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PARTISAN REVIEW
are the subjects of its attention will be doomed to trivialization. Fried
is right in arguing that these texts are imaginatively more unstable
and interesting than they have been given credit for being in the
past. The general uneasiness created by his criticism is not that it
ferrets out imaginative disturbances in texts that have none, but that
the disturbances it finds trivialize the texts in their own way as badly
as the realist criticism did in its way.
Put briefly, the expressive effects Fried describes in the works
he examines are alternately either too esoteric and technical or too
eccentric and extreme to be convincing. On the one hand, as his
concentration on the thematics of writing and drawing suggests , the
meanings he traces are frequently so involved with the merely tech–
nical or formal details of the production of a text that we are back in
the old dreariness of works of art being sterilely about themselves or
their own processes of being created. On the other hand, the
thematics of violence and disfigurement that he attributes to these
texts is so excessive and melodramatic that it makes them apparently
speak only to the most extreme or deranged states of feeling and
awareness in us. In either case the text is made irrelevant to the ex–
perience of ordinary life as it is li ved by nonartists (and by artists
when they are not actually creating their works). Or, to put it
another way, in being melodramatically trumped up with such
crude violences of expression and grand intensities of conflict ,
Eakins's and Crane's texts are not enriched but coarsened and made,
in fact, less interesting, less complex, less nuanced, less intricately
and subtly troubled than they actually are. The problem is that
Fried makes these texts too simple.
Fried's criticism lives in exciting extremes; he gives us stirring
contrasts, but almost nothing he describes in these works connects
with or impinges on the middling, ambiguous, ambivalent condi–
tions of our ordinary experience. As a result, what one loses sight of
in his analysis is precisely the complex human meanings he seems so
fervently to want to bring back into the works he examines.
If
Johns's talking about the "American heroism" represented by
The
Gross Clinic
insufficiently recognizes the unstable play of imaginative
energies and the conflicts of feeling present in the painting , Fried's
microscopic focus on the importance of the color red, the conceal–
ment of one surgeon's figure, and the figural distortions of the pa–
tient's body makes the disturbances he claims to see in the work seem
merely formal and therefore irrelevant to the practicalities of our
daily lives. In his tendentious discussions of the technical aspects of
