COMMENT
297
My conclusion is strange, and takes place on a darkling plain.
Literature, to come into being at all, must call on the imagination;
imagination is in fact the flesh and blood of literature; but at the
same time imagination is the very force which struggles to snuff the
redemptive corona. So a redemptive literature, a literature that
interprets and decodes the world, beaten out for the sake of
humanity, must wrestle with its own body, with its own flesh and
blood, with its own life. Cell battles cell. The corona flickers,
brightens, flares, clouds, grows faint. The
yetzer ha-ra,
the Evil
Impulse, fills its cheeks with a black wind, hoping to blowout the
redemptive corona; but at the last moment steeples of light spurt up
from the corona, and the world with its meaning is laid open to our
astonished sight.
In that steady interpretive light we can make distinctions; we
can see that one thing is not interchangeable with another thing; that
not everything is the same; that the Holocaust is dift'erent, God
knows, from a corncob . So we arrive, at last, at the moral purpose of
literature: to reject the blur of the "universal"; to distinguish one life
from another; to illumine diversity; to light up the least grain of
being, to show how it is concretely individual, particularized from
any other; to tell, in all the marvel of its singularity, the separate
holiness of the least grain.
Literature is the recognition of the particular.
For that, one needs the corona.
