COMMENT
295
in the stream that comes to us from Greece, through Walter Pater
and Emerson: art for its own sake, separated from the moral life. He
is mainly Greek.
For me, with certain rapturous exceptions, literature
is
the
moral life. The exceptions occur in lyric poetry, which bursts
shadowless like flowers at noon, with the eloquent bliss almost of
nature itself, when nature is both benevolent and beautiful. For the
rest-well, one discounts stories and novels that are really
journalism; but of the stories and novels that mean to be literature,
one expects a certain corona of moral purpose: not outright in the
grain of the fiction itself, but in the form of a faintly incandescent
envelope around it. The tales we care for lastingly are the ones that
touch on the redemptive-not, it should be understood, on the
guaranteed promise of redemption, and not on goodness, kindness,
decency, all the usual virtues . Redemption has almost nothing to do
with virtue, especially when the call to virtue is prescriptive or
coercive; rather, it is the singular idea that is the opposite of the
Greek belief in fate: the idea that insists on the freedom to change
one's life.
Redemption means fluidity; the notion that people and things
are subject to willed alteration; the sense of possibility; of turning
away from, or turning toward; of deliverance; the sense that we act
for ourselves rather than are acted upon; the sense that we are
responsible, that there is no
deus ex machina
other than the character
we have ourselves fashioned; above all, that we can surprise
ourselves. Implicit in redemption is amazement, marveling,
suspense, even the suspense of the didactic, wherein the next
revelation is about to fall. Implicit in redemption is everything
against the fated or the static: everything that hates death and harm
and elevates the life-giving-if only through terror at its absence.
Now I know how hazardous these last phrases are, how they
suggest philistinism, how they lend themselves to a vulgar call for an
"affirmative" literature in order to fulfill a moral mandate. I too
recoil from all that: the so-called "affirmative" is simpleminded,
single-minded, crudely explicit; it belongs either to journalism or to
piety or to "uplift."
It
is the enemy of literature and the friend of
coercion.
It
is, above all, a hater of the freedom inherent in story–
telling and in the poetry side of life. But I mean something else: I
mean the corona, the luminous envelope - perhaps what Henry
James meant when he said, "Art is nothing more than the shadow of
