632
EDWARD W. SAID
only primer of [our, his] ignorance." Intimacy, first of all, with
Anni
Mirabiles,
the literature of 1921-1925: with the sensuality of its poetry,
with the absence
in
it of "predictive form," and the lack in it of a recog–
nizable principle of composition. The writers he deals with are fully ap–
propriated by his sensibility, and certainly his knack for inventing quirky,
yet superb, titles for his essays and unparalleled epitomes for his authors
is a sign of how assimilated modern literature had become to his idiom.
In subsequent essays he plays with problems of the intellect and imagina–
tion in modern society (the logos in the catacomb) and with the prevail–
ing symptoms of the American pathology. Henry Adams and Henry
J
ames are poignant witnesses to the "expense of greatness" in America.
The concluding paragraph of Blackmur's warm essay on Allan Tate
shows Blackmur at his generous, and epitomizing, best. There the achieve–
ment of a man of letters "unwilling to surrender his intelligence or his
sense of the human condition as its chief regular informing agent," is
turned into a symphony of interweaving themes associated with Tate's
work. What especially characterizes the passage (which is far too long
to quote) is Blackmur's use of "terms," words that are the focus of
Blackmur's criticism and the gestures of his mind: they fix the contours
of his reason and imagination even as they describe the object (in this
case Tate) of his critique. For, he wrote in "My Critical Perspective,"
published in Japan in 1959 and not found in the present volume,
intellectual formulation is the great convenience for ordering the
experience of the mind, and the cause of the imperfections of the
mind and even greater convenience for stepping
in
the guise of
generalization or hypothesis when there is not enough experience
to go around; which is how you lead from the known to the un–
known in any field, I suppose. Or again, if either art or criticism,
if either imagination or intellect, were relatively perfect, we should
have no trouble and no problem and the staring inadequacies of
either in respect to the other would long since have disappeared.
The staring inadequacies of imagination in respect to intellect secure
Blackmur's terms: they appear then to belong inevitably together. To
theorizing intellect belong administration, convention, formulation and
bourgeois humanism (defined as "the treasure of residual reason in live
relation to the madness of the senses"); to representative imagination
belong the faculties of "incarnating" the madness of the senses, "the lap
of the actual," the "under-momentum" of life that gives gesture to lan–
guage. Action is common to both reason and imagination, and
in
art
each ought to borrow from the other. Technique is imagination aspiring
to reason; form is reason aspiring to imagination. Knowledge is "a fall
from the paradise of undifferentiated sensation." The two sets of terms
