BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
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Silence is Yeats's word for "the perfection of standing aside" - Blackmur's
phrase for the quality of Marianne Moore's poems - which artists and
men and women of distinction choose against the mundane, noisy per–
fections that satisfy them in other moods and for the most part. It
corresponds, in Yeats's
A Vision,
to the inward gaze, as opposed to the
external or administrative glance. Julius Caesar, according to Yeats's
fancy, had his silences and gazes.
I am merely listing a few of the forms taken by the literary imagina–
tion in its silent critique of the general culture. Another one is what
Henry James called operative irony. In the Preface to "The Lesson of the
Master," James recalls that some readers asked him where on earth his su–
persubtle
fry,
his Neil Paradays and Hugh Verekers, were to be found .
Conceding the case, James nonetheless said he wasn't at all abashed:
On going over these things I see, to our critical edification, exactly why - which
was because I was able to plead that my postulates, my animating presences, were
all,
to their great enrichment, their intensification of value, ironic; the strength of
applied irony being surely in the sincerities, the lucidities, the utilities that stand
behind it. When it's not a campaign, of a sort, on behalf of the something better
(better than the obnoxious, the provoking object) that blessedly, as is assumed,
might
be, it's not worth speaking of But this is exactly what we mean by opera–
tive irony. It implies and projects the possible other case, the case rich and
edifying where the actuality is pretentious and vain. So it plays its lamp.... How
can one consent to make a picture of the preponderant futilities and vulgarities
and miseries of life without the impulse to exhibit as well from time to time, in
its place, some fine example of the reaction, the opposition or the escape?
What one must do, according to James, is "to
create
the record, in default
of any other enjoyment of it; to imagine, in a word, the honorable, the
producible case." The possible other case, I assume he meant, is one not
produced on the whole by the general culture: it is, perhaps, the person
who most signally embodies emotions and qualities likely to be su p–
pressed by that culture - wonder, awe, astonishment, a conviction of the
sublime or the abysmal, beyond the reach of accredited knowledge.
