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dance together in
A Primer of Ignorance,
each set "radically imperfect"
alone, and Blackmur choreographs them ambitiously to embrace litera–
ture, politics, society. He notes, for example, the tendency of Americans
to use technique so well as to leave out the informing subject - this in
connection with his impressions of American ballet. Yet this tendency
seems designed to counter the force in twentieth-century letters that gives
precedence to thought
arising out of the senses,
rather than to thought
out of the reason. Thus one set of terms - those related to the repre–
sentative imagination - rebel, and instead of seeking their control in
reason, look to their own activity for control. Poetry in the twentieth
century becomes an irregular metaphysics, and subsequently a secret
craft, the novel a "technique of trouble" and sciences like psychology
"mistake the conditions of our struggle for its object." Conversely, poli–
tical agencies administer without governing, and society becomes a
catacomb without spirit. History is a creative lie. The intellectual, like
Adams, finds intellectual "harmony" in the twelfth-century world; the
artist, James, is lost in "the country of the blue," for which there is no
equivalent in reason. Artist and intellectual are makers of rival creations.
Alone, reason constricts; alone, imagination is chaos.
'On
the one
hand, prison, on the other, "painful unlearning" and "a special kind of
illiteracy." So regular is BIackmur's sense of provisionality, however, that
even in the supreme partnership of art the two generate more uncertain–
ty. Even if in his essays one feels that intelligible terms tend finally to
dissolve like sugar in hot tea, Blackmur himself survives the momentary
sense of his terms. He quotes Ophelia's "To have seen what I have
seen, see what I see" with special pertinence: art rises beyond intelligi–
bility into a kind of stunned, yet clear, awareness. This is why two of
Blackmur's favorite sayings are Croce's "art gives theoretic form to our
feelings," and Maritain's "art bitten by poetry longs to be freed from
the control of the reason." What else is this but art acting as reason
(Croce) and art acting as imagination (Maritain)? And when in his
essays he works the two maxims together, it is criticism behaving like
art. Between them then Poulet and Blackmur show us life translated into
literature. One, life's resolution into a book of world consciousness, fully
immanent and always moving toward certain realization; the other, life's
irresolution in essays that mock realization and represent the stutters
of our imperfections. James said that the house of fiction has many
windows, to which we add that criticism has many eyes with which
to see; its unique poignancy is that criticism sees from
this
side of
fiction, though in reading Blackmur and Poulet we cannot often be sure.
Edward W. Said
