The harshest irony is that his mature criticism was distinguished and deepened the power to read. This resistance, which grew among many critics and writers, could be a necessary revolt against an ever more confident form of literary theory that emptied away far more than a transcendent signified. As writers of fiction know, the point about writing is that it is existentially real, an active mode of discovery through the modalities of the imagination, a reaching toward a supreme fiction. It is not a subordinate category of criticism. When writers are censored, imprisoned, killed or threatened with death for their writings, this is not because they are the disciples of undecidability.
Writing is an act of expressed moral responsibility.
If we are to take authors and their fate seriously, criticism must offer a portrait of creativity and of authorship as existential self-declaration. We need to honor fiction as more than a rhetorical practice, in fact as a mode of radical discovery. We need an ambiance around writing that collaborates with its nature as imaginative exploration, as idea, as dream, and that in the longer view considers creativity a prime power in the making of intelligence, feeling and moral existence. He started it because during the 1930's the word had been defamed and defigured, the book burned, the writer erased, by forces that lay outside criticism, in history. In the sad drama of a man who in youth misread not text but history, the cumulative moral, political and linguistic crises of our agonizing century are returned to us.