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PARTISAN REVIEW
fractions of the critic's spectrum, the reader accepts as his own the
critic's dubious superiority to the work as a whole. He is only at–
tending serially to the separated parts in which he worships his own
image. This is critical idolatry; the idols of its three great sects
are the techniques of purity described in Thesis II.
V.
If
criticism undertakes the responsibility and the privilege
of a strict theory of knowledge, the critic will need all the humility
that human nature is capable of, almost the self-abnegation of the
saint. Is the critic willing to test his epistemology against a selfless
reading of
The Rape of the Lock, War and Peace,
or a lyric by
Thomas Nashe? Or is his criticism merely the report of a quarrel
between the imagined life of the work and his own "philosophy'"
Has possession of the critic by a severe theory of knowledge interfered
with the primary office of criticism? What is the primary office of
criticism? Is it to expound and to elucidate, with as little distortion
as possible, the knowledge of life contained by the novel or the
poem or the play? What critic has ever done this?
VI. A work of the imagination differs from a work of the
logical intellect in some radical sense that seems to lie beyond our
comprehension. But this much may be said: the imaginative work
admits of neither progressive correction nor substitution or rear–
rangement of parts; it is never obsolete, it is always up-to-date. Dry–
den does not "improve" Shakespeare; Shakespeare does not replace
Dante, in the way that Einstein's physics seems to have "corrected"
Newton's. There is no competition among poems. A good poem sug–
gests the possibility of other poems equally good. But criticism is
perpetually obsolescent and replaceable.
VII. The very terms of elucidation-the present ones, like any
others-carry with them, concealed, an implicated judgment. The
critic's rhetoric, laid out in his particular grammar, is the critic's
mind. This enables him to see much that is there, a little that is
there, nothing that
is
there, or something that
is
not there; but
none of these with perfect consistency. We may ask again: to what
extent is the critic obligated to dredge the bottom of his mind and
to exhibit to an incredulous eye his own skeleton? We might answer
the question rhetorically by saying: We are constantly trying to smoke
out the critic's "position." This is criticism of criticism. Should we
succeed in this game to our perfect satisfaction, we must be on guard
lest our assent to or dissent from a critic's "position" mislead us into
