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LIONEL TRILLIN6
this hope. His disgust was aroused by this novel's assumption, that man
would be better for a rationally organized society, by which was me.ant,
of course, a society organized in the service of pleasure. Dostoevsky's
reprobation of this idea, begun in
Notes From Underground
J
reached
its climax in Ivan Karamazov's poem of The Grand Inquisitor, in
which again, but this time without the brilliant perversities of the
earlier work, the disgust with the specious good of pleasure
is
the
ground for the affirmation of spiritual freedom.
I have taken the phrase "specious good" from a passage in
Wallace Fowlie's little book on Rimbaud, in which Mr. Fowlie
discusses what he calls "the modern seizure and comprehension of
spirituality." Without evasion, Mr. Fowlie identifies a chief character–
istic of our culture which critics must inevitably be conscious of and
yet don't like to name.
If
we are to be aware of the spiritual
intention of modern literature, we have to get rid of certain nineteenth–
century connotations of the word spiritual, all that they may imply
to us of an over-refined and even effeminate quality, and have
chiefly in mind what Mr. Fowlie refers to when he speaks of a
certain type of saint and a certain type of poet and says of them that
"both the saint and the poet exist through some propagation of
destructive violence." And Mr. Fowlie continues: "In order to
discover what is the center of themselves, the saint has to destroy the
world of evil, and the poet has to destroy the world of specious good."
The destruction of what is considered to be specious good is
surely one of the chief literary enterprises of our age. Whenever in
modern literature we find violence, whether of represented act or of
expression, and the insistence upon the sordid and the disgusting, and
the insult offered to the prevailing morality or habit of life, we may
assume that we are in the presence of the intention to destroy specious
good, that we are being confronted by that spirituality, or the
aspiration toward it, which subsists upon violence against the specious
good.
The most immediate specious good that a modem writer will
seek to destroy is, of course, the habits, manners, and "values" of
the bourgeois world, and not merely because these associate them–
selves with much that is bad, such as vulgarity, or the exploitation
of the disadvantaged, but for other reasons as well, because they
