FORM AND HALLUCINATION
doubt of Dostoevsky about the usefulness of art belongs to
3i
new
era in the history of art. Such a resistance to form-and it
is
the
complex development of this doubt and resistance that one has
in
mind in speaking of
modern
art- this resistance could not but
entail a conflict with art itself. In the past
100
years,
art
has
more and more conducted wars against its own nature under the
banners of various truths or of the search for experience.
If
Eliot,
anxiously restating art's need for "precise fitness of form and
matter," is typical of modern art, so, too, is Dostoevsky,
in
his
impatience with art's inability to "trace a certain fact of actual
life." One contemporary aims at restoring the rule of literature;
the aim of .another is to defeat literature
in
behaJf of revelation.
Often the motives crisscross
in
the same work-the documenta–
tion in
Moby
Dick
going against its "Elizabethan" soliloquies.
In addition, there is the work that makes a theme of the opposi–
tion of art and fact and derives new forms from the ambiguity;
Pirandello built his theater, as well
as
his philosophy, upon
this
contradiction.
3
Theoretically, Eliot stands at one pole, Dostoev–
sky
at the other; in their practice they move toward a common
center. Especially
in
his
early poems, Eliot is deep in the art of
anti-art in which the poetically unassimilated fact plays
<Ii
large
part; while Dostoevsky in one of his grandest novels provides a
serio-comic pantomime of art pretending to get rid of
itself.
Here is the opening of
The Raw Youth:
It has suddenly occurred to me to write out word for word all
that has happened to me during this last year, simply from
an in-
3. "We surrealists," wrote Dali in
The Conquest of the Irrati01l4l,
"are
not exactly artists, nor are we exactly real men of science . . . like the
sturgeon we are carnivorous fish who swim as it were between two waten
[nager entre deux eaux,
which also means "run with the hare and hunt
with the hounds"], the cold water of art and the warm water of science,
and it is precisely in that temperature and swimming against the
C\llTent
that the experience of our life and our foundation reaches those murky
depths, that moral and irrational hyperlucidity which can only
be
pro–
duced in the climate of Neronian osmosis." Quoted in
Salvador Dali
by
Fleur Cowles.
