The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature

5. Basic Principles of Literature

THE MOST important principle of the esthetics of literature was formulated by Aristotle, who said that fiction is of greater philosophical importance than history, because “history represents things as they are, while fiction represents them as they might be and ought to be.”

This applies to all forms of literature and most particularly to a form that did not come into existence until twenty-three centuries later: the novel.

A novel is a long, fictional story about human beings and the events of their lives. The four essential attributes of a novel are: Theme—Plot—Characterization—Style.

These are attributes, not separable parts. They can be isolated conceptually for purposes of study, but one must always remember that they are interrelated and that a novel is their sum. (If it is a good novel, it is an indivisible sum.)

These four attributes pertain to all forms of literature, i.e., of fiction, with one exception. They pertain to novels, plays, scenarios, librettos, short stories. The single exception is poems. A poem does not have to tell a story; its basic attributes are theme and style.

A novel is the major literary form—in respect to its scope, its inexhaustible potentiality, its almost unlimited freedom (including the freedom from physical limitations of the kind that restrict a stage play) and, most importantly, in respect to the fact that a novel is a purely literary form of art which does not require the intermediary of the performing arts to achieve its ultimate effect.

I shall discuss the four major attributes of a novel, but I shall ask you to remember that the same basic principles apply, with appropriate qualifications, to the other literary forms.

1. Theme. A theme is the summation of a novel’s abstract meaning. For instance, the theme of Atlas Shrugged is: “The role of the mind in man’s existence.” The theme of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is: “The injustice of society toward its lower classes.” The theme of Gone With the Wind is: “The impact of the Civil War on Southern society.”

A theme may be specifically philosophical or it may be a narrower generalization. It may present a certain moral-philosophical position or a purely historical view, such as the portrayal of a certain society in a certain era. There are no rules or restrictions on the choice of a theme, provided it is communicable in the form of a novel. But if a novel has no discernible theme—if its events add up to nothing—it is a bad novel; its flaw is lack of integration.

Louis H. Sullivan’s famous principle of architecture, “Form follows function,” can be translated into: “Form follows purpose.” The theme of a novel defines its purpose. The theme sets the writer’s standard of selection, directing the innumerable choices he has to make and serving as the integrator of the novel.

Since a novel is a re-creation of reality, its theme has to be dramatized, i.e., presented in terms of action. Life is a process of action. The entire content of man’s consciousness—thought, knowledge, ideas, values—has only one ultimate form of expression: in his actions; and only one ultimate purpose: to guide his actions. Since the theme of a novel is an idea about or pertaining to human existence, it is in terms of its effects on or expression in human actions that that idea has to be presented.

This leads to the crucial attribute of a novel—the plot.

2. Plot. To present a story in terms of action means: to present it in terms of events. A story in which nothing happens is not a story. A story whose events are haphazard and accidental is either an inept conglomeration or, at best, a chronicle, a memoir, a reportorial recording, not a novel.

A chronicle, real or invented, may possess certain values; but these values are primarily informative—historical or sociological or psychological—not primarily esthetic or literary; they are only partly literary. Since art is a selective re-creation and since events are the building blocks of a novel, a writer who fails to exercise selectivity in regard to events defaults on the most important aspect of his art.

The means of exercising that selectivity and of integrating the events of a story is the plot.

A plot is a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax.

The word “purposeful” in this definition has two applications: it applies to the author and to the characters of a novel. It demands that the author devise a logical structure of events, a sequence in which every major event is connected with, determined by and proceeds from the preceding events of the story—a sequence in which nothing is irrelevant, arbitrary or accidental, so that the logic of the events leads inevitably to a final resolution.

Such a sequence cannot be constructed unless the main characters of the novel are engaged in the pursuit of some purpose—unless they are motivated by some goals that direct their actions. In real life, only a process of final causation—i.e., the process of choosing a goal, then taking the steps to achieve it—can give logical continuity, coherence and meaning to a man’s actions. Only men striving to achieve a purpose can move through a meaningful series of events.

Contrary to the prevalent literary doctrines of today, it is realism that demands a plot structure in a novel. All human actions are goal-directed, consciously or subconsciously; purposelessness is contrary to man’s nature: it is a state of neurosis. Therefore, if one is to present man as he is—as he is metaphysically, by his nature, in reality—one has to present him in goal-directed action.

The Naturalists object that a plot is an artificial contrivance, because in “real life” events do not fall into a logical pattern. That claim depends on the observer’s viewpoint, in the literal sense of the word “viewpoint.” A nearsighted man standing two feet away from the wall of a house and staring at it, would declare that the map of the city’s streets is an artificial, invented contrivance. That is not what an airplane pilot would say, flying two thousand feet above the city. The events of men’s lives follow the logic of men’s premises and values—as one can observe if one looks past the range of the immediate moment, past the trivial irrelevancies, repetitions and routines of daily living, and sees the essentials, the turning points, the direction of a man’s life. And, from that viewpoint, one can also observe that the accidents or disasters, which interfere with or defeat human goals, are a minor and marginal, not a major and determining, element in the course of human existence.

The Naturalists object that most men do not lead purposeful lives. But it has been said that if a writer writes about dull people, he does not have to be dull. In the same way, if a writer writes about purposeless people, his story structure does not have to be purposeless (provided some of his characters do have a purpose).

The Naturalists object that the events of men’s lives are inconclusive, diffuse and seldom fall into the clear-cut, dramatic situations required by a plot structure. This is predominantly true—and this is the chief esthetic argument against the Naturalist position. Art is a selective re-creation of reality, its means are evaluative abstractions, its task is the concretization of metaphysical essentials. To isolate and bring into clear focus, into a single issue or a single scene, the essence of a conflict which, in “real life,” might be atomized and scattered over a lifetime in the form of meaningless clashes, to condense a long, steady drizzle of buckshot into the explosion of a blockbuster—that is the highest, hardest and most demanding function of art. To default on that function is to default on the essence of art and to engage in child’s play along its periphery.

For example: most men have inner conflicts of values; these conflicts, in most lives, take the form of small irrationalities, petty inconsistencies, mean little evasions, shabby little acts of cowardice, with no crucial moments of choice, no vital issues or great, decisive battles—and they add up to the stagnant, wasted life of a man who has betrayed all his values by the method of a leaking faucet. Compare that to Gail Wynand’s conflict of values in regard to Howard Roark’s trial in The Fountainhead—and decide which, esthetically, is the right way to present the ravages of a conflict of values.

From the aspect of universality as an important attribute of art, I will add that Gail Wynand’s conflict, being a wide abstraction, can be reduced in scale and made applicable to the value-conflicts of a grocery clerk. But the value-conflicts of a grocery clerk cannot be made applicable to Gail Wynand, nor even to another grocery clerk.

The plot of a novel serves the same function as the steel skeleton of a skyscraper: it determines the use, placement and distribution of all the other elements. Matters such as number of characters, background, descriptions, conversations, introspective passages, etc. have to be determined by what the plot can carry, i.e., have to be integrated with the events and contribute to the progression of the story. Just as one cannot pile extraneous weight or ornamentation on a building without regard for the strength of its skeleton, so one cannot burden a novel with irrelevancies without regard for its plot. The penalty, in both cases, is the same: the collapse of the structure.

If the characters of a novel engage in lengthy abstract discussions of their ideas, but their ideas do not affect their actions or the events of the story, it is a bad novel. An example of that kind is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Its characters periodically interrupt the story to philosophize about life, after which the story—or lack of it—goes on.

A related, though somewhat different, example of a bad novel is An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. Here, the author attempts to give significance to a trite story by tacking on to it a theme which is not related to or demonstrated by its events. The events deal with an age-old subject: the romantic problem of a rotten little weakling who murders his pregnant sweetheart, a working girl, in order to attempt to marry a rich heiress. The alleged theme, according to the author’s assertions, is: “The evil of capitalism.”

In judging a novel, one must take the events as expressing its meaning, because it is the events that present what the story is about. No amount of esoteric discussions on transcendental topics, attached to a novel in which nothing happens except “boy meets girl,” will transform it into anything other than “boy meets girl.”

This leads to a cardinal principle of good fiction: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

The link between the theme and the events of a novel is an element which I call the plot-theme. It is the first step of the translation of an abstract theme into a story, without which the construction of a plot would be impossible. A “plot-theme” is the central conflict or “situation” of a story—a conflict in terms of action, corresponding to the theme and complex enough to create a purposeful progression of events.

The theme of a novel is the core of its abstract meaning—the plot-theme is the core of its events.

For example, the theme of Atlas Shrugged is: “The role of the mind in man’s existence.” The plot-theme is: “The men of the mind going on strike against an altruist-collectivist society.”

The theme of Les Misérables is: “The injustice of society toward its lower classes.” The plot-theme is: “The life-long flight of an ex-convict from the pursuit of a ruthless representative of the law.”

The theme of Gone With the Wind is: “The impact of the Civil War on Southern society.” The plot-theme is: “The romantic conflict of a woman who loves a man representing the old order, and is loved by another man, representing the new.” (Margaret Mitchell’s skill, in this novel, lies in the fact that the developments of the romantic triangle are determined by the events of the Civil War and involve, in a single plot structure, other characters who are representative of the various levels of Southern society.)

The integration of an important theme with a complex plot structure is the most difficult achievement possible to a writer, and the rarest. Its great masters are Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky. If you wish to see literary art at its highest, study the manner in which the events of their novels proceed from, express, illustrate and dramatize their themes: the integration is so perfect that no other events could have conveyed the theme, and no other theme could have created the events.

(I must mention, parenthetically, that Victor Hugo interrupts his stories to insert historical essays dealing with various aspects of his subject. It is a very bad literary error, but it was a convention shared by many writers of the nineteenth century. It does not detract from Hugo’s achievement, because these essays can be omitted without affecting the structure of the novels. And, although they do not properly belong in a novel, these essays, as such, are brilliant literarily.)

Since a plot is the dramatization of goal-directed action, it has to be based on conflict; it may be one character’s inner conflict or a conflict of goals and values between two or more characters. Since goals are not achieved automatically, the dramatization of a purposeful pursuit has to include obstacles; it has to involve a clash, a struggle—an action struggle, but not a purely physical one. Since art is a concretization of values, there are not many errors as bad esthetically—or as dull—as fist fights, chases, escapes and other forms of physical action, divorced from any psychological conflict or intellectual value-meaning. Physical action, as such, is not a plot nor a substitute for a plot—as many bad writers attempt to make it, particularly in today’s television dramas.

This is the other side of the mind-body dichotomy that plagues literature. Ideas or psychological states divorced from action do not constitute a story—and neither does physical action divorced from ideas and values.

Since the nature of an action is determined by the nature of the entities that act, the action of a novel has to proceed from and be consistent with the nature of its characters. This leads to the third major attribute of a novel—

3. Characterization. Characterization is the portrayal of those essential traits which form the unique, distinctive personality of an individual human being.

Characterization requires an extreme degree of selectivity. A human being is the most complex entity on earth; a writer’s task is to select the essentials out of that enormous complexity, then proceed to create an individual figure, endowing it with all the appropriate details down to the telling small touches needed to give it full reality. That figure has to be an abstraction, yet look like a concrete; it has to have the universality of an abstraction and, simultaneously, the unrepeatable uniqueness of a person.

In real life, we have only two sources of information about the character of the people around us: we judge them by what they do and by what they say (particularly the first). Similarly, characterization in a novel can be achieved only by two major means: action and dialogue. Descriptive passages dealing with a character’s appearance, manner, etc. can contribute to a characterization; so can introspective passages dealing with a character’s thoughts and feelings; so can the comments of other characters. But all these are merely auxiliary means, which are of no value without the two pillars: action and dialogue. To re-create the reality of a character, one must show what he does and what he says.

One of the worst errors that a writer can make in the field of characterization is to assert the nature of his characters in narrative passages, with no evidence to support his assertions in the characters’ actions. For instance, if an author keeps telling us that his hero is “virtuous,” “benevolent,” “sensitive,” “heroic,” but the hero does nothing except that he loves the heroine, smiles at the neighbors, contemplates the sunset and votes for the Democratic Party—the result can hardly be called characterization.

A writer, like any other artist, must present an evaluative re-creation of reality, not merely assert his evaluations without any image of reality. In the field of characterization, one action is worth a thousand adjectives.

Characterization requires the portrayal of essential traits. Now what are the essentials of a man’s character?

What do we mean, in real life, when we say that we do not understand a person? We mean that we do not understand why he acts as he does. And when we say that we know a person well, we mean that we understand his actions and know what to expect of him. What is it that we know? His motivation.

Motivation is a key-concept in psychology and in fiction. It is a man’s basic premises and values that form his character and move him to action—and in order to understand a man’s character, it is the motivation behind his actions that we must understand. To know “what makes a man tick,” we must ask: “What is he after?”

To re-create the reality of his characters, to make both their nature and their actions intelligible, it is their motivation that a writer has to reveal. He may do it gradually, revealing it bit by bit, building up the evidence as the story progresses, but at the end of the novel the reader must know why the characters did the things they did.

The depth of a characterization depends on the psychological level of motivation which a writer regards as sufficient to illuminate human behavior. For instance, in an average detective story, the criminals are motivated by the superficial notion of “material greed”—but a novel such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment reveals the soul of a criminal all the way down to his philosophical premises.

Consistency is a major requirement of characterization. This does not mean that a character has to hold nothing but consistent premises—some of the most interesting characters in fiction are men torn by inner conflicts. It means that the author has to be consistent in his view of a character’s psychology and permit him no inexplicable actions, no actions unprepared by or contradictory to the rest of his characterization. It means that a character’s contradictions should never be unintentional on the part of the author.

To maintain the inner logic of his characterizations, a writer must understand the logical chain that leads from the motives of his characters to their actions. To maintain their motivational consistency, he must know their basic premises and the key actions to which these premises will lead them in the course of the story. When he writes the actual scenes in which the characters appear, their premises act as the selectors of all the details and small touches he decides to include. Such details are innumerable, the opportunities for revealing a character’s nature are virtually inexhaustible, and it is the knowledge of what he has to reveal that guides the writer’s selections.

The best way to demonstrate what the process of characterization accomplishes, the means by which it is done, and the disastrous consequences of contradictions, is to illustrate it in action on a specific example.

I shall do it by means of two scenes reproduced below: one is a scene from The Fountainhead, as it stands in the novel—the other is the same scene, as I rewrote it for the purpose of this demonstration. Both versions present only the bare skeleton of the scene, only the dialogue, omitting the descriptive passages. It will be sufficient to illustrate the process.

It is the first scene in which Howard Roark and Peter Keating appear together. It takes place on the evening of the day when Roark was expelled from college and Keating graduated with high honors. The action of the scene consists of one young man asking the advice of another about a professional choice he has to make. But what kind of young men are they? What are their attitudes, premises and motives? Observe what one can learn from a single scene and how much your, the reader’s, mind registers automatically.

Here is the scene as originally written, as it stands in the novel:

“Congratulations, Peter,” said Roark.

“Oh… Oh, thanks… I mean… do you know or… Has mother been telling you?”

“She has.”

“She shouldn’t have!”

“Why not?”

“Look, Howard, you know that I’m terribly sorry about your being…”

“Forget it.”

“I… there’s something I want to speak to you about, Howard, to ask your advice. Mind if I sit down?”

“What is it?”

“You won’t think that it’s awful of me to be asking about my business, when you’ve just been… ?”

“I said forget about that. What is it?”

“You know, I’ve often thought that you’re crazy. But I know that you know many things about it—architecture, I mean—which those fools never knew. And I know that you love it as they never will.”

“Well?”

“Well, I don’t know why I should come to you, but—Howard, I’ve never said it before, but you see, I’d rather have your opinion on things than the Dean’s— I’d probably follow the Dean’s, but it’s just that yours means more to me myself, I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m saying this, either.”

“Come on, you’re not being afraid of me, are you? What do you want to ask about?”

“It’s about my scholarship. The Paris prize I got.”

“Yes?”

“It’s for four years. But, on the other hand, Guy Francon offered me a job with him some time ago. Today he said it’s still open. And I don’t know which to take.”

“If you want my advice, Peter, you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”

“You see, that’s what I admire about you, Howard.

You always know.”

“Drop the compliments.”

“But I mean it. How do you always manage to decide?”

“How can you let others decide for you?”

This was the scene as it stands in the novel. Now here is the same scene, rewritten:

“Congratulations, Peter,” said Roark.

“Oh… Oh, thanks… I mean… do you know or… Has mother been telling you?”

“She has.”

“She shouldn’t have!”

“Oh well, I didn’t mind it.”

“Look, Howard, you know that I’m terribly sorry about your being expelled.”

“Thank you, Peter.”

“I… there’s something I want to speak to you about, Howard, to ask your advice. Mind if I sit down?”

“Go right ahead. I’ll be glad to help you, if I can.”

“You won’t think that it’s awful of me to be asking about my business, when you’ve just been expelled?”

“No. But it’s nice of you to say that, Peter. I appreciate it.”

“You know, I’ve often thought that you’re crazy.”

“Why?”

“Well, the kind of ideas you’ve got about architecture—there’s nobody that’s ever agreed with you, nobody of importance, not the Dean, not any of the professors… and they know their business. They’re always right. I don’t know why I should come to you.”

“Well, there are many different opinions in the world. What did you want to ask me?”

“It’s about my scholarship. The Paris prize I got.”

“Personally, I wouldn’t like it. But I know it’s important to you.”

“It’s for four years. But, on the other hand, Guy Francon offered me a job with him some time ago. Today he said it’s still open. And I don’t know which to take.”

“If you want my advice, Peter, take the job with Guy Francon. I don’t care for his work, but he’s a very prominent architect and you’ll learn how to build.”

“You see, that’s what I admire about you, Howard. You always know how to decide.”

“I try my best.”

“How do you do it?”

“I guess I just do it.”

“But you see, I’m not sure, Howard. I’m never sure of myself. You always are.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. But I guess I’m sure about my work.”

This is an example of “humanizing” a character.

A young reader to whom I showed this scene said with astonished indignation: “He’s not awful—he’s just completely ordinary!”

Let us analyze what the two scenes have conveyed. In the original scene, Roark is impervious to Keating’s or the world’s view of his expulsion. He does not even conceive of any “comparative standard,” of any relation between his expulsion and Keating’s success.

Roark is courteous to Keating, but completely indifferent.

Roark relents and shows a touch of friendliness only when Keating acknowledges his respect for Roark’s architectural ideas and only when Keating shows an earnest sincerity.

Roark’s advice to Keating about independence shows the generosity of taking Keating’s problem seriously—Roark gives him advice, not about a specific choice, but about a crucial basic principle. The essence of the difference between their fundamental premises is focused in two lines of dialogue. Keating: “How do you always manage to decide?”—Roark: “How can you let others decide for you?”

In the rewritten scene, Roark accepts the standards of Keating and his mother—the estimate of his expulsion as disaster and of Keating’s graduation as triumph—but he is generously tolerant about it.

Roark shows interest in Keating’s future and eagerness to help him.

Roark accepts the charity of Keating’s condolences.

At Keating’s insulting comment on his ideas, Roark shows concern by asking: “Why?”

Roark shows a tolerant respect for all differences of opinion, thus confessing a non-objective, relativistic view of ideas and values.

Roark gives Keating specific advice about his choice, finding nothing wrong in Keating’s reliance on another man’s judgment.

Roark is modest about his self-confidence and tries to minimize it. He does not hold self-confidence as a major virtue, he sees no wider principle, no reason why he should be confident in issues other than his work. Thus he indicates that he is merely a superficial, concrete-bound professional man, who might have some integrity in regard to his work, but no wider concept of integrity, no wider principles, no philosophical convictions or values.

If Roark were that type of man, he would not be able to withstand for more than a year or two the kind of battle he had to fight for the next eighteen years; nor would he be able to win it. If that rewritten scene were used in the novel, instead of the original scene (with a few other “softening” touches to match it), none of the subsequent events of the story would make sense, Roark’s later actions would become incomprehensible, unjustifiable, psychologically impossible, his characterization would fall apart, and so would the story, and so would the novel.

Now it should be clear why the major elements of a novel are attributes, not separable parts, and in what manner they are interrelated. The theme of a novel can be conveyed only through the events of the plot, the events of the plot depend on the characterization of the men who enact them—and the characterization cannot be achieved except through the events of the plot, and the plot cannot be constructed without a theme.

This is the kind of integration required by the nature of a novel. And this is why a good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

There is no rule about which of these three attributes should come first to a writer’s mind and initiate the process of constructing a novel. A writer may begin by choosing a theme, then translate it into the appropriate plot and the kind of characters needed to enact it. Or he may begin by thinking of a plot, that is, a plot-theme, then determine the characters he needs and define the abstract meaning his story will necessarily imply. Or he may begin by projecting certain characters, then determine what conflicts their motives will lead to, what events will result, and what will be the story’s ultimate meaning. It does not matter where a writer begins, provided he knows that all three attributes have to unite into so well integrated a sum that no starting point can be discerned.

As to the fourth major attribute of a novel, the style, it is the means by which the other three are presented.

4. Style. The subject of style is so complex that it cannot be covered in a single discussion. I shall merely indicate a few essentials.

A literary style has two fundamental elements (each subsuming a large number of lesser categories): the “choice of content” and the “choice of words.” By “choice of content” I mean those aspects of a given passage (whether description, narrative or dialogue) which a writer chooses to communicate (and which involve the consideration of what to include or to omit). By “choice of words” I mean the particular words and sentence structures a writer uses to communicate them.

For instance, when a writer describes a beautiful woman, his stylistic “choice of content” will determine whether he mentions (or stresses) her face or body or manner of moving or facial expression, etc.; whether the details he includes are essential and significant or accidental and irrelevant; whether he presents them in terms of facts or of evaluations; etc. His “choice of words” will convey the emotional implications or connotations, the value-slanting, of the particular content he has chosen to communicate. (He will achieve a different effect if he describes a woman as “slender” or “thin” or “svelte” or “lanky,” etc.)

Let us compare the literary style of two excerpts from two different novels, reproduced below. Both are descriptions of the same subject: New York City at night. Observe which one of them re-creates the visual reality of a specific scene, and which one deals with vague, emotional assertions and floating abstractions.

First excerpt:

Second excerpt:

The first excerpt is by Mickey Spillane, from his novel One Lonely Night. The second excerpt is by Thomas Wolfe, from his novel The Web and the Rock.

Both writers had to re-create a visual scene and convey a certain mood. Observe the difference in their methods. There is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane’s description; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness. Wolfe does not describe the city; he does not give us a single characteristic visual detail. He asserts that the city is “beautiful,” but does not tell us what makes it beautiful. Such words as “beautiful,” “astounding,” “incomparable,” “thrilling,” “lovely” are estimates; in the absence of any indication of what aroused these estimates, they are arbitrary assertions and meaningless generalities.

Spillane’s style is reality-oriented and addressed to an objective psycho-epistemology: he provides the facts and expects the reader to react accordingly. Wolfe’s style is emotion-oriented and addressed to a subjective psycho-epistemology: he expects the reader to accept emotions divorced from facts, and to accept them second-hand.

Spillane has to be read in full focus, because the reader’s own mind has to estimate the given facts and evoke an appropriate emotion; if one reads him out of focus, one gets nothing—there are no loose, ready-made generalizations, no pre-digested emotions. If one reads Wolfe out of focus, one gets a vague, grandiloquent approximation, suggesting that he has said something important or uplifting; if one reads him in full focus, one sees that he has said nothing.

These are not the only attributes of a literary style. I have used these examples only to indicate some very broad categories. A great many other elements are involved in these two excerpts and in any piece of writing. Style is the most complex aspect of literature and, psychologically, the most revealing.

But style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end—the means of telling a story. The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

The typical literary product of such writers—and of their imitators, who possess no style—are so-called “mood-studies,” popular among today’s literati, which are little pieces conveying nothing but a certain mood. Such pieces are not an art-form, they are merely finger-exercises that never develop into art.

Art is a re-creation of reality, which can and does affect a reader’s mood; this, however, is merely one of the by-products of art. But the attempt to affect the reader’s mood, by-passing any meaningful re-creation of reality, is an attempt to divorce consciousness from existence—to make consciousness, not reality, the focal point of art, to regard a momentary emotion, a mood, as an end in itself.

Observe that a modern painter offers some smears of paint over a crudely inept drawing and boasts about his “color-harmonies”—while to a real painter color-harmony is only one of the means he has to master for the achievement of a much more complex and important end. Similarly, a modern writer offers some evocative sentences, adding up to a trivial vignette, and boasts about the “mood” he has created—while to a real writer the re-creation of a mood is only one of the means he has to master for the achievement of such complex elements as theme, plot, characterization, which have to be integrated into so gigantic an end as a novel.

This particular issue is an eloquent illustration of the relationship between philosophy and art. Just as modern philosophy is dominated by the attempt to destroy the conceptual level of man’s consciousness and even the perceptual level, reducing man’s awareness to mere sensations—so modern art and literature are dominated by the attempt to disintegrate man’s consciousness and reduce it to mere sensations, to the “enjoyment” of meaningless colors, noises and moods.

The art of any given period or culture is a faithful mirror of that culture’s philosophy. If you see obscene, dismembered monstrosities leering at you from today’s esthetic mirrors—the aborted creations of mediocrity, irrationality and panic—you are seeing the embodied, concretized reality of the philosophical premises that dominate today’s culture. Only in this sense can those manifestations be called “art”—not by the intention or accomplishment of their perpetrators, but only by grace of the fact that even in usurping the field of art, one cannot escape from its revelatory power.

It is a frightening sight, but it has a certain didactic value: those who do not wish to surrender their future to the mercy and power of unfocused gargoyles, can learn from them what swamp is their breeding ground and what disinfectant is needed to fight them. The swamp is modern philosophy; the disinfectant is reason.

(July-August 1968)