IS LITERARY CRITICISM POSSIBLE?
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would not follow from its rejection that these arts or their equivalent
would rise again. (One must always be prepared for the
rise
of
nothing.) My Chicago student was laudably trying to read the text
of the poem; he had nothing but a good mind and good intentions to
read it with. What he had done, of course, was to abstract Eliot's
symbols out of their full rhetorical context, so that they had become
neither Eliot's nor anybody else's symbols. They were thus either
critically useless, or potentially useful in a
pragmatic dimension
of
discourse where ideas may be
power:
as the fullback is said to "bull"
through the opposing line. The rhetorical disciplines, which alone
seem to yield something like the full import of the work of imagina–
tion, are by-passed; and we by-pass these fundamentals of under–
standing no less when we read our own language. All reading is
translation, even in the native tongue; for translation may be described
as the tact of mediation between universals and particulars in the
complex of metaphor.
As
qualified translators we are inevitably
rhetoricians. One scarcely sees how the student (like the Chicago
student, who is also the Minnesota, the Harvard, and the Cornell
student) can be expected to begin the study of rhetoric at the top,
particularly
if
below it there is no bottom.
If
he begins at the top, as
a "critic," he may become the victim of "insights" and "evaluations"
that he has not earned, or he may parrot critical systems that his
instructors have expounded or perhaps merely alluded to, in class.
In any case, man being by nature, or by the nature of his language,
a rhetorician, the student becomes a bad rhetorician.
It
is futile to
expect him to be a critic when he has not yet learned how to read.
How can rhetoric, or the
arts
of language, be taught today?
We are not likely to begin teaching something in which we do not
believe: we do not believe in the uses of rhetoric because we do
not believe that the full language of the human situation can be the
vehicle of truth. Weare not facing the problem when we circum–
vent
it
by asking the student to study the special languages of
"criticism," in which we should like to believe. Can we believe in
the language of humane truth without believing in the possibility of
a higher unity of truth, which we must posit as
there)
even if it
must remain beyond our powers of understanding? Without such
a belief are we not committed to the assumption that literature has
nothing to do with truth, that it is only illusion, froth on the historical
current, the Platonic
gignomenon?
We languish, then, in the prag-
