OBSESSED CRITICS
601
Castorp in
The Magic Mountain .
One effect of taking mescaline, Henri
Michaux has recently testified. . . .
And so on into the night. It is one thing to have an organic sensibility,
to apprehend that correspondences between the outward and physical
forms of things often mark inward and spiritual similarities; it is another
to be at the
s~e
time incapable of seeing that certain words, images
or ideas which resemble each other from a verbal or mechanical point
of view are ,in fact incommensurate.
By
the time one finishes Mr. Levin's
book one has lost all confidence in his formless organicism, and feels
that his conception, which initially seemed quite plausible, has been in–
flated out of existence. A literary critic is not a Hegel; his job is not
to tie up the world in a pink ribbon-or a black and white one for
that matter-to describe everything as a function of everything else.
And had Hegel himself read Mr. Levin's book he would, I think, have
found himself once more in that night in which all cows are black.
Although Mr. Levin's failure is a failure of intellect, his book, un–
like those of Mr. Kenner and Mr. Geismar, is not solely a curiosity. He
does make interesting comments, but these are mostly by-blows and
incidental, bits of insights that fly out from the whirring centrifuge of
his method. Could he have managed to suppress about half of his "evi–
dence," could he have restrained the pedantic impulse to set down
everything that came to mind, to drop names as
if
they were hot po–
tatoes, and to make as many associations as possible all the time ; could
he have remembered that great literature is not written by dormitory
metaphysicians, that its systems are partial, fragmentary, full of cross–
purposes and contradictions, and that criticism is neither a detective
agency nor a census bureau; could he have done all this it is con–
ceivable that his particular intellectual gifts might not have drawn
him so irretrievably into the failures of method and manner which make
his book so finally unenlightening.
Though these three books represent the outer limits of American
criticism and are so different from each other, they share one quality:
they are all excessive and extravagant. Each suffers from an unbalancing
commitment to a radically distorted and distorting point of view–
from an obsession. And the very fact of such books expresses something
about our society and culture. We are still, as Matthew Arnold said of
us seventy-five years ago, a provincial and decentralized society, a so–
ciety without a center of cultural intelligence and sanity; and that Mr.
Levin should write his deeply eccentric and provincial book from a
"center" like Harvard is exactly to the point. It is not that our kind
of culture, out of its violent oppositions and devastating obsessions, can-
