If beauty is truth, as Keats and Lorenz Hart used to claim, there must be an extraordinary beauty in the simultaneous assertion of two contradictory truths. And that extraordinary department of beauty, for which someone must have invented a name by now, is the principal source of drama. I mean drama and not theater: In the latter, beauty can be single and simple. Nor do I mean any of the ways, from dialectics to deconstruction, by which theorists have tried to "solve" the puzzle of this beauteous dualism: I mean a both/and, not an either/or with a synthesis or a symposium to follow. What I mean is—actually, it makes more sense to point to an object that exemplifies what I mean than to waste space trying to explain it; let the lexicographers and taxonomists face that challenge. The critic's function is to... More >>>