FORM AND HALLUCINATION
645
formel
has been tried out as a term to describe the latest painting.
Beneath these ironies there is the pressing circumstance that
artists in our time have become increasingly sensible of the other–
world of form as a check on, or distortion of, experience.
"Con~
jormism,"
significant word, manifests itself in the first instance
in the use of language. The writer must choose in every sentence
between the automatism of his craft and his sense of reality.
Perhaps the resistance of art to form is heightened by the
presence of the mass arts, in which the powers of the traditional
forms are employed for aims which artists no longer recognize
as their own.
The mass arts are "formal" through and through- it is only
the ambiguous advanced art that
has
been willing to sacrifice
form to reality. There are, of course, critics who maintain that
aesthetic forms have taken flight or disintegrated in modern
democratic society- they like to think of present-day civilization,
and particularly in America, as wallowing in a morass of fact.
Yet too much reality is less the issue than the desire of these
critics to substitute the fantasies of some other"period-Greek,
say, or Renaissance-for the prevailing ones. For the mountain
of fables and images which the public absorbs daily, and which
confronts it with its conception of itself and of the world, has one
unfailing characteristic: obedience to traditional concepts of
form. A short story in the
Saturday Evening Post,
a Western on
TV, has a beginning, a middle and an end; its characters are
social types recognizable from earlier literature to a lesser degree
than "from life"; the action, however, superficially grounded, is
motivated by issues of good-bad, honest-dishonest, hero-coward,
that is, by conventions of morality and manliness. A poem in the
mass media will be constructed in an established verse form
(if
not in the Free Verse of 40 years ago) and develop a theme more
or less "universaL" In short, this stuff, which is disavowed as art
but of which our dream of life is made, draws at
all
points on
art's illusory powers and without those powers it could not exist.
An essay on Russian Socialist Realism in last winter's
Dis-
