PARTISAN REVIEW
441
and rootless iconographies, satirised by Kenyon when he jokes about a
possible American equivalent for the fountain of Trevi - the ancient
deities pulled down, and thirty-one spouts, one for each state, pouring
into one vast basin, symbolising "the grand reservoir of national pros–
perity" (XVI). Yet Rome repr:esents that heritage of sin, the loss of
natural joy, which, it is suggested, though as usual the suggestion is
contested, may make of history a fortunate fall, from which "we might
rise to a far loftier paradise." (L).
For the classic of the modern
imperium
cannot be, as the Bible
had been, and Virgil too, a repository of certain, unchanging truths.
Truth in art - itself a dangerous and perhaps ambiguously evil activ–
ity -will have the hestitancy, the instability, of the attitude struck by
the new world, provincial and unstable itself, towards the corrupt ma–
turity of the metropolis. This is why one cannot even try to read Haw–
thorne, that great inventor of American attitudes
to
the metropolitan
past, as one is still urged to read Virgil. To say that the meaning of
The Scarlet Letter,
or of
The House of the Seven Gables,
is the mean–
ing Hawthorne meant, is pointless; his texts, with all their varying,
fading voices, their controlled lapses into possible inauthenticity, are
meant as invitations to co-production on the part of the reader.
In this sense it may
be
said that the texts of the once innocent new
empire in the west of necessity at once lose their innocence; accom–
modations needed by the old classics after a lapse of years are required
by these modern classics from every reader, from the very beginning of
their existence. This had to be so, if there were to be a new-world art,
which, itself reticent and opaque, could hint at the true relation be–
tween the old
imperium
and the new.
By this route, we reach the modern classic, which offers itself only
to readings which are encouraged by its failure to give a definitive ac–
count of itself. Unlike the old classic, which was expected to provide
answers, this one poses a virtually infinite set of questions. And when
we have learnt how to ask some of the questions we may discover that
the same kinds of question can also be put
to
the old classic. The mod–
ern classic, and the modern way of reading the classic, are not to be
separated.
