554
PARTISAN REVIEW
matic vortex where ideas are disembodied into power; but power for
what it is not necessary here to try to say. I tum now to literary
criticism as it seems to be in itself, apart from any question of
teaching it.
II
We have reached the stage of activity in individual criticism
at which we begin to ask whether what we severally do has, or ought
to have, a common end. What has a common end may be better
reached, or at any rate more efficiently pursued, if the long ways to
it are by-passed for the short ways-if happily we can agree on a
common methodology, or at worst a few cooperating methodologies.
The image that this enticing delusion brings to mind is that of the
cheerful, patient bulldozer leveling off an uncharted landscape. The
treeless plain thus made could be used as a desert- by those who can
use deserts-or as an airfield from which to fly somewhere else.
The notes that follow I have put in the form of propositions,
or theses, which either I or some imaginable person might be pre–
sumed to uphold at the present time. Some will be found to contradict
others; but this is to be expected when we try to distinguish the
aims and habits of literary critics over a period so long as a quarter
of a century. The ten theses will affirm, deny, or question a belief or
a practice.
1.
Literary criticism is in at least one respect (perhaps more
than one) like a mule: it cannot reproduce itself, though, like a
mule, it is capable of trying. Its end is outside itself.
If
the great
formal works of literature are not wholly autonomous, criticism, how–
ever theoretical it may become,
is
necessarily even less so. It cannot
in the long run be practiced apart from what it confronts, that gives
rise to
it. It
has no formal substance: it is always
about
something
else.
If
it tries to be about itself, and sets up on its own, it initiates
the infinite series: one criticism within another leading to another
criticism progressively more formal-looking and abstract; or it is pro–
gressively more irrelevant to its external end as it attends to the
periphery, the historical buzz in the rear of literature.
II. The more systematic and methodical, the "purer," criticism
becomes, the less one is able to feel in
it
the presence of its
im–
mediate occasion.
It
tends more and more to
sound
like philosophical
discourse. There are countless degrees, variations, and overlappings of
