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PARTISAN REVIEW
James is referring to citizens of the country of the blue, people who
are exceptions to the general rule of muddle, hubbub, and noise. But it is
also a critical purpose of literature to present ordinary people far more
clearly and with more concentration of attention than they are likely to
receive from the multitude. In Raymond Carver's story "Fat," the wait–
ress who tells the story to her friend Rita and indirectly to us is imagined
even more completely than the fat man who is the occasion and the
theme of her story. The story she tells is about the fat man, but it's also
about storytelling, about bringing new perceptions and recognitions and
shadows into the world. The waitress doesn't claim to know the fat man's
story but she is sure that he has one. A man who refers to himself in the
royal plural - "We're not making you late, are we?" - and who thinks
that in most situations "there is no choice" is likely to have a story, even
though he doesn't tell it. At the end we know little more about him than
these fragments, whatever we make of them, but they are enough to
maintain him in his mystery, the strange radiance of it. How much more
we know about the waitress is a question of interpretation: we have to
decide what to make of her feeling that her life is going to change. "It is
August. My life is going to change. I feel it," she says. Why she feels it,
and why the feeling has been caused by her attending to the fat man, are
left in shadow; but the shadow is provocative to us precisely because the
general culture rarely acknowledges opacity and secrecy in its dealings
with people. The culture insists upon explanations, even if they are only
statistical or otherwise blunt.
So we come to what literature does: it imagines, it conjures, it sum–
mons things to come into existence for the first time, even if they
resemble in certain particulars things that have existed for ages. It may tell
what happened once, or what happens all the time, and if it is good it will
compose "the music of what happens." Literature gives what Benedetto
Croce and later Blackmur called the "theoretic form" of our experiences,
and it has particular care for experiences that are diversely customary,
convivial, and tragic. Some of these experiences may be archaic in rela–
tion to current axioms of cognition. Many of Seamus Heaney's poems, as
cases in point, bring old experience to the condition of form and rhythm.
The sequence of poems in
The Haw LAntern
called "Clearances" tells of
his mother folding sheets, peeling potatoes, doing the domestic chores:
the poems give these experiences their appropriate feeling, which is what
they have lacked. A community might well found itself upon such po–
ems; little stories from which a large story might be divined.
Not that literature is obliged to mime the ways of the world, the im–
peratives of "is" and "seems," or the privilege the general culture ascribes
to facts . Even when it seems to register a fact, literature makes it appear
