GORKY AND HISTORY
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Goodman questions what "right time" means-going along with the
rationalizing effort and shifting at the moment when that way had
been collectively exhausted). Thus Gorky's history was "exemplary."
But the important thing is that
in both phases,
Gorky was responding to
historical actuality with historical consciousness and intention.
Goodman makes much of my inability to "unite the two strands"
of history and art in Gorky's career. One may gather from the above
that no such uniting was necessary, since there was no separation–
again, the problem is Goodman's, not mine. Gorky's career was linked
simultaneously to political and social history and to esthetic experi–
ment by the problem of
location.
The drama of this refugee from war
and from famine is entirely a drama, almost a saga, of self-placement;
in this drama all of his intellectual and emotional powers came into
play.
The consciousness of being stuck with, or in, history is simply out–
side of Goodman's comprehension. For him, as we have seen, the
actual historical moment is unreal or unserious, and to feel hedged in
by this unreality or triviality is to be the victim of an illusion that
needs to be translated into a more basic symbolism of traps,
e.g.,
the
womb.
But how can one who denies or displaces Gorky's anxious conscious–
ness grasp the tension of his thought? Even if Goodman were right
about history, his impatience with determinism would make him wrong
about Gorky. Not that it is necessary to agree with the artist in his
feeling about history. But it is necessary to respect that feeling as a
fact and not brutally to substitute for it one's own ideas of what the
"real fact" is. After all, the critic has not, like the head doctor, been
called in to straighten anyone out to that extent.
Nor does the problem of self-location exist for Goodman. It did
exist, but Goodman long ago solved it to his own satisfaction. It is his
great creative feat, in fact, and the mark of his own pioneering intel–
ligence, that back in the thirties he consciously situated himself in a
Manhattan set within a combination of semi-real Nature and a fiction
of Athens, and that within this symbolically transformed environment
he established, discovered, or pretended to discover a "community" of
friends and disciples, the "humane discourse" about whom overlay the
"crazy details" of current history in
The Empire City.
But what Good–
man has done he cannot understand other people failing to do. Gorky,
with far fewer social, intellectual, symbolic and psychological resources,
had to keep searching for a spot, on the map and in the human world–
it was to this end that he sought to decipher the history of painting as
