Yesterday I finished reading Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. It’s a mere “genre” novel, but I doubt any of the “art” novels of our time are better. I think critics have too long been under the influence of Henry James, whose forte was characterization, not plot, as Clancy’s is. I much prefer The Hunt for Red October to the one James novel I know I read, The Ambassadors–a penetrating psychological study of an absolute nincompoop as far as I’m concerned. The inability to be explicit does not seem the brilliant virtue to me it does to Jamesians.
I think taste in these matters boils down to which of a person’s awarenesses is stronger, his sagaceptual awareness or his anthroceptual awareness. I’ve discussed all this before, but haven’t anything else to post today, so here it is again. (I also want to make public my notion of sagaceptuality as much as possible so maybe I’ll get some credit for it when some certified theoretical psychologist discovers it.) It’s the awareness which tends to organize thinking in goal directed modes–i.e., to put a person on a quest. It could be a child hunting for pirate treasure on a beach, a girl pursuing a boy, me working up a decent definition of . . . “sagaceptuality.” It could also be a vicarious quest, as was the one I went on with the hero of The Hunt for Red October. With several of the heroes of that book, actually.
What happens is that we all have an instinctive recognition of certain goals–for instance, the capture of a mate. We usually have some instinctive goal pursuit drive that the object we recognize as a proper goal makes available to us. What it does, basically, is lock us onto the object it is our goal to capture (or escape from) and energize us when we are effectively closing in on it (or escaping it), and de-energize us to take us out of single-minded ineffective pursuit and expose us to other possible better kinds, until one of them is judged to improve out pursuit. In other words, just a homing device, with many different possible targets, like a possible mate, or food, or beauty, or fame. Nothing much to it.
Anthroceptuality is simply interest in oneself and others. When it is dominant, other instincts rule us, such as the need for social approval. Needless to say, both anthroceptuality and sagaceptuality will usually be in some kind of partnership–with other awarenesses. But some, as I’ve said, will be stronger in sagaceptuality than anthroceptuality, and some the reverse. The former will prefer plot in the stories he reads or movies he watches to characterization; the latter will consider plot trivial compared to characterization. I’m convinced that normal men are sagaceptuals, normal women anthroceptuals. But not necessarily all the time.
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