THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY
27
the literary world is a gradual bureaucratization of opinion and taste;
not a dictatorship, not a conspiracy, not a coup, not a Machiavellian
plot to impose a mandatory "syllabus"; but the inevitable result of
outer success and inner hardening. Fourth-rate exercises in exegesis
are puffed in the magazines while so remarkable and provocative a
work as Arnold Hauser's
Social History of Art
is hardly reviewed,
its very title indicating the reason. Learned young critics who have
never troubled to open a novel by Turgenev can rattle off reams of
Kenneth Burke, which gives them, understandably, a sensation of
having enlarged upon literature. Literature itself becomes a raw ma–
terial which critics work up into schemes of structure and symbol;
to suppose that it is concerned with .anything so
gauche
as human
experience or obsolete as human beings- "You mean," a student said
to me, "that you're interested in the
characters
of novels!"-is to
commit Mr. Elton alone knows how many heresies. (Cf. The
Glos–
sary,
now in its fifth edition, which proves that bad reviews can't kill
ponies.) Symbols clutter the literary landscape like the pots and pans
a two-year-old strews over the kitchen floor; and what is wrong here
is not merely the transparent absence of literary tact- the gift for
saying when a pan is a pan and when a pan is a symbol-but far
more important, a transparent lack of interest in represented exper–
ience. For Mr. Stallman the fact that Stephen Crane looking at the
sun felt moved to compare it to a wafer is not enough, the existence
of suns and wafers and their possible conjunction is not sufficiently
marvelous; both objects must be absorbed into Christian symbolism
(an ancient theory of literature developed by the church fathers to
prove that suns, moons, vulva, chairs, money, hair, pots, pans and
words are really crucifixes). Techniques for reading a novel that
have at best a limited relevance are frozen into dogmas: one might
suppose from glancing at the more imposing literary manuals that
"point of view" is the crucial means of judging a novel. (Willa
Cather, according to Miss Caroline Gordon, was "astonishingly ignor–
ant of her craft," for she refrained from "using a single consciousness
as a prism of moral reflection." The very mistake Tolstoy made,
too!) Criticism itself, far from being the reflection of a solitary mind
upon a work of art and therefore, like the solitary mind, incomplete
and subjective, comes increasingly to be regarded as a problem in
mechanics, the tools, methods and trade secrets of which can be
picked up, usually during the summer, from the more experienced
