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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the Emersonian tradition, that is, of American writing before Frost,
which also means in part that American tradition which consists in
disparaging tradition. This done, it might be possible to make a
longish leap and attack Frost as an enemy of rationality and liberalism
(which he may personally have been); but to do that might well be, in
Leavis's phrase, to be "abstracting improperly," for it would be
to
ignore too much else, complicating and enriching, in Frost's poems.
It
would not, however, be "abstracting improperly" to notice that his
opinions and prejudices, still more his provocative stances, sometimes
work within the poems
to
corrupt their feeling, to establish a surface of
irritability and discomfiting aggression.
My second example concerns the work of the extremely talented
novelist V.S. Naipaul. As a rough approximation we can say that his
recent novels return obsessively to delusions and corruptions of so–
called Third World countries emerging from colonial status but
without adequate social or intellectual preparation, without either
industrial infrastructure or liberal tradition, for becoming modern,
more-or-Iess free societies. A peculiar blend of indigenous brutality,
decadent radical rhetoric, and nationalist frustration is portrayed by
Naipaul in a way that one may judge
to
be honest, even liberating, in
its corrosiveness. Yet one remains uneasy. That "peculiar completeness
of response" Leavis has called for demands that we fret a little about
the seeming obsessiveness, perhaps vindictiveness, with which Naipaul
portrays these delusions and corruptions. There is an absence of any
notes of hope, transcendence, asserted positives: there is perhaps an
illicit, unacknowledged emotion in his assault. Is it "abstracting
improperly" to ask, as I did in a recent review of Naipaul's most recent
and very brilliant novel, whether an ideological irritability makes his
corrosiveness, for all its value, a little suspect? I am not sure, but I know
the question presen ts itself.
In the case of Frost, the critic is confronted with difficulties
concerning the "character" of the poet, not as a historical person but
as a voice rendered in his poems. In the case of Naipaul, the critic is
confronted with difficulties concerning the relation of politics to the
novel, ideology to art.
If
there is a theory which can dispose of these
problems for me, I shall be glad to receive it. My own experience, for
whatever it is worth, tells me that I have to rely on, for whatever
they
are worth, my resources of tact, sensibility, hearing, and sympathy.
But do not we believe that the unexamined life is not worth
living-especially we critics who declare ourselves the great examiners?
