742
PETER MARIN
AN EXCITING DISAPPOINTMENT
IN DEFENSE OF IGNORANCE.
By
Kllrl Shllpiro. Rllndom House.
$4.00.
Criticism at its best is relaxed and generous-honest, in·
telligent and passionate response; its ultimate values and uses are
by-products of this initial confrontation. But most contemporary
critics have somehow lost sight of the essential simplicity of their
craft, and substitute for it pretentious abstraction, pompus author–
ity or a scholarship divorced from reaction. Lost in this zealous
shuffle are the private and fundamental acts of response and
judgment, the critic's only obligations. What criticism does present
as judgment is usually a disguised and desperate metaphysical or
political polemic-this is the common denominator of all New
Criticism-and these opinions, passed down in toto and weighted
with authority, became increasingly corrosive: the primary acts
vanish, what should be spontaneous becomes packaged. .
In Defense of Ign.rance
needs this introduction because Karl
Shapiro is fretfully aware of this situation-my paragraph, I think,
mirrors his attitude toward modern criticism-and it is within this
framework that his book seems to me an exciting kind of disappoint–
ment. Exciting and disappointing- those are the two words I should
choose. It is exciting because it is free of the critic's usual bombast
and cant-a grotesque, brave and passionate book with all the
failings critics have learned to avoid: commitment, risk and even
contradiction. It is disappointing because it somehow fails to break
into that enchanted country for which Shapiro aims; in its way it is
a shrill and crippled book, and at times it seems almost hysterical.
I say this a little sadly, for it seems to me that Shapiro is on the
right track here, though the track itself isn't as sparsely traveled as
he appears to think. Impatient with the cultural establishment,
these troubled essays, subjective and romantic;. have excited the
sympathies and sometimes the intelligence of many young writers
and teachers I have questioned. Intended not to correct but to reo
invigorate taste, they concentrate on the literary illusions of our
time, and in so doing they complete Shapiro'S public conversion,
