From artist to critic

Abstract

During the process of creation, that is, up to the moment his theory is ‘full-blown’, the narrator is indeed an artist, an artist in the conceptual medium of interpretation and imagination. But our reluctance to call his creation a work of art is obviously due to the fact that it so little resembles any of the artistic products we know. Some critics have evaded the problem by reading the novel simply as allegory;1 while we have refined and redefined the concept of artistic creation. We have already encountered a number of similar figments: the Beldonald Holbein, Granger’s Flickerbridge, Maud Blessingbourne’s little drama, and the vision of Nona Vincent. Mrs Briss calls the narrator’s a ‘bubble’ which she would like to ‘burst’ (p. 213), an ‘incubus’ (p. 213) — almost a tumour implanted in the narrator’s mind. What happens at the end of the novel is, however, crucial. The latent contradiction of this state of affairs — of the intangible ‘work of art’, or of the one-man sacred fount — has come to a head; the theory is fully grown and becomes detached from its author’s mind. A real work of creation cannot remain for ever imprisoned in the subjectivity of its maker who alone watches over it, and this conflict resolves itself in the narrator’s case in the simultaneous ‘disintegration and … doom’ of the supplier, the victim of the sacred fount. Both the theory’s perfection and the narrator’s salvation lie in fact in the severing of their connection, to which the narrator ‘almost breathlessly hurrie[s]’.