COMMENT
IN looking about us to discover what is wrong with the world for October, we decided that the most poignant ailment is a general vagueness as to the function of criticism. We hungered after some irreducible minimum, something of the nature of a cogito, ergo sum, which might serve at least as the opportunity for someone to come forth with a better one. And we felt safe in examining Aristotle, on the hypothesis that Aristotle is the formal literary critic whose work has stood the test of time most substantially.
The irreducible minimum seemed to be this: That the contribution which the Poetics makes to Greek literature is nothing other than the Poetics itself. That is, Aristotle’s criticism did not serve to improve Greek poetry; it was simply the parallel, in ideological values, to the emotional values of Greek poetry, the translation of one set of terms into another set of terms. And criticism becomes an independent activity, the beauty of which consists purely in the power and subtlety of its formulations.
Next, we found tentatively three phases in which such formulations might conceivably manifest themselves, and these for convenience we called interpretation, orientation, and judgement.
By interpretation is meant the critic's function of seeing more deeply into the work of art than is to be expected of the layman. His programme here is to understand the author's purpose and the means utilized for effecting that purpose. This phase of criticism tends towards the technical approach, and is usually done best by critics who are themselves poets.
Orientation is the examination into the origin of the work of art. As such it is quite aside from the high road of criticism, but is probably justified in that it does throw new lights upon the art work itself. Under orientation come those various attempts to approach art through sociology, biology, ethnology, biography, politics, geography, economics—in short, the approach through history, the explanation of the art work as a result, as the miniature reflection of some larger condition. This method is not very valuable in accounting for excellence—which remains pretty much of an accident—but it has proved very useful in giving us further insight into why certain elements are to be found in a given work, and it is
