Vol. 35 No. 4 1968 - page 632

1>32
PETER BROOKS
argues, engages the ethical perspective, and the highest expression of the
ethical is tragedy: Othello's final union with his own experience, Lear's
final communication with Cordelia and his human condition. Tragedy
is a product of a threatened or broken anthropocentric consciousness
which yet preserves the will to action: the tragic
agon
becomes possible
when the order of the universe has been challenged, but nothing new
has come to take its place; hence the conclusion of tragedy is not overtly
positive - no new meanings for life and the justice of God arrive - but
rather "an interrupted sentence, an active verb without its full predica–
tion." With the passage to Romantic naturalism, the will to action is
lost, the passive verb replaces the active, comedy and a stance of stoic
naturalism bury tragedy. Kaplan has located (quite rightly, I think)
the first decisive symptom of this passage in the novels of Flaubert: here
knowing and acting are hopelessly split; authorial consciousness about
life becomes an end in itself, a victory of the ironic perspective which
kills not only the possibility of action but also any real ethical engage–
ment. The demonstration is pursued through Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner,
Conrad and Lawrence - perhaps most perceptively in Conrad, whose
emphasis on "character" is seen as an heroic attempt to negate solipsism
and posit an implicit humanism.
Shades of Irving Babbit. Kaplan's values are indeed consciously
humanistic and traditional. This is precisely the strength of the book,
its commitment to a kind of Arnoldian high seriousness about literature
and its ethical engagement. Yet the quality of Kaplan's general specula–
tions is to a degree lost in his discussions of texts, which are far too much
commentary:
he has not found a methodological principle for locating
his theme in the texts, and the result is a barrage of words - allegoriza–
tion, in Northrop Frye's terms - around the text. The procedure is
common enough, but more and more inadequate the larger the synthetic
vision of the critic. Kaplan's book in fact poses with clarity a problem
common to many such studies, where the ambition and richness of the
overall structure or vision is betrayed by a technique of exegesis which
remains faithful to a fragmented treatment of discrete novels one after
another: where commentary - whose language, choices and exclusions
depend on the synthesis - seems arbitrary to the novel taken in its
autonomy; and the autonomy of the novels seems to subvert the syn–
thesis and its language. Doesn't someone with Kaplan's concerns need
a methodological principle which will allow him to reform all his discrete
novels (and authors) into a larger structure, a sort of "meta-novel"
which will reveal the essential constituents of the passive voice? Fried–
man, reading novels from the point of view of their endings, comes much
closer to holding all the elements of his subject in a dynamic totality.
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