ON PORNOGRAPHY
117
a necessary staple of literature. The exploration of ideas is as authentic
an aim of prose fiction, although the adoption of this aim severely
limits the representation of persons by the standards of novelistic
realism. The constructing or imaging of something inanimate, or of
part of the world of nature, is also a valid enterprise, and entails an
appropriate rescaling of the human figure. (The form of the pastoral
involves a mixture of both these aims: the depiction of ideas and
of nature. Persons are used only to the extent that they create a
certain kind of landscape, which is partly a stylization of "real"
nature and partly a neo-Platonic landscape of ideas.) And equally
valid as a subject for prose narrative are the extreme states of human
feeling and consciousness, those so peremptory that they exclude the
mundane flux of feelings
~nd
are only contingently linked with
concrete persons-which is the case with pornography.
One would never know, from the confident generalizations on
the "nature" of literature set forth by most American and English
critics, that a stirring debate on the issue had been going on now for
several generations.
As
Jacques Riviere wrote in the
NRF
in 1924,
"It seems to me that we are witnessing a very serious crisis in the
concept of what literature is." One of several responses to "the
problem of the possibility and the limits of literature," Riviere notes,
is
the marked tendency for "art (if even the word can still be kept)
to become a completely nonhuman activity, a supersensory function,
if
I may use that term, a sort of creative astronomy." I have cited
Riviere not because his essay, "Questioning the Concept of Litera–
ture," is particularly original or definitive or subtly argued, but
merely to recall to mind that group of radical notions about litera–
ture, which were almost critical commonplaces forty years ago in
European magazines comparable to
PR.
To this day, though, that ferment remains something alien, un–
assimilated and persistently misunderstood in the English and Amer–
ican world of letters: suspected as issuing from a collective cultural
failure of nerve, frequently dismissed as outright perversity or ob–
scurantism or creative sterility. The better English-speaking critics
could, however, hardly fail to notice how much great twentieth-cen–
tury literature subverts those ideas received from certain of the great
nineteenth-century novelists on the "nature" of literature which they
continue to echo in 1967. But the critics' awareness of genuinely new
literature was usually tendered in a spirit much like that of the rabbis
