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PARTISAN REVIEW
emotions which immediately dissipate upon the conclusion of the
experience. " This is an idea which I have seen expressed again and
again in one form or another by observers of popular culture, few of
whom, however, seem to me to recognize the full implications for
criticism of what they are saying.
If
entertainment is the sort of impermanent, self-consuming
experience that most of us would, I think, agree it is, and if, further–
more, the experience is entirely contained within known boundaries,
then what role is left for criticism? As we have known and practiced it
criticism has been in very large part the separation of the enduring
from the transitory-in some modest sense criticism itself is an element
of a criticized work's endurance, the pointing out of the new and its
relation to the known, and the analysis or explication precisely of how
the work of art extends past one's immediate experience of it to enter a
dim~nsion
of permanence, so that it exists in fact as a source of relief
from time and its erosions. I don't mean to suggest that these things are
all criticism does, only that I can' t imagine a criticism worthy of the
name that doesn't do them.
The notion of art as permanence, as existing somehow outside of
time, contains, I know, an implication of the museum, together with a
sort of curatorial function for criticism, and indeed a certain type of
scholarly criticism does approach its subject in that way. One of the
objections to "elitist" art is just that it creates a separation between
action and contemplation, so that it is not of the moment and resides,
damningly, in "another world." I believe it does reside there, in a way,
purposefully, savingly, but I am not defending that here. It may well
be
that entertainment is destined to replace by its swift, unpreservable
actions the repertoire of solid, stationary objects to which high art
keeps adding. My point here is simply that entertainment resists
criticism, at any rate criticism as we have known it.
To try to analyze the structures or motifs of a work of entertain–
ment (in the definition I've given of it) is to be faced with something
whose structures and motifs pass out of existence as soon as they
display themselves. Or, more accurately, they pass into the realm of the
psychological or sociological, more broadly the historical. All that can
be anal yzed or even discussed are the ways in which the emotions raised
by entertainment are in fact raised; nothing can really be said about the
quality of the emotions, or, as is crucial to criticism, the relationship of
these emotions to thought. I would define consciousness as just that–
thought and emotion in relationship-and I said earlier that entertain–
ment leaves consciousness in the same condition in which it found it.
By any definition I can imagine art changes consciousness or adds to it,
