Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
almost pure information has had a tremendous effect on modern aesthetics. Thanks to it, far too much emphasis is laid upon the documentary value of the work of art, upon art as a revelational function. We find both Mr. Matthew Josephson and Mr. Burton Rascoe, for instance, objecting to Joyce because there are more psychoanalytic facts to be obtained from the reading of Kraft-Ebbing or Freud than from Ulysses. And I trust soon to hear these Messrs objecting to Cezanne because his paintings do not contain nearly so much data on trees as can be found in a bulletin of the Forestry Department.
The point is that the problem of the artist lies elsewhere, and that the novel after Dostoevsky has given too much attention to the document. The document per se, being neither beautiful nor unbeautiful, falls into quite another plane of considerations from purely aesthetic ones. And if Dostoevsky must stand for his revelations of the human soul, then he stands as nothing other than a scientist who was improperly trained in scientific methods of presentation, and who gave us consequently a hodgepodge rather than a schematization. One might have thought that the peculiarly vigorous flourishing of science would have served rather to purge literature of any documentary obligations, just as the perfection of photography has brought about a similar release in painting. But instead, literature was swept into a sympathetic movement, and science became a burden rather than an instrument of liberation.
Perhaps, to define unescapably just how I should distinguish between the psychology of form and the psychology of subject-matter, I should pin myself to a specific illustration. We read, then, in The Things We Are:
. . . Bettington felt sad. It seemed to him that at the moment when he knew his friend, his friend was embarking on a great journey with him, a journey more dangerous perhaps, but far more wonderful than his own. It was too much. To have to say two farewells at the same moment was more than he could bear, more than he ought to bear; and besides, there was a strange envy in his heart. He must confess it.
“I envy you . . . old man. I can’t help it; I try not to.”
“I wonder you don’t hate me as well.”
“No, I don’t hate you . . . I don’t think I do. Why should I? I don’t feeling you’re taking Felicia away from me. The more I think about her, the more I know she wasn’t mine. But envy, yes. I’m afraid it goes pretty deep, too.” After a minute he added, et cetera.
Perhaps the author has established whether it is hate or envy. But I take liberty to assure the reader that he will not care. The information is there, but the issue hardly seems a contribution to beauty. Of course, I do not deny that even this sort of information could have been made beautiful, especially if—in the truest sense—it had been made more intense. But it would have been the intensity, and not the fact, which was beautiful. The accurate definition of an idea is beautiful—as in Spinoza. The accurate solution of a problem is beautiful—which doubtless explains why Euclid was included among the humanities. And which obviously suggests defining beauty as the shortest distance between two points. But there is also the functional side to beauty, and fortunately Mr. Murry has given a very fine instance of it, which I quote from Still Life to illustrate the psychology of form:
Above them Anne began to sing, low enough to be singing to herself. She could hear that they were not talking, and she crooned. But the house was so still, beneath the regular beat of the rain between the gusts, that they could hear her when her voice rose above a low humming. Neither knew what she was singing.
“Does Anne often sing like that?” said Dennis, almost whispering.
“How do you mean, ‘like that’?” Maurice [Anne’s lover] hardly understood the question. Then something familiar in the sound came vaguely into his memory. “I don’t know. Yes, she does sometimes. But not often. . . . At least, I don’t think so. . . . I don’t know.”
It is, quite plainly, the functional value which counts here. Mr. Murry has given us a mechanism of beauty. A program is officially announced; a blare of trumpets has been sounded. Similarly in Macbeth when the porter scene follows the murder scene this is no documentary coup, but a purely functional one. Writing in the Dostoevsky tradition, however, one underrates this really primary quality of art, and—in Mr. Murry’s case, at least—attains it too seldom.
The making of this lengthy distinction, I feel, is justified in that it attempts to get at the exact quality of diffuseness which makes Mr. Murry’s books a bit dissatisfying.
The Consequences of Idealism
Rahab by Waldo Frank. Boni and Liveright
City Block by Waldo Frank. Privately printed for subscribers only
The Dial, October 1922, 449–452
Let us imagine a room painted in this wise: there are the walls, a window, chairs, table, food on table, and two humans. These walls are aligned as inexorably as armies; one feels their seclusion and their leaden mass. Light, however, pours through the flood-gates of the window, tumbles and seethes into the room, rolling with sheer commensurable bulk. The chairs fulfill their functions as chairs earnestly, even avidly; in a sense one might say that they are crying out to be chairs; they are more than chairs, by God, they are staunch havens of palliation, they are strong, tender arms to which our failing corporeal fibers may surrender with confidence. As to the table, note how it offers up its contents as profusely, as unstintingly, one might say, as the calyx of a lily. And that man and that woman, leaning, gravitating towards each other . . . they are waterspouts growing up out of the floor. Their arms hang limp, but countless phantom arms interlock in the air. While these two humans stand “silent upon each other, heavily.”
The closing quote is from Waldo Frank, as is fitting. For our painted room is in the truest manner of Rahab, or City Block. I wish mainly to bring out the element of volition behind the author’s eye. He has written elsewhere that when “feet clamber up and over a hill” the hill is already there; “the feet do not create the hill, although they have a tendency to think so.” Yet his own writings are a testimony of feet which, if they do not create the hill, at least recreate it, transforming it from a mere hill, qua hill, to a spiritual problem, an obstacle proclaiming its identity over against the yearnings and necessities of human atoms.
In 1893 Stephane Mallarmé gave the first definite formulation of the poetics which encompasses this attitude in writing. Building on Hegel, he found in idealism the artist’s right to his own universe, a right which extended even to the development of a personal idiom. Mallarmé’s expert mal-writing reached a rare flowering—in such a hothouse product, for instance, as “heureuses deux tétines.” And the peculiar glory of these pursuits is that the artist attains thereby “au-dessus d’autre bien, l’élément de félicités, une doctrine en memo temps qu’une contrée.”
Waldo Frank’s idiom is no less personal. But instead of Mallarmé’s special-case fauns and nymphs with their icy emotions, Mr. Frank gives us the eager, pulsing universe noted above. Still, it cannot be denied that Waldo Frank’s idealism emphasizes a somewhat different aspect. If Mallarmé was striving simply for beautiful possibilities, for intriguing enormities, for likely distortions which would appeal to the connoisseur acquainted with all the rules, Mr. Frank falls in rather with the German expressionists who strive to give us a version of life which shall be alas! only too true. For the last fifty years the world has been pressionistic (read, volitional) first im and then ex. If Mallarmé, looking at a man, goes beyond that man with the direct purpose of distortion, the expressionists take their man, rip off his clothing, observe the sorry nipples of his breasts, look into his viscera, and maintain that here is the real man, the essential man. The subtle difference is that Mallarmé has said, “Here is a distortion,” and has given us one, while the expressionists have said, “Here is the very pulse of truth,” and their distortion has been no less marked.
One goes into a park and sits down, and immediately, if one is an artist, the park becomes a problem. It lies there. The individual feels his edges knocking improperly against it. He is sitting in somebody else’s park. Then, if he is Waldo Frank, he starts remaking that park. Exorbitant characters appear, the skyline begins to churn, mad speeches are ground out. And we have “John the Baptist,” one of the most interesting stories of