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Literature and the Sixth Sense
Literature And The Sixth Sense by Rahv, Philip
- GenresEssays
445 pages, Hardcover
Published December 1, 1970
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 8, 2018
Rahv was an editor at the Partisan Review, which was a literary magazine which mattered when literary magazines mattered. This book is a collection of his essays and book reviews, and most of them are very good. His one sort of theoretically important idea, that American lit is divided into "paleface" and "redface" authors, hasn't aged well, and neither has his low estimation of Woolf, which is shockingly off, considering that most of what he uses to anchor his opinion seems to be marks in her favor. He is good on Eliot, Hemingway, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Possibly his best stuff (possibly because I haven't seen anyone else do it) is on Kafka. The "Sixth Sense" of the title is historical awareness.
There's not much of a distinctive voice at the back of it all, I guess, so look up individual essays rather than read the whole thing in bulk. Still good though.
There's not much of a distinctive voice at the back of it all, I guess, so look up individual essays rather than read the whole thing in bulk. Still good though.
August 21, 2024
Kinda hard to know where to begin, considering this book doesn't even have a decent Goodreads thumbnail. I found it by complete accident as I was looking for a book of Henry James' criticism and the title alone Literature and the Sixth Sense made me go, Oooohhhh.... and when I had a gander at the table of contents I had to dig in. I kept digging, not reading everything (esp if it was on a book or author I haven't read before), and wow, what a happy accident.
Rahv is in the top row, in the middle. He was part of a group of "New York Intellectuals" who seemed to have pretty awesome lives, in that they were allowed to have jobs based on reading and writing, all of whom seem utterly forgotten now, along with the concept of such jobs. There's an illuminating and backhandedly funny article on Rahv that is worth reading in this contemporary literary journal that somehow still exists.
James, Hawthorne, Kafka, the concept (now gone thank goodness) of the macho male American Writer (Hemingway and Norman Mailer), a great summary of 1984, the lameness of Henry Miller and so-called bohemian writers who think cussing a lot and describing sex is profound, and many more!
Here are some of my favorite gems from his essay "The Dark Lady of Salem" (great title). The dude really gets Hawthorne in a way I haven't seen in any other critic:
“The dark lady is a rebel and an emancipator; but precisely for this reason Hawthorne feels the compulsion to destroy her. He thus converts the principle of life, of experience, into a principle of death. Incessantly haunted by the wrongs of the past, by the memory of such brutal deeds directly implicating the founders of his family as the witchcraft trials and the oppression of the Quakers, this repentant puritan is nevertheless impelled by a irresistible inner need to reproduce the very same ancestral pattern in his work.” (63)
“No, this business of Rapaccini and his poisons is just so much flummery and Gothic sleight-of-hand. Its use is that of an “alibi” for the author, who transforms Beatrice into a monster in order to punish her for tempting Giovanni.” (66) [bolds mine—C.]
“The unregenerate temptress knows her power, but in the end Dimmesdale cheats her of her triumph by publicly confessing his sin on the scaffold; that is his triumph. This thin-skinned clergyman is the ancesor of all those characters in Henry James who invent excruciatingly subtle reasons for renouncing their heart’s desire once they are on the verge of attaining it.” (68)
“He wants to destroy the dark lady at the same time that he wants to glorify her [he wants to fuck her]; hence his indictment of her is never really driven home.” (69) [brackets mine, duh]
“[Hawthorne] is unable to authenticate Miriam’s guilt for the quite obvious reason that her beauty and love of life already sufficiently condemn her in his eyes. In other words, it is not her deeds but her very existence which is the supreme provocation and the supreme crime.” (74)
Rahv is in the top row, in the middle. He was part of a group of "New York Intellectuals" who seemed to have pretty awesome lives, in that they were allowed to have jobs based on reading and writing, all of whom seem utterly forgotten now, along with the concept of such jobs. There's an illuminating and backhandedly funny article on Rahv that is worth reading in this contemporary literary journal that somehow still exists.
James, Hawthorne, Kafka, the concept (now gone thank goodness) of the macho male American Writer (Hemingway and Norman Mailer), a great summary of 1984, the lameness of Henry Miller and so-called bohemian writers who think cussing a lot and describing sex is profound, and many more!
Here are some of my favorite gems from his essay "The Dark Lady of Salem" (great title). The dude really gets Hawthorne in a way I haven't seen in any other critic:
“The dark lady is a rebel and an emancipator; but precisely for this reason Hawthorne feels the compulsion to destroy her. He thus converts the principle of life, of experience, into a principle of death. Incessantly haunted by the wrongs of the past, by the memory of such brutal deeds directly implicating the founders of his family as the witchcraft trials and the oppression of the Quakers, this repentant puritan is nevertheless impelled by a irresistible inner need to reproduce the very same ancestral pattern in his work.” (63)
“No, this business of Rapaccini and his poisons is just so much flummery and Gothic sleight-of-hand. Its use is that of an “alibi” for the author, who transforms Beatrice into a monster in order to punish her for tempting Giovanni.” (66) [bolds mine—C.]
“The unregenerate temptress knows her power, but in the end Dimmesdale cheats her of her triumph by publicly confessing his sin on the scaffold; that is his triumph. This thin-skinned clergyman is the ancesor of all those characters in Henry James who invent excruciatingly subtle reasons for renouncing their heart’s desire once they are on the verge of attaining it.” (68)
“He wants to destroy the dark lady at the same time that he wants to glorify her [he wants to fuck her]; hence his indictment of her is never really driven home.” (69) [brackets mine, duh]
“[Hawthorne] is unable to authenticate Miriam’s guilt for the quite obvious reason that her beauty and love of life already sufficiently condemn her in his eyes. In other words, it is not her deeds but her very existence which is the supreme provocation and the supreme crime.” (74)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews