which Marxism and psychoanalysis were the successors (I am think–
ing only of their relation to art), and the aesthetic to which they
were opposed as well, had reached a point where a change of per–
spective was much to be desired. (Moreover, the reader always hopes
that he will be able to understand a little about how a great work
"came about.") But, in the end, the value of these theories is ex–
clusively negative: obviously the work of Balzac would not exist in
the form in which we know it
if
the French Revolution had not
brought the bourgeoisie to power, but it is just as obvious that it
would not have existed either
if
the mother of Balzac had died during
pregnancy.
It
is unlikely that "The Conscience" of Victor Hugo
would exist
if
Hugo had not had that "obsession of the eye," which
is
well known to psychoanalysts and fairly common; but it is just as
obvious that there are quite a good many people who have this
obsession, that quite a few of them have written poems, and that
no one but Victor Hugo wrote "The Conscience." What interests
us chiefly
is
the quality of the poem.
So
long as a work of art is approached from a sociological
point of view, so long as one is interested above all in the history of
art, a philosophy such as Marxism contributes a great deal; but the
moment the essential problem becomes one of quality, the theories
that art is conditioned do not solve much of anything. Let us say,
if you like, that at best they explain the dead but do not explain life.
All poetry implies the destruction of the relationship between
things that seems obvious to us in favor of particular relationships
imposed by the poet. His means of imposing these particular relation–
ships is, of course, the metaphor. Obviously, the domain of meta–
phors at the disposal of the poet may be circumscribed. I am not
saying that a military civilization (the Assyrian, for example)
will
create metaphors in the style of Deroulede,
1
but I do say that the
system of metaphors by which a poet of such a civilization expresses
himself cuts across feelings and sensations in which war plays a large
role, and the role of a value. The metaphors of military civilizations
are not the "rational" expression of military values; the metaphors
1 A nineteenth-century French poet who wrote a volume of poems about
war entitled
Chants du soldat.-TRANsLAToR
