534
PARTISAN REVIEW
their emotional underpinnings are bleak indeed. But with some exceptions,
this bleakness is highly mannered; it announces its alienation but gives us
"literature," and in the process casts a strange light on Rosenfeld's insist–
ence that fiction ought to live.
That contradiction brings Rosenfeld's criticism into focus as both
self-exhortation and evidence for analysis. The essays and stories seem to
constitute a dialogue in which Rosenfeld's potentialities are thrown into
relief by his difficulties and the deeply personal nature of his principles
made plain by his failure to realize them. That dialogue discloses the stiff
barriers to feeling behind the pleas for clarity and the emotional tremulous–
ness within the call for joy. Rosenfeld wrote best when his personal invest–
ment was easiest to disguise, where his subjects were sufficiently distant to
allow his meanings to come forward as objective criticism. In fiction, where
his themes were painfully personal, he offered up·style as a supplement to
directness, showing, in effect, just how literary neurotic conflict could be.
One suspects from Rosenfeld's fictional styles as well as from his enthusiasms
-Kafka, Gide, Hesse, Tolstoy, Y.L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem-that he
entertained the fantasy of being a writer in translation, a European who had
only been imperfectly rendered into English. He did find greater ease in
using distant modes and explained in an essay on Gide that" . . . the self is
naturally on guard, and to force down its guard is to violate its natural pos–
ture. But the imagination betrays the man; the more objective its work and
the more distant from the personality, the smaller the suspicion with which
it must contend and the greater the personal revelation."
The essence of Rosenfeld's criticism was just such an alertness to the
dialectics of telling and hiding, a heightened sensitivity to the tug and push
of a mind that it itself both subject and object. He always looked upon style
as the posture of self-encounter. Thus he analyzed Hemingway's famous
laconic style as a pretense toward absent feelings, a way of implying an
emotional life that did not exist but had to be invented by readers. "So
good are the credentials of this style," he observed, .. that we honor it with
our whole experience." But in fact, he added, the hard-boiled prose is not
just a stylized passionateness, that is, a way to imply feeling by withholding
it, but an acknowledgement that nothing is deeply felt.
The style covers up this starvation with the honorific leanness. Dividing
its skill between the suppression of feeling and the presentation of the
clear, clean impression for which Hemingway is famous, it becomes a
paraphrase of his philosophy, which considers emotion a disgraceful
epiphenomenon, and holds a man
to
be most human when he is most
like wood.
