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ture or by the general culture. Maurice Blanchot speaks of sculpture as
setting out "a rebellious space in the center of space." So there is no con–
tradiction in saying that the stance of art is dissent and that it is
simultaneously creative, a force of invention and wonder. Sometimes an
artist's delight in exercising his fictive and creative capacity is such that it
is hard to see in the work any discontent or resentment. When I first saw
the windows of Matisse's chapel at Vence, I found it hard to believe that
he was doing anything but celebrating a world in which faith, color, and
form were as elemental as earth, air, fire, and water. But there is still a
critical intent at work. If Matisse were content with nature or the general
culture, he would pay it the tribute of imitation. That is not enough. An
artist's mind wants more. In his Preface to the 1815 edition of his poems,
Wordsworth speaks of the poetic imagination as "the mind in its activity,
for its own gratification" presenting objects and events not as they literally
are but as the writer chooses to see them. In
King Lear
the person who
gathers samphire is not hanging on the cliffs of Dover, but Shakespeare's
imagination chooses to think of him as so hanging. The choice maintains
Shakespeare's imagination at a distance from what it sees, and aside from
it. There is a certain ironic disposition at work.
This is to say that the general stance of the most serious modem
writing has been critical, interrogative, and ironic. Thomas Mann said
that the motive of modem literature was to enable people to escape from
the middle class. That's not quite true. The stronger motive is to enjoy
middle-class satisfactions while imagining still better relations within that
class, better in the sense of more flexible, more susceptible to one's desire,
one's vision. Kenneth Burke spoke of literature as trying to prevent soci–
ety from becoming too completely, too hopelessly, itself The law of the
imagination is: when in Rome, do as the Greeks. I would revise that
formula to read: when in Rome, do as the Romans if you must, but oth–
erwise think and feel and desire as the Greeks. R. P. Blackmur said that
the true business of literature, as of all intellect, critical or creative, is to
remind the powers that be, simple and corrupt as they are, of the turbu–
lence they have to control. The imagination of that turbulence is the
burden of modem literature, as in Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment,
Conrad's
Heart of Darkness,
and Eliot's "The Waste Land."
I shall come to this another way by saying that insofar as modern lib–
eral democratic societies are predicated upon the Enlightenment, a
scientific view of reality, and some version of pragmatism or positivism,
literature is disposed to question the orthodoxy those values entail. I take
it that the Enlightenment was a secular translation of a theology of re–
demption, and that while much was lost or discarded in the translation,
the ambition of redemption was retained in a mundane form and sub-
