ART AND THE WARPED VISION
183
Just as other periods sometimes regarded the imagination as a
wild, demonic force, we now like to think of it as quite tame and
orderly; and we tend to associate abnormality with literary postures
and false ideas. But let us not be fooled into thinking these views
are objective or that they help clarify the relations between
art,
truth, and morality. They are merely symptoms of the times; and
their literary meaning lies mainly in the fact that they serve to pro–
mote one creative strain rather than another. Thus in recent years
there has been a growing tendency to tear down the more obviously
neurotic and alienated writers, the extremists, like Kafka, Proust,
Joyce, even Dostoevsky, and to elevate such figures as Dickens,
George Eliot, and Trollope, who seemingly stand for a more orderly
and "wholesome" kind of experience. No doubt the tension between
these two traditions has played a large part in the literary life of the
past century, and we have tended to associate greater abnormality
with those whom Van Wyck Brooks once called "coterie" writers,
largely because they symbolized a more radical break with existing
norms.
As
Gide, who favored the wilder talents, put
it:
"There do
exist geniuses, Victor Hugo for example, sane and whole. Their
perfect spiritual poise precludes the possibility of any fresh problem.
Rousseau without the leaven of madness, would, I am sure, be no
better than an undigested Cicero. . . . The individual who is ab–
normal refuses to submit to laws already established." At the same
time, we should note that the cleavage is not absolute. Someone like
Mann, for example, was torn between the two traditions; and it is
amusing to watch the efforts today to transform Whitman into a
man of the main stream.
If,
however, we investigate the life and work of the individual
writer, the distinction between the normal and the abnormal in
literature turns out to be largely programmatic rather than scientific.
Henry James or T. S. Eliot, for example, who are usually assumed
to be on the side of order and classicism, may be just as neurotic–
in their work as well as in their private lives-as Joyce or Kafka;
and as for the question of truth, I see no way of deciding which one
of them is closer to the "truth" in
his
writing. The national and
personal ambiguities in the work of James, which were bound up in
some way with the ambiguities of
his
own life, are just as true as,
say,
Joyce's rejection, in the name of the uncompromising artist, of
