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PARTISAN REVIEW
much contemporary criticism is that these two contexts are either
taken to be one or to be organically related, so that it becomes pos–
sible to assume that a sense of literary tradition necessarily involves
and sanctions a "traditional" view of morality. There is a powerful
inclination here-it is the doing of the impish
Zeitgeist-to
forget
that literary tradition can be fruitfully seen as a series of revolts, liter–
ary but sometimes more than literary, of generation against genera–
tion, age against age. The emphasis on "tradition" has other con–
temporary implications: it is used as a not very courageous means
of countering the experimental and the modern; it can enclose the
academic assumption-and this is the curse of the Ph.D. system–
that the whole of the literary past is at every point equally relevant
to a modern intelligence; and it frequently includes the provincial
American need to be more genteel than the gentry, more English than
the English. Basically, it has served as a means of asserting conserva–
tive or reactionary moral-ideological views not, as they should be
asserted, in their own terms, but through the refining medium of
literary talk.
In general, there has been a tendency among critics to subsume
literature under their own moral musings, which makes for a con–
spicuously humorless kind of criticism.
4
Morality is assumed to be a
sufficient container for the floods of experience, and poems or novels
that gain their richness from the complexity with which they drama–
tize the incommensurability between man's existence and his con–
ceptualizing, are thinned, pruned and allegorized into moral fables.
Writers who spent-in both senses of the word-their lives wrestling
with terrible private demons are elevated into literary dons and
deacons. It is as
if
Stendhal had never come forth, with his subversive
wit, to testify how often life and literature find the whole moral ap–
paratus irrelevant or tedious, as if Lawrence had never written
The
Man Who Died,
as if Nietzsche had never launched his great attack
on the Christian impoverishment of the human psyche. One can only
4 Writing about
Wuthering Heights
Mr. Mark Schorer solemnly declares
that "the theme of the moral magnificence of unmoral passion is an impossible
theme to sustain, and the needs of her temperament to the contrary, all personal
longing and reverie to the contrary, Emily Bronte teaches herself that this was
indeed not at all what her material must mean as art." What is more, if Emily
Bronte had lived a little longer she would have been offered a Chair in Moral
Philosophy.
