IS LITERARY CRITICISM POSSIBLE7
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method, but everyone knows that there are three typical directions
that method may take: (1) Aesthetics, which aims at the ordering
of criticism within a large synthesis of either experimental psychology
or ontology; from the point of view of which it is difficult to say any–
thing about literature that is not merely pretentious. For example:
Goethe's Concrete Universal, Coleridge's Esemplastic Power, Croce's
Expression.
(2)
Analysis of literary language, or "stylistics" (com–
monly supposed to be the orbit of the New Criticism). Without the
correction of a total rhetoric, this
techne
must find its limit, if it is not
at length to become only a habit, in the extreme "purity" of nominal–
ism ("positivism") or of metaphysics.
(3)
Historical scholarship, the
"purest" because the most methodical criticism of all, offers the
historical reconstruction as the general possibility of literature, without
accounting for the unique, miraculous superiority of
The Tempest
or
of
Paradise Lost.
III. When we find criticism appealing to phrases like "frame
of reference," "intellectual discipline," or even "philosophical basis,"
it is not improper
to
suspect that the critic is asking us to accept his
"criticism" on the authority of something in which he does not be–
lieve. The two first phrases contain perhaps hidden analogies to
mathematics; the third, a metaphor of underpinning. This is nothing
against them; all language is necessarily figurative. But used as I
have indicated, the phrases have no ontological, or substantive,
meaning. The critic is only avoiding the simple word truth, and beg–
ging the question. Suppose we acknowledge that the critic, as he begs
this question, gives us at the same moment a new and just insight
into a scene in
The Idiot
or
King Lear.
Yet the philosophical lan–
guage in which he visibly expounds the insight may seem to reflect
an authority that he has not visibly earned. The language of criticism
had better not, then, try to be univocal. It is neither fish nor fowl, yet
both, with that unpleasant taste that we get from fishing ducks.
IV. Literary criticism may become prescriptive and dogmatic
when the critic achieves a coherence in the logical and rhetorical
orders which exceeds the coherence of the imaginative work itself
in those orders. We substitute with the critic a dialectical order for
the elusive, and perhaps quite different, order of the imagination.
We fall into the trap of the logicalization of parts discretely attended.
This sleight of hand imposed upon the reader's good faith invites
him to share the critic's own intellectual pride. Dazzled by the re-
