FORM AND HALLUCINATION
651
taneous help the writer to grasp the reality of the people around
him? Particularly of people who are the opposite of disciplined
and spontaneous? To get to their truth, one should, it would
seem, take hold of the forms that beset their consciousness, rather
than cleanse oneself through immediacy.
If, however, there are misunderstandings
in
this
statement
(by James Baldwin)
,5
criticism shares the responsibility. Its way
has been either to lay siege to the writer
in
the name of technical
skill or to expound "content" as
if
form were a mere market
basket. But to miss the point about the meaning of form is,
in–
evitably, to miss it about fact. A critic who snubs a work for its
formal audacity, seeing the preoccupation with form as the anti–
thesis of the large "human" statement and as indicative of a
taste for distortion, will, most likely, shrink from the radical
events and personages of the age. Such a critic dreams of an
identity of beauty and truth; in practice he admires works and
ideas in which the edges of both have been softened.
Having once set itself against social hallucination, literature
will never recover its easy conscience of the epochs of "higher
truth." Literature will
go
on lying-history, however, has de–
prived it of the capacity to adore its lies. Literary truth, a contra–
diction in terms, has become a moral issue for every writer, but
the will to sincerity, which gives him such an "uneasy time," can–
not satisfy itself except by aesthetic means.
5. Fiction of the Fifties,
selected by Herbert Gold. Doubleday
&:
Co. New
York. 1959.
