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particular text when he is really concerned with it only as illustration,
it is even more to the point that Warren has learned from his long
practice in the classroom to concentrate on the actual matter in hand in
a way that emphasizes his own affection for a text rather than pride in
the "method."
It is tempting to show in how many particular insights Warren has
shown himself freer and more ranging than his school. Nevertheless,
he does belong to a "school"-to a point of view, a doctrine, he shares
with many Southerners and traditionalists. He sees the experience of
modern man as one that cries out for the Christian vision of the world
as sacramental, not accidental and meaningless. Warren states his own
philosophy in a passage on Conrad: ". . . the last wisdom is for man
to realize that though his values are illusions, the illusion is necessary,
is infinitely precious... in the end, his only truth." He says the motif in
Conrad's fiction is the "true lie"-that which we believe because we
must, not because we can.
In reading Warren's fiction and poetry I often have the sense that
this theme of "the true lie," of the necessary contradiction between
man's nature and man's values, offers an image of stoical struggle that is
necessary to Warren. He refuses the sanctions of orthodox Christianity,
which proclaim spiritual values as absolute truth, and the naturalistic
interpretation of values as pragmatically necessary to man. For Warren
values are something that man
insists
on heroically and arbitrarily in the
face of everything. There is no
system
of values that he believes in;
there is only the last-ditch faith in values themselves as they emerge
through the activity of literature. At the heart of literature is the es–
sential faculty of poetic imagination, which works through symbols
that are recollections of our ancient connection with a spiritual world.
What Warren does in his work is actually to make the Christian sen–
sibility, the awareness of "order" and "truth," an extension of the literary
imagination. His struggle, the special struggle that goes on in all his cre–
ative work and divides it between introspective rhetoric and the night–
mare of a totally corrupt society, is a peculiar one. Warren is really
concerned only with literature (one reason why he is so strong a critic),
but he seems to me beset by a need to keep alive the "sacramental vision"
as a tragic discrepancy. Literature thus carries the burden of reminding
man of his true values. It is as if Warren associated his "sacramental
vision" with the classic power of literature itself-he writes like a man
who has isolated this power in literature and given it a name. My
complaint against this procedure is that it makes the great imaginative
novelists he discusses, Conrad and Faulkner, sound much more noble,
