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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, June 25.1963
Slavery to Hackneyed Forms Precludes Unique Art Work
By Bernard Henrie
When you sit down to write a theme for an English composition class you have one thing in common with a Hemingway or Mickey Spillane.
You probably want to say something.
The difficulty in doing this is immediate.
YOU MUST attempt to express live feelings with dead terms.
It is the same problem of the still photographer at a football game. He takes a picture which represents in fixed and unmoving terms a scene which is vibrant with motion and life.
There is one problem, however, which a Hemingway has that a Spillane does not: the creation of significant form.
THIS SIGNIFICANT form, as defined in the first article of this series, is what the critic sees in all great art. This significant form stimulates a profound emotional response in the critic who is able to recognize it.
But while the critic simply recognizes significant form, the writer—or artist—must create it. The writer must concern himself with surmounting the problems just outlined. He must concern himself with the content of the form just as the desk-maker must concern himself with the materials he shapes into a form which we call a desk or recognize as a desk.
The writer's material is the language. To put motion and meaning into his language he needs to select the words wisely. However, the language does not always contain so obliquing a word and the author is forced to create a new word—a new
series of words—a new concept or impression.
"EVERYBODY KNOWS," leading symbolic philosopher Susanne K. Langer wrote in "Philosophy In a New Key." "that language is a very poor medium for expressing our emotional nature. It merely names certain vaguely and crudely conceived states, but falls miserably in any attempt to convey the ever-moving patterns, the ambivalences and intricacies of inner experience, the interplay of feelings with thoughts and impressions, memories and echoes of memories, transient fantasy, or its mere runic traces, all turned into nameless, emotional stuff . . . Language is quite inadequate to articulate inmost feelings, even if they could be spoken."
Consequently, the writer must create new words. This is done by the process of metaphor. Miss Langer calls metaphor the law of language development.
METAPHOR—the combining of old words, concepts, or images with other old words and concepts—results in new terms and possibilities of meaning.
Metaphor includes all the storytelling devices which together, or, at least so in art, create significant form. These devices include among others, simile, meter, rhythm, alliteration, and, perhaps, even myth—which many people believe to be a separate device.
The danger with metaphor is that the meaning created will be so obscure or unclear as to fall below the recognition of the reader. For this reason, as well as the reason of difficulty in thinking of original metaphors, many writers avoid the use of metaphor. Such writers are content
to avoid metaphor or make such weak metaphors that there will be no chance of confusing the reader.
OTHER WRITERS express what they wish without regard to whether the reader will "understand" what has been created.
More common, however, is the artist who makes some compromise in his creation. He leaves enough traditional meaning in his story or art, so that what abstractions or metaphors he makes can be related and associated in relation to the traditional meanings already offered.
THE HARBOUR
Lightning Toll Heavy
CHICAGO-(UPI)-In 1962, lightning or lightning-set fires killed 5,012 cattle, 192 horses, 888 sheep and goats, 4,084 hogs and 59,860 fowl. The dollar loss amounted to $1,617,220, says the Lightning Protection Institute.
We saw this in the Frost poem— (Continued on page 6)
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