All this is a paradoxical situation for intellectuals who turn to fiction as the best possible prose vehicle for their interpretations, only to discover that those very interpretations—the urgency of which prompted the work—are to the reader the work’s most dispensable aspect. They discover that in order to write fiction that anybody might want to read, they must painstakingly conceal what is to them its very point. (Here is the germ of truth in that funny, sweet saying of the ignorant, that the function of criticism in general, and of freshman critical essays in particular, is to “find the hidden meaning.”) In order to make a world in which their ideas might be discovered, writers embody those ideas in materials solid and opaque, and thus conceal them. In the process of fleshing out a thought, they brick it in. The more subtle they are as artists (not as thinkers, but as artists), the more completely their structures will vanish into the work, and the more grouchy they will become the more readers tell them what lovely, solid bricks they make.

The story contains no trace of that bundle of bias, enthusiasm, motive, morality, personality, and mind which we might term “the author.” Where is Joyce? The work is seamless. I do not mean that Joyce does not intrude his opinions into his story—that is a pleasing but not uncommon virtue—but instead I mean something more profound and less easy to name. The sentences have in their rhythms an austerity that is complete. They exhibit, by their perfect concealment of it, an absolutely controlled tension, like that of a mastered grief or longing. I suggest that the austerity with which a writer wholly subsumes his thoughts to his fictional materials reminds us of—or is even identical to—the difficult dignity with which some people control strong and private feelings. We are people, and we call this “power”; it will always command our respect.

Perhaps, then, this high degree of tension and control in prose, this sense of great emotional passion at short rein, attracts our mind and leads us to inquire into the sources of the tension and the principles of control. And perhaps, too, the absence of any hint of explanation or motive on the author’s part will lead us to seek it, lead us to inquire, as we do of “Leaving the Yellow House” and, somewhat differently, of “The Dead,” what these things are doing here in the first place. I hope so.

Symbol does not only refer; it acts. There is no such thing as a mere symbol. When you climb to the higher levels of abstraction, symbols, those enormous, translucent planets, are all there is. They are at once your only tools of knowledge and that knowledge's only object. It is no leap to say that space-time is itself a symbol. If the material world is a symbol, it is the symbol of mind, or of God. Which is more or less meaningless - as you choose. But it is not mere. In the last analysis, symbol and art objects do not stand for things; they manifest them, in their fullness. You begin by using symbols, and end by contemplating them.

As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible—or at least visible, at least discussible—those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains which science’s tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all that we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts and of all ideas to forms.

The task, then, of all the arts in each century is to rescue the clichés, not to turn from them, and to dedicate themselves each new decade to more comprehensive forms of beauty and understanding. It is to expand those arts’ purviews, to expand the arc of the comprehended world, and not to restrict any vision according to the demands for purity set by theory. Purity of practice guarantees that the artist will not err, and that superficial critics will find no flaw in the work, and that nothing has been ventured. Within the bare pantry of purity, stocked solely with what the mind knows to be essential, symbol, which is itself material and which requires a chaotic wealth of materials, can neither grow nor flourish. Symbols arise from material messes.