94
PARTISAN REVIEW
art
is a way of thinking, that is different from and in many ways superior to
abstract thinking . In any case, it is true more often than not that , in retro–
spect, revolutionaries revolutionize something other than what they thought
they did. For example, the attempts of Williams and Olson to explain their
metric never makes sense to me unless I think of them as untecognized
transition from verse that is largely oral to verse that is largely visual ("con–
crete' ')-the opposite ofwhat they are saying .
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Though I am not concerned here with literary theory, I must stress the
importance of the kind of working theory that influences the process of
composition . There are three theories that, in modern history, have gener–
ally governed what an artist, consciously or nonconsciously , thinks he is
doing in his work: roughly in order of their appearance-though they are
also obviously coexistent-they are imitation, expression, illumination .
There is also a fourth idea of composition which is beginning to crystallize
and to dominate the work of artists who are in touch with their contem–
poraneity, that I will call generation. The relation of these theories is not
successive but metabolic: each digests the preceding way of organizing
things into its own particular way of organizing things . Imitation is the most
pervasive and most deeply embedded theory of art in our culture (though in
many others it is not), particularly for the novel. It's hard to avoid . Let's
take the example of two good novelists (the comments of whom I consider
here, I want to add, do not necessarily reflect their creative practice) .
William Gass talks about fiction as an addition to reality, and Gilbert
Sorrentino talks about fiction as invention. Both of these terms I would
characterize as having to do with art as generation, but both writers seem at
the same time encumbered in their thinking by undigested leftovers from
other theories . Gass thinks of fiction as a model of the world-an idea itself
modeled , probably, on the abstract schemes of reality developed in the exact
sciences. But the idea of a mode! reintroduces the schizoid split between art
and reality that one gets rid of in speaking about art as an addition to reality
(as Gass does elsewhere). A model is a model of something else that is
"real." A model is not real. The real is the subject of the model. The model
is the form we give to the subject. This is basically a subtler kind of imitation
theory in which continuity between art and experience is broken because art
is seen as a mode essentially different from experience . One of the conse–
quences of such theories is the distinction between form and content: form
is justifiably seen as merely a way of formulating content, rather than as the
creation of content, that is, as addition to reality . Another consequence is a
literature that cannot believe in its own reality and must have constant
recourse to irony and self-parody, a literature that has lost confidence in
itself: Barth's "literature of exhaustion," or what critic Jerome Klinkowitz
