468
PARTISAN REVIEW
What all of these critics have in common is their tendency to make
the text the site for a series of self-dramatizing imaginative associa–
tions and flights of fancy. It may make for a kind of high drama, but
such criticism ultimately directs our attention more to the perfor–
mance of the critic than to that of the artist he explicates.
As Fried's pun involving explosiveness in the shooting painting
suggests, it is the critic who is doing all of the associating and con–
necting in these passages , not Eakins or his works. That is why such
adjectival pressure has to be exe rted by Fried . That is why his argu–
ment becomes so rhetorical. Precisely because the work is not au–
thorizing his imaginative investment in it, he must make whatever
interest that will accrue. Fried does it all. The figure of the
distraught woman in
The Gross Clinic
is disfigured and made illegible
only by Fried's treatment of it- not by Eakins's. In
Will Schuster
the
gun is pointedly
not
firing, and the moment commemorated is em–
phatically
not
one that refe rs to its explosiveness, only Fried's pun
does. (The painting is, in fact, about the patience , prec ision , and
balance involved in stalking game and aiming at it-about a state of
concentration and meditative poise - almost the opposite of the con–
notations evoked by Fried's overly ingenious reading.)
While Fried ponders the "extremity of affect" he encounters in
Eakins, what he doesn't realize is that the reader is probably ponder–
ing the "extremity of affect" he encounters in Fried's own descrip–
tions. Why is this critic so overwrought? Why is he so committed to
a rhetoric of violence, distortion, and anarchy even where it is ob–
viously inappropriate - not only in
Will Schuster,
but also in the
domestic interior scenes, tonally closer to being meditative than to
being "anarchic" in any respect, which he alludes to at the end of the
previous quotation? (Even if his essay was originally commissioned
to appear in
Representations,
there must be more to account for Fried's
rhetoric than the current fashionableness of such violences of lan–
guage and reference in "advanced" intellectual journals .)
However, Fried's personal psychohistory is less important than
the larger critical issues his work raises. In the second half of the
book the commentary turns to the work of Stephen Crane. Fried's
approach to literature is , if anything, even more tendentious and
loaded than his approach to painting. Consider his comments on the
following passage from
The Red Badge
oj
Courage
in which Henry
Fleming encounters the body of a fallen soldier and notes , in Crane's
characteristically chilly and ironic way , the touching pathos of death
and of our bodies:
