BOGS ALONG THE MIDDLE PATH
reports having asked a student why one should bother studying literature.
Students being what they are, the answer was unsatisfactory; hence, this
book to provide better answers. But if we are to credit its title, the book is
also addressed to critics, who are or should be something more than
students. The book is paralyzed by this conflict of purpose, and Daiches
writes with one eye on the classroom and the other on the "literary
audience," which he sometimes treats as if
it
too were in a classroom.
Specifically: Daiches develops a general exposition of literary values
(the novel as art form; the characteristics of poetry; literature in rela–
tion to belief; the denotative and connotative uses of language) which,
if addressed to critics and experienced readers, hardly contains anything
so striking or closely worked as to warrant its existence.
If,
however, the
book is addressed to students, it is a usable restatement, but is seriously
marred by the occasional intrusions of Daiches the critic. When he is
not merely reformulating common notions for novitiates and instead of–
fers what is really
his
(a perceptive analysis of semi-literacy as a cul–
tural condition, a teasing hint of what he calls the "esthetic distance"
between the reader and the book, a very neat discussion of
Lycidas),
then he is a suggestive critic, of whom it might almost be said, 'tis a
pity he's a teacher. The book seems, consequently, a fascinating bit of
evidence of how the academic and the critic, in the same man, can
get in each other's way.
But as a critic Daiches has some valuable things to say, even though
they are isolated, sparse and undeveloped. He conducts an anonymous
running attack against the more rigid of the "new critics" which I, for
one, should have wished to see enlarged. It is good to read his sporadic
attacks on "those critics ... who in their zeal for "objectivity" try to
nail down some aspect of literature without reference .. . to life (and
who) are in danger of missing the one point about literature that really
matters." But when Cleanth Brooks is meant, if he is meant, why not
name him, so that the discussion will be in the open and Brooks can
get his chance to rebut. Why does the humanist critic feel the need
to be so genteel (and gentle) at the very point where he is most interest–
ing?
Perhaps the trouble is that Daiches is a bit too untroubled, that
rather than his critical self having been tripped up by his academic
self, he has naturally, as it were, grown an academic skin. (I don't
mean to suggest that teaching n ecessarily involves academicism, though
it certainly seems to help.) Ten years ago Daiches wrote a book, little
known in this country, called
L iterature and Society
in which, rather
crudely and skimpily, he tried to develop in Marxist terms the relation-
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