27th
”
The capacity of the intuitive self to breach the historical ego is the life-giving and terrifying objectivity of imaginative art that makes a painting or a poem or a piece of sculpture or a fiction endure beyond the artist’s short lifetime and gives it the strangest beauty or coherence in depth.
This interaction between sovereign ego and intuitive self is the tormenting reality of changing form, the ecstasy as well of visionary capacity to cleave the prison house of natural bias within a heterogeneous asymmetric context(1) in which the unknowable God—though ceaselessly beyond human patterns—infuses art with unfathomable eternity and grace.”
Not normally given to abstractions, but Harris’ response to Achebe’s critique of Conrad is utterly brilliant. Achebe called Conrad a “bloody racist”. Of course, for Achebe, and all of that tribe, the premier and indeed sole interest in any author is their orientation towards a very narrow definition of interest.
