Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

An artist usually presents a given object or idea in one relationship to other objects and ideas; if he opens his reader's consciousness to more than one frame of reference, he focuses on the object in one of its relationships and subordinates all other relationships to it. The essential action of the artist in creating the experience of an audience is the one that in grammar is made by indicators of relationship like “although,” “but,” “after,” “because,” “however.” In literature such indicators of relationship tell the reader that he is not in the borderless world outside art where he himself has always to work upon what he perceives, to arrange it around a focal point chosen and maintained by himself. Syntactic organization tells the reader that he is dealing with what we are likely to label “truth,” experience sorted, classed, and rated, rather than with “what is true,” the still to be sorted data of “real” experience.The great distinction between the experience of life and of art is that art, by fixing one or more sets of relationships, gives its audience an experience in which objects are as they must be to be thought about, in which the audience can see what I have called “truth” without having to hunt it out and pull it out, in which “what is true” and “truth” can be the same. Art presents the mind with an experience in which it is at home rather than one in which it must ... log in or subscribe to read full text