Post on 04-Jun-2018
8/13/2019 Feeling and Form
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/feeling-and-form 1/1
Continued from page 3)
of genius-one of the most awesome literary performances I
ever witnessed), an d Charles G. Finney's perplexing Circus o f Lao, which, like Ross Lockridge's epic, poetic Rain tree County,
been stolen f rom many potential readers by the simple device of
wretched, worthless film adaptations of them. In the case
f Lockridge this bit of bad p.r. is particularly tragic, because one
f the most important of his many achievements in his much-mis-
only novel was the integration of the technical devices of
writers like James Joyce with the traditional devices ofand character writing which have proved of greatest continuing
for most readers-Lockridge succeeded in combining a
story with some of the most sophisticated narrative tricks
have developed in their quest for ever more precise
I shall not, by the way, recommend the work of James Joyce,
I consider it beyond question that he is the most brilliant
of the past century, and possible of the past five-
little pleasure in reading Ulysses (or even A Portrait of the
a s a Young M a n o r Dubliners), except o f a raref ied, cerebral
ut very real and very intense) sort available only to those preoccu-
ith literary style. This is why (and every Joyce enthusiast
FEELING AND FORM
knows this, though none will own up) reading good criticism o
Joyce's work is just as much fun as reading Joyce himself . It
novels like Raintree County and like Samuel R. Delany's rece
Dhalgren which vindicate Joyce by proving his methods u sefu l an actual imaginative context.
The period we are all living in has seen the rise to excellence of
number o f f irst-rate novelists (William H. Gass with Omensetter
Luck, Anthony Burgess with A Clockwork Orange, Al f red Best
with The Stars My Destination, J.D. Salinger with The Catcher
the Rye, Ray Bradbury with Dandelion Wine, Ross MacDona ld wi
any of the later Lew Archer novels, Edgar Pangborn with A Mirrfor Observers, there are many others) of whom I think the most im
portant are Ayn Rand (principally for Atlas Shrugged-ihe story
what happens when the men of the mind go on strike), Vladim
N a bo ko v (principally for Pale Fire-the story of a literary artist wh
though this is not a fantasy, literally becomes unuable to distin
uish between his work and reality), and Mervyn Peake (principal
fo r the Gormenghast Tr iology-TYftw Groan, Gormenghast, and Tit
Alone— the story of how and why it is necessary for any individuof creative intelligence-for any individual at all-to break free
imposed systems like the State). (Next month: Neil McCaffr
brings us Part III of Jazz: Th e Golden Age. Jeff Riggenbach rturns in February with ajjjscussion o
By Susanne
In 1914, well over 2000 years af ter Plato undertook the f irst
Clive Bell declared that it is
that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics
n about anything else: the literature of the subject is not large
that. Nearly 50 years later, Ayn Rand could still lament
While physics has reached the level where men are able to
little or nothing
out its nature, its function in human l ife or the cause of
tremendous psychological power.Bu t is the record of those 2400 years really so barren? Are we
no closer to the truth about art than we were when Plato
writing about it in the lonl The f ac t is, the record is not
totally barren one: a good deal is known and on record about the
and articles are scattered far and wide. Man y of them are out
f print, and a number of the others are so obscure that not even an
can be counted upon to have them all. More-
literature of the subject is large enough that even an active
working in the f ield, like Bell or Rand, would be hard-
keep up with all of it; they could easily have missed works
their gloomy views of the situation. _=«._And for the~general reader ̂things ar e even'worseTSurely'it is un-
to expect him to read his way through Kant, Coleridge,
H u l m e , Pound, D.G. James, George Moore, Ransom, Hos-
Beardsley, Gass, William J. Handy, Ma r cus Hester, and
and (to mention only the most significant writers in literary
sift the valuable ideas out of their books and work
tegration of these valuable ideas into some kind of coher-
nt theory of art. Even having done so, he would lack necessary
bout the other primary and performing arts, and he
would still have ahead of him a fascinating body of knowledge,
compiled mostly by logicians, psychological theorists, and philo-
sophers of science, pertaining to the logical and psycho-epistemo-
methods appropriate to the appreciation of art. Altogether it
s a formidable job.But how is the general reader to avoid it if he wants to get the most
out of the art he exposes himself to? The point of contemplating
artworks, a f ter all, is the enjoyment we hope to gain f r om the ex-
perience. And the capacity to appreciate works of art (that is, to
grasp their import) is ful ly as latent in the healthy human mind as
the capacity to perceive entities or to form and manipulate concepts.
Bu t like these latter two capacities, it does not function automati-cally. We are not born knowing how to appreciate art any more thanwe are born knowing how to perceive or how to think conceptually.
K Langer
W e have to learn to do each of these things. And the nonspecial
who nevertheless wants to burn with Pater's hard gem-like f l a m
allowing art to give the highest quality to his moments as they pa
needs the facts in order to know how to use his mind most e ffe
tively in pursuit of that purpose. To my knowledge there is only o
philosopher or critic who has presented in one book the basic inf
mation a person needs to develop his capacity for art appreciatio
The philosopher is Susanne K. Langer. The book, first publish
more than twenty years ago, is Feeling and Form: A Theory of A
Developed from Philosophy in a New Key.
Feeling and Form elaborates the theory that a work of art ispresentational symbol of human feeling. Feeling is used here
a very broad sense, as roughly synonymous with experience awareness. A work of art is a symbol of human feeling, Lang
argues, because it concretizes and objectifies a concept of some kiof human experience. And the various branches of art are dist
guishable f r om one another hi terms of the kinds of conceiv
feelings they symbolize. Thus the visual arts symbolize hum
experience of scene (in painting), kinetic volume (in sculpture) an
ethnic domain (in architecture). Music symbolizes human feeling
temporal motion; literature, human feeling of past events or meory; drama, human experience of destiny through a sequence
, tin? X rafiVeT(WhiCli Eafrgjei
argues is a primary art), human feeling of bodily power, and so o
She also includes a brief appendix on the art of film-making, sketc
ing the reasons for her view that f i lms are not simply dramas p
served for later presentation, but constitute instead a fundamenta
ne w art f o r m .The chapters on the dance, on music, and on drama are amon
the most important and among the most filled with brilliant insigh
What are the factors that d if ferentiate a technically per fect b
artistically f l awed performance of a musical work f r om an arti
cally successful but technically ordinary performance of the sam
piece? What is the d if ference between the creativity of the compoand the creativity of the performing artist? Is the dance stilprimary art when is is set to music, as in ballet? W h a t are trage
and comedy, and what is their relation to drama? There are answ
to all these questions, and the answers are related back to the ba
theory and shown, in each case, to be special instances of it.
Langer points out, a true general theory has no exceptions, awhen it seems to have them it is not properly stated. And it may
suff icient , to distinguish Langer's own general theory f r om ev
other I have encountered in the field of aesthetics, to say thatseems to have no exceptions. Reviewed by Jeff RiggenbachPhilosophy / Scribner's, 1953, out of print / $2.65
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED