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the discovery-the recognition scene, or, as Aristotle indicates, the
peripeteia-but in criticism the unveiling of the proper perspective
is often embarrassing, because although the literary work can be as–
saulted, it cannot be conquered. Critics have, therefore, quite properly
denominated the work as "recalcitrant," "incomplete," "difficult,"
"continually changing," or fickle-full of guises or disguises.
Of the alternatives available to critics, the return to the authori–
tarianism of Horace is forbidden. The howlers in that famous treatise
on poetry are with wisdom carefully avoided. Horace ridiculed such
combinations as tragedy and comedy and declared that they would
be as grotesque as the body of a horse with the head of a man. But
although Horace never saw the paintings of Picasso nor the plays
of Shakespeare, he might at least have avoided commitments for the
future. His authoritarianism is attributed to his empiricism-he de–
scribed what he knew; but did he know what he described? One
critic's empiricism is another critic's dogmatism; and the pluralistic
doors must be kept open.
Nevertheless it must not be assumed that pluralism is relativism.
Between authoritarianism and relativism exists the proper area of
critical value: the concrete universals, the materialistic essences, the
collective ideology of which all critics are parts and none of them
wholes, the area between mind and art, head and hand. It is a solu–
tion which the mystery novel had prepared for us, but which it took
an analytic philosopher to make clear. For, as Margaret Macdonald
has shown, true criticism is really a form of art itself. The function
of the critic is not to decide value, but to exhibit it, to fuse the
detective story with literary criticism, to return to that unity which
has been lost since the Renaissance, the unity of critical detectibility.
This is, after all, the direction in which modem criticism has
been moving, and the suggestion is a dual one. On the one hand,
murder mysteries such as
The Long Goodbye
could use a more cogent
critical vocabulary. When the detective declares, "I thought it was
tripe," he could perhaps substitute vegetable for animal metaphors,
conveying a more organic assertion. And in works of criticism dealing
with concrete analysis, the critics might recognize themselves as the
audience to which Eliot referred when asked about the meaning of
The Confidential Clerk:
"I want the audience to make up its own
mind."
