ARGUMENTS
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more than the function of literary criticism that is being discussed; it is
the general function of critical intelligence in a civilized community."
Arnold was acutely aware of what Bellow scarcely acknowledges: the
political
dimension of criticism. The one thing almost absent from Bel–
low's speech is the real world (except as material evidence of the bad
faith of the literati). One gets the impression that history is little more
than a constant struggle between artists and critics for the possession of
the Word and the favor of the
Zeitgeist,
a Manichean struggle of the
forces of light with the forces of darkness.
To be avant-garde is not merely to be different from what came
before, but to alter radically the consciouspess of the age. Art alone works
and mirrors the great changes in human sensibility, but criticism often
implements those changes concretely in the arena of the actual world.
One contemporary instance will suffice. Though Eliot and Lawrence
were his avowed originals, Dr. Leavis has had a larger immediate influ–
ence on English life. In his hands Eliot's poetry and Lawrence's novels
have been transformed from art-speech into literary history, educational
theory and practice, cultural criticism, verbal analysis, morals and sociolo–
gy.
This of course may be the very beast that Bellow is attacking, but if so
we should recognize that it is not, as Bellow thinks, a new beast, but
one resolutely in the critical tradition of Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin and
Arnold. It is a tradition that respects literature too much to ignore its
"meanings" and which invokes those meanings as a radical and civilizing
standard of value within the human community. Against this tradition
Bellow confines art to the sacred keeping of the artist and defends the
moral and political
status quo
of the great "rooted" masses.
Morris Dickstein
