theoryofliteratu00inwell

Evaluation 249
what, in act, is its function. It is what it can doj it can do and
should do what it is. We must value things for what they are and
can do, and evaluate them by comparison with other things of
like nature and function.
We ought to evaluate literature in terms and degrees of its
own nature. What is its own nature? What is literature as such?
What is "pure" literature? The phrasing of the questions implies
some analytic or reductive process j the kind of answer arrives at
conceptions of "pure poetry"—imagism or echolalia. But if we
try to press for purity along such lines, we must break up the
amalgam of visual imagery and euphony into painting and
and poetry disappears.
music -
y
Such a conception of purity is one of analyzing elements. We
do better to start with organization and function. It is not what
elements but how they are put together, and with what function,
which determine whether a given work is or is not literature. 2
In their reformatory zeal, certain older advocates of "pure lit-
erature" identified the mere presence of ethical or social ideas in
a novel or a poem as the "didactic heresy." But literature is not
defiled by the presence of ideas literarily used, used as integral
parts of the literary work—as materials—like the characters and
the settings. What literature is, by modern definition, "pure of"
is practical intent (propaganda, incitation to direct, immediate
action) and scientific intent (provision of information, facts,
"additions to knowledge"). By "pure of" we don't mean that
the novel or poem lacks "elements," disengaged elements, which
can be taken practically or scientifically, when removed from
their context. Again, we don't mean that a "pure" novel or poem
can't, as a whole, be read "impurely." All things can be misused,
or used inadequately, i.e., in functions not centrally relevant to
their natures:
As some to church repair
Not for the doctrine but the music there.
In their day, Gogol's "The Cloak" and Dead Souls were ap-
parently misread, even by intelligent critics. Yet the view that
they were propaganda, a misreading explicable in terms of iso-
lated passages and elements in them, is scarcely to be reconciled
with the elaborateness of their literary organization, their com-