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meaningless? May it claim thereby to have criticized society? Or to have recreated our experience? May a work claim for itself whole hunks of other people’s thoughts on the flimsy grounds that the work itself, being so fragmented, typifies our experience of this century? Can a writer get away with this? I don’t think so.
    But let me state the question more sympathetically, from the writer’s point of view. The writer’s question is slightly different. If the writer’s honest intention is to recreate a world he finds meaningless, must his work then be meaningless? If he writes a broken book, is he not then a bad artist? On the other hand, if he unifies a world he sees as shattered, is he not dishonest? All this is an old problem for any writer, for a traditional one as well as a contemporary one. Stated broadly, the question is, What is negative art? What can it be? What can a writer do when his intention is to depict seriously a boring conversation? Must he bore everybody? How should he handle a dull character, a hateful scene? (Everyone knows how the hated voice of a hated character can ruin a book.) Or, in the big time, how can a writer show, as a harmonious, artistic whole, times out of joint, materials clashing, effects without cause, life without depth, and all history without meaning?
    There are several strategies which may ameliorate these difficulties. A writer may make his aesthetic surfaces very, very good and even appealing, in the hope that those surface excellences will impart to the workenough positive value, as it were, to overwhelm its negativity. Better, he may widen his final intention to include possibilities for meaning which illuminate, without relieving, suffering: but this solution, the writing of tragedy or of contemporary art whose intentions are wider than those posited, does not address the problem. The only real solution is this, which obtains in all art: the writer makes real artistic meaning of meaninglessness the usual way, the old way, by creating a self-relevant artistic whole. He produces a work whose parts cohere. He imposes a strict order upon chaos. And this is what most contemporary modernist fiction does. Art may imitate anything but disorder. The work of art may, like a magician’s act, pretend to any degree of spontaneity, randomality, or whimsy, so long as the effect of the whole is calculated and unified. No subject matter whatever prohibits a positive and unified handling. After all, who would say of “The Waste Land” that it is meaningless, or of Molloy , or Mrs. Bridge? We see in these works, and in traditional black works like Greene’s Brighton Rock and Lowry’s Under the Volcano , the unity which characterizes all art. In this structural unity lies integrity, and it is integrity which separates art from nonart.
    Let me tread shaky ground in order to insert a note from René Magritte on this business of integrity. Any juxtaposition may be startling. Narrative collage is a cheap source of power. An onion ring in a coffin! Paul of Tarsus and Shelly Hack! We can all do this all day. But in the juxtaposition of images, as in other juxtapositions, there is true and false, says Magritte. Magritte says we know birds in a cage. The image gets more interesting if we have, instead of a bird, a fish in the cage, or a shoe in the cage; “but though these images are strange they areunhappily accidental, arbitrary. It is possible to obtain a new image which will stand up to examination through having something final, something right about it: it’s the image showing an egg in the cage.”
    Now, what do we make of this curious assertion of Magritte’s, that surrealist images may be right or wrong? What can be right about a surrealist image? I am certainly not going to endorse as an artistic criterion Magritte’s vague, emotional phrase “something right about it.” But I do endorse his notion that the right image will