[In the following essay, Perosa describes Blackmur's theories of poetry criticism, tracing its evolution from the early tenets of New Criticism to what Perosa terms as a later “break-down” of that mode of interpretation.]

If R. P. Blackmur's criticism of poetry can be considered “new-critical”, his criticism of fiction shows the break-down of that attitude.¹ This shift in attitude is in many ways typical of the late 1950s-early 1960s.

The underlying principle in Blackmur's criticism is the concept of homeostasis—the precarious balance of an unstable state, as he put it This concept invokes a compulsion, as it were, to keep opposing ideas, principles, and perceptions balanced in one's mind, in order to be able to perceive meaning and form, depth and extension of reference, the burden, drift, and momentum of literary expression. Not only in Blackmur's view and practice does the reconciliation or balance of opposites become a guiding principle: this element, in turn, provides the force, the momentum, and the exaltation of literature, in fiction as well as in poetry. Blackmur's sharp distinctions were meant to reconcile, combine, reconstruct, or reach towards ultimate or pristine unity. “I do not mean to differentiate so much as to join,” he wrote (LH, 307); while the domain of the arts “is precisely the actual experience of what goes on between the idea and the reality” (EE, 29).

In his essay “Between the Numen and the Moha” he posited the two contrasting principles of a power other and greater than ourselves: the aspiration and force of the sublime, and the baseness and stupidity in our souls that brings us down and makes us see beauty and attraction in Sodom. Blackmur's avowed wish was “to combine them, to make them compose, in the interests of beautiful reason” (LH, 296). In all his essays on Henry James though particularly in “The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James” (1951), Blackmur worked on dichotomies and divisions, on the relation and balance of opposites so amply provided by James: between art and life, art and morality, life and the ideal, reality and imagination, abstractions and human values, appearance and reality, general vision and limited point of view, expansion and foreshortening, “platitude of statement” and ambiguity, regionalism and internationalism. In James, Blackmur found the example and the model of the novelist who combined and reconciled, particularized and composed—a splendid balance and blend of opposites.

If we thought he drew from James mostly a technical lesson we would be grossly mistaken. There is nothing (admittedly) of the strict New Critic, even less of the Narratologist, in Blackmur. Technique is subservient to the incarnation and the discovery of meaning; it is a means of showing or expressing life, to compress, sharpen, or enliven “the amount of felt life” (in James's own phrase). Once more, it is a way of balancing the claims of vision and the claims of reality, the “theoretic form” imposed by the writer and the pressure and sweep of the actual. In each case these opposing terms are, if not of equal importance, of strictly related and interwoven relevance. From “The Loose and Baggy Monsters”:

All that I have to say here springs from the conviction that in the novel, as elsewhere in the literary arts, what is called technical or executive form has as its final purpose to bring into being-to bring into performance, for the writer and for the reader-an instance of what life is about. Technical form is our means of getting at, of finding, and then making something of, what we feel the form of life itself is: the tensions, the stresses, the deep relations and the terrible disrelations that inhabit them as they are made to come together in a particular struggle between manners and behavior, between the ideal insight and the actual momentum in which the form of life is found. … There is a mutual interaction. There is a wooing both ways; what is found is in some respect affected by the tools used; … what is found affects, for the instance, the medium in which it emerges. …

(LH, 268)

In this view, Tolstoy is as much a master of composition (in spite of James's strictures) as James is a writer enveloped, provoked, and inspired by the enormous lap of the actual (in spite of his stress on purely personal relations and on consciousness). The artist is caught—or is at work—between the actual and the ideal, between turbulence and form; he is, “against ‘his’ time” and yet he has “necessarily to collaborate with it” (LH, 285). He requires a technique that “articulates and joints and manipulates” (LH, 282), as well as a feeling for life that animates his view and his perspective.

In “Between the Numen and the Moha” we read that “the novel is ethics in action. Feeling and action. What is felt and what is in action … This is because the novel, and every other form of literature, is a confrontation of behavior” in which “morals are compelled to respond to the turbulence of actual life” (LH, 289-90 and 305). In the novel gives theoretic form to life, it must first confront actual behavior, “the deep contest of adverse wills” (LH, 307) in society and in morality. Thus its underlying, classic form is neither the conceptual, nor the executive or technical form, nor the symbolic form: “what the novel is really about [is] the everlasting struggle, the concert of conflict, between the two realities of aspiration and behavior” (LH, 306).

Chiasmus is overwhelmingly present in these definitions, and so is a consideration of its basic elements: the drama of extremes in conflict, “how behavior gets into literature and what it does to morals when it gets there” (LH, 306). Blackmur was aware of the mimetic tradition, of the type of novel mostly concerned with the actual, relying on the existence of a knowable, recognizable world: Zola and Dreiser, Balzac (with his great élan, though he could not write) and Hemingway (whose power to write in actual scenes attempted timidly and inconclusively the imposition of symbolic patterns). But this was not his cherished tradition. It lacked “the deep contest of adverse wills,” the moral and symbolic complexities, the probings into the dark sides of the soul—those elements, formulas or cliches that in his Prefatory Note to Eleven Essays in the European Novel Blackmur listed as essential to his “great tradition.”

As one might expect, these were, first, theoretic form imposed on life; second, the creation of new psychologies; third, “a speculation in myth which reaches into the driving psyche” (EE, vii). These ultimately converged into the formula that combines, once more, the requirements of plot and character, of outer behavior and deeper psychologies: “A man's ethos in his daimon” (the terms were of course used in an Aristotelian sense (EE, v—viii).

Blackmur's “great tradition” of the European novel reaches backwards in time only for springs and tentative historical roots (in Fielding and Smollett, Richardson and Austen). It is basically a pre-Modernist and Modernist tradition: the great nineteenth-century founding fathers (Stendhal and Flaubert, James and Tolstoy) and their culmination in the early twentieth century (Proust and Joyce, Gide and Thomas Mann, Kafka and Pirandello). In between the two moments fall the shadow and the influence of Freud and Jung (“the two greatest allegorists of the present time,” in my notes), with their stress on the dark side of the mind and on a dramatic view of life in which tragic confrontations spring not only from conflicts in society but from lacerations in ourselves.

“In the nineteenth century the novel of Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy took on the risk of drama and was forced into objective imagination” he wrote (EE, 50). Madame Bovary, in particular, is “the history of one of the great ways by which we accommodate our inner or our true selves to the bruise and press of society. … It is also the history of that kind of damnation which comes when we are unable to accept the conditions of life” (EE, 49). As for Anna Karenina, “her tragedy is that she has destroyed too much of the medium, too many of the possibilities, of actual life, to leave life tolerable” (EE, 25); and this in a novel which is seen and analyzed as an almost perfect system of symmetries and reversals.

Moving forward in time, Proust's Recherche strikes Blackmur as an “enormous rival creation of the world.” “His whole book is morals in action,” showing “a continuous approximation of moral progress” (PI, 26). In Proust, as in the other great figures of Modernism, the central character is often an artist—mostly baffled, frustrated, exposed, crushed as much in his confrontation with the drive and drift of society as by the dark forces at work within his psyche. Though this is never openly stated, it seems that for Blackmur there are ordered, structured, and imposing ways of representing this ordeal and its counterpoises; there are also forms that lean towards or rely on entropy and dissipation, that mimic fragmentation and loss of identity.

Blackmur's study of Ulysses seems to me the apotheosis of his balanced and chiastic view. Joyce's novel is declared “the book that made an order out of the substance of the dadaist imagination” (PI, 24), out of fragmentation and dissipation, by combining the big gap of the unconscious and the enormous lap of the actual. Blackmur was less at home with, and felt less sympathy for, those writers who mimicked, expressed, or exploited entropy and dissipation and who did not struggle to reconstruct an order, however precarious, out of chaos. Behind both types of Modernist writers he saw, however, the presence and the lesson of perhaps the greatest nineteenth-century forerunner, mentor, and indeed representative of the modern novelist: Dostoevsky—who was with James, perhaps, the object of Blackmur's greatest love.

In Dostoevsky he found or posited a powerful dualistic force at work: the fascination with the torments, the lacerations, the debris of conscience, on the one side, and, on the other, a driving need to hold the scattered pieces of the mind and of the world desperately together. In Dostoevsky Blackmur found the epitome, or the greatest example, of the chiastic creative imagination at work—a rage for order in spite of, or thanks to, the inner and outer chaos: “All Dostoevsky's great novels form a drama of the two extremes in conflict” (LH, 294).

The critic who emphasized so often and so much these two crucial aspects of fictional creation—the big gap of the unconscious and the enormous lap of the actual, a rage for order in the full acknowledgment of chaos—has clearly left behind a new-critical attitude or approach to literature. Even a cursory look at his articulated analysis of Dostoevsky's major novels (which forms Part II of Eleven Essays in the European Novel) would be sufficient proof of Blackmur's conclusive shift.

For Blackmur, in his great novels the Russian writer could offer contrasting moral values and opposing views of society brought to a crisis or to a climax by the driving forces of torn, lacerated, aspiring characters. Dostoevsky was perhaps the greater discoverer of deep and dark new psychologies at work in the context of society, morality or religion. His characters are never solitary or in isolation: thay react to the life of the senses and the life of the spirit, human relations and human oppositions, social struggles and utopian dreams. Above all, they are presented as part of complex patterns—psychological, social, intellectual, and ideological patterns—in which each has a relative value and lives in structured connection with the others.

A detailed analysis of Blackmur's view of Dostoevsky² would give conclusive evidence that new-critical attitudes had been totally superseded in his highly inspired and perceptive criticism of fiction, and of Dostoevsky in particular. Neither the New Critic nor the neo-humanist, neither the cold analyst nor the moralist, in the fiction of the great Russian writer Blackmur saw the full embodiment of the plight of modern man, a totality of vision that called all aspects of man and society into play.

Notes

1. For his criticism of poetry, see his Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New York: Doubleday, 1957); of fiction, The Lion and the Honeycomb (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1955: hereafter LH in the text); Eleven Essays in the European Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964: hereafter EE in the text); A Primer of Ignorance (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967: hereafter PI in the text); Studies in Henry James (New York: New Directions, 1983).

2. I have attempted one in my “Blackmur's Criticism of European Fiction”, in The Legacy of R. P. Blackmur, ed. Edward Cone, Joseph Frank, and Edmund Keeley (New York: The Ecco Press, 1987), from which I draw some ideas and some passages.