Literary Criticism and Political Action

...that is, giving us the illusion that, nevertheless, we really are dealing with ourselves...

...away with his right hand what he gives with his left...

...The scholar-critic, working within ideas of order, sees art as a way of understanding culture, while the artist means to change it, to disturb those categories of perception by which we understand and communicate our culture in time and space...

...Artists, as artists, violate form...

...or, again more properly, for disturbance of our very highly ordered perceptions, so as to avoid hardening into the rigidity of perception that is psychic, and eventually physical, death...

...This is a matter of distinguishing between two roles: audience and scholar-critic...

...Stevens gives us a perfect figure for the manner of knowledge in Western culture: a knowledge "beyond us"—outside us where we can deal with it, as if scientifically, without contaminating it with our feelings—"yet ourselves...

...which is what perception is, and it is only by keeping the dialogue alive that we keep acting intelligently, be we novelists or civil rights workers...

...it is a life-style of non-action (dealing with levels of experience in which all action is irrelevant) and nonemotion (resting in a state of detached calm outside oneself...

...Hyman confuses these roles...

...As the Greeks knew, this is an illusion...

...Hence Plato's ban on artists from the ideal state: they make disturbances and upset the political order...

...With necessary oversimplification, it means that the widely held idea that art provides, reveals or creates order requires the false assumption that reality or, more properly, our perceptions of reality are chaotic or at least disordered...

...That phrase, "personal bias," for instance, is one of those mild smears against feeling that, as scholar-critics, we make almost by unconscious reflex...

...Not to hate an evil act isn't just bad morals, it's bad art...

...The problem here is one that we all, as intellectuals, share, a problem of lifestyle...

...With art of another culture, though, we need some idea of the original audience's expectations...

...So, if the artist thus initiates political action, the scholar-critic acts out, and in the classroom teaches by example, a role to which all action is irrelevant, to say nothing of political action...

...Consequently, it means that, given such a need for order, we have an equally pressing need for disorder...

...Not inhering in any particular work, it is what we as scholar-critics abstract out of a chronological series of literary works...

...And feeling is the necessary third factor missing from the unreal choice that Hyman presents to us, between thought and action, prejudice and experience, in the civil rights situation illustrating his argument...

...For this we turn to the academic scholar-critic, whose role it is to describe cultural assumptions, as sets of expectations, and thus teach us how to be disturbed —or "moved"—by art not of our own culture...

...while our role as scholar-critics, to which action and feeling are irrelevant, coincides with the "politics" of the totalitarian state in which political action is as irrelevant as it is impossible, short of revolution...

...Actually, our behavior corresponds more to a dialogue between prejudice and experience...

...Hyman provides an exciting way for handling moralistic objections—from Left and Right—that art is too often dissociated from our moral and political concerns...

...Whereas, in fact, we would be unable to function at all without possessing very highly ordered categories of perception to use every minute of the day...

...Aside from the obvious special pleading for the artist's (presumably higher) "level of experience in which all action is irrelevant," there is really no reason for distinguishing between novelist and civil rights worker...

...What breaks the illusion is dialogue, politically the democratic interaction of peers with one another...

...And with the claim that art provides a special sort of knowledge, he hypostasizes literary "form," carrying its intellectual qualities of aesthetic distance and calm into the particular work where they have no place...

...Our competence at dealing with "reality"—or whatever you wish to call it—however actual as a technology, is like the competence of Oedipus at solving the riddle of the Sphinx, an illusion of competence...

...Such a notion could be held only by those immersed in a culture demanding that its artists "represent" reality and equating art with "imitation...

...Picasso, understanding this, has remarked that he creates a painting by a series of destructions...

...New York: Chilton, 1965...

...In the history of civilization, which is also the history of art, such a culture has had only a very brief and very local existence.' Hyman, then, seems to be taking 1 For the source of these brief remarks see Morse Peckham's persuasive analysis of the problem: Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts...

...In the transaction between the contemporary artist and his audience, both take for granted that they live in the same time and place, and share essentially the same cultural assumptions...

...Only in this sense of a set of expectations do we speak with validity of literary "form...

...Or: "An artist reaches his greatness not by subordinating his impressions to his moral or personal bias, but by getting out of himself...

...in the other, the suppression of disturbances is a condition of our work in describing and judging the "form"—or set of expectations— which those disturbances violate...

...One's role as audience requires a pliancy and quickness of felt reaction...

...In one, we experience the disturbances of art...

...It is only such a confusion of roles, and what Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," that, to my mind, will account for statements like the following: "The novelist, unlike the political scientist or the psychologist, tries to 'understand' the situation not in order to act more intelligently, but to bring us to a level of experience in which all action is irrelevant [my italics...

...while action and feeling are irrelevant, if not hostile, to the work of the scholar-critic...

...And the split in Hyman's thinking corresponds—I'm willing to bet— with a split between the way he perceives, as critic and scholar, a novel by Melville, and the way he perceives, as part of our contemporary audience, a novel by Bellow or Ellison, or a movie by Bergman or Fellini...

...But as contextualist critic, he still holds to the notion that art provides a special sort of knowledge or, in the verses of Wallace Stevens quoted by Hyman: A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are...

...It is ourselves, and not artists, who are interested in form as such...

...and it is the violation that an audience responds to...

...He sees the important political (and, we should add, biological) function of art as a provider of disturbances...

...Finally—and this is where Hyman contradicts himself—it means that art provides no special knowledge, as is widely claimed by humanists defending the arts against the sciences...

...It is not surprising, after all, that Hyman chooses Wallace Stevens as spokesman for his understanding of art...

...Since, however, he styles himself a contextualist critic, Hyman must be aware that with this idea of art he is keeping rather strange company...

...The idea that art provides not order but disturbance, that it upsets and exercises the categories of perception we bring to art and to the world in general, belongs to the behavioral sciences, to transactionalism and the New Look in perception theory...

...It was a pleasure to read Lawrence W. Hyman's statement: "It is not a moral direction that we must look for in literature but a disturbance" ("Literature and Political Action," DISSENT, July—August 1967...

...Though these statements say very little about art or artists, they do say a great deal about the life-style which our culture values and which we all share as intellectuals, scholars and critics...

...Here, the role of the artist is to disturb those assumptions...

...After all, we reserve a very contemptuous label, "sentimentality," for the work of art that caters to our naive assumptions about life...

...Again, where Hyman says that the artist performs his role "by getting outside himself," it would be just as sensible to say, with Horace, that the artist does best by getting inside himself...

...To make this claim is to involve yourself inextricably, as Leavis and Snow did, in the pseudo-problem of "realism" in the arts, which means making a theory of the purely ethnocentric notion that art provides special insight into reality...

...Though the novelist may understand a Georgia red-neck, it doesn't mean that he can't, as novelist, hate the man's cowardly threatening of Negro children...

...It would be hard to find more of a snob, a man more autocratically disdainful of dialogue than the poet of the blue guitar with his aesthetician's fantasy of a cool, Apollonian understanding "Of things exactly as they are...