Godina izdanja: Ostalo
ISBN: Ostalo
Jezik: Engleski
Vrsta: Eseji i kritike
Autor: Strani

Philip Rahv - Literature and the Sixth Sense
Studies in american and european literature by a modern master of criticism

Houghton Mifflin Co, 1969.
Tvrd povez, zastitni omot, 445 strana.

Literature and the Sixth Sense is Philip Rahv’s selection from thirty years of his literary criticism. He has included much material from the earlier books, Image and Idea and The Myth and the Powerhouse, as well as a dozen or so pieces not hitherto collected, but has omitted several essays on Dostoevsky’s novels, which are planned as chapters in a future book, and essays dealing directly with politics. Some titles have been changed; two or three updating postscripts have been added; otherwise few changes have been made in the material. The pieces are arranged chronologically in two sections, one for longer and generally synoptic essays, the other for shorter reviews. The reviews come last but they do not let the book down. Rahv is one of the few living critics whose reviews are collectible.

“Collection,” however, is a misleading term for a book that is as much a coherent whole as Arnold’s Essays in Criticism or T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays. Rahv indicates in his Foreword that the prime integrating source upon which he has drawn is that historical insight which Nietzsche identifies as “virtually a new faculty of the mind, a sixth sense . . . [that] functions both as an analytic instrument and as a new bracing resource of the modern sensibility.” It is the sixth sense in Rahv that has made him, to use the distinction he develops in “Criticism and the Imagination of Alternatives” (1956), a prospective rather than retrospective critic: one who “conceives of literature as something actual and alive in his own time and relates himself to it by trying to affect its course of development here and now.” It is the lack of this sense in our age, he points out in a 1950 essay, that is in large part responsible for the “abrupt swings in consciousness from one demoralizing extreme to another.”

_____________

Those abrupt swings in consciousness have produced the various kinds of excess against which Rahv has done battle over this thirty-year span: in the socially-oriented 30’s, the excess that stuffed “the creativity of the Left into the sack of political orthodoxy”; in the 40’s and 50’s, the excess of the traditional-formalist New Critics and of the myth- and symbol-mongers; in the “swinging” 60’s, the excesses of the mind- and consciousness-fearing neo-romantics who have confused manic verbalization with excellence of style and who are bemused with the prospect of salvation through sex.

To put it another way, Rahv’s sixth sense has functioned since the mid-30’s as a distant early warning system against the false promises of ideology—ideology understood as a natural enemy of historical insight. He has had the good fortune of discovering early in life that the ideologue’s inevitable impulse in the presence of literature is to use it in the service of a “higher” cause. His early efforts as a Partisan Review editor to resist this impulse are well known. In effect, however, he has never stopped resisting it, for what he has objected to in the traditionalists, the mythomaniacs, the religionists, the formalists, the amateur Freudians, the vulgar Marxists, the sociologizers, and the swingers is the attempt to reduce literature by making it subservient to the needs of some cult, piety, or orthodoxy. Observing in “Religion and the Intellectuals” how many gifted writers are “plunging from one debauch of ideology into another without giving themselves time to sober up,” he recommends “a dose of skepticism so strong as to make them stand fast against the solicitations of ideologies.” This was written in 1950, but as Rahv views the ensuing years he finds little reason to alter the prescription. At times, it seems to me now, it has been stronger than the symptoms warranted (as administered against the New Critics and the myth critics, for instance); nevertheless, it has been prescribed for the right ailments and at the right time.

The sixth sense in Rahv has made him especially sensitive to the dichotomy between experience and consciousness in American writing. The opening essay, the familiar “Paleface and Redskin” (1939), functions like a prelude, the interrelated themes of which sound throughout the book. “The Cult of Experience in American Writing” (1940), “The Dark Lady of Salem” (1941), “The Heiress of All the Ages” (1943), and “The Native Bias” (1957) are concerned with this dichotomy in a major way, but it is an important factor also in Rahv’s assessment of such writers as Hemingway, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Miller, Leslie Fiedler, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer. One of Rahv’s great services to American literature is that he helps us to see why Mailer’s neo-primitivist “yea-saying to experience” in his recent fiction is no less crippling to the writer than Hawthorne’s isolation from experience. James, who “learned how to nourish his gifts and grew to full maturity,” was not so crippled, nor is Saul Bellow, “the most intelligent novelist of his generation” as well as “the most consistently interesting in point of growth and development.”

_____________

A book of this kind, ranging as it does over a period in our cultural life so marked by change at all levels, could be a useful record even if its insights and judgments were no longer especially relevant. Rahv himself accedes to this record-value in his decision to reprint his essays without substantial changes, and so delivers himself to the whimsies of the Zeitgeist. But what continually struck me as I reread pieces I had not read for years was how well they stand up despite the fact that they carry the imprint of their particular times and occasions. This is especially true of the spendid synoptic essays on Hawthorne (1941), Henry James’s heroines (1943), and the introductions to the short fiction of Tolstoy (1946) and Kafka (1952). It is hard to imagine an America in which “The Cult of Experience in American Writing” (1940) will not be a prime critical resource. It takes little imagination to transpose “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy” (1939) into terms the beginning 70’s can understand and profit from—consider this remark, for instance: “At that time the party saw the revolution as an immediate possibility, and its literature was extreme in its Leftism, aggressive, declamatory, prophetic.” The earliest piece in the book, the 1936 review of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, is still a model of critical procedure for those who because of passionate commitments are unable to distinguish between poetry and belief—or are unable to see that one of the greatest services a critic can perform for politics is to curb its tendency to acquire literature.

Rahv has continued over the years to see in Eliot (as he puts it in his 1966 review of Eliot’s posthumous essays) “one of the principal educators of the imaginative life of his age, a uniquely great shaping influence both as poet and critic.” To be for Eliot, even with Rahv’s qualifications, is to court conspicuous enemies. He swells their ranks by referring to Jean Genet as a moral idiot, by admiring Orwell, and by refusing to accept F. R. Leavis’s estimate of D. H. Lawrence, or Hugh Kenner’s estimate of Pound’s Cantos, or John Aldridge’s estimate of Norman Mailer, or Maxwell Geismar’s estimate of Henry James, or Leslie Fiedler’s estimate of William Burroughs. No doubt for many Rahv is simply a once-influential critic who is no longer with it, who has missed the wave of the future. And they would be correct after their fashion. He is, I suspect, as little impressed with wave-of-the future notions as Orwell was, having gotten his dose of skepticism from the same medicine cabinet. To be with it, to swing, as he makes clear in his 1965 piece on Mailer, is to take the fickle moods of a permissive and self-deluded time at their own evaluation—an assignment for a publicist, not a critic. If he sometimes seems unduly pessimistic in his estimation of the swinging 60’s, the reason is not the conservatism of age, and certainly not failure of nerve, but moral seriousness combined with that tragic sense that once led him to quote with approval Freud’s conviction that “renunciation and suffering are not to be eluded by the race of men.” Such sentiments are unacceptable in many quarters, especially to those who, entranced with the vision of an outward-bound counter-culture, want their Freud filtered through Norman O. Brown.

_____________

In any event, opponents anxious to find signs of deterioration in this critic had best avoid his 1968 essay “On F. R. Leavis and D. H. Lawrence.” Here, it seems to me, the intellectual vigor, the discriminate generosity, and the ability to keep a firm grasp on the line of argument while ranging over great expanses of literature were never more impressively on display. Criticism of this sort is exciting to read even when one does not agree with it, and not least because it demonstrates the possibility of redeeming the time with meaning, but without underestimating or belittling the forces that threaten it.

Rahv has always demonstrated this possibility in a style that does not lend itself to quotation. Consider a sentence from “The Myth and the Powerhouse.” “True, in the imaginative act the artist does indeed challenge time, but in order to win he must be able to meet its challenge; and his triumph over it is like that blessing which Jacob exacted from the angel only after grappling with him till the break of day.” This is superb in its strong precision, in its tact, in its unostentatious balance and climax, in its harmony of idea and structure. But one becomes conscious of it only through an effort of the will that might isolate countless other sentences no less admirable. The style itself discourages such attention; like the book of which it is a proper model, it exists only as an instrument of clarification.

Philip Rahv (March 10, 1908 in Kupin, Russian Empire – December 22, 1973 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American literary critic and essayist. In 1933 he and William Phillips co-founded Partisan Review, one of the most influential literary periodicals in the first half of the twentieth century. Initially affiliated with the Communist Party and adhering to their agenda of proletarian literature, Rahv went on to publish a broad spectrum of modern writers in the pages of his magazine. He was one of the first to introduce Kafka to American readers.
Life

He was born to a Jewish family in Kupin, Russian Empire. The family migrated and spent two years in Vienna, where Philip attended the gymnasium.[1] He was born under the name Fevel Greenberg.[2] He made his way to Providence, Rhode Island, with his father and two brothers, Selig and David. He lived for a time in Palestine where his mother chose to live, and worked as a teacher of Hebrew, in Portland, Oregon, from 1928 to 1931. He wrote at first under the name Philip Rann.[3] Then came the modification to `Rahv,` which appeared in an essay he published in 1932.[4]

In 1933 Rahv joined the American Communist Party. Partisan Review broke with the Soviet line in 1937 in the wake of the Moscow Trials and maintained an ongoing feud with Stalinist Popular Front advocates such as Granville Hicks of New Masses. He was officially expelled as a Trotskyite by the American Communist Party on October 1, 1937.[5] Rahv taught at Brandeis University in his later years and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973.
Literary career

Philip Rahv`s writing career began during the Depression. It reflected the prevailing literary currents of Marxism and the rise of proletarian literature.[6] In search of a collective ideology, he and others of his generation rejected the formalism and social disengagement of the great writers of the twenties.[7] An exception was T. S. Eliot, whose intellectual depth and historic sense Rahv continued to admire, Eliot`s increasingly reactionary politics and traditional religiosity notwithstanding.[8] Because Rahv believed the creative contradictions within a writer are the greatest measure of his achievement, he welcomed the opportunity to reconcile Eliot`s conservative views with revolutionary ones that his writing also contained.[9]

Rahv`s literary influence arose from his role as editor, author, and reviewer for Partisan Review and other magazines including The New York Review of Books. From the start of his writing career he articulated his key literary values: the need for a synthesis between European and American artistic traditions and between literary modernism and radicalism; the importance of the Marxist dialectic to effectuate such syntheses; the value of cosmopolitanism to promote a broad understanding of the world and the leading ideas of the writer`s times; the rejection of parochial ideas based on region, nation, or ethnicity.[10] In one of his most often quoted essays, `Paleface and Redskin,` he identified two opposing currents: upper-class palefaces such as Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne and uncultured redfaces such as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. The result was a dichotomy between consciousness and experience and between symbolism and naturalism. Rahv deplored the dichotomy, looking to the future for the kind of synthesis achieved by such European writers as Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann.[11]

Rahv reached the height of his literary influence editing and writing for Partisan Review in the late 1930s. His influence continued through the 1940s with his writings on a wide range of European and American authors, most notably Henry James, whose reputation he contributed to reviving. With the rightward turn of politics in the 1950s, however, he retreated from his earlier literary and political prominence. He played little role in Partisan Review in this era, publishing essays in other publications, most notably The New York Review of Books. In the 1960s his brief enthusiasm for the New Left was followed by disillusionment. He never finished his final project, a book on Dostoyevsky.[12]
Works

Image and Idea (1949) – essays
The Myth and the Powerhouse (1965) – essays
Literature and the Sixth Sense (1969) – essays
Essays in Literature and Politics (1978) – essays
Modern Occasions, vol 1., 1970–71, issues 1, 2, 3, 4; vol. 2, 1972, issues 1, 2.