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it has been an inherent movement of the mind to let essential similarities
take precedence over accidental differences. Still, the danger for cri–
ticism here is very close to the one that Mr. Blackmur points out with
reference to Kenneth Burke--except that where Burke substitutes
his
rhetoric for literature, Mr. Blackmur, if he is not careful, may find
himself substituting his dialectic or his general form of life for the con–
crete literary form of life he is nominally talking about.
Mr. Blackmur's overinvolvement with his dialectic betrays itself
most obviously, it seems to me,
in
the disconcerting vagueness and
im–
precision of his vocabulary whenever he gets down to primary definitions.
It is difficult even for the best-intentioned reader not to feel some
exasperation when Mr. Blackmur defines his most important term as
follows: "The symbolic imagination perhaps can be put as the means
of bringing to significance, to order, the knowledge we have above and
below the level of the mind. It is, in short, the chief mode of participa–
tion in the life common to all men at all times." This is more a shot
in
the dark than a definition; but to attribute its deficiencies either to
carelessness or incapacity would be a serious mistake: no one is more
careful than Mr. Blackmur when he wishes to be, and no one more
expert. By using such blanket terms, Mr. Blackmur is trying to avoid
getting caught
in
his own dialectic-he is struggling to escape the ul–
timate treachery of language, which commits you to one position and
one perspective when you are so agonizingly aware at the same time
of all the others. To circumvent such treachery Mr. Blackmur defines
his
terms as sweepingly as possible, or he uses some emotive or imagina–
tive image to give the "feel" of what he means rather than any meaning
that would hem him in too tightly.
But this,
in
the end, amounts to an attempt to evade the conditions
of all rational discourse. Was it not Mr. Blackmur himself, after all,
who remarked appositely that "to think straight you must overshoot
your mark"? Mr. Blackmur tries desperately not to overshoot, and he
pays the penalty for this
hubris-he
sometimes lands so lamentably short
that he fails to communicate any apprehensible meaning whatever. At
such moments one cannot help wishing that Mr. Blackmur would risk
overshooting, and, as in the past, focus his superb critical sensibilities
(and his concepts) sharply on the object. For
in
the past, present or
future, so long as Mr. Blackmur aims his shots at the particular work
of art, we can be sure that he will continue to produce criticism of a
subtlety and profundity unrivaled in modern Anglo-American literature.
Joseph Frank
