II
LIONEL TRILLING
and Bentley to Munro and Postgate, who worked on Codex G
and Codex
0
and drew conclusions from them about the lost
Codex V-for doing only this and for not trying to realize and
demonstrate the true intensity and the true quality and the true
cultural meaning of Catullus's passion and managing to bring it
somehow into eventual accord with their respectability and bald–
ness. Nowadays we who deal with books in universities live
in
fear that the World-which we imagine to be
a
vital, palpitating,
passionate, reality-loving World-will think of us as old, respect–
able, and bald, and we see to it that in our dealings with Yeats-–
to take him as the example-his wild cry of rage and sexuality
is
heard by our students and quite thoroughly understood by them
as-what is it that we eventually call it?-a significant expression
of our culture. The exasperation of Lawrence and the subversive–
ness of Gide, by the time we have dealt with them boldly and
straightforwardly, are notable instances of the
alienation of
modern man as exemplified by the artist.
"Compare Yeats, Gide,
Lawrence, and Eliot in the use which they make of the theme of
sexuality to criticize the deficiencies of modern culture. Support
your statement by specific references to the work of each author."
Time: one hour. And the distressing thing about our examina–
tion questions is that they are not ridiculous, they make perfectly
good sense-such good sense that the young person who answers
them can never again know the force, the terror, of what has
been communicated to him by the works he is being examined
on.
Very likely it was with the thought of saving myself from
the necessity of speaking personally and my students from
the
betrayal of the full harsh meaning of a great literature that I first
taught my course in as
literary
a way as possible. A couple of
decades ago the discovery was made that a literary work is a
structure of words: this doesn't seem a surprising thing to have
learned except in its polemical tendency, which is to urge us to
minimize the amount of attention we give to the poet's social
and personal will, to what he wants to happen outside the
poem
