638
PETER BROOKS
in regard to the wild and new, and at the same time this newness may
seem to imply an order. Conrad and Faulkner finally use a language
in which "the suggestion of order is maintained only because it is nearly
lost in the richness of the imaginative experience which the metaphor
presents." But, claims Guetti, to achieve this is to insist more and more
on the unreality of the ordering and cognitive function of metaphor,
hence of art. Metaphor becomes provisional and even "frivolous," a pro–
cess of
as
if
thinking, a self-delusive reconstruction of the illusion of order.
I t is here that Guetti's complex, uncompromising argument becomes
both most suggestive and most open to question, and I regret that he
chooses to end it at this point. The next step, it seems to me, would be
an interrogation of the validity of literature as a secular mime of
incarnation and transcendence: a desperate attempt to create tran–
scendence with symbol, which is in fact (since no transcendent realm,
source of true symbols, really exists) metaphor which has achieved a
state of totality and independence, a "monad" which may fail as metaphor
but does have a cognitive function in that it has organized phenomena
toward
a "transcendence" which is in fact the work of art itself. Guetti's
argument, like Kaplan's and Girard's, must at the last return us to a
central problem in Romantic and Symbolist aesthetics; and to Melville,
Conrad and Faulkner would have to be added Yeats and Mallarme,
Shelley and Rousseau. I am quick to add that Guetti's book is by no
means undermined because he has not done so; it is perhaps more
persuasive for his statement of the problem where it has least clearly been
seen, in terms of works that are not so obviously open to the charges of
hermetic aestheticism and narcissism.
Yet it is remarkable that ultimately almost all these critics - Guetti,
Kaplan and Girard directly (if the last rather perversely), Friedman
much less so - point beyond what they achieve, or even conceive to be
their tasks, to an interrogation of the modem imagination in its act
of consciousness and creation in a world of untranscendent phenomena,
and pose implicitly the question of the role this imagination has assigned
to itself and its productions. Hence they imply essential questions about
the critical act in its relation to the creations of imagination. "The Age
of Suspicion has come into the world," wrote Stendhal; suspicion now
seems to be investing criticism, and this can only be a good sign, for, as
Guetti's book most decisively suggests, what we need is not more exegesis
or even analysis, but a questioning of language itself, and beyond lan–
guage, of imagination and what it makes: some "meta-critiseism" of our
imaginative consciousness.
Peter Brooks
