Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Poland: Selected Essays ed. by Jean G. Harrell and Alina Wierzbiànska (review)

14 Books Lukacs. have s o commonly mistaken it. That an artist represents or describes a state of affairs, Vazquez suggests. is not of itself an cri(/or.setmvit; this means that a 'realistic' portrayal of bourgeois society (such as that by Balzac or, at a later stage, by Kafka) can be judged valuable simply on the grounds of the perceptiveness or accuracy of the representations . To put the matter on a less grand scale: a representation of ennui or boredom need not itself be boring. There are. of course, other questions to be raised about the concept of art as representational and Vazquez deals with a number of them, such as the 'representational' character of abstract painting. But the central issue is in the question of the relation between representation and artistic value. The concept of tiiiniesfs, after all, is not so simple as either Marxist dogmatists or non-Marxist formalists have made it out to be and Vazquez cogently argues against the reductionism on both these sides. Readers of Goodheart's book, on the other hand. hardly acquire what they are promised. The 'radical conscience' that Goodheart chastizes in the name of culture is a grab bag of personal peeves: utopianism (as in Marx and strange bedfellow B. F. Skinner): the claims for instinctual freedom (as in Norman 0. Brown and Marcuse); the anti-intellectualism of the 'radical intellectuals'. The sources of the critique that stand behind these 'radical' expressions in the U.S.A. ;ire hardly touched on by Goodheart: the culture he would defend. with its fixation on the benign individualism and untroubled meliorisni of the 19th century (in models like John Suart Mill and Cardinal Newman), nowhere shows, in his version of it. any awareness that its own failures can be read OHin the focr of the 'counterculture'. Undoubtedly, the radical conscience has reason to be more troubled than it often appears but not because of Goodheart's magisterial patronizing. .Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Poland: Selected Essays. Jean G. Harrell and A h a Wierzbianska. eds. Bucknell Univ. Press, Lewisburg. Penn.. 1973. 285 pp. $12.00. Reviewed by John E. Bowlt* This is ii collection of 10 articles on various branches of visual tinc art and literary aesthetics written by Polish scholars between I921 and 1967. The articles, in excellent English translation, are accompanied by a lucid introduction by Jean G. Harrell. In his essay On So-called Truth in Literature, Roman lngarden mentions that '[this] is not ;I value judgement or B statement of principles according to which literary works of art ought to be composed' (p. 201 ). And I might add here that this collection. as a whole, is concerned much more with the analysis of art than with its evaluation. This attitude is, in my view, a disease of our age (the 'non-critical criticism') and while these texts may, therefore. generate a certain sympathy among today's students, they d o leave unanswered the fundamental question o f what is 'good' and 'bad'. This state of affairs would be tolerable if the authors presented exciting and distinctive arguments or if they even constituted a particular national school of thought. But the word 'Poland' in the book's title proves to be a mere 'tictitious subsistence' instead of a 'real model' (to borrow terniinology from Jerry Pelc's Nominal Expressions and Literary Fiction). Certainly, it is useful to familiarize oneself with the elementary concerns of theoretical aesthetics, but the statements selected provide very little innovation. For example, lgnacy Witkiewicz's investigation into 'pure form' is a tedious pastiche of late 19th-century concepts: although written in the age of Mondrian and Malevitch, of Formalism and emergent Constructivism. the ideas here are scarcely relevant to the 20th century. How much better it would have beep to have included instead a piece by Strzeminski or Starewsk i, +Dept. of Slavic Languages. Box 7217. University of Texas Austin. TX 78712. U.S.A. The essays in general, with the possible exceptions of Stanislaw Ossowski's What Are Aesthetic Experiences? and Mieczyslaw Wallis's The World of Arts and the World of Signs, seem quite out of touch with contemporary art and literature and make no...